Comments Elsewhere

Starr,

Criticism of Barnett’s work should of course focus on the position advocated, not a misunderstanding of the position. But if Barnett tells us that he is deliberately obscuring or downplaying his real position in some forums, then he does bear some of the responsibility for misunderstandings of his work, even if he makes his position more clear in other forums. Particularly when Barnett knows that large portions of the intended audience of his book aren’t familiar with those other forums.

Kennedy,

Note that in his exchange in JLS 19.4, Barnett also more or less stated openly that he knowingly obscured his anarchism out of considerations of audience:

… While there is much that I disagree with in Huebert’s review, in this Reply I will focus on one crucial respect in which he misunderstands my thesis. This concerns the concept of constitutional legitimacy I develop and defend in my book.

Part of the fault for this misunderstanding may be mine. Although I fully expected some libertarians to make this mistake, because my book was aimed at a more general audience, I nevertheless did not address it explicitly. For this reason, I am sincerely grateful to Mr. Huebert for putting this misconception into print and thereby providing me with the perfect forum in which to rectify it …. (71, emphasis added).

… So when Mr. Huebert observes that I “do not address how a government may legitimately have a monopoly on the use of force and the provision of defense” (p. 105), he reveals his misunderstanding of both my project and my argument. It should not be clear that I do not address this question because I continue to deny that “government may legitimately have such a monopoly,” although I would now substitute the word “justly” in place of “legitimately” in this particular context. (75)

I do wonder why he thinks it wouldn’t matter to his “general audience” (including the general run of Con Law scholars) whether he is defending (1) the legitimacy of the “lost” Constitution as one legal system among many in an anarchistic social order, or rather (2) the legitimacy of the “lost” Constitution as the basis for a monopoly State. In any case, it should hardly be surprising that the many, who do not read JLS, misunderstand his point.