Anarchism

Anarchism is the doctrine that society should have no government: that the functions of police, courts and defense should be abandoned, or supplied competitively by private agencies on a market. Objectivism rejects it. Rand held that a proper government is not an infringement on liberty but the institution that makes liberty possible, by placing retaliatory force under objective control.

“Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Nature of Government", The Virtue of Selfishness

Why Objectivism rejects it

The Objectivist case for government does not start from a claim that men need to be ruled. It starts from what physical force is and what has to be done about it.

Man survives by reason, and reason does not function under compulsion. The one thing that can stop a mind from operating is the initiation of force, which is why barring it from human relationships is the whole content of Objectivist politics. Barring it, however, means being prepared to answer it — and retaliatory force used at each person's own discretion is the problem restated rather than solved.

Left to individual judgment, retaliation has no way to distinguish a just response from a mistaken or a pretended one. Two men in a dispute each believe themselves wronged; both are entitled to strike back; nothing decides between them but who is stronger. The function of a government, on this analysis, is to remove force from the realm of arbitrary decision and subordinate it to objectively defined law: rules stated in advance, applied by a known procedure, with evidence weighed by someone who is not a party to the quarrel. See Rights and Justice.

Competing protection agencies

The specifically modern form of the argument — anarcho-capitalism, associated with Murray Rothbard and David Friedman — accepts private property and free exchange but proposes that defense services be bought from competing firms.

Objectivism's reply is that the proposal does not describe a coherent alternative:

Either an agency has final say in a territory or it does not. If it does, it is a government, whatever it is called, and the question of how it is constituted and limited returns unanswered. If it does not, then when two agencies reach opposite verdicts nothing settles the matter but force between them.
Arbitration between agencies pushes the problem up a level. Agencies might agree in advance on a common arbitrator and a common code — which is a description of a government arrived at by a longer route. Any agency that declines to join is back to the first case.
Force is not a service like any other. Competition benefits buyers because a customer may decline to buy. The person on the receiving end of an arrest, a judgment or a foreclosure is not a customer and has not consented, so the market mechanism that disciplines other firms does not reach the transaction that matters.
What is being decentralised is the law itself. Objectivism's requirement is not merely that force be restrained but that it be objective: a citizen must be able to know in advance what is permitted. Multiple bodies of law applying simultaneously in one place defeats that requirement directly. See Constitution and Statism.

Anarchism on the left

Most anarchist movements historically have been anti-capitalist. Anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism and the collectivist strands descending from Bakunin and Kropotkin oppose private property as such and treat the abolition of the state and the abolition of ownership as one project.

That matters for a common confusion. The word covers both a position that would abolish the state to free the market and a position that would abolish the state to abolish the market. They share only a negative, and neither is the Objectivist position. See Capitalism and Libertarianism.

Common misunderstandings

That laissez-faire capitalism is a mild form of anarchism. It is the opposite in the respect that matters. Capitalism as Objectivism defines it requires a government strong within its function — police, courts and armed forces, well-funded and effective — and absent outside it.
That a monopoly on force is the same as a coercive monopoly. A government's monopoly is on the use of retaliatory force under objective rules, which is a legal monopoly on a function, not a grant of economic privilege. Objectivism opposes coercive monopolies in production for reasons that do not apply here. See Monopoly.
That Objectivism therefore endorses any actual government. It endorses a government limited to the protection of individual rights. A state that goes beyond that is exercising the very power the institution exists to prevent. See Statism and Totalitarianism.
That the disagreement is about how much freedom is desirable. Both sides claim to want the maximum. The dispute is over whether force can be brought under objective control without a body that has final jurisdiction.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "The Nature of Government", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "Man's Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness.
Rand, Ayn. "What Is Capitalism?", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 10.

External links

Anarchism at the Ayn Rand Lexicon