Bourgeois Anarchism: Minimal States and Pickpockets—Even Petty Criminals Are Criminals

by David Dürr on June 19, 2026

From the Vault. By PFS member David Dürr. Translated from David Dürr, “Bürgerlicher Anarchismus: Das Abendland schwimmt koedukativ,” eigentümlich frei (05 März 2017). Eigentümlich frei (“peculiarly free”) is a German magazine edited by André F. Lichtschlag. Other Dürr articles at eigentümlich frei.

Bourgeois Anarchism: Minimal States and Pickpockets—Even Petty Criminals Are Criminals

by David Dürr

Are you a minimal statist? Are you a convinced libertarian who grants the state not a single bit more than looking after the protection of people from mutual violations of life, body, and property, and absolutely nothing else? Not even traffic rules on the road, and certainly no social programs for the poor and weak? This is, of course, not because you do not care about chaos on the streets or the plight of poor and weak fellow human beings, but because you know that order and prosperity establish themselves much better without state intervention. So, are you someone who knows exactly that the state is not the solution but the problem, and therefore must be reduced to an absolute minimum—a minimal statist, in fact?

Perhaps I am addressing quite a few readers and authors of *eigentümlich frei* here; people I genuinely like, of whom I know that human freedom is a sincere concern to them, and that not a few even find it difficult to grant the state anything at all. I know from some of my friends that they would prefer to abolish the state altogether right away, but they say that this is unfortunately not possible; for a bare minimum of basic stability in society, a minimal state is simply needed.

With all due sympathy for these freedom-lovers: Is it not precisely the bare minimum of basic stability in a society that is better left in the hands of the people than with a small but nonetheless illegitimate monopolist?

The state is not a fundamental problem because it does this or that, or because it does so much and ever more, but because through its actions it encroaches upon the respective private spheres of individual human beings, and does so simply out of its own absolute power.

Taxes, to name a prominent example, it takes “unconditionally”—that is, regardless of whether those affected have voluntarily committed to them, or whether they have caused any damage and now have to compensate for it. There is, therefore, a lack of inner justification and thus ultimately of lawfulness, regardless of whether it is a head tax of 100 euros or a 60 percent income tax—just as a small pickpocketing in the crowd at the marketplace with a loot of ten euros is no less unlawful than a professionally and cinematically executed bank robbery with a loot of 100 million. Of course, the pickpocket can expect a lighter sentence if caught than the gang of professional bank robbers, but they are both criminal.

Now, proponents of the small state will resist this comparison with the small pickpocket: The legitimacy of the minimal state, they argue, lies not in the fact that it steals only a little, but in the fact that it is not theft at all. Unlike the pickpocket, who uses the stolen money merely for himself, the state deploys it in the interest of all. And this is where the difference between the cautiously acting minimal state and the bloated maximal state comes into play: while the latter presumes to decide over everything and anything in people’s lives, the former restricts itself to the absolute minimum needed to protect people from mutual encroachments.

That is then rather like the excuse of the caught pickpocket: He doesn’t need the money for himself, but to protect the people in the marketplace from mutual encroachments; after all, it’s absolutely swarming with pickpockets there!

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