May Lockean Doughnuts Have Holes? The Geometry of Territorial Jurisdiction: A Response to Nine
| Published date | 01 December 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00764.x |
| Author | Hillel Steiner |
| Date | 01 December 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
May Lockean Doughnuts Have Holes? The
Geometry of Territorial Jurisdiction: A
Response to Nine
Hillel Steiner
University of Manchester
The traditional Lockean account of a state’s territorial rights constr ues them as arising from, and
coextensive with,the property rights of whichever set of landowners mutually contract to form that state.
The coherence of this individualistic account has recently been challenged by Cara Nine.I argue that the
reasons offered in support of that incoherence charge are unpersuasive.
Here’s an uninteresting fact. In my south Manchester neighbourhood, there are
three newsagent shops that each offer the service of delivering daily, weekly and
monthly newspapers and magazines to homes in that locality. To increase their
volume of trade and to secure economies of scale in delivery costs, one strategy
they employ is to offer householders a percentage discount on the price of each
of the items they regularly deliver to any one home – a discount that varies
directly with the number of items delivered. More interestingly, perhaps, and for
the same reason, they also offer a further discount to each home to which they
deliver: in this case, a discount that varies directly with the number of other
homes to which they deliver on the same street. So what each newsagent shop
thereby obviously aims to acquire – and what householders correspondingly have
some obviously strong reason to want it to acquire – is a monopoly of delivery
rights in their street.
Sometimes, however, that convergence of a shop’s aim with householders’ strong
reasons still proves insufficient to create that monopoly right. Why is this? One
cause might be a coordinative information deficit: perhaps not all the household-
ers in any one street know which shop delivers to their neighbours. I am going
to set aside this possible explanation of that insufficiency, since the difficulty it
invokesasanexplanans is, after all, a pretty easily surmounted one in most
circumstances.
But another possible explanation invokes a difficulty which is less easily over-
come. For an alternative cause of that failure to create a monopoly right might be
that some householders, despite knowing that the rest of their neighbours
patronise shop S1– and, thus, despite having a strong reason to do so themselves
– have a stronger reason to patronise shop S2. Perhaps that stronger reason is that
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00764.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2008 VOL 56, 949–956
© 2008The Author.Jour nal compilation © 2008 Political StudiesAssociation
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