April 8, 2009 5:30PM # New at Cato Unbound: Brian Doherty Defends ‘Folk Activism’ By [Will Wilkinson](https://www.cato.org/people/will-wilkinson) --- SHARE In today’s installment of *Cato Unbound*, *Reason* senior editor Brian Doherty [defends](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/08/brian-doherty/the-many-paths-to-libertarianism/) “folk activism” (that’s what we do here at Cato, in case you’re wondering) against Patri Friedman’s [complaints](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyond-folk-activism/) of ineffectiveness. Doherty argues, in effect, that Friedman’s [effort](http://www.seasteading.org/) to simply go out and float a boat upon which one can do whatever floats one’s boat is parasitic on earlier “folk activism” aimed at persuasion. It is hard to find [20,000 people who will commit to moving to ](http://www.freestateproject.org/)[New Hampshire](http://www.freestateproject.org/)[ for the cause of liberty](http://www.freestateproject.org/) and, as Brian points out, it’s even harder to find people who will now commit to moving to a man-made island. The viability of projects like Seasteading seems to depend on the success of prior evangelism. That said, one of the merits of Friedman’s “[dynamic geography](http://seasteading.org/seastead.org/new_pages/dynamic_geography.html)” is that it is not really a “libertarian” project at all. As he writes in his *Unbound* lead essay: > Because we have no *a priori* knowledge of the best form of government, the search for good societies requires experimentation as well as theory — trying many new institutions to see how they work in practice. I think there’s good reason to expect competing sea-top jurisdictions to settle on a scheme of governance *more* libertarian than what the world’s current nation states have to offer. But I also think there’s little reason to expect a seastead to embody the system of most libertarians’ dreams unless a lot of libertarians coordinate and settle there. In that case, it’s really clear that creating a libertarian society from whole cloth depends on the prior existence of libertarians, which depends on the success of the folk activism that produces them. For more on seasteading, check out [yesterday’s Cato Policy forum](https://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=5747) with Patri Friedman and today’s [podcast interview](https://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/podcast-archive.php?podcast_id=871). [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).