The provision of public goods is an important problem in economics and the social sciences. It is often claimed that this problem has the structure of the well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma so that rational and self-interested individuals would not be able to provide any public good by spontaneous cooperation. In this paper, we argue that this pessimistic view of the possibility spontaneous cooperation is largely unjustified, since the game theoretic analysis of public goods shows how their voluntary provision is indeed feasible in a number of circumstances. We conclude by considering the implications of the game theoretic approach to the problem of public goods for political philosophy and, in particular, for the possibility of "ordered anarchy" as defended in the works of Anthony de Jasay.
