An Historical Survey of Anarchist Thought

Authority and Its Alibis

The word "anarchist" does a great deal of work that has nothing to do with anarchism. It is deployed to discredit, to conjure an image — the black flag, the broken window, the figure in a hood who wants nothing in particular except the end of everything — and the image is so useful to those who wield it that the underlying philosophy has been effectively buried beneath it for most of a century. This is not an accident. Ideas that place the entire burden of justification on existing authority, rather than on those who question it, are threatening in direct proportion to their coherence, and the coherent version of anarchism is considerably more threatening than the cartoon.

What follows is an attempt to excavate the actual intellectual tradition: not to advocate for any particular political program, but to take seriously a line of thought that has recurred, with striking consistency, across cultures and centuries and in the work of thinkers who had no knowledge of each other. The recurring emergence of this tradition is itself a fact worth sitting with. When ancient Athenian philosophers, Daoist sages in Warring States China, a teenage French jurist in the 16th century, English radical sectaries in the aftermath of civil war, and a succession of 19th-century political theorists all arrive independently at roughly the same question, the question deserves to be examined on its merits rather than dismissed by association with its least careful adherents.

That question, in its simplest form, is this: does political authority have a legitimate foundation, and if so, what is it? Not whether governments are useful, or whether coordinated social life requires institutions of some kind, but whether the specific claim that states make — the claim to obedience, backed by coercive force, extending to people who never consented to it and cannot meaningfully refuse it — can be grounded in any principle that would survive honest philosophical scrutiny. This is not a question that the political mainstream has answered. It is a question that the political mainstream has, with considerable effort and occasional success, managed to avoid asking.

The tradition that has refused to let the question drop is far older, far wider, and far more philosophically serious than its popular reputation suggests. It includes some of the most rigorous analytic philosophers of the 20th century alongside some of the most acute social anthropologists of the 21st. It includes a Cynic who told Alexander the Great to get out of his light and a Daoist who argued, two and a half millennia before Michel Foucault, that institutions produce the disorders they claim to manage. It includes a French teenager whose single unfinished essay would influence every major anarchist thinker who came after him, though it wasn't published until long after his death, and a Russian scientist whose careful study of animal and human cooperation demolished, or should have demolished, the social Darwinist mythology that was used in his time — as versions of it are used in ours — to naturalize hierarchy and competition as facts of life rather than features of particular social arrangements. What unites these figures is not a shared program but a shared refusal: the refusal to accept that the burden of proof runs the way power insists it does.

This article traces that refusal from its earliest expressions to the point where contemporary philosophy picks the argument up. A companion piece will take the story into the present — into the most rigorous current thinking on political authority and obligation, and into our own contribution to that conversation. The purpose here is simply to establish the depth and seriousness of the tradition: to demonstrate, as clearly as the record allows, that anarchism is not a temperament but an argument, and that the argument has never been adequately answered.

Roots in The Ancient World

The question of whether political authority can justify itself is at least as old as the first sustained attempt to justify it, which is to say it is a feature of philosophy almost from the beginning. Plato's Republic — the founding document of Western political philosophy, the text from which virtually everything afterward descends — opens in argument with a man named Thrasymachus, who holds that justice is nothing more than the interest of the stronger party, that law is the instrument by which the powerful extract compliance from the less powerful, and that anyone who believes otherwise is either deceived or performing a kind of useful innocence that serves the system's needs. Plato spends the remainder of one of the longest and most elaborate works in the philosophical canon trying to refute him. That this effort required so much machinery — the allegory of the cave, the theory of forms, the construction of an entire ideal city, the tripartite soul — is itself a kind of testimony to how difficult the refutation turned out to be. The question Thrasymachus posed was not disposed of; it was managed, aesthetically overwhelmed, buried under the most beautiful philosophical architecture the ancient world produced. It survived nonetheless.

Thrasymachus was a Sophist, or at least associated with that movement, and the Sophists as a group were responsible for what may be the most important conceptual contribution to proto-anarchist thinking in the ancient world: the distinction between nomos and physis, between law or convention on one side and nature on the other. The distinction is simple in statement and devastating in application. Laws, the Sophists argued, are not discoveries but inventions — agreements reached among communities for purposes that serve some interests better than others, dressed in the language of universal obligation to obscure this fact. Antiphon, whose fragments survive on papyrus and who is one of the most underread figures in ancient philosophy, pushed the argument furthest: the laws of the city and the requirements of nature frequently conflict, and when they do, and when breaking the law carries no risk of detection, the rational person follows nature. This is not quite anarchism — there is a self-interested pragmatism to it that the later tradition would largely leave behind — but the structural move is foundational. Once you have established that law is convention rather than nature, you have permanently altered the burden of proof. Convention requires justification; nature does not. From this point forward, every defender of political authority has to explain not simply that law exists but why convention should command the same loyalty as nature, which is a different and much harder question.

The Cynics carried the nomos/physis distinction into lived practice with a theatricality that was itself a philosophical method. Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in Athens in the fourth century BCE and who is the tradition's most vivid figure, rejected the polis not in writing but in conduct — sleeping in a large ceramic jar, owning nothing, eating whatever came to hand, masturbating in public to demonstrate the foolishness of modesty, and engaging in conversation with anyone who would talk to him, including Alexander the Great, whom he reportedly asked to step aside as he was blocking the sun. The exchange with Alexander deserves a moment's attention, because it is more than anecdote. Alexander, by all accounts, was charmed by Diogenes and asked if there was anything he could give him. Diogenes said yes: get out of my light. What is being enacted here is a complete inversion of the political order. The most powerful man in the world has nothing to offer the philosopher, who has arranged his needs so that nothing the powerful can give or withhold has any claim on him. This is not a performance of eccentricity; it is a demonstration that the entire apparatus of political power — patronage, punishment, reward, status — operates by first manufacturing the desires and fears it then satisfies or threatens. Eliminate the manufactured needs and the apparatus loses its leverage. The Cynics called this askesis — the disciplined reduction of need — and understood it as the practice of freedom rather than its renunciation.

When Diogenes was asked where he was from, he answered that he was a citizen of the world, a kosmopolites. This too is frequently received as an early statement of cosmopolitan idealism, a charming anticipation of later universalism. It was neither charming nor idealistic in its original intent. It was a refusal — a declaration that the boundaries drawn by cities, nations, and empires, the distinctions on which political authority rests and through which it distributes loyalty and obligation, had no claim on him. The polis defines itself by who belongs to it and who does not; Diogenes declined to belong, which meant the polis could not define him. Hipparchia, who chose to live and philosophize publicly alongside Crates rather than assume the domestic role that Athenian society prescribed for women of her class, was making a cognate argument: that the conventions organizing gender were exactly as arbitrary and exactly as resistible as the conventions organizing politics, and that living as if they were not binding was itself a form of philosophical demonstration. She is remembered as a curiosity. She should be remembered as a thinker.

Zeno of Citium, who founded the Stoic school roughly a generation after Diogenes, is not usually placed in the anarchist tradition, and his mature system — with its emphasis on duty, its accommodation of political participation, its influence on Roman imperial ideology — makes this omission understandable. But the early Zeno is a stranger and more interesting figure. He wrote a Republic, now almost entirely lost, that ancient sources describe with a mixture of alarm and fascination. What they tell us about it is this: it depicted a community of sages, people who had achieved genuine rational virtue, living together without need for law courts, without temples, without money, without the conventional institution of marriage. The absence of these things was not a deprivation but a consequence — a community of people who genuinely reason and genuinely act well does not need coercive structures to manage the gap between what people do and what they should do. The coercive structures exist precisely to manage that gap, and the gap exists because most people are not fully rational, fully virtuous, fully capable of governing themselves. The implication — which Zeno seems to have drawn and which later Stoics carefully stepped back from — is that the institutions of political life are not achievements of civilization but compensations for its failure, scaffolding erected around a building whose foundations never set properly. A community of actual sages would dismantle the scaffolding because the building, at last, could stand.

This is a philosophically precise and genuinely radical argument. It does not romanticize chaos or argue for the suspension of order. It argues that the order produced by coercive institutions is a degraded substitute for the order that genuine human development would produce without them, and that the existence of those institutions actively interferes with the development that would make them unnecessary — that the scaffold prevents the building from ever setting. Whether one accepts the Stoic premise about rational virtue or not, the structure of the argument is serious and has never been adequately dismissed.

By far the richest ancient source for anarchist thinking, and the most comprehensively neglected in Western treatments of the subject, is the Daoist tradition in China, and specifically the Zhuangzi, the collection of writings attributed to Zhuang Zhou and his followers, composed in the fourth and third centuries BCE. The Tao Te Ching, attributed to the perhaps-legendary Laozi, is more widely known in the West, and its political implications are real: the text returns again and again to the theme of governance as interference, to the paradox that the more laws and prohibitions a ruler promulgates, the more disorder follows, to the figure of the ideal ruler as one whose subjects barely notice his existence and attribute all achievements to themselves. "Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish," runs one of its most cited passages — carefully, minimally, without excessive intervention. The trajectory of this thinking, followed far enough, leads to the question of why intervention is needed at all.

But Zhuangzi goes considerably further, and does so with an explicitness and a satirical ferocity that the Tao Te Ching mostly avoids. The chapters known as "Horses' Hooves" and "Opening Trunks" are sustained philosophical arguments against the Confucian glorification of sage-kings and benevolent governance, and they are devastating. Horses in their natural state, Zhuangzi writes, live well: they eat grass, drink from streams, express their nature freely. Then comes the trainer, who imposes bit and bridle and stable and saddle in the name of making them useful, and in the process ruins more horses than he improves, because the nature he is organizing against was already organized. The political application is made explicit. Human beings in their natural condition live in small communities, meeting their needs without hierarchy or coercion, and are neither better nor worse than they should be. Then come the sage-kings with their institutions of benevolence and righteousness, their rites and regulations, their rewards and punishments, and in the name of improving on nature they introduce precisely the anxious striving, the competitive self-advancement, the systematic cruelty that they claim to be correcting. In "Opening Trunks" the argument extends to law and punishment specifically: the devices invented to prevent theft create more sophisticated thieves; the locks invented to secure property teach the clever criminal exactly where the valuables are kept. The institutions that claim to manage disorder are among its primary causes. This is not a counsel of naive optimism about human nature. It is a structural argument about how coercive institutions generate the problems that justify their own existence — an argument that would not be made with comparable rigor in the Western tradition until the twentieth century.

What is striking, standing back from the entire sweep of ancient thought, is that the anarchist question does not arise at the margins of serious intellectual life. It arises at its center. It is the question Plato is arguing against in the Republic. It is what the Cynics are enacting in the agora. It is what drives the most challenging passages of the Zhuangzi. Wherever thinkers have been serious about the foundations of political life rather than merely its management, the question of whether authority can justify itself has surfaced, and the answers given have been, at best, inconclusive. The tradition that refused to accept the inconclusive answer as sufficient is old enough that calling it a tradition undersells it. It is closer to a permanent feature of serious thought about power — one that power, for obvious reasons, has always preferred to bury.

Medieval Radicalism and the Reformation

It might seem that Christianity, with its doctrines of legitimate authority descending from God and its injunctions to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, would be inhospitable terrain for anarchist thinking. The institutional church was, after all, one of the most elaborately hierarchical organizations in human history, and the theology it produced was frequently deployed in the service of precisely the political arrangements that anarchist thinking puts in question. But the relationship between Christian thought and political authority was never as settled as the hierarchy preferred, and running beneath the official theology — sometimes erupting through it, more often surviving underground — was a persistent counter-tradition that drew from the same scriptural sources very different conclusions about the claims of earthly power.

The most radical of these counter-currents is associated with the movement known as the Free Spirit, which was less an organized sect than a recurring tendency that appeared and reappeared across medieval Europe from the thirteenth century onward, attracting the sustained attention of inquisitors precisely because it was difficult to locate and difficult to extinguish. Its central claim was antinomian: the soul that had achieved genuine union with God was beyond all law, because law exists to govern the gap between what people do and what they should do, and that gap had been closed. For the person in whom the divine spirit genuinely dwelled, no external authority — ecclesiastical or civil — retained any purchase, because external authority is a compensatory device for the absence of the internal condition that makes it unnecessary. This is structurally identical to Zeno's argument about the community of sages, arrived at by a completely different route through a completely different tradition, which is one of those convergences that suggests something more than coincidence. The institutional church understood perfectly well what the argument implied. If inner transformation is sufficient for right conduct, then the church's entire apparatus — its sacraments, its hierarchy, its mediating function between the human and the divine — is redundant. The same logic applied with equal force to secular authority. It is not difficult to understand why inquisitors pursued these ideas with such urgency.

The radical Reformation of the sixteenth century produced a more organized but structurally related tradition in the various Anabaptist movements that emerged across Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries following the initial Protestant break. The Anabaptists are frequently reduced in historical memory to the catastrophe at Münster in 1534 and 1535, where a millenarian community under Jan of Leiden descended into theocracy, polygamy, and ultimately a siege that ended in the movement's violent suppression. The Münster episode is real history and should not be minimized, but treating it as representative of Anabaptism as a whole is roughly equivalent to treating the Reign of Terror as representative of Enlightenment political philosophy — a convenient reduction that allows the tradition's more serious claims to be dismissed without engagement. The mainstream Anabaptist tradition, represented by figures like Conrad Grebel, Menno Simons, and the communities that eventually became the Mennonites and Hutterites, was characterized not by millenarian violence but by a principled and sustained refusal of state authority on theological grounds. They refused oaths — which were the connective tissue of the entire medieval social and legal order — refused military service, refused participation in civil magistracy, and in many cases refused to recognize the jurisdiction of secular courts over their communities. These were not merely sectarian preferences. They were grounded in a theological argument: that the kingdom Christ proclaimed was genuinely not of this world, that the community of believers therefore lived by a different law than the surrounding society, and that the accommodation of Christian practice to the demands of temporal power was not a compromise but a betrayal.

The Hutterites went further, and in doing so produced something that deserves considerably more attention than it usually receives in discussions of communal social organization. Drawing on the description of the early Jerusalem community in the Acts of the Apostles — where the believers held all things in common and distributed to each according to need — they established communities of common property that survived, and in some forms continue to survive, across centuries. This is not primitivism or enforced poverty. The Hutterite communities of the sixteenth century were often among the most economically productive in their regions, precisely because the elimination of private accumulation directed productive energy toward collective welfare rather than competitive advantage. The argument being made, in practice rather than in theory, is that voluntary communal organization without private property is not only morally preferable but functionally superior to the arrangements surrounding it. Kropotkin would have recognized the argument immediately.

Into this ferment stepped Gerrard Winstanley, who is perhaps the most important proto-anarchist thinker in the European tradition before the nineteenth century and who remains surprisingly marginal in intellectual histories of political thought given the quality of his arguments. Winstanley was a failed cloth merchant who experienced, around 1648, what he described as a divine revelation instructing him that the earth was a common treasury, created for all and enclosed by none. In April 1649, a few months after the execution of Charles I had apparently opened a new political dispensation, he led a small group of followers onto St. George's Hill in Surrey and began digging and planting on the common land, inviting the poor to join them and holding what they cultivated in common. They called themselves the True Levellers, though history has remembered them as the Diggers, and they were dispersed within a year by a combination of legal harassment and physical violence from local landowners who understood perfectly well what the experiment implied.

But the experiment was also an argument, and the argument was more sophisticated than the action's brevity might suggest. Winstanley's pamphlets and his major work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, addressed to Oliver Cromwell in 1652, articulate a political philosophy of striking coherence. His central claim was that what he called "kingly power" was not a feature of monarchy specifically but a structural property of any arrangement in which some people commanded the labor and the lives of others. The execution of the king had removed the figurehead without touching the system: the landlords remained, the lawyers remained, the enclosures remained, the clergy extracting tithes remained, and the New Model Army that had defeated the royalist forces now protected the property of those who had hired it. The English Revolution, in Winstanley's analysis, had changed the personnel of power without changing its logic, which is a critique that would be made with equal force about every subsequent revolution for the next three and a half centuries. The remedy he proposed was correspondingly radical: not a new government but the abolition of buying and selling, the return of enclosed land to common use, the elimination of wage labor, free universal education, the rotation of all public offices to prevent the formation of a permanent administrative class, and the replacement of coercive law with the free reasoning of community members among themselves. He was not describing a return to some prior state of nature. He was describing a social organization that had never existed but that he believed the resources and capacities of mid-seventeenth-century England were fully adequate to sustain, if the political will to attempt it could be found.

What is remarkable about Winstanley, reading him now, is how precisely his analysis maps onto arguments that would be made independently across the following two centuries without apparent awareness of his work. The claim that the state is the enforcement arm of property, not its neutral arbiter; the claim that wage labor is a form of coercion rather than a free exchange; the claim that professional lawyers and clergy serve primarily to mystify arrangements that transparent common reasoning would expose and reject; the claim that the rotation of offices is the only structural safeguard against the formation of a governing class — all of these would appear again in Proudhon, in Bakunin, in Kropotkin, worked out from different starting points by thinkers who were almost certainly not reading seventeenth-century English pamphlets. The convergence is, again, the kind of thing that demands explanation. One explanation is that these thinkers were all making the same observation about the same phenomenon — that political authority, wherever you examine it carefully, protects the same interests, deploys the same mystifications, and produces the same class of people whose welfare depends on its perpetuation.

Winstanley's theology is inseparable from his politics in a way that might seem to date him, but the theological language is in many respects a vehicle for ideas that do not depend on it. When he writes that "the earth was made by Almighty God to be a common treasury," he is making a claim about original legitimacy and subsequent usurpation that translates directly into secular terms: the arrangements we inherit are not natural, not inevitable, not divinely ordained, but historical — the products of specific acts of force and fraud that have been dressed in the language of right. The Norman Conquest, for Winstanley, is not ancient history but the origin point of a legal and economic order that presents itself as immemorial custom while concealing its violent foundation. To expose that foundation is to dissolve the authority that rests on it.

The Most Important Text You've Never Read: La Boétie

Somewhere around 1548, a French student of perhaps eighteen years of age — the exact date is disputed, and so to a lesser extent is the age — sat down and wrote an essay that would not be published in his lifetime, that would circulate in manuscript among a small circle of readers, that would be seized upon by Huguenot propagandists who wanted it for purposes quite different from its author's, and that would eventually, across the following three centuries, exert a quiet but unmistakable pressure on almost every serious anarchist thinker who encountered it. Étienne de La Boétie died of plague in 1563 at thirty-two, having published nothing of political consequence and having spent his brief adult career as a magistrate in Bordeaux, a man of the establishment by every outward measure. His friend Michel de Montaigne, who was with him when he died and who mourned him for the rest of his long life, preserved and eventually published the manuscript, though with characteristic caution about its implications. The essay is called the Discours de la servitude volontaire — the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude — and it is, by any reasonable measure, the most important proto-anarchist text in the Western tradition, as well as one of the most penetrating analyses of political power ever written.

Its central question is as simple as it is unsettling: given that tyrants are few and the people they dominate are many, given that the tyrant's power derives entirely from the cooperation of those he subjugates, why do people not simply stop cooperating? This is not a rhetorical question. La Boétie pursues it with the seriousness it deserves, and what he finds at the end of his pursuit is a set of mechanisms so clearly described, so precisely observed, and so disturbingly familiar that reading the essay in the twenty-first century produces the particular discomfort of recognizing something you have seen every day without knowing how to name it.

The first mechanism is habit, and La Boétie's account of it is psychologically acute in ways that anticipate later thinking about socialization and ideology without requiring any of the apparatus those later traditions developed. People obey, he argues, primarily because they have always obeyed, because their parents obeyed, because their grandparents obeyed, because the arrangement they were born into presents itself as nature rather than history. Custom is the most powerful of all teachers, he writes, and its most important lesson is that the current order of things is the only possible order of things — not because anyone argues this explicitly, but because the absence of any other experienced reality makes the imagination of alternatives feel not merely difficult but faintly absurd. This is not cynicism about human capacity. It is a clinical description of how any stable system of power maintains itself without constant recourse to overt force: by ensuring that the question of its legitimacy is never seriously posed, because the people who might pose it have been so thoroughly formed by the system that posing it feels like questioning gravity. La Boétie was eighteen when he wrote this. It remains one of the best accounts of ideological normalization in the literature.

The second mechanism is what La Boétie calls the network of complicity, and here the analysis becomes almost unbearably precise. The tyrant, he observes, does not rule alone. He rules through a hierarchy of collaborators — courtiers, officials, enforcers, clerks, informers — each of whom receives enough privilege from the layer above to become invested in the system's continuation, and each of whom transmits enough of that investment downward to implicate the next layer in their own subjugation. The tyrant has perhaps five or six confidants who enjoy his intimate favor; each of those has several hundred dependents who profit from their proximity to the confidants; each of those several hundred has several thousand below them who benefit from proximity to that intermediate tier; and so on until the network of mutual implication extends through the entire society. What this produces is not simply a ruling class protected by force but a structure in which almost everyone has something to lose from the system's disruption — a small something, in most cases, but enough to make disruption feel threatening rather than liberating. The man who profits marginally from the current arrangement is not obviously better off than he would be in a freer society, but he can see his marginal profit clearly and cannot see the alternative at all, which makes him a reliable defender of what he has. La Boétie does not use the word ideology, but he has described its social function with considerable precision.

The third mechanism is spectacle and ceremony — what La Boétie calls the theatrical dimension of power, though in his own terms it is described as the calculated stupefaction of the public through games, festivals, theatrical performances, and the elaborate ceremonial that surrounds the ruler's person and renders him simultaneously magnificent and inaccessible. This is not merely entertainment provided to keep restless populations occupied, though it is that too. It is a technology of awe, designed to make the ruler appear to inhabit a different order of reality from ordinary people — to make his authority seem not like a human arrangement that could be otherwise but like a feature of the cosmos that it would be impious to question. The religious dimension of political authority, in this reading, is not incidental to it but structural: the mystification that makes power appear legitimate is always in some sense a theological operation, a claim that the current order of things participates in or is sanctioned by something larger than mere human preference. This is why La Boétie finds the religious and political authorities of his time so thoroughly interwoven — not because of historical accident but because they are performing complementary functions in the same system of managed compliance.

What makes the Discourse genuinely radical, and what distinguishes it from every earlier analysis of tyranny, is its conclusion. Earlier traditions — Aristotle, Cicero, the entire medieval tradition of thinking about tyranny — treated the problem of bad government as a problem that required correction from above or outside: a better ruler, a constitutional constraint, a right of resistance exercised through legitimate channels. La Boétie argues that this entire framework mislocates the problem. The tyrant has no power that has not been given to him, and the remedy therefore requires not resistance but withdrawal. "Resolve to serve no more," he writes, "and you are at once freed." Not: organize an army. Not: find a better prince. Not: petition for reform. Simply stop. Stop providing the cooperation, the deference, the productive labor, the military service, the emotional investment, the daily performance of legitimacy that the system requires. The tyrant cannot imprison everyone. He cannot execute everyone. He cannot function without the active participation of the very people he is tyrannizing, and if that participation is withdrawn, the entire edifice — which was always nothing more than a collective performance, a shared fiction maintained by mutual complicity — simply ceases.

This conclusion has been read as naively optimistic, and there are obvious objections to it: withdrawal is more easily theorized than achieved, especially by people whose material survival depends on the system they are withdrawing from. La Boétie is aware of this, though he does not engage it at the length it deserves. But the argument's importance is not diminished by the practical difficulties it underestimates. What it establishes, with a clarity that no earlier thinker had achieved, is that political authority is not a natural phenomenon requiring management but a social construction requiring consent — and that the withdrawal of consent is not merely a theoretical possibility but the most fundamental form of political power available to those who are governed. Every subsequent thinker who has argued for non-violent resistance as a political strategy — Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, the entire tradition of civil disobedience — is working within a framework that La Boétie sketched in a student essay four and a half centuries ago. He would likely have been appalled to know this, since he was by all indications a thoroughly conventional magistrate who wrote the essay as an academic exercise and never publicly identified with its conclusions. This too is worth noting: the most subversive political argument of the sixteenth century was produced, almost accidentally, by someone who spent his working life enforcing the laws of the state whose legitimacy the argument implicitly demolished. The question doesn't spare even those who pose it.

Proudhon read La Boétie. So did Tolstoy, who considered the Discourse among the most important political documents ever written and arranged for its translation and distribution in Russia at considerable personal risk. Kropotkin admired it. The entire tradition of non-violent anarchism carries its imprint. This influence is worth acknowledging not as a matter of literary genealogy but because it illustrates something important about how genuine philosophical arguments travel: not through institutional channels, not through the official curriculum of political thought, but through the underground of serious readers who recognize in a text something that has been waiting to be said.

The 19th Century: Anarchism Names Itself

The intellectual tradition we have been tracing — the persistent, cross-cultural refusal to accept that political authority can justify the claims it makes — found its modern form in the century that began with the French Revolution and ended with the Paris Commune and its aftermath. It was not that the 19th century invented the questions; it was that a particular convergence of historical conditions made those questions both more urgent and more systematically addressable than they had been before. Industrial capitalism was reorganizing human social life at a speed and on a scale that made the existing frameworks of political justification visibly inadequate. The liberal state was presenting itself as the solution to the problem of arbitrary authority while simultaneously functioning as the enforcement mechanism for a new form of economic coercion that was arguably more total in its reach than the feudal arrangements it replaced. The revolutionary tradition, inaugurated in France in 1789, had demonstrated both that existing orders were not immovable and that replacing one form of concentrated power with another left the underlying problem untouched. Into this situation stepped a succession of thinkers who were, for the first time, willing to name what they were arguing for.

William Godwin arrived first, which is fitting since he arrived before the name existed. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793 with considerable courage given the political climate — Pitt's government was prosecuting radicals with enthusiasm, and Godwin's publisher was understandably nervous — is the first systematic anarchist argument in the modern sense, grounded not in theology or natural philosophy but in a rationalist ethics that owes something to utilitarianism while reaching conclusions that Bentham would have found alarming. Godwin's foundational claim is that human beings are rational creatures capable of perceiving what is right and acting on that perception, and that the institutions of political life — government, law, inherited property — systematically deform this capacity rather than supporting it. Law, in Godwin's analysis, is by its nature retrospective: it addresses past situations with fixed rules that cannot adequately respond to the particular circumstances of present cases, and in doing so it substitutes mechanical compliance for the moral reasoning that would produce genuinely right action. Worse, it habituates people to a mode of conduct — obedience to external authority — that is directly opposed to the exercise of the moral intelligence that right conduct actually requires. Government does not make people better; it makes them worse, by training them to outsource their moral judgment to an institution whose interests are not identical with theirs and whose continued existence depends on maintaining the conditions that justify it.

Godwin's positive vision is of a society of small communities in which decisions are made by rational persuasion among equals, in which no person claims authority over another, and in which the gradual improvement of human reason — which he believed was both real and continuing — would progressively reduce the occasions for conflict and the need for coercive management. He was not naive about the timeline; he expected this to be the work of generations. But the direction was clear, and it was away from institutional authority rather than toward its reform. Godwin is sometimes described as a philosophical anarchist in the pejorative sense — someone whose conclusions are so long-term as to be practically inert — but this undersells both the rigor of his analysis and the political courage it required. Writing a systematic philosophical argument for the dissolution of government in 1793, when the English ruling class was watching the French experiment with mounting terror, was not an academic exercise. It was a calculated act, and the calculation was that the argument was true regardless of whether the moment was propitious for it.

The man who gave the tradition its name arrived half a century later, in a pamphlet that opened with one of the most effective rhetorical questions in the history of political philosophy. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property?, published in 1840, announced itself with the question in its title and answered it on the first page: property is theft. The slogan is so familiar, and has been so thoroughly absorbed into the decorative vocabulary of radical politics, that it has largely ceased to function as an argument. This is unfortunate, because the actual argument is considerably more precise than the slogan, and precision is what gives it its force. Proudhon was not arguing that all possession is illegitimate or that the shirt on your back is stolen from humanity. He was making a careful distinction between two things that the legal and economic vocabulary of his time collapsed into one: property, which he defined as the right to extract rent, profit, and interest from resources one does not personally use — the landlord's income from the tenant's labor, the capitalist's return on capital the worker operates — and possession, the legitimate occupancy and use of what one actually works and lives with. The first of these, he argued, was indeed theft, in the precise sense that it transferred value produced by one person to another without equivalent exchange, using the legal apparatus of property rights backed by state enforcement to accomplish what would otherwise require open coercion. The second was not only legitimate but the proper basis of a free society.

What Proudhon proposed in place of the existing arrangement was mutualism: a federation of self-governing workshops and communities in which producers exchanged goods and services at cost, in which credit was available without interest through mutual banks, and in which no one extracted a return on anything they did not personally contribute. The state, in this vision, was not reformed but dissolved — replaced by contractual federation among free communities, each governing its own affairs, none commanding the others. This is the first fully elaborated anarchist political program in the modern sense, and it is more technically sophisticated than its frequent dismissal as utopian suggests. Proudhon was thinking carefully about economic organization, about the mechanics of exchange and credit, about the relationship between political and economic power, in ways that most of his critics, then and since, have not bothered to engage. His limitations are real — his attitudes toward women were reactionary in ways that contradict his own principles about domination, a contradiction that later figures in the tradition would have to address explicitly — but the core economic and political argument is serious and has not been refuted so much as ignored.

Mikhail Bakunin shared Proudhon's conclusions about the state and disagreed with almost everything else, which made their intellectual relationship — and Bakunin's relationship with virtually everyone he encountered — tempestuous in ways that generated more heat than light on several occasions but also produced some of the most important arguments in the tradition. Where Proudhon was a systematic theorist who worked through his ideas in dense, sometimes contradictory prose over decades, Bakunin was a force of nature who produced his most important thinking in the context of polemic and organizational conflict, most famously in the First International, where his collision with Marx produced one of the great theoretical confrontations in the history of socialist thought. The argument between them was not primarily about ends but about means, and specifically about the role of the state in the transition to a free society. Marx held that the working class must first seize state power, use it to expropriate the capitalist class, and then — at some unspecified future point, when the conditions for it had been created — allow the state to wither away. Bakunin argued that this sequence was not merely mistaken but impossible: that state power, once seized, would not wither but consolidate; that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would become simply a new ruling class exercising the same coercive authority in the name of different beneficiaries; and that the abolition of capitalism and the abolition of the state must be simultaneous, because each sustains the other and dismantling one while leaving the other intact simply transfers the locus of domination without eliminating it.

The accuracy of this prediction across the history of the following century — the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, every subsequent experiment in Marxist-Leninist governance — has been noted so many times that noting it again risks seeming cheap. But it is worth insisting that Bakunin was not making a lucky guess. He was making a structural argument about the nature of state power that did not depend on the particular failings of particular leaders or the specific distortions of particular historical moments. Power concentrates. Institutions protect themselves. The people who administer a revolutionary state develop interests in its continuation that are not identical with the interests of those in whose name it governs. These are not contingent features of badly executed revolutions; they are properties of state power as such, and Bakunin identified them with a clarity that his rival's theoretical framework could not accommodate without self-contradiction. That Marx expelled him from the International rather than answering the argument is not, of course, evidence that the argument was right — but it is suggestive.

Bakunin's own organizational practice was considerably less admirable than his theoretical critique, and the tradition has generally been honest about this. His involvement with the shadowy conspirator Sergei Nechaev, his fondness for secret hierarchies and manipulation, his occasional antisemitic outbursts, all represent a failure to apply his own principles with consistency. The man who argued most powerfully that secret vanguard organizations would reproduce the authoritarianism they claimed to be fighting was himself prone to organizing secret vanguard organizations. This contradiction does not invalidate the argument, but it is a useful reminder that the anarchist critique of power is not automatically immunized from the pathologies it identifies, and that the tradition has periodically had to reckon with its own failures of internal consistency.

Peter Kropotkin is the figure in whom the tradition achieves perhaps its greatest intellectual completeness, and he is also the one whose arguments have worn best against the subsequent century's evidence. A Russian prince who had served as a page to Tsar Alexander II and then renounced his aristocratic position and career to become a revolutionary, Kropotkin brought to anarchist theory the discipline and empirical seriousness of a trained scientist, having spent years on geographical and zoological expeditions in Siberia before his political radicalization. His most important theoretical contribution, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published in 1902 following serialization in a journal edited by Thomas Huxley's grandson, was a direct intervention in the debate that social Darwinism had made central to late Victorian intellectual life. The social Darwinists — and Huxley himself, in his famous essay on the "gladiatorial" character of nature — had read Darwin's account of natural selection as confirming that competition was the primary mechanism of evolutionary progress, and had used this reading to naturalize economic competition, inequality, and the elimination of the unfit as expressions of a biological law that sentiment might deplore but rationality must accept. Kropotkin went back to the evidence, both zoological and anthropological, and argued that they had simply misread it. Cooperation, mutual aid, the suppression of intra-group competition in favor of collective survival — these were, he demonstrated across species after species and human community after human community, at least as significant a factor in evolutionary success as competition, and in many cases more significant. The bee colony, the wolf pack, the medieval guild, the village commune: everywhere Kropotkin looked, he found organisms and communities surviving and flourishing not by outcompeting each other but by developing elaborate mechanisms of mutual support.

This was not a sentimental argument, and Kropotkin was scrupulous about not making it one. He was not claiming that nature was kind or that competition did not exist. He was making a narrower and more defensible claim: that the social Darwinist reading of evolution was empirically wrong, that cooperation was a genuine biological phenomenon with a genuine evolutionary function, and that the political conclusions drawn from the misreading — that hierarchy and competition were natural and inevitable — therefore lacked the scientific grounding they claimed. The positive political vision he drew from this analysis, developed most fully in The Conquest of Bread, was of an anarcho-communist society organized through federated communes, in which the means of production were held in common, distribution was organized according to need rather than wage, and the elaborate administrative machinery of the state was replaced by the voluntary coordination of free communities pursuing their own affairs. He was careful to argue that this was not a utopian projection but an extrapolation from tendencies already visible in actual human social organization — in the cooperative movements, in the labor unions, in the informal mutual aid networks that working-class communities had developed without instruction from any state or any theory.

Emma Goldman arrived in the tradition slightly later and from a different angle, and what she added was not a new theoretical framework but something the framework had consistently failed to provide: an analysis of the connections between the forms of domination that earlier anarchist thinkers had treated as separate problems. Proudhon, as noted, was a misogynist by any reasonable standard. Bakunin was better, but his thinking about gender and domestic life was not systematic. Kropotkin was sympathetic to women's emancipation without integrating it into his political theory at any depth. Goldman insisted that this was not an incidental omission but a structural one: that the authority of the state over citizens, the authority of capital over labor, and the authority of men over women were not parallel but interlocking systems, each sustaining and legitimizing the others, and that an anarchism that addressed the first two while leaving the third intact was not anarchism but a more selective liberalism. Her essays — collected in Anarchism and Other Essays in 1910 and composed with a directness and rhetorical force that the more academic figures in the tradition rarely matched — extended the anarchist critique to marriage as an institution of ownership, to religion as a technology of social control, to patriotism as a manufactured emotion that served the state's need for cannon fodder, and to formal democracy as a system that periodically allowed the governed to choose their governors without altering the structure of governance at all. On this last point she was particularly sharp: the ballot, she argued, did not transfer power to those who cast it but legitimized the arrangement that concentrated power away from them. Participation in electoral politics was not a step toward liberation but a performance of consent that the system required to maintain its claim to represent those it governed.

Goldman was also the figure who most honestly confronted the tradition's complicated relationship with political violence — having herself been implicated, in complex ways, in the aftermath of Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Her eventual position, worked out over decades of painful experience, was that violence as a political tactic was not only tactically self-defeating but theoretically inconsistent: an anarchism that sought to abolish coercive authority by exercising it could not coherently maintain that its own exercise of coercion was categorically different from the coercion it opposed. This is not a comfortable conclusion, and Goldman did not arrive at it comfortably. But the honesty with which she engaged the contradiction is part of what makes her more than a propagandist. She was a thinker working through genuinely difficult problems in real time, in a tradition that had always found the problem of violence easier to provoke than to resolve.

By the end of the 19th century, anarchism had accumulated something it had previously lacked: a body of serious theoretical literature, a set of internal debates about fundamental questions, and a demonstrated capacity to generate political movements — some catastrophic, some inspiring, all instructive — that tested its ideas against the resistance of actual social conditions. It had also, through Kropotkin especially, established a claim that the tradition would continue to develop in the following century: that its account of human social nature was not merely philosophically defensible but empirically grounded, that the capacity for voluntary cooperation it attributed to human communities was not a utopian assumption but an observable feature of how people actually organized their lives when not organized for them. This claim — that anarchism describes rather than merely prescribes — would become central to the most important developments in the tradition's subsequent history.

The Analytic Turn: Philosophy Takes Anarchism Seriously

For most of the twentieth century, academic philosophy in the English-speaking world maintained an attitude toward anarchism that was less a considered position than a professional reflex — the reflex being to treat it as a topic for historians of ideas rather than a live philosophical option requiring engagement. Political philosophy in the analytic tradition was largely organized around the question of how authority should be arranged and exercised, taking for granted that it would be arranged and exercised, and the question of whether the entire enterprise of political authority could survive serious scrutiny was not one the discipline felt much urgency about posing. This changed, with some abruptness, in 1970, when a philosopher at Columbia University named Robert Paul Wolff published a short book called In Defense of Anarchism that posed the foundational question with a precision and economy that made ignoring it considerably more difficult than it had been before.

Wolff's argument is almost aggressively simple, which is part of its power. He begins not with a theory of the state but with an account of moral agency. The defining feature of a moral agent, he argues, is autonomy: the capacity and responsibility to govern one's conduct according to one's own reasoned judgment about what is right. This is not a controversial claim. It is more or less what Kant meant by moral personhood, and it is the premise from which virtually the entire tradition of liberal political philosophy proceeds. Wolff then turns to the state and observes that the state's defining feature is its claim to legitimate authority — not merely the power to compel compliance, which any sufficiently armed organization possesses, but the right to be obeyed, a right that holds independently of whether the person obeying agrees with the particular command in question. This too is not controversial. It is more or less what distinguishes a state from a protection racket, at least in the vocabulary of political philosophy. The problem is that these two premises cannot be simultaneously honored. Moral autonomy requires that one evaluate each situation according to one's own judgment and act on that evaluation. Legitimate authority requires that one act on the authority's commands regardless of one's own evaluation. To grant legitimate authority to the state is to surrender moral autonomy; to maintain moral autonomy is to deny that the state's commands have authority independent of one's own judgment. There is no stable middle position. You can comply with the state's commands when you agree with them, but that is not obedience to authority — it is simply doing what you would have done anyway. And you can comply when you disagree with them, but that is a suspension of moral agency that cannot be justified by any account of moral personhood that the liberal tradition is prepared to endorse.

The response that Wolff anticipated — that democratic procedures provide the missing justification, because in a democracy one is in some sense obeying oneself — he addressed with equal economy. Majority rule does not resolve the problem; it simply relocates it. The minority who voted differently have not consented to the outcome, and telling them that they consented to the procedure is not the same as telling them they consented to the result, which is the thing they are actually being asked to comply with. Unanimous direct democracy would satisfy the autonomy requirement, but no state of any significant size or complexity has operated on this principle or could plausibly do so. The conclusion Wolff draws is not that we should therefore have revolution or that existing institutions should be immediately dismantled, but that no state has ever been, or could in principle be, legitimate in the morally full sense that the concept requires. This is what he calls philosophical anarchism, and it is a position that follows from premises the liberal tradition cannot disavow without abandoning its own foundations.

Wolff subsequently retreated somewhat from his own conclusion, suggesting in later work that the problem might be managed through various institutional devices, and his critics argued that the retreat was more significant than the argument. But this has the logic backward. The argument either holds or it doesn't, and no subsequent equivocation by its author affects its validity. What the retreat actually illustrates is the psychological and professional difficulty of maintaining a conclusion that the institutional world one inhabits has no interest in accommodating — a difficulty that La Boétie identified five centuries earlier under the heading of manufactured complicity. That a philosopher who had demonstrated the illegitimacy of state authority should then spend the remainder of his career within institutions funded and structured by the state, and should find reasons to moderate his conclusion, is not a refutation of the argument. It is a data point.

The work of A. John Simmons approached the same conclusion from a different angle and with a different methodology, working not from first principles about moral agency but from within the tradition of consent theory that runs from Locke through the social contract theorists and that underpins most liberal accounts of political obligation. Simmons's Moral Principles and Political Obligations, published in 1979, subjected each of the main grounds on which political philosophers had argued that citizens are obligated to obey the law to the kind of careful analytical scrutiny that the tradition claimed to value but had rarely applied to its own premises. Tacit consent — the idea that by remaining in a territory and enjoying its benefits one has implicitly consented to its authority — he showed to fail on the basic terms of any coherent account of consent: consent that cannot be meaningfully refused, that is never explicitly sought, and that is inferred from the performance of activities one would perform regardless of one's political commitments is not consent in any sense that would be recognized in any other domain of life. Fair play — the idea that one is obligated to bear one's share of a cooperative scheme from which one benefits — fails because the state is not a voluntary cooperative scheme of the relevant kind, and because people who did not choose to participate in it and cannot meaningfully exit it cannot be said to have incurred obligations through their participation in the way that genuine voluntary cooperators do. Natural duty — the idea that there is a duty independent of consent to support just institutions — fails because actual states are not just institutions, and the degree of injustice that would have to be tolerated before the duty was suspended turns out, on examination, to encompass virtually every actually existing state. The conclusion Simmons reaches — that virtually no citizen of any actual state has a genuine moral obligation to obey its laws simply because they are laws — is what he calls "philosophical anarchism," using the same term as Wolff but arriving at it by a completely different route. The convergence is significant. It suggests that the anarchist conclusion is not an artifact of any particular argumentative strategy but the result that careful analysis of political obligation tends to produce regardless of where it starts.

Simmons was also careful to distinguish between the claim that there is no obligation to obey and the claim that there is no reason to obey. The absence of political obligation does not mean that everything governments require is arbitrary or that compliance is never warranted. Laws against murder do not become less binding because the state lacks legitimate authority; they were binding before the state existed and remain binding for reasons that have nothing to do with the state's authority. What the philosophical anarchist position denies is specifically the additional layer of obligation that political authority is supposed to add — the duty to comply not because the command is right but because it is a command from a legitimate source. That additional layer, Simmons argues, simply isn't there, and recognizing its absence does not generate the chaos that defenders of political authority assume it must, because most of the substantive moral requirements that states enforce were already morally required on independent grounds.

Michael Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority, published in 2012, represents the most recent and in some respects most audacious contribution to this philosophical tradition, and it is distinguished by its deliberate refusal to ground the argument in any particular philosophical framework. Where Wolff works from Kantian moral philosophy and Simmons from Lockean consent theory, Huemer explicitly appeals to what he calls "common sense morality" — the intuitions about right and wrong that ordinary people apply to their everyday interactions — and asks whether those intuitions, applied consistently, provide any support for the coercive authority that states claim. His method is to take situations that are morally unambiguous in the interpersonal register and examine what changes, if anything, when the same action is performed by a state rather than by an individual. If a private person were to approach you and demand a portion of your income, threatening to lock you in a cage if you refused, we would call this extortion and there would be no serious philosophical disagreement about its impermissibility. The fact that the state calls the same transaction taxation and provides services in return changes some things — the services are real and have value, and this is not nothing — but it does not obviously change the fundamental structure of the transaction, which involves the coercive extraction of resources from people who have not individually and voluntarily agreed to the terms. Huemer's question is not rhetorical. He genuinely wants to know what moral principle accounts for the difference, and he goes through the candidates — consent, fairness, the social contract, democratic authorization — with considerable care, finding each of them inadequate in ways that resemble but extend the analyses of Wolff and Simmons.

What Huemer calls "political institutionalism" — the tendency to treat political authority as a domain exempt from the moral reasoning we apply everywhere else — is, he argues, a form of motivated exception-making that we would not tolerate in any other area of ethics. We do not generally accept that institutions confer moral permissions that individuals do not possess, except in carefully delimited cases where we can provide explicit justification: a surgeon may cut you open because you have consented and the procedure serves your welfare; a lifeguard may physically restrain you from swimming into dangerous surf because the authority to do so is specifically granted and specifically bounded. The state's claim is categorically different: it claims a general, unlimited authority to coerce in any domain it chooses to enter, backed by a monopoly on legitimate violence, extending to people who have not consented and cannot meaningfully refuse. The justification for this claim, Huemer argues, has never been provided, because it cannot be — because no principle that we are prepared to apply consistently across cases will generate it.

Huemer's positive political vision — a form of market anarchism, sometimes called anarcho-capitalism — is the most contested aspect of his book, and the mainstream anarchist tradition has argued with considerable force that it simply relocates coercive authority from the state to private property relations without providing any additional justification for the relocation. This debate touches on some of the deepest fault lines in anarchist theory, and engaging it fully would require an essay of its own. What matters for present purposes is that the critical argument — the demolition of political authority's philosophical foundations — stands independently of the positive vision, and has not been answered by its critics so much as by-passed, usually by the claim that the alternative would be worse. This is possible. It is also, as a philosophical response, essentially a concession: an admission that the justification sought cannot be provided and that we are in the domain of pragmatic calculation rather than principled foundation. La Boétie's teenager would have recognized the move.

What the analytic tradition accomplished, across these three decades of careful argument, was the transformation of anarchism from a political position associated with a particular historical moment and a particular set of social movements into a conclusion that follows from the premises of liberal political philosophy itself, rigorously applied. This is a significant achievement, and it has been more influential than the academic discipline's relative silence about it suggests. Political philosophers know about Wolff and Simmons and Huemer. They assign them in graduate seminars. They write papers that engage with the arguments. And then, for the most part, they proceed to work on questions about the proper organization of authority rather than its justification, because the questions about organization are tractable in ways that the question of justification, once taken seriously, is not. The field has developed, in other words, an institutional relationship to the anarchist conclusion that is structurally identical to the relationship La Boétie described between subjects and their rulers: everyone knows, at some level, that the foundation is not there; everyone has reasons, professional and personal, to proceed as if it were; and the habit of proceeding as if it were becomes, over time, indistinguishable from genuine belief.

The Anthropological Turn: Anarchism as Description, Not Prescription

The philosophical tradition examined in the preceding section approached the problem of political authority from the inside — working with the premises of liberal theory, using the tools of analytic philosophy, arguing that the conclusions the tradition claimed to support did not follow from the premises it was actually prepared to defend. This is a powerful approach, but it has a limitation that its practitioners were generally aware of: it establishes that existing justifications for state authority fail without establishing what, if anything, should or could replace it. The standard objection to philosophical anarchism — that it is a purely critical position, that it demolishes without building, that it tells us the foundation isn't there without telling us what to stand on — is not a refutation, but it is a genuine observation about scope. The anthropological turn in anarchist thinking addresses this limitation not by providing a blueprint but by shifting the question entirely: rather than asking what a stateless society would look like, it asks what stateless societies have actually looked like, and finds that the historical and ethnographic record is considerably richer on this point than the political mainstream has been willing to acknowledge.

James C. Scott spent most of his career as a political scientist and anthropologist at Yale studying what he called the "weapons of the weak" — the everyday forms of resistance, evasion, and non-compliance through which subordinate groups navigated and subverted systems of domination without engaging them in the direct confrontation that would invite overwhelming repression. His earlier books, particularly Weapons of the Weak and Domination and the Arts of Resistance, established a framework for understanding how power actually operates at the level of daily life, and how people who cannot openly challenge authority develop sophisticated practices of partial compliance, strategic incompetence, rumor, desertion, and foot-dragging that collectively constitute a politics invisible to those looking only at formal institutions. This framework — the insistence on looking at what people actually do rather than what official accounts say they do — is what he brought to his most directly anarchist work.

The Art of Not Being Governed, published in 2009, is one of those books that reorganizes the intellectual landscape around a question that turns out, once it has been posed, to have been obviously worth asking all along. The question is this: who are the people who live in the highland regions of mainland Southeast Asia — the vast upland zone stretching across parts of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou — and why do they live there rather than in the lowland valleys that are, by any conventional measure, more agriculturally productive and more materially comfortable? The conventional answer, which Scott describes as the implicit assumption of the entire historiography of the region, is that they are primitive, pre-modern, developmentally backward peoples who have simply not yet been incorporated into the civilizational progress that the lowland states represent. They are, in this view, people whom history has not yet reached.

Scott's answer is the opposite. The highland peoples of what he calls Zomia — a term he borrows from the geographer Willem van Schendel for the entire upland region — are not people whom history has not reached. They are people who have been reached by history and have, with considerable sophistication and deliberate effort, organized their societies to evade its grasp. The upland regions are not where development has not yet arrived; they are where people have gone to escape it — escape being understood not as flight from progress but as flight from the specific institutions of lowland state-making: taxation, corvée labor, military conscription, debt bondage, epidemic disease concentrated in dense agricultural settlements, and the various forms of coercion through which lowland kingdoms and empires extracted surplus from their populations. The highlands are, in Scott's formulation, a state-repelling geography, and the peoples who live there have, over centuries and millennia, developed social structures specifically adapted to maintaining that repellence.

The implications of this argument are extensive and carefully developed. The apparent primitivism of highland societies — their preference for root crops over wet rice, their swidden agriculture, their oral rather than written cultures, their lack of fixed settlements — turns out, on examination, to be not a failure of development but an achievement of ungovernability. Wet rice cultivation produces the storable, measurable, taxable surplus that state revenue systems require; root crops, which can be left in the ground and harvested incrementally, produce no such surplus and therefore offer the state nothing worth taxing. Oral cultures leave no records that administrators can use to assess populations and extract obligations; writing, in the early history of most states, is primarily a tool of surveillance and accounting before it is anything else. Fixed settlements are legible to state power in ways that mobile communities are not. Highland peoples did not fail to develop these features of lowland civilization; they actively avoided them, because the features of lowland civilization most visible from the highlands were the ones that made populations available for exploitation. Scott calls this "the art of not being governed," and his argument is that it has been practiced, consciously and skillfully, by a significant fraction of the human population for most of recorded history.

The political implication Scott draws, with characteristic care and some deliberate understatement, is that the standard narrative of human political development — in which statelessness is the condition from which civilization rescues us — has the causality substantially backward. States did not emerge because populations wanted the services they provide; they emerged because elites found ways to concentrate coercive power, and populations who could escape that concentration did so. The history of civilization is not only the history of state-building; it is equally the history of the flight from states, the development of social technologies for evading their reach, and the maintenance of forms of communal life that did not require or want their management. Statelessness, in this reading, is not the absence of something but the achievement of something — a political condition that required, and still requires, considerable collective effort and intelligence to maintain.

Two Cheers for Anarchism, published in 2012, is a slimmer and more personal book in which Scott draws the implications of his historical and anthropological work for contemporary political theory, and his refusal to give anarchism the full three cheers is itself an argument worth attending to. What he withholds the third cheer for is the anarchist tradition's occasional tendency toward a totalism that mirrors the totalism it opposes — the assumption that a complete and thoroughgoing transformation of social organization is both possible and necessary, rather than a piecemeal, experimental, and necessarily partial improvement of existing conditions. Scott's anarchism is empirical and incremental, suspicious of grand theoretical systems precisely because the history he has studied is the history of grand theoretical systems being imposed on populations by people convinced they knew better. The anarchist insight he finds most valuable is not the blueprint for a stateless society but the disposition — the reflexive suspicion of hierarchy, the attention to how institutions concentrate power and insulate it from accountability, the preference for direct action and voluntary cooperation over bureaucratic management, the recognition that the people most affected by decisions are generally better placed to make them than the administrators who claim to manage on their behalf. This is anarchism as a sensibility rather than a program, and Scott defends it with the authority of someone who has spent decades watching both states and their subjects in considerable ethnographic detail.

David Graeber arrived at anarchism from a different disciplinary direction — he was trained as an anthropologist at Chicago, did fieldwork in Madagascar, and taught for years at Yale before moving to the London School of Economics — but his intellectual project converged with Scott's in its insistence that anarchism be understood as a description of existing human capacities rather than a projection of ideal conditions. Where Scott's empirical base was historical and geographical, Graeber's was more broadly ethnographic and theoretical, and the combination produced a body of work that was, until his death in 2020, the most intellectually generative in the anarchist tradition since Kropotkin.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, published in 2004, is the clearest statement of Graeber's methodological position, and its central claim is arresting in its simplicity: anthropology, by virtue of having studied the full range of human social organization across cultures and centuries, is the discipline best equipped to demonstrate that the forms of voluntary cooperation, horizontal decision-making, and mutual aid that anarchism proposes are not utopian fantasies but documented features of how human communities have repeatedly organized themselves. The Malagasy communities Graeber had studied, the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, the Kurdish experiment in Rojava, the indigenous governance structures of countless societies that Western political philosophy had filed under "pre-political" — all of these were not approximations of a political form that had not yet been achieved but evidence that it had been achieved, repeatedly, in conditions of varying difficulty and under varying degrees of external pressure. The question was not whether horizontal self-governance was possible in principle but why political philosophy had so consistently declined to take seriously the evidence that it was possible in practice.

The answer Graeber proposed was partly disciplinary — political philosophy is organized around the state as its central object, and evidence that the state is not necessary tends not to find a receptive audience in a discipline constituted by the question of how states should be organized — and partly ideological, in the specific sense that the mythology underwriting capitalist and statist legitimacy required the suppression of this evidence. This is where his major work, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published in 2011, becomes important. The book is ostensibly a history of debt, but its real subject is the set of stories that modern economic and political life tells about its own origins and nature, and the sustained work of demolition it performs on those stories is as thorough as anything in the anarchist canon.

The myth Graeber begins with is the myth of barter — the story, found in virtually every introductory economics textbook, that before money existed people traded goods directly, and that money emerged as a more efficient medium for exchanges that were already happening. This story is not, Graeber demonstrates with an anthropological literature that is both extensive and largely ignored by economists, true in any documented case. No society that has been studied has operated on a barter economy in the way the textbook story requires. What actually precedes money, everywhere it has been studied, is credit — complex systems of mutual obligation, recorded in memory or in physical tokens, through which communities managed the distribution of goods and services without requiring the simultaneous exchange of equivalents. The textbook story has the history backward: money does not emerge from barter to solve the inefficiency of direct exchange; it emerges from credit systems, and its emergence is generally associated with state formation and warfare, because states need to pay soldiers and tax populations, and standardized currency is a tool for doing both. The origin of money is not, in other words, a solution to an economic problem but an instrument of political control, and the mythology that naturalizes it as the former is doing work for the latter.

This pattern — the mythology that presents a historical and contingent arrangement as a natural and necessary one — Graeber finds repeated throughout the ideological structure of contemporary economic life. The "natural" tendency of humans to exchange and accumulate, the "natural" priority of debt obligations over other moral claims, the "natural" requirement that states exist to enforce contracts and protect property — each of these naturalistic stories turns out, on examination, to be a historical construction with a specific origin in specific acts of force and institutional design, dressed in the language of nature or necessity to make it harder to question. The political implication is identical to La Boétie's: arrangements that present themselves as inevitable are historical, and arrangements that are historical can be otherwise.

Graeber's involvement in the Occupy movement, which he helped to organize in 2011 and in which he played a significant role in developing the horizontal decision-making structures that became one of the movement's most discussed features, was a deliberate attempt to practice the anthropological argument he had been making theoretically — to demonstrate, in a visible public setting, that large groups of people could make collective decisions without hierarchical authority, that the skills required for this were not exotic but latent in ordinary people who had simply never been given occasion to exercise them, and that the experience of exercising them changed people's sense of what was possible in ways that no theoretical argument could replicate. Whether Occupy succeeded or failed by the measures appropriate to social movements is a separate question; what it demonstrated about human organizational capacity was, by Graeber's lights, the point.

What the anthropological turn accomplished, in the hands of Scott and Graeber, was something philosophically important that the analytic tradition had not attempted: it grounded the anarchist argument not only in what human beings are capable of in principle but in what they have demonstrably done in practice. The objection that a stateless society is a utopian fantasy cannot survive the evidence that stateless societies have existed, do exist, and have developed the internal complexity and cooperative sophistication that the objection assumes they could not. The objection that human nature requires coercive authority cannot survive the ethnographic record of the enormous variety of human social arrangements, most of which have managed without the specific form of coercive authority that the modern state represents. What remains after the objections have been examined is not a proof that anarchism will work — nothing in the complexity of human social life is susceptible of that kind of proof — but a demonstration that the burden of evidence, like the burden of philosophical argument, lies with those who insist that authority is necessary rather than with those who question it. This is the same reversal that Wolff accomplished through analytic argument, arrived at through a completely different route. That the two traditions converge on the same conclusion is not, at this point, surprising.

The Internal Debates: Tensions That Won't Resolve

Any intellectual tradition that has persisted across two and a half millennia and produced thinkers as various as Zhuangzi, La Boétie, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Wolff, and Graeber is not going to be internally unified, and anarchism has never pretended otherwise with any great conviction. Its fault lines are real and in some cases run deep enough to raise the question of whether "anarchism" names a single tradition at all or a family of positions related by a shared object of critique — political authority — without sharing much else. The internal debates are worth examining not as a catalogue of the tradition's failures but as evidence of its philosophical seriousness: traditions that do not have genuine internal disagreements are generally traditions that have stopped thinking.

The oldest and most fundamental division is between individualist and collectivist anarchism, and it maps, imperfectly but recognizably, onto a disagreement about what anarchism is fundamentally opposed to. The individualist tradition — represented in the nineteenth century by Max Stirner, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker, and in various forms throughout the twentieth — holds that the irreducible unit of anarchist politics is the individual person, whose sovereignty over herself and her life is the value from which everything else follows. Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, published in 1845 and one of the strangest and most uncompromising texts in the tradition, argues that every abstraction — the state, society, humanity, God, even anarchism as an ideal — is a potential tyranny over the individual ego, because every abstraction demands subordination of the particular person to something larger than herself. This is not solipsism; Stirner was not arguing that other people don't exist or don't matter. He was arguing that the moment you posit an abstraction — the working class, the commune, the revolution — as the proper object of loyalty, you have created a new authority over the individual and reproduced the structure you set out to abolish. The individual does not serve the collective; the collective, if it has value, is an "union of egoists" that serves the individuals composing it and dissolves when it ceases to.

The collectivist tradition — running from Proudhon and Bakunin through Kropotkin and Goldman and the mainstream of the anarchist movement — holds that this is at best an incomplete account of human social reality and at worst a philosophical justification for the most aggressive forms of self-interest. Human beings are not sovereign individuals who subsequently form social relationships; they are social creatures whose individuality is itself constituted through relationship, whose capacity for reason and moral judgment develops within communities that precede them and will outlast them, and whose freedom is therefore not opposed to collective life but dependent on its proper organization. The commune, the federation, the network of mutual aid — these are not threats to individual freedom but its conditions of possibility, because no individual is free in isolation from the social arrangements that determine whether her basic needs are met, whether her capacities are developed, whether her voice has any effect on the world she lives in. An individualism that abstracts the person from these conditions is not a defense of freedom but a mystification of the conditions under which some people's freedom is purchased at the cost of others'.

This debate has not been resolved and probably cannot be, because it touches a genuine philosophical antinomy about the relationship between persons and the social structures that form them. What it has produced, in the more careful thinkers on both sides, is a mutual correction: the collectivist tradition has been improved by the individualist insistence that collective purposes can become tyrannies, and the individualist tradition has been improved by the collectivist insistence that individual sovereignty abstracted from social conditions is a fiction that usually serves those who already possess the resources to act on it.

The more recent and in some respects more acrimonious division is between the mainstream anarchist tradition and what calls itself anarcho-capitalism — the position associated primarily with Murray Rothbard and David Friedman, which holds that the state is illegitimate but that private property, free markets, and the voluntary contractual relationships they generate are not only legitimate but the proper organizational basis of a free society. Rothbard argued with considerable philosophical rigor that the state's defining characteristic — its monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory — was the source of its illegitimacy, and that eliminating this monopoly while retaining private property and market exchange would produce a genuinely free order in which all relationships were voluntary and no authority was coercive. Defense, dispute resolution, and the other functions currently performed by the state would be provided by competing private firms in a market, and individuals would choose among them as they choose among other goods and services.

The mainstream anarchist response to this position has been consistent and, on its central point, compelling. Private property, in the analysis that runs from Proudhon through the entire collectivist tradition, is not a natural fact that precedes the state and can be retained after its abolition. It is a legal and institutional construction that requires coercive enforcement — the eviction of those who cannot pay rent, the exclusion of those who trespass, the enforcement of contracts against those who default — and that distributes coercive authority not to the state but to property owners, whose power over those who depend on access to their property is no less real for being exercised through market mechanisms rather than state institutions. The worker who must accept the employer's terms or starve is not in a voluntary relationship in any sense that the anarchist tradition can recognize as free, regardless of whether the state is present to enforce the employment contract. What anarcho-capitalism proposes, in this reading, is not the abolition of coercive authority but its privatization — the distribution of the state's coercive functions among private actors who exercise them without the formal accountability, limited as it is, that even existing states are subject to. This is not anarchism but a more thoroughgoing version of the capitalism that the anarchist tradition has always identified as one of the primary systems of domination it opposes.

Rothbard and Friedman have responses to this objection, and the debate between market and socialist anarchism is philosophically genuine rather than merely a terminological dispute. But it forces into the open a question that the tradition cannot avoid: is anarchism opposed to the state specifically, or to domination in general? If the former, then anarcho-capitalism may have a legitimate claim to the name, because it does propose to eliminate the state. If the latter, then eliminating the state while preserving the property relations that enable some people to control the material conditions of others' lives is not a solution to the problem but a reorganization of it. The mainstream tradition has always held the latter position, which is why it has always coupled the critique of the state with a critique of capitalism — they are, in this analysis, not separate problems requiring separate solutions but aspects of a single system of domination whose components cannot be dismantled independently without simply transferring power from one component to another.

The feminist critique of the anarchist tradition is both the most important internal challenge the tradition has faced and the one it has been slowest to fully integrate, which is itself revealing. Goldman raised the fundamental point: that the authority of men over women in the family and in intimate life was a form of domination as real and as damaging as the authority of the state over citizens or capital over labor, and that an anarchism that failed to address it was applying its principles selectively in ways that reproduced, within the liberated community it imagined, the structures of power it claimed to be dismantling. This was not merely a programmatic objection about whether women's issues should be included in the anarchist platform. It was a theoretical objection about the consistency of anarchism's own premises. If domination is illegitimate wherever it occurs, then the domestic authority of husbands over wives, the social authority of men over women's reproductive choices, the cultural authority that assigns care work and intellectual labor to different genders — all of these are anarchist problems, not supplementary concerns to be addressed after the primary political and economic transformation has been achieved.

The subsequent development of anarcha-feminism — through figures like Voltairine de Cleyre in the early twentieth century, through the feminist movements of the 1970s and their engagement with anarchist organizational forms, through contemporary theorists like Cindy Milstein — has pushed this critique further in ways that have permanently altered the tradition's self-understanding, or should have. The recognition that domination is not only exercised through formal political and economic institutions but through the organization of intimate life, through the social construction of bodies and desires, through the distribution of labor and care that makes formal freedom possible for some by making it impossible for others — this recognition has produced a more comprehensive and more internally consistent anarchism than the one Proudhon and Bakunin developed, at the cost of making the tradition's positive vision considerably more demanding than a simple abolition of the state and capital would require.

The question of political violence is where the tradition's internal tensions have been most publicly visible and most practically consequential, and it has never been resolved to anything like general satisfaction. The "propaganda of the deed" — the idea, associated primarily with late nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchist movements, that spectacular acts of political violence could awaken mass consciousness to the possibility of revolutionary action — produced a series of assassinations and bombings, including the killing of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, and a sequence of bombings in Europe and America that did more to define anarchism in the public mind than any of its philosophical literature. The practical consequences were largely catastrophic: the violence provided the justification for severe state repression that decimated the movements responsible, while providing no evidence that it had achieved any of the political awakening it theorized. Goldman, who had initially supported propaganda of the deed and who remained in a complicated relationship with Berkman's act throughout her life, arrived eventually at the position that political violence was both tactically self-defeating and theoretically inconsistent — that an anarchism committed to the abolition of coercion could not coherently employ coercion as a transformative tool without undermining its own account of what transformation required.

This position — which became mainstream within the tradition — was never universally accepted, partly because it sits in tension with a genuine philosophical problem that cannot be dissolved by principle alone: what is the appropriate response to violence that is already being exercised? The state's coercion is not hypothetical. The violence of the existing order — in its prisons, its police, its wars, its structural deprivation — is ongoing and systematic. An anarchism that refuses all counter-violence risks becoming, in conditions of severe repression, a principled acquiescence to the violence of the status quo. This is not an argument for terrorism, but it is an argument that the question of violence cannot be resolved by a simple commitment to non-violence without engaging the asymmetries of the situation in which the commitment is made. The tradition has generally been honest about this tension without being able to resolve it, which is perhaps the only honest position available.

What the internal debates collectively demonstrate is that anarchism is a living intellectual tradition rather than a fixed doctrine — one that has generated genuine philosophical controversy, that has been improved by its own internal criticism, that has faced its contradictions more honestly than most political traditions face theirs, and that has remained capable of development in response to the evidence and arguments that history has provided. The feminist critique made it more consistent. The anthropological turn made it more empirically grounded. The analytic tradition made it more philosophically precise. The disagreement with anarcho-capitalism forced it to clarify what it was actually opposed to. None of these developments resolved everything, and some of them introduced new complications. This is what serious intellectual traditions look like from the inside.

What the History Establishes

There is a version of this history that ends with a triumphant statement of the anarchist case — a summation that gathers everything that has been argued across twenty-five centuries and presents it as a verdict. That version would be dishonest, and the tradition examined here has generally been too serious to indulge it. What the history establishes is not that anarchism is correct in all its forms and implications but that it poses a question that has not been answered — a question that recurs, with the persistence of something that has not been disposed of, wherever serious thinkers have examined the foundations of political life rather than simply its management. The question deserves to be named clearly: whether political authority — the specific claim to rightful command backed by coercive force, extended over people who have not individually and voluntarily consented to it — can be grounded in any principle that survives honest scrutiny. After two and a half millennia of attempts, the honest answer is that it has not been.

This is not a trivial finding. Political philosophy has had some of the most formidable intellects in human history working on the problem of authority's justification, and what they have produced is not a solution but an increasingly sophisticated account of why the solution is difficult — which is a different thing. Plato built the most elaborate philosophical architecture of the ancient world to answer Thrasymachus and produced something magnificent that did not quite answer him. The social contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constructed the framework within which liberal political philosophy still largely operates, and the most careful analysis of that framework — Simmons's patient dismantling of its major variants — concludes that virtually no actual state satisfies its own justificatory conditions. The democratic tradition has generated a century and a half of institutional innovation and a genuinely important body of thought about how to make the exercise of power less arbitrary and more accountable, without resolving the prior question of what makes that power legitimate in the first place. That prior question remains open, and the tradition examined here has kept it open against the institutional preference of every era for treating it as closed.

What is perhaps most striking about the historical sweep of this tradition is its geographical and cultural breadth. The anarchist question was not invented in nineteenth century Europe and subsequently discovered to have precursors elsewhere. It arose independently, in response to the same observable features of political life, in classical Athens and in Warring States China, in the radical currents of medieval Christianity and in the aftermath of the English Revolution, in the intellectual ferment of the French Enlightenment and in the communities of Southeast Asian highlands that had been practicing statelessness for centuries without benefit of any theory about it. This pattern of independent convergence is significant in exactly the way that similar patterns are significant in other domains of inquiry: when different investigators, working from different starting points with different methods and without knowledge of each other's conclusions, arrive at the same result, the result is more likely to reflect something real about its subject than to be an artifact of any particular investigator's assumptions or circumstances. What all of these thinkers and traditions converged on is not a single political program but a single observation: that the relationship between those who exercise authority and those who are subject to it is not natural, not necessary, not rationally justified, and not inevitable — that it is historical, contingent, maintained by mechanisms of habituation and manufactured consent and distributed complicity that La Boétie described with devastating precision in 1548, and that a social order organized differently is not a fantasy but a possibility to which the human record offers repeated, if imperfect, testimony.

The tradition has also been honest, in its better moments, about the difficulty of what it proposes. The transition from a world organized around coercive authority to one organized around voluntary cooperation is not a technical problem awaiting the right solution but a transformation of the entire set of social habits, institutional arrangements, cultural assumptions, and material conditions that currently constitute what most people experience as reality. Kropotkin understood this. Graeber understood it. Scott understood it with particular clarity, which is why he withheld his third cheer — not because he doubted the desirability of what anarchism proposed but because he had spent enough time studying actual human communities to know that the gap between a good argument and a livable social arrangement is one that no argument, however good, can close by itself. The anarchist conclusion that political authority lacks legitimate foundation does not, by itself, tell us how to organize the large-scale coordination that complex social life requires, how to manage genuine conflicts of interest between people who disagree, or how to prevent the re-emergence of coercive hierarchy in communities that have formally abolished it. These are real problems, and the tradition that dismisses them too quickly does itself a disservice.

What the tradition at its best has always insisted, against this objection, is that the absence of a complete alternative blueprint is not a reason to accept an arrangement whose foundations have been shown to be fraudulent. We do not generally argue that a building whose foundations are demonstrably unsound should continue to be inhabited because we have not yet designed a replacement. The anarchist case is not that we know exactly what should replace existing political authority but that existing political authority's claim to necessity — the claim that without it, coordinated social life is impossible, that the alternative is chaos, that the burden of proof lies with those who question rather than those who exercise coercive power — is false, and that recognizing its falsity is the precondition for thinking seriously about what a genuine alternative might look like. La Boétie's resolution — "serve no more" — is not a policy prescription. It is a reorientation of imagination, a refusal of the mental habit that conflates the existing order with the possible order, and it is the contribution that the entire history traced here ultimately converges on.

The philosophical tradition established that the burden of justification lies with authority. The anthropological tradition established that human beings have repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to organize complex social life without it. The historical tradition established that the question of its legitimacy has been suppressed, evaded, and institutionally managed rather than answered, across every era in which it has been seriously raised. Together they constitute not a proof but a permanent challenge — a set of arguments and evidence that political philosophy cannot honestly ignore and has not honestly engaged, and that returns, with each generation of thinkers serious enough to pose it, with undiminished force.

There is a companion question to all of this, which is where the argument goes from here — what contemporary political theory makes of the anarchist challenge, what new thinking has been brought to bear on it in recent decades, and what a fresh engagement with the problem might contribute to a tradition that is, by any serious measure, still very much alive. That question belongs to a different essay.