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Title: Anarchism and non-domination
Author: Ruth Kinna
Date: 2019
Language: en
Topics: domination, freedom, republicanism
Source: *Journal of Political Ideologies* Volume 24, 2019 - Issue 3 DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2019.1633100

Ruth Kinna

Anarchism and non-domination

Abstract

In this article we recover the classical anarchist deployment of

republican tropes of non-domination, tyranny and slavery, to expose the

conservative limits of the contemporary neo-Roman republican revival.

For the anarchists, the modern nation state and the institution of

private property are antithetical to freedom as non-domination, acting

as structural constraints to freedom rather than the means for its

realisation. We re-examine the grounds of this critique to advance two

arguments. First, that a commitment to either the state or private

property represents an unwarranted positive moral and ethical commitment

that skews the negative theory of freedom contemporary republicans seek

to develop. Second, the prior moral commitment to the state renders

neo-Roman republicanism fundamentally conservative. Anarchist theories

of freedom as non-domination push much further than the contemporary

republican revival seems to permit, opening new possibilities for

institutional and constitutional innovation while remaining consistent

with the core republican normative value of non-domination.

Introduction

With the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, both

republicanism and anarchism have seen something of a revival in

fortunes, both coming to prominence espousing a normative political

philosophy that equates freedom with non-domination. In contemporary

political theory, republicanism has by far attracted the most scholarly

interest. Associated with Quentin Skinner’s third concept of liberty and

Philip Pettit’s neo-Roman view, the republican conception of freedom as

non-domination prioritises the rejection of arbitrary interference over

non-interference.[1] Distinguished from the taxonomy of positive and

negative liberty outlined by Isaiah Berlin, it is associated with

independence: to be non-dominated, Skinner argues, is ‘to be possessed

of a power to act according to your own will rather than being obliged

to live in dependence on the will of someone else.’[2] Essential to this

conception is an affective language of emancipation from slavery and

slavish toadying to the powers that be. Non-domination describes the

move from dominium to libertas, from the status of servus to liber. Law

and constitutional provisions are central to this move but also double

as means for checking the powers of majorities, minorities and

individuals. It is the presence of laws and an established

constitutional framework, benchmarks for political agency, which ensure

that none is able to arbitrarily interfere in the free decisions of

others.

The concept of non-domination also has a place in modern anarchism. Uri

Gordon, one of the leading theorists of anarchist movement politics, has

shown that anarchists routinely identify and challenge the plural and

intersecting ‘regimes of domination’ that structure modern life.[3]

Gordon continues, ‘any act of resistance is, in the barest sense,

“anarchist” when it is perceived by the actor as a particular

actualisation of a more systemic opposition to domination.’[4] Saul

Newman, equally influential in contemporary postanarchist theory, argues

that anarchism is a ‘project […] of exposing the contingency and

arbitrariness of our current social arrangements, the ways they are

established through multiple dominations and exclusions.’[5]

Just as the anarchist revival of traditionally republican tropes has

been overlooked by most political theorists, contemporary anarchists

have advanced their conception without any engagement with the

comparable neo-Roman lexicon. The contemporary anarchist neglect of

republicanism is particularly unfortunate because it also points to the

sidelining of a historical anarchist critique of republicanism. Gordon,

like David Graeber, traces the roots of today’s anarchist networks to

the radicalism of the sixties, and minimises the links to the 19th and

early 20th centuries anarchist traditions; Newman’s concern to expose

the perceived epistemological and philosophical shortcomings of 19th

century theory actively dissuades reflection on these historical

links.[6] Although anarchism provides a powerful critical lens to expose

the limits of republican theory on republican grounds, this critique

remains buried in the history of ideas. By resurrecting it, our aim is

to reformulate it by anarchizing the republican concept of freedom as

non-domination.

For Pettit, freedom as non-domination is a negative principle. This

means that it is detached from any particular vision of the good and

acts as a benchmark against which to judge different constitutional

arrangements and assess their ability to maximize negative freedoms.

Accordingly, Pettit argues that ‘environmentalism, feminism, socialism,

and multiculturalism’ might all ‘be cast as republican causes,’ since

each sets out the negative conditions which freedom as non-domination

ought to meet, whether freedom from environmental degradation or

vulnerability, patriarchy, or the vicissitudes of capitalism.[7] The

critical purchase of freedom as non-domination then extends from the

rigorousness of the tests it sets to assess the freedom-enhancing

properties of political institutions.[8] In this article, we explore how

anarchist socialists have responded to the republican call. We recover

an anarchist critique of republican institutions to reflect on the

robustness of the conceptual test that contemporary republicans use to

evaluate the non-dominating properties of their preferred institutional

arrangements.

The discussion turns on the question: ‘which institutions do best by

freedom?’[9] For Pettit, this necessarily remains an open question.

Anarchists argue that the state and private property are

freedom-curtailing institutions. For most republicans, the state and

private property are essential background conditions for freedom as

non-domination.[10] The state is like ‘gravity’[11] or ‘the laws of

physics,’[12] Pettit argues. Private property is likewise a regime ‘akin

to the natural environment.’[13] Pettit’s schema forces contemporary

theorists of non-domination to theorize freedom within their confines,

taking states and private property to be empirical conditions, not

normative benchmarks, and yet, on further analysis, we see that in fact,

this defence of state and private property dilutes the critical purchase

of republican theory.

The anarchist view we advance here is that these two institutions

underpin our current predicaments and conceptually limit our ways of

thinking about alternatives. In and of itself, this is hardly an

original claim, but what the recovery of anarchist ideas shows us is

that there are strong republican grounds for rejecting both institutions

and that freedom as non-domination can be retained as a normative

benchmark for future constitutional post-statist and post-capitalist

design.[14]

In advancing the anarchist position, we extend two important friendly

critiques of the neo-Roman republican turn. The first is that neo-Roman

republicanism tacitly endorses a near limitless state, through enabling

the state to provide constitutional constraints against all manner of

relations of dominations, some of which are non-arbitrary, like the care

of the young and vulnerable.[15] The second is that neo-Roman

republicanism has failed to take account of republican critiques that

highlighted the structural constraints on freedom caused by private

ownership of the means of production. This is the argument Alex

Gourevitch advances in his recent analysis of the 19th-century union,

the ‘red republican’ Knights of Labor.[16]

Following a broadly contextualist method,[17] our aim is to show how

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), Peter

Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), key figures in the

historical anarchist tradition[18] developed the language of slavery,

domination and non-domination, central to 19th century republicanism, to

advance what became known as anarchism. The anarchists almost

universally argued that private property was a ‘transformation’ of

slavery from chattel to wage slavery, and that defending exclusive

claims to ownership necessitated a state. Because the constitutional and

legal frameworks of statism cemented structural injustice, anarchists

argued that freedom from domination required the abandonment of these

two institutions. Our aim in this article is to undertake the

preliminary task of advancing an anarchist critique of republicanism

that has been ignored by historians and political theorists, rather than

trace the plural alternatives to statehood that have been advanced in

anarchist literature.[19] The 19th century anarchist critique of

republicanism we outline here pushes debates about alternatives to the

contemporary world order in ways that are congruent with the general

commitment to freedom as non-domination.

This analysis also achieves three wider, though no less important

correctives. First, locating the emergence of anarchism from within

republicanism corrects the standard anachronistic historiography of

anarchism that sees it as a tradeoff between liberalism and

socialism.[20] Second, the recovery of this republican heritage allows

us to open up an important vein of constitutional theorizing in

anarchist thought. Anarchists tend to see empowerment as the key to

social change,[21] but our account suggests that empowerment without

constitutional provision is normatively stunted. Finally, this synthetic

conceptual history of the emergence of anarchism provides a normative

and political challenge to the implicit and explicit politics of the

neo-Roman recovery in contemporary political theory.[22] Our

politicization and recuperation of the anarchist account of domination

is intended to make the contemporary neo-Roman recovery seem

conservative, moralized and historically stunted. It is arbitrary on

account of its refusal to explore the 19th century tradition of

republican thought, and moralized in so far as it requires a normative

and political commitment to the state to guarantee private property

ownership. This undercuts the negative credentials of the theory of

freedom neo-Romans advance, and sheds light on the fundamentally

conservative nature of the republican critique.[23] The neo-Roman

reluctance to accommodate 19th century republican thinking is

telling.[24] The effect is to detach republicanism from material and

intellectual transformations central to the emergence of contemporary

capitalism. If we want to make sense of modern society, these processes

are at least as significant to us as the wars of American independence

and the aspirations of the commonwealthmen.[25]

Anarchism and the republican tradition

For Pettit, Rousseau’s communitarian unicameralism marks the end of the

Roman tradition in European thought, and the point of departure for

liberalism which subsequently dominated political thought.[26] It is

broadly for this reason that he and others look backwards from the 18th

century, rather than look forward to the 19th century to develop their

conception of freedom. Historical accounts of French republicanism are

not so quick to draw this line. The bifurcation of republicanism into

Jacobin and liberal varieties has tended to dominate the

historiography[27] since replicated in accounts of the emergence of

liberalism and Marxism in the United States.[28] However, not even

forward-looking historians who accept the ‘extremely elastic’[29] nature

of republicanism stretch it to include anarchism. Hazareesingh admits

Proudhon’s association with the republican tradition, only to dismiss

him on account of his systematic anti-feminism.[30] Perhaps more

important is the fact that Proudhon could not be said to have ‘founded’

any republic for it is undoubtedly the case that the centrality of the

American and French Revolutions, and the subsequent experimental

tendencies of republicans with constitutional and institutional

arrangements, define republicanism’s modern origins.[31]

One of the virtues of Pettit’s conceptual corrective to the approaches

adopted in the history of ideas is that it offers a different way of

thinking about the scope of republican traditions. By examining the

language of freedom, slavery and non-domination, rather than the

political project of republican statebuilding, Pettit provides a far

broader framing of republicanism and its historical concerns than the

mainstream. This opening has been exploited by Alex Gourevitch.[32]

Recovering the rich history of the Knights of Labor, Gourevitch has

shown how the language of domination and slavery was adopted to define a

red republican position that equated freedom as non-domination with the

rejection of ‘free labour contracts’ and the constitutional protection

of private property. Anarchists also used this language, adopting it at

least forty years before the Knights organized.

From the end of the restoration period and up to the beginning of the

Second Empire (1830–1851), anarchist thought was shaped by an engagement

with the major currents of republicanism: the Jacobin republican

socialism of Louis Blanc, the liberal republicanism of Adolphe Thiers

and Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, Jules Barni and Charles Renouvier, and

the economics of J.B. Say.[33] As Stephen Vincent and Alex Prichard have

shown,[34] not only did Proudhon engage directly with these tendencies

in republican thought, he also engaged with the leading political

philosophies of the age, specifically the writings of Rousseau, Kant and

Comte. Likewise, Bakunin’s anarchism was shaped as much by his critique

of Mazzini as it was by his fall-out with Marx.[35] The rise of

republican nationalism was an important spur for the development of his

anti-theological, socialist federalism. Only three years before the

bloody repression of the Paris Commune in 1871, Bakunin shared a stage

with Hugo, Giuseppi Garibaldi and Barni in the ill-fated congress of the

League for Peace and Democracy.

Anarchists honed the language of domination and slavery in the late 19th

century in a milieu shaped by debates about abolition of slavery and

serfdom, during the consolidation and enforcement of the institution of

private property, the commodification of labour and the emergence of the

modern nation state. Albert Parsons, one of the Chicago anarchists

martyred in 1887 when he was tried and executed for professing anarchist

ideas embraced the civil and political liberties established in the

course of the French Revolution but rejected the economic ‘subjection

and dependence’ extending from property ownership and ‘formally

entrenched behind the bulwarks of statute law and government.’ Using

Proudhon to develop the critique of wage-labour dependency that

resonated with the Knights of Labor, he declared himself an anarchist

and constitutionalist and described anarchism heir to French

revolutionary republicanism: ‘We stand upon the right of free speech, of

free press, of public assemblage, unmolested and undisturbed. We stand

upon the constitutional right of self-defense, and we defy the

prosecution to rob the people of America of these dearly bought

rights.’[36]

As Carl Levy notes, anarchists also made common cause with the ‘radical

federalist and internationalist’ movements contained within

republicanism[37] to advance alternative constitutional arrangements.

Proudhon was almost alone in using the language of constitutionalism to

elaborate his ideas, but the principles of the decentralized federation

and ‘free’ or ‘voluntary’ agreement that he recommended were taken up

widely by later 19th and 20th century anarchists and anarchist

syndicalists. His ideas found fertile soil in the land of the cacique

system and latifundismo.[38] Indeed, Spanish republicanism and

federalism were profoundly shaped by Proudhon’s anarchism, most notably

through the influence of the Catalan Francesc Pi i Margal (1824–1901)

and the Galician Ramon de La Sagra (1798–1871). Margal translated two of

Proudhon’s works on constitutional politics into Spanish before becoming

president of the first Spanish republic in 1875. De la Sagra, a close

friend of Proudhon’s, established El Porvenir in 1848, one of the first

anarchist journals, before founding sociology as an academic discipline

in Spain, serving on the board of Proudhon’s ill-fated Bank of the

People, and then as a Spanish politician.[39]

Following the collapse of the Paris Commune and the massacre of 20,000

communards by the French state in 1871, anarchists and other radicals

who organized in the First International, including the nascent Marxist

camp, dropped all reference to republicanism.[40] From this time,

oppressed peoples were more likely to associate republicanism with

colonization, racism and imperialism than freedom against tyranny.[41]

This re-alignment of anarchism against republicanism helps explain why

contemporary theorists have little or no knowledge of the anarchist

heritage of the republican tradition, even though anarchists still use a

language of freedom, domination and slavery that all contemporary

republicans would recognize. Making up for this neglect re-links

anarchism to wider and more established currents in contemporary

political theory, opening up new lines of critical analysis within it.

Private property, domination and the ‘transformation of slavery’

In order to make sense of the conceptual innovations the anarchists

introduced, we return to Rousseau and reconstruct, from the anarchist’s

rejection of his ideas, the legacy of republicanism therein. The

anarchists were attracted and repelled by Rousseau in equal measure. On

the one hand, they endorsed Rousseau’s rejection of Pufendorf’s claim

that it is legitimate to sell oneself into slavery, to renounce one’s

freedom as one would one’s property. On the other, they objected to

Rousseau’s framing of property as a convention that must be regulated by

law. This formulation resolved the paradox that arises from Rousseau’s

critique of inequality and the nature of first possessory claims, which

he advances in the Discourse on Inequality and his defence of property

in The Social Contract.[42] But it did not placate the anarchists, who

continued to argue, with Rousseau, that both property and slavery do

‘violence to nature,’[43] and they also rejected his contention that the

reign of force ends where law begins.

We consider the argument against law and the state below, but first,

examine the way Proudhon and Bakunin related property to slavery.

Proudhon’s argument was that the introduction of constitutional rights

to private property and the exploitative systems these entrenched in the

post-revolutionary period precipitated the transformation of slavery

into wage-slavery. Remembered best for the epithet ‘property is theft!’

Proudhon opened his defining work of anarchist political theory by

conjoining property with slavery. Invoking republican ideas about the

virtues of independence, Proudhon explained:

If I had to answer the following question, ‘What is slavery?’ and if I

should respond in one word, ‘It is murder,’ my meaning would be

understood at once. I should not need a long explanation to show that

the power to deprive a man of this thought, his will, and his

personality is the power of life and death. So why to this other

question, ‘What is Property?’ should I not answer in the same way, ‘It

is theft!,’ without fearing to be misunderstood, since the second

proposition is only a transformation of the first.[44]

Private title in things, Proudhon argued, facilitated the theft of

property and value from those who produced it. Whereas under systems of

primitive accumulation property is seized, and slavery produces without

recompense, under capitalism, labourers work to produce, but the title

to the capital and the exclusive domain over property ensures that the

product of labour never remains with the labourer, and that the labourer

remains as dependent on the master as the slave had been prior to

emancipation. Proudhon argued that the transformation of slavery, from

chattel to wage labour, and the theft of the product of labour resulted

from the legal appropriation of property as an exclusive right of

dominion:

When the Emancipation of the Slave was proclaimed, the proprietor lost

the man and kept the land; just as today, in freeing the blacks, we

leave the master his property in land and stock. Nevertheless, from the

standpoint of ancient law as well as of natural and Christian right,

man, born to labour, cannot dispense with the implements of Labour; the

principle of Emancipation involved an agrarian law which guarantees them

to him and protects him in their use: otherwise, this pretended

Emancipation was only an act of hateful cruelty, an infamous deception

[…] The result was that the emancipated slave, and, a few centuries

later, the enfranchised serf, without means of existence, was obliged to

become a tenant and pay tribute.[45]

Passages such as these can be found throughout the anarchist literature.

Tolstoy, who corresponded with one of the sons of the radical

abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison,[46] described the transformation in

a worked example of the master–slave relationship before and after the

abolition. Even though the ‘slaver owner’ was deprived of ‘slave John,

whom he can send to the cesspool to clear out his excrements,’ Tolstoy

noted, he still had money ‘to be a benefactor’ to ‘anyone out of

hundreds of Johns … giving him the preference and allowing him, rather

than another, to climb down into the cesspool.’[47] For Bakunin too,

‘[t]he truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous

and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom – voluntary from the

juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense – broken up

by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in

other words, it is real slavery.’[48]

Making common cause with the red republicans in America, anarchists

rejected the free labour contracts that abolitionists like Garrison

championed. Yet in contrast to the Knights of Labor, who used the

critique of free labour contracts to focus on the effects of property

ownership – the extraction of surplus value – the anarchists contended

that domination is inherent in the claim to exclusive ownership.[49]

Further parting company with red republicans, the anarchists rejected

the possibility of universalising republican freedom through state

regulation. Proudhon’s aim was rather to ‘REPUBLICANIZE […]

PROPERTY’[50] to ‘republicanize specie, by making every product of

labour ready money.’[51]

As a critic of republicanism Proudhon argued for the removal of the

possibility of dominium inherent to the possibility of the privateness

of property. This explicitly struck at the heart of classical Roman

accounts of property. For the Romans, as for the Greeks,[52] the very

possibility of privateness of property, the ability to alienate and to

exchange title was dependent on the prior notion of total dominium. Meum

esse, a claim to dominium and absolute exclusivity or sovereignty over a

thing is central to the possibility of the privateness of property for

without this, the property could not be said to be alienable and

transferable.[53] It underpinned and was epitomised by the institution

of slavery. Proudhon’s argument was that the exercise of domination,

experienced as dependency on a master by chattel and wage slaves alike

extended from the exclusive right to private property that meum esse

enshrined.[54] Republicanizing property meant abandoning this exclusive

right and granting only the limited right to property on the basis of

use.

In contrast to classical republicans, neo-Romans do not treat inequality

as natural and of course reject chattel slavery, but they concur that

private property does not itself entail domination. Further departing

from a strict Roman republicanism contemporary neo-Romans seek to

redress the egregious inequalities that result from historic

distributions of private property, and the potentially dominating

practices of agents who benefit from this distribution. The typical

solution is progressive taxation or a universal basic income.[55] This

third way aligns republicanism with welfarism and, as Nelson has

forcefully argued, it is ‘wholly incompatible’ with the Roman view of

non-domination.[56] Redistribution is designed to ensure that there is

no structural domination of the poor by the rich, but in the standard

republican account, it ensures the domination of the rich by the poor.

The anarchist critique that extends from Proudhon’s rejection of

republicanism is that for as long as private property is

constitutionally guaranteed, dominion is only weighted one way or

another and domination ensues.

By analyzing bourgeois property relations from the perspective of

domination and freedom rather than marginal utility and value theory,

Proudhon’s arguments also highlight the limits of the left-republican

position that Alex Gourevitch extracts from his history of the Knights

of Labor. Gourevitch is concerned with workplace domination as a

microcosm of social domination more broadly, and talks of ‘social

domination’ as structural.[57] He takes this from Marx. For Marx, such

relations of domination persist beneath the state in what he called

‘civil society.’ Gourevitch is right that the labour contract is

fundamentally and irreversibly exploitive and that ‘[n]o matter how

equal the two parties are when making the contract, that equality

disappears once the contract is made.’[58] Gourevitch shows in detail

how constitutional guarantees of private property, not just asymmetries

of power, work to the advantage of the bourgeoisie, enforcing the

structural domination of the propertyless or poor. Yet echoing the

critique developed by the Knights of Labor, Gourevitch turns to the

state to remedy this structural domination, effectively detaching the

constitutional defence of private property from the right to personal

dominion. Proudhon would have agreed that key social relations of power

are left unmolested by republican constitutionalism – indeed the latter

is the enforcement of the former – but his view that the background

constitutional defence of private property underpinned the

transformation of slavery into wage slavery pointed to a rejection of

the transfer of the right of dominion to the state. It is only by

removing this right that we can ensure domination is removed. Indeed, as

we now show, this right of dominium is central to state sovereignty,

itself central to the ability to enforce the constitutional right to

private property.

Structural domination and the state

In much contemporary political theory, anarchism is still haunted by

libertarianism and philosophical anarchism. As is well known, the first

group proscribes state interference on the basis of a prior commitment

to property in the self and an absolute defence of private property in

general.[59] The latter group, including writers ranging from Robert

Paul Wolff to John Simmons,[60] largely ignores the question of private

property and focuses on the problem of political obligation. As Nathan

Jun has recently pointed out, it is rare to find anyone interested in

either form of anti-statism who engages with the lived traditions or

political philosophy of anarchism.[61]

We should not, therefore, find it surprising that anti-state arguments

in contemporary republican political theory tend to face towards the

niche libertarian view or that the framing of the argument about the

state replicates the terms of this established debate. In both, state

theory turns on the justification of a stark alternative. Wolff’s

dichotomy between autonomy and authority is mirrored in Pettit’s choice

of the ‘freedom of the heath’ or the freedom of the ‘city.’[62] Only the

latter is a properly political community, and the near universal

alternative to the state is an ‘apolitical order.’[63]

The state, it is held, is a commonwealth where citizens are compelled to

the political community by their material obligation to

constitutionalize. This entails the establishment of and obedience to

laws, ‘an empire of laws, not of men’ as Pettit puts it.[64] Laws in

turn entail the monopolization of force and thus a clear distinction

between inside and outside, or the constitution of international

politics as a distinct and problematic domain of political life, which

compels us to arms.[65] The non-state is either a Hobbesian condition

which ‘approximates to permanent civil war,’ a ‘state of nature,’

‘balance of deterrence,’ ‘war of all against all’ or one in which

‘reciprocal powers’ with no formal delimitation of their roles and

functions will dominate.[66] In this version, anti-statists are

voluntarists who misunderstand Locke’s warnings about the

‘inconveniences’ of the state of nature. Pettit imagines that a form of

constitutionalism might plausibly emerge from this a-legal order, but it

would be a system of ‘antipower,’[67] that is, an overwhelming

deployment of power that actively controls or eliminates the arbitrary

power of some over others. Gourevitch uses similar tropes. In his

closing remarks on the Knights of Labor, he detects a certain naivety in

the movement’s ‘voluntaristic’ tendencies.[68] The Knights were wrongly

suspicious of state power and dissuaded from establishing political

parties.

The binary choice, state/non-state explains why Pettit contends that

living with the state is like living with ‘the laws of physics,’[69] or

‘[l]ike having to live in the presence of gravity.’[70] This view is

reinforced by the state’s interventionist role which injects goodness

into naturalness. As Pettit puts it: ‘[u]nregulated by the agency of a

state, wealth and power tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. As

by an “iron law”, to quote a recent historian [Fukuyama] of political

order, “the rich tend to get richer, in the absence of state

intervention”. It is extremely unlikely that any spontaneous norms could

resist the effects of growing economic accumulation and ensure the

resourcing of basic liberties for the poor as well as the rich.’[71] Yet

this account of intervention relies on prior understandings of

accumulation predicated on a specific conception of the nature of

property and the alienation of surplus. In other words, Pettit only

needs a state because of the special ways that private property

operates. Absent the latter, there need to be other reasons for a state,

or none at all.

The important point to emerge here is that the (absent) historical

sociology of the state structures the republican argument: law is a

system which regulates our interactions in this sub-optimal, if

realistic, status quo, and violence must be monopolized, ironically to

enforce right. In the next three sub-sections, we outline the anarchist

sociology of the state and explore the critique of law and violence it

elicits. Our aim is to show that Pettit’s claim that the efficiency

savings of ‘having a state’[72] outweigh the loss of liberty this

entails is a false choice. The absorption of the history of state

formation in a theorization of a state/non-state dichotomy tricks us

into thinking that the anarchist critique supports an unrealistic,

dangerous idea of abolition. While the anarchist critique is unstinting,

it focuses on processes of state formation that are open to change and

constitutional redesign. It thus provides a normative critique of the

state which encourages us not to give up on the attempt to properly

interrogate ‘which institutions do best by freedom.’ And it first did so

deploying the language of slavery, domination and freedom.

The distinctiveness of the anarchist historical sociology of the

state

The thrust of the classical anarchist argument is that the state’s

dominating force is not independent of the institution of private

property which it upholds. Understanding that this relationship is a

dynamic historical one gives anarchists insights into the ways that

contemporary states continue to sustain structural forms of domination.

Their critique has deep roots and it has been a major bone of contention

in revolutionary socialist circles since the 1860s.

As historians have often observed, this disagreement emerged from a

shared critique of exploitation and wage slavery. Bakunin and Marx

agreed that law is permissive of domination in what Marx called ‘civil

society.’ ‘Juridically,’ Bakunin noted in a review of Capital,

capitalists and workers are both equal ‘but economically the worker is

the serf of the capitalist, even before the market transaction has been

concluded.’[73] This voluntary servitude, contract slavery, to which

Rousseau objected, is central to the capitalist labour market.[74] Like

Marx, Bakunin recognized that this structural condition compels all

social classes – factory owners, the bourgeoisie and state functionaries

– making all slaves to the logic of property and the market: ‘there is

hardly an industrial enterprise’ Bakunin argued, ‘wherein the owner,

impelled on the one hand by the two-fold instinct of an unappeasable

lust for profits and absolute power, and on the other hand, profiting by

the economic dependence of the worker, does not set aside the terms

stipulated in the contract and wring some additional concessions in his

own favor.’[75]

As we have seen, left republicans like Gourevitch draw on this account

of the relationship between worker and capitalist and conclude from it

that the state might yet realize a non-dominating condition of social

relations through the correct deployment of constitutional political

power ‘in order to redistribute ownership and control.’[76] But it is on

this point that Bakunin and later anarchists departed from Marx.

The idea that the state was a system of domination was a unifying thread

in Bakunin’s writing. While still a republican fellow-traveller, he

described the state as ‘nothing but […] domination and […] exploitation,

well-regulated and systematized.’[77] Two years later, by now mixing

with Marx, Bakunin used class idioms to express the same idea:

‘bourgeois domination’ he contended, ‘is the slavery of the

proletariat.’[78] In Statism and Anarchy, a text directed against Marx,

Bakunin revived the languages of republicanism to argue that the

structural domination of capital and the state are mutually

constitutive: ‘If there is a State, then necessarily there is domination

and consequently slavery. A State without slavery … is inconceivable –

that is why we are the enemies of the State.’[79]

The distinctiveness of the anarchist conception of the state that

Bakunin outlined remained hazy in the fluid and often feverish politics

of 19th century socialism. But it complicated and pushed further than

Marx’s analysis of economic forces, towards the analysis of parallel

processes of territoriality, monopoly and centralization.[80] The

conclusion Bakunin drew from the Commune, for example, was that

anarchists and Marxists both envisaged the ‘creation of a new social

order based solely on the organisation of collective work’ and ‘the

collective appropriation of the instruments of labour.’ The difference

was that ‘communists believe they should organise the workers’ strength

to take over the political power of the states’ and the ‘revolutionary

socialists organised with a view to the destruction, or, if one want a

more polite word, the liquidation of the states.’[81] Believing ‘every

political state’ to be ‘nothing but organized domination for the benefit

of one class, to the detriment of the masses,’ he warned that the

proletariat would ‘in its turn become a new dominating and exploiting

class’ should it ever attempt to seize state power.[82]

Anarchists also rejected Marx’s view that the state was an historic

achievement.[83] For them, forms of statelessness were historic

achievements, for the state entailed the centralization of power and

domination, and the diminution of decentralization and complexity. It

was a system of monopoly and colonization that gradually, but forcibly,

extended its responsibilities across social, cultural, religious and

political realms. Anarchists anticipated Weber as much as they developed

Marx.[84] As Bakunin put it:

The bourgeoisie and its diverse social and political organisations in

industry, agriculture, banking and commerce, just as in all the

administrative, financial, judicial, university, police and military

functions of the State, is tending to weld itself further and further

each day into a truly dominant oligarchy and a countless mass of

creatures who are more or less vainglorious and more or less fallen,

living in a perpetual illusion and pushed back inevitably more and more

into the proletariat by an irresistible force, that of present-day

economic development, and reduced to serving as blind instruments of

this all-powerful oligarchy.[85]

When anarchist-inflected analysis started to gain traction in academia,

over a hundred years after Bakunin’s death,[86] it was still at odds

with prevailing currents in Marxist political theory which revolved

around questions of relative autonomy and the state’s ontological

status.[87]

Law, violence and the state

Bakunin’s conception of the process of state’s formation reinforced

Proudhon’s view that the state was always already implicated in

domination by the logic of the constitutional defence of private

property. This challenged the legitimizing stories that underpinned

liberal and republican accounts of the state’s origins. The state did

not provide universal transcendent order, as modernists proclaimed, only

order of a particular kind.[88] Pressing this analysis, Kropotkin linked

the monopoly and colonization of the state directly to the imposition of

law, showing how the promise of instituting private property motivated

political, military and religious elites to codify laws that would

cement their privileges. The revival of the Roman tradition secured this

change. Formal commitments to rights and freedom seduced the citizens of

newly constituted states, yet as Bakunin remarked, the people understood

the meaning of ‘equality, freedom, justice, human dignity, morality and

the well-being of individuals’ quite differently from the lawyers

empowered to give them content.[89] The vagaries of the language enabled

elites to turn republican thinking on its head. Law and the state were

the tools elites used to craft the movement from freedom to slavery:

Roman law never protected peoples from tyranny nor rescued them from

chaos. It transformed ‘a confederation of citizens’ into ‘a flock of

subjects,’[90] consolidating power, delimiting it and explaining its

material distribution.

Anarchists agreed with republicans that force was required to underwrite

the law but saw the monopoly of violence as a cultural phenomenon which

structured justice and law, not a separate requirement for law’s

protection. Arguing that our institutions of justice are radically

‘infected with violence,’[91] Proudhon coined the term militarisme to

describe the integration of war making functions with

state-building.[92] Later anarchists developed alternative conceptions

of war, but generally absorbed Proudhon’s understanding of state

violence. For Bakunin ‘[s]overeignty, the drive toward absolute

domination, is inherent in every State; and the first prerequisite for

this sovereignty is the comparative weakness, or at least the submission

of neighboring states.’[93] Whether or not states regularly used armed

force, the monopoly of violence placed the ‘domestic’ and the

‘international’ on a continuum of relations of violence.

The transformation of slavery into wage-slavery ran alongside the

transformation of arbitrary monarchical rule into the regularized

militarized domination of representative governments. The State, as

Kropotkin put it, was a ‘power placed above society … a territorial

concentration and a concentration of many or even all functions of the

life of society in the hands of the few.’[94] It was an ‘engine for

stealing wealth by commanding the military.’[95] And as law fixed

property relations it not only cemented wage slavery through labour

contracts, it also regularized prevailing local moral norms to determine

the boundaries of legitimate action in ways that benefited elites.

Appropriating the republican language of slavery, anarchists showed that

they were fully attuned to what is now referred to as the intersectional

nature of oppressions; legal domination entrenched patriarchy through

the regulation of marriage contracts and racism, through colonial

expansion within and without the state’s territorial boundaries. Rudolf

Rocker later quoted approvingly from the constitution of the IWW (1906),

which portrayed the law as an instrument of ‘outright slavery,’[96]

Elisée Reclus examined the effects of abolitionism in America and argued

that the continued existence of supremacist cultures meant that

ex-slaves were not merely exploited as workers, but in special ways as

black workers.[97] Voltarine de Cleyre similarly probed the nature of

sex slavery and the relationship to chattel and wage-slavery.[98] And so

this trope persisted well into the first half of the 20th century.

Prior to the two World Wars, universal suffrage and welfare states, this

process of the transformation of slavery and the consolidation of state

power to embed capitalist property relations, seemed self-evidently

unjust, and the critique of republican language perfectly natural and

deeply political. Tolstoy was one of the most vociferous critics of law

and the state in this respect. In the presence of the law as established

by and through states, slavery is inevitable, he argued, precisely

because those who are governed by laws never write them, and their

imposition necessitates brute force. States extract taxes to fund

conquest, which is itself dependent on the prior establishment of secure

administrative systems and the cooperation of the propertied elites,

whether landholders drawing from serfs or factory owners drawing from

their workforce. Law can never be the guarantor of liberty, as

republicans argue, because the interests it ‘tracks,’ to use Pettit’s

phrase, are always mediated by background conditions of domination that

are removed from public scrutiny. Echoing Proudhon, Tolstoy designated

‘(l)and, taxes and property’ as the three ‘sets of laws’ that explained

‘the slavery of our times.’[99] Presumed or tacit consent necessarily

involved structural violence. ‘It cannot be otherwise. For laws are

demands to obey certain rules and to compel some people to obey certain

rules can only be done by laws, by deprivation of liberty and by

murder.’[100]

The state and domination

In the context of contract theory, Pettit’s claim that ‘laws create the

freedom enjoyed by citizens’ looks compelling.[101] Set alongside the

anarchists’ historical sociology, it is less persuasive. The anarchist

account of state-formation supports a conception of anarchy that

mainstream political theory typically reduces to an abstract condition

whose leading features can be deduced from the state’s absence.

Neo-Roman republicanism does not challenge this dominant approach.

Anarchy, for anarchists, is not a lawless condition best thought of as

nasty or inconvenient. No such order exists in international relations

and modern anthropology indicates that it is an inaccurate description

of the cultures of stateless peoples.[102] Recent scholarship, showing

how the revival of the Roman legal tradition by 18th-century republicans

established particular types of political community, rather than

political community in general, adds weight to the anarchist

critique.[103] Recovering the anarchist sociology of the state explains

why, for anarchists, domination, otherwise conceptualized as dominus,

exclusive and absolute control and jurisdiction, is at the heart of

private property and statehood. These institutions are not historical

accidents or transhistorical a priori. They are the cumulative and often

unintended effect of political decisions taken by republicans and others

to structure world politics in the interests of the propertied elites.

Domination is ideologically and structurally core to modern states and

any attempt to realize non-domination as a transformative principle must

at the very least call into question these two institutions.

Democratising the constitution: can it be done?

Armed with their critique of the state, 19th century anarchists denied

the possibility of democratizing the constitution but advocated the

democratic republicanization of property as a means to challenge the

powers of the constitution that states guaranteed. While some modern

political theorists voice deep concerns about the undemocratic nature of

neo-Roman republicanism, they also suggest that there is scope for the

democratic reform of republican constitutions. In this last section, we

show how the anarchist theory of the state shapes a very different

conception of democratic change.

As John McCormick argues, neo-Roman republicanism constitutionalizes

without democratizing.[104] Invoking Michels’ ‘iron law of

oligarchy,’[105] McCormick contends that the popular selection of groups

of elites in democracies is structurally embedded through republican

constitutionalism. Reversing the neo-Roman argument that ‘republicanism

is the completion of democracy,’ Nadia Urbinati similarly argues that in

the absence of ‘an equal relationship of power among citizens’ and ‘an

effective right to express one’s opinions […] legal liberty and due

process of law are not secure acquisitions.’[106] This demands a fuller

participation. This line of argument underpins a number of different

proposals to democratize republicanism. McCormick’s specific demand is

for a new people’s tribune, and radical democratic innovations, to

reconstruct republicanism ‘almost beyond the point of recognition.’[107]

The anarchist critique of neo-Roman republicanism suggests that ‘almost’

is the operative word, for the democratic deficit that McCormick,

Urbinati and others identify in neo-Roman republicanism operates at the

level of the constitution. The limits of republicanism are indeed marked

by the active discouragement of participation and the curtailment of

democratic processes, but also by the systems of power that the modern

constitution cements and within which democratic processes operate. It

is for this reason that anarchists have typically rejected electoral

politics, even though many contemporary anarchists would endorse the

participatory and deliberative forms of democracy that McCormick and

others call for.

Often dismissed as a juvenile response to authority, the anarchist

rejection of electoral politics and representative democracy is a

function of the depth of the problems democracy is asked to resolve: the

institution of private property, the structures and processes of

domination that maintaining this constitutional arrangement demands, and

the ways in which sustaining this central form of domination then

percolates into other, no less important, areas of social life. This is

a labour of Sisyphus.

In attacking the republican constitution, anarchists neither rejected

democracy nor constitutional politics. Instead, they sought to detach

constitutional politics from relationships grounded in the forms of

slavery that inhered from private property and the state. Proudhon’s

argument was not that there should be no property, for this would be

tantamount to Athenian or Jacobin communism and require a seemingly

limitless state to enforce it.[108] He proposed limitless possessory

claims, negotiated democratically between groups and individuals.[109]

Rather than title being exclusive and based on dominium, property would

be democratically negotiated in infinitely plural ways, both in

productive relations and exchange relations too. It is this democratic

republicanization of property which, ironically, destroys its

exclusivity. Accomplishing the abolition of property entails the

curtailment of proprietary rights, dominus, by law, routinely and

constitutionally.[110] All ownership thus becomes possession, with no

absolute right to ownership of anything. This communal negotiation of

title is vital to freedom as non-domination, distinguishing the ‘free

man’ from the ‘slave.’

Proudhon’s anarchist proposal demands continuous democratic vigilance

and a constitutional framework that facilitates interventions that are

non-dominating. Indeed, in Proudhon’s politics, democracy is freed from

an exclusively ‘political’ realm into the complex groupings of society.

It becomes central to every purposeful political group, not just the

state.[111] Republicans might object that this is hardly feasible.

Pettit rightly warns that any distribution of property that has to be

maintained by continual government intervention is extremely taxing from

the point of view of non-domination.[112] However, this is exactly what

Roman accounts of private property, or Athenian inspired collectivist

property relations, require: the meddling state so abhorred by

libertarians. Democratizing property along the lines Proudhon suggested,

that is mutualistically, horizontally and though bilateral and

multi-lateral contract, would obviate the need for a state to enforce

any one particular regime over another. Indeed, such is the cost to the

state of maintaining private property that taxation for this purpose is

the sine qua non of policing and the military, namely, the protection

agencies that guard the title that accrues to sovereignty and colonial

occupation. It is against this background that we need to understand

anarchist criticisms of constitutionalization, the state and

conventional accounts of democracy.

Pettit is surely right to fear populist and extra constitutional means

for revising the constitution in favour of dominant majorities or

minorities. Yet if republicanism does not foster civic virtue, the

neglected question is how vocal minorities and disenfranchised

majorities who are neither propertied nor politically powerful can

revise the constitution. Pettit’s contention that private property

constitutes the ‘natural environment’ and that living in a state is like

‘living under the laws of physics’ drastically limits the potential for

democratic innovation. It invites charges of both utopianism and

conservatism at once, and this is, at its core, the problem with

neo-Roman conceptions of property and statehood.

Unless the state removes dominium in property, inequality and social

discord will increase. If states restrict property, then private

property itself, as Proudhon observed, becomes ‘impossible,’ and the

domination of the propertied is inevitable.[113] As Bakunin argued, no

state ‘not even the reddest republic’ is capable of giving the people

‘what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and

administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any

interference or violence from above.’[113]

Towards anarchist constitutionalism

In this article, we have recovered a set of arguments that challenge the

notion that freedom from domination must work within the intellectual

and political parameters of the modern nation state and capitalism. Such

is the dominance of the modern nation state in our contemporary

understandings of politics and freedom, that thinking imaginatively

about non-domination without the state has become difficult, to say the

least. The role of political theory is surely to expose and to uncover,

as well as to build and justify, and to the extent that the anarchists

are able to pierce the assumptions of modern politics, it is incumbent

upon political theorists to engage with anarchist arguments about what

politics might be. We have tinkered long enough and the return to a new

constellation of authoritarian, populist, neoliberal and autarkic world

leaders suggest we need radically rethink the benefits of our current

liberal institutions. We hope that the anarchist account here makes a

political case for much more radical institutional re-design.

Centrally, we must accept that any attempt to think about freedom as

non-domination and from dependency must question the necessity of the

state and the exclusive right to private property. The alternative

simply prefigures our conception of which institutions might do best by

freedom and forecloses our political imagination. Our purpose in this

article has not been to detail that alternative, only to challenge the

republican arguments for constraining the concept freedom as

non-domination by conflating it with a set of contingent historical

constitutional arrangements. In advancing this critique, our review of

the history of anarchist ideas dovetails with the left-libertarian

argument that the concept of freedom as non-domination developed by

neo-republicans is moralized.[114] For Ian Carter,[115] the negative

credentials of the republican theory of freedom are compromised by the

claim that some obstacles to doing whatever you like are morally

acceptable – specifically obstacles like imprisonment by states who

track your avowed interests. Pettit’s blunt retort to his critics is

that ‘there is no substance to the claim that the republican theory of

freedom I favor is moralized,’[116] but this is clearly not the case.

The legitimacy of the state cannot be defended with reference to the

principle of non-domination, for this implies that a whole range of

secondary moral and ideological commitments come into play, some of

which will evoke substantive conceptions of the good, outlawed by a pure

negative theory of freedom as non-domination. To defend the state and

the constitutional guarantee of private property disables vigilance of

institutionally embedded, dominating social relationships and

perpetuates forms of slavery linked to dependency.

This observation does not suggest easy resolution. Indeed, it is

doubtful that there is any resolution. When anarchists illuminated the

shortcomings of republican constitutionalism they asked questions about

the extent to which non-domination could be guaranteed by any

constitutional arrangement. The 19th century anarchist critique does not

hold out the promise of a non-moralized theory of freedom. Rather it

opens up the possibility of using anarchy as a constitutional principle,

that is, to provide a concept of non-domination capable of testing the

freedom-enhancing properties of actually existing states.

Anarchism not only exposes how deeply the neo-Roman account of freedom

as non-domination is moralised, it also uncovers a much wider set of

dubious assumptions about freedom and politics. The richness of

republican political theory and its emancipatory force is revealed

through the recovery of anarchist analysis. While it should be clear

from the forgoing discussion that anarchists deployed a coherent and

sustained critique of the republican concept of freedom as

non-domination, much more needs to be done to tease out the

constitutional implications of that critique and to re-link anarchism to

the history of political thought more broadly. If the constitutional

question is not reopened, beyond the narrow confines of the state, then

domination and tyranny are all we can expect.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Ian Carter, Dario Castiglione, Keith Dowding, Benjamin

Franks, Ana Juncos Garcia, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Bruno Leipold, Phil

Parvin, Christina Oelgemoller, Thomas Swann and Andy Schapp for comments

and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. The paper benefited

greatly from the comments and suggestions of JPI’s reviewers and

participants at the Exeter Political Theory Reading Group, the Anarchist

Studies Network Conference (Loughborough), the Association of Political

Theory Conference, the Kent Critical Legal Conference, the Political

Studies Association Convention; at the workshops on freedom at the

University of Sydney and the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the

University of Westminster and a political theory seminar at the

University of St. Andrews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

Research for this paper was undertaken as part of the project 'Anarchy

as a Constitutional Principle: Constitutionalising in Anarchist

Politics' funded by the ESRC Transformative Research Award ES/N006860/1.

[1] Classic statements of the contemporary neo-Roman republican

tradition include P. Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex

World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014). P. Pettit, On the People’s

Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2012); P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom

and Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Q. Skinner, Liberty before

Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); M. van

Gelderen, and Q. Skinner, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early

Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). M. van

Gelderen and Q. Skinner, The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern

Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Key secondary

literatures include: C. Laborde and J. W. Maynor, Republicanism and

Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); I. Honohan and J. Jennings,

Republicanism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2006).

[2]

Q. Skinner, ‘Freedom as the absence of arbitrary power,’ in Laborde and

Maynor, ibid., p. 86.

[3]

U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to

Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008), p. 33.

[4] Ibid, p. 34.

[5]

S. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2010), p. 64.

[6] Gordon, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 5; D. Graeber, ‘The new anarchists,’

New Left Review, 13 (2002), pp. 61–73; S. Newman, ‘Crowned anarchy:

postanarchism and international relations theory,’ Millennium – Journal

of International Studies, 40 (2012), p. 272.

[7] Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 134.

[8] Skinner, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 83–101.

[9] Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 100.

[10] Neo-Roman republicans have been concerned to defend their

conservative credentials from the libertarian right, rather than the

left. For example, S. Slaughter, Liberty Beyond Neo-Liberalism: A

Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalising Age

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), P. Pettit, ‘Freedom in the

market,’ Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 5, no. 2 (2006), pp. 131–149.

[11] Pettit, On the People’s Terms, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 162.

[12] Ibid., p. 161.

[13] Pettit, ‘Freedom in the market,’ op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 140.

[14]

M. Egoumenides, Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation

(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

[15]

M. Friedman, ‘Pettit’s civic republicanism and male domination,’ in

Laborde and Maynor, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 259–265.

[16]

A. Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and

Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2015), pp. 40–41.

[17]

D. Runciman, ‘History of political thought: the state of the

discipline,’ British Journal of Politics and International

Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 84–104.

[18] We focus on the writings of three of the key exponents identified

by P. Eltzbacher, The Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven

Major Thinkers, Benjamin R. Tucker (Trans.) (New York: Dover Books,

2004/1908). For a critical discussion see L. Van der Walt, and M.

Schmidt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and

Syndicalism, Counterpower (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009).

[19] The revival in interest in anarchist political thought since the

end of the Cold War has been staggering. A key resource are the

annotated bibliographic chapters in R. Kinna, The Continuum Companion to

Anarchism (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 353–450.

[20]

D. E. Apter, ‘The old anarchism and the new – some comments,’ in

Anarchism Today (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 1–13; R. Rocker,

Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto, 1989). In this enterprise,

we follow A. Kalyvas and I. Katznelson’s revisionist

historiography of the emergence of liberalism. Liberal

Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[21] Gordon, op. cit., Ref. 3, p, 61; S. Newman, ‘Postanarchism: a

politics of anti-politics,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 3 (2011),

pp. 313–327; P. McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical

Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); S.

Clark, Living without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist

Utopia, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 67.

[22]

P. Kelly, ‘Rescuing political theory from the tyranny of history,’ in

Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (Eds) Political Philosophy Versus

History?: Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political

Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 13–37.

[23] There are clear positive grounds on which a critique of

republicanism could be advanced. We do not pursue these here. For one

outstanding example of this, see J. P. Clark, The Impossible Community:

Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp.

53–92.

[24]

A. Gourevitch, ‘Labor republicanism and the transformation of work,’

Political Theory, 41 (2013), pp. 593–594; Gourevitch, Slavery to the

Cooperative Commonwealth, op cit., Ref. 16, p. 9.

[25] There is a substantial left-republican literature. See for example

C. Laborde, ‘Republicanism and global justice,’ European Journal of

Political Theory, 9 (2010), pp. 48–69; P. Markell, ‘The insufficiency of

non-domination,’ Political Theory, 36 (2008), pp. 9–36; S. White, ‘The

republican critique of capitalism,’ Critical Review of International

Social and Political Philosophy, 14 (2011), pp. 561–579.

[26] Pettit, Just Freedom, op. cit., Ref. 1., pp. 11–13.

[27]

S. Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1994); J. Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A

History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth-Century

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[28] Kalyvas and Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings, op. cit., Ref. 20; N.

Fischer, Marxist Ethics within Western Political Theory: A Dialogue with

Republicanism, Communitarianism and Liberalism (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan 2015).

[29] Hazareesingh, Political Traditions, op. cit., Ref. 27, p. 66.

[30]

S. Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in

Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2001), pp. 216, 290.

[31] See, for example, R. Bellamy. ‘The political form of the

constitution: the separation of powers, rights and representative

democracy,’ Political Studies, 44, no. 3 (1996), p. 436. Whether because

they have been interpreted as the poor cousins to Marx (P. Thomas, Karl

Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1980), generic

anti-statists (cf. N. Jun, ‘On philosophical anarchism,’ Radical

Philosophy Review, 19 (2016), pp. 551–567), or simply terrorists (R.

Kinna, Early Writings on Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2006)), ignoring

anarchism seems perfectly acceptable in contemporary political science.

[32]

A. Gourevitch, ‘Labor and republican liberty,’ Constellations, 18, no.

3 (2011), pp. 431–454; Gourevitch, ‘Labor republicanism,’ op. cit.,

Ref. 24; Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, op.

cit., Ref. 16.

[33]

L. Lobère, Louis Blanc: His Life and His Contribution to The Rise of

French Jacobin Socialism (Illinois: Northwestern University Press:

1961); Jennings, op. cit., Ref. 27, pp. 269–276.

[34]

S. K. Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French

Republican Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); A.

Prichard, Justice, Order and Anarchy. The International

Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: Routledge,

2013).

[35]

T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians (Kingston and Montreal:

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988).

[36]

A. Parsons, Haymarket Statements of the Accused, [1886] online at

https://www.marxists.org/subject/mayday/articles/speeches.html#PARSONS.

[37]

C. Levy, ‘Anarchism, Internationalism and Nationalism in Europe,

1860–1939ʹ, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 50, no. 3

(2004), p. 333.

[38]

E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain: Origins

of the Civil War (London/New Haven: Yale University Press 1970); T.

Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903 (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1977).

[39]

G. Bourde, ‘La Sagra, sabio y utopista,’ Revista de la Biblioteca

Nacional de Cuba José Martí, 3 (2015), pp. 109–150.

[40]

J. -J. Becker, ‘La Gauche et l’idée de la guerre,’ in J.-J. Becker

and G. Candar (Eds) Histoire des Gauches en France: Volume 1,

L’héritage du XIXe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), pp.

522–530; P. Darriulat, Les Patriotes: La gauche républicaine et la

nation 1830–1870 (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 2001).

[41]

F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969).

[42]

C. Pierson, ‘Rousseau and the paradoxes of property,’ European Journal

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P. -J. Proudhon, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of

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P. -J. Proudhon, ‘Letter to Bastiat,’ [1850] in Benjamin Tucker

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L. Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in

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L. Tolstoy, ‘The Slavery of Our Times,’ in David Stephens (Ed.)

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M. Bakunin, in G.P. Maximoff (Ed.) The Political Philosophy of Bakunin:

Scientific Anarchism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953), p. 188.

[49] That this is echoed in Marx should come as no surprise. As Marx

pointed out in the Holy Family, Proudhon’s analysis made possible the

first scientific study of the economy, a modern influence as significant

as Sieyès’ on politics. P. Haubtmann, Marx et Proudhon. Leurs Rapports

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P. -J. Proudhon, ‘Organisation of credit and circulation and the

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[55] Pettit, ‘Freedom in the market,’ op. cit., Ref. 10.

[56] Nelson, op. cit., Ref. 52, p. 16.

[57] Gourevitch, ‘Labor republicanism,’ op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 606.

[58] Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, op. cit., Ref.

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[59]

R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).

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R. P. Wolff, In Defence of Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: University of

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N. Jun, ‘On philosophical anarchism,’ Radical Philosophy Review, 19

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[62] Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref 1, p. 67.

[63] Pettit, ibid., p. 136.

[64] Pettit, ibid., p. 173.

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P. Pettit, ‘A republican law of peoples,’ European Journal of Political

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[69] Pettit, On the People’s Terms, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 161.

[70] Pettit, ibid., p.162.

[71] Pettit, ibid., p. 135.

[72] Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref 1, p. 93.

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[76] Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, op. cit., Ref.

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[77]

M. Bakunin, in S. Dolgoff (Ed. and Trans.) Bakunin on Anarchy. Selected

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[78] Bakunin, ibid, p. 164.

[79]

M. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz (Ed.) (Cambridge:

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[84] On Max Weber and the anarchists see D. M. Williams, ‘A society in

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[85] Bakunin, The Paris Commune, op. cit., Ref. 81, p. 4.

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[88] For more see Prichard, op. cit., Ref. 34.

[89] Bakunin, Bakunin on anarchy, op. cit., Ref. 77, p. 299.

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[93] Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, op. cit., Ref. 77, p. 337.

[94] Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role, op. cit., Ref. 90, p. 10.

[95] Peter, Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Montreal:

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[96]

R. Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto, 1989), p. 45.

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[99] Tolstoy, op. cit., Ref. 47, p. 136.

[100] Tolstoy, ibid., p. 139.

[101] Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 36.

[102]

J. C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of

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G. E. Aylmer, ‘The meaning and definition of “Property” in

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R. Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical

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[107] McCormick‚ op. cit., Ref. 104, p. 616.

[108] Proudhon, What is Property?, op. cit., Ref. 44, pp. 196–197.

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P. -J. Proudhon, ‘Theory of Property,’ (1865) in S. Wilbur (Trans.)

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[110] For fuller discussions of anarchist accounts of law and stateless

law see G. Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a

Stateless Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); A. S.

Chambost, Proudhon et la Norme: Pensée Juridique d’un Anarchiste

(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004); N. Bourgeois, Les

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[111]

M. Maeckelbergh, ‘Learning from conflict: innovative approaches to

democratic decision making in the alterglobalisation movement,’

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Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (New York:

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[112] Pettit, ‘Freedom in the Market,’ op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 140.

[113] Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, op. cit., Ref. 77, p. 338.

[114]

M. H. Kramer, ‘Liberty and domination,’ in Republicanism and Political

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[115]

I. Carter, ‘How are power and unfreedom related?,’ Republicanism and

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[116] Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 117.