liberty is not anarchy essay in english

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Liberty Is Not Anarchy Essay

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“I think, therefore I am,” is a famous saying by a French philosopher. A person is said to be at liberty when he is free to think, speak and act without any compulsion. However that does not mean he can run amok and behave in a manner that would harm or displease others. Just because there is no law restricting the carrying of a stick, a person cannot go about hitting everyone with one.

Each individual should appreciate the freedom that he enjoys and not misuse it. That would be anarchy – or a state of lawlessness. The freedom of movement does not allow you to barge into another person’s house; freedom of speech does not allow you to say things that would hurt others and freedom of action does not allow you to use violence on others.

Freedom is something that should be granted only when one learns to handle it. If a toddler is given freedom of movement, he would wander out of the house, fall down the stairs or can even have an accident. So only when he learns to differentiate between danger and safety, can we grant him freedom of movement.

There are boys who zip around in their father’s car, to try and impress their classmates; there are some who would go for a hair style to follow the latest fashion, not bothered that because of harsh chemicals used, they ! could have serious health consequences.

The constitution of India grants many right to its citizens – most important of which is freedom of thought, speech and action. Unfortunately, there have been times when the people, have misused them to extreme, Instigating speeches, provocative actions and non-co-operative attitudes have often turned peaceful crowds into a violent mob.

The liberty which should have been peacefully utilised turned to anarchy and the result of any such transformation can never be positive. But, on the contrary, liberty used wisely never turns into anarchy. It depends how wisely we use our liberty and enjoy it forever.

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Whither anarchy: perspectives on anarchism and liberty

Professor of Politics, University of Sydney

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John Keane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network . The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. The essay is the first of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchism and the prospects for liberty in the world today.

The following reflections on the subject of anarchism give a voice to the spirit of anarchy. By this I don’t mean what’s conventionally understood by the term: disturbance, disagreement and violent confusion triggered by the lack ( an ) of a ruler ( arkhos ). Rather, the perspectives published in this collection of essays brim with interest in the spirit of anarchism and its radical defence of unrestrained liberty, whose reality I first encountered on my hometown streets, with a wham and a whump.

At the high point of public opposition to the Vietnam War, during a rush-hour sit-down by several thousand fellow students, riot police were summoned to clear the traffic snarl we’d caused at the main CBD intersection of our city. The picture below captures something of the swelling mayhem, as helmeted constables, wielding batons, came in on horseback.

To my astonishment, in the midst of tumult and turmoil, the anarchists in our ranks cool-headedly whipped out bags of marbles from deep inside their pockets. Unused to rollerskating, the horses grew unsteady; frightened, they began to rear up and draw back from the crowd. The anarchist tactics were simple, militant and effective.

I was impressed, and that’s perhaps why I soon graduated to The Anarchist Cookbook, written by William Powell . First published in 1971, and oozing so much liberty that governments around the world quickly banned it, the handbook included tips for manufacturing everything from telephone phreaking devices to home-made hash brownies.

My taste for black, and for surrealist films, soon followed. Un Chien Andalou was an early favourite: a 1928 short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí whose “dream logic” had no plot in any conventional sense.

Then came some serious reading: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarins :

Quite generally, what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin?

I paid attention to studies of the first self-organising affluent societies by the radical anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres. Later, I sat at the feet of the priestly Ivan Illich ; listened to flamboyant lectures by Herbert Marcuse on feminism and repressive tolerance; and attended seminars on anarchism and ecology by Murray Bookchin .

I met the author of The Female Eunuch and several times, in clubs so small they felt like Turkish baths, heard The Clash rail against petty injustice, plutocrats, poverty and racism.

I found myself influenced by Michel Foucault’s writings on power/knowledge and Guy Debord’s theory of mediated resistance; and I listened intently to lectures by Cornelius Castoriadis in defence of the idea of the autonomous individual lucid in her desires, clear-headed about reality, and capable of responsibly holding herself accountable for what she does in the world.

It was my doctoral supervisor, C.B. Macpherson , who taught me to combine the subject of liberty with the principle of equality, and to do so by way of serious reflection on the past, present and future of democracy. Thanks to the quiet doyen of democratic theory, I became a part-time anarchist.

I still today sympathise with the anarchist disgust for heteronomy and its passion for liberty, with what Saul Newman, in the third of these articles, calls freedom as ownness , or “the experience of self-affirmation and empowerment which ontologically precedes all acts of liberation”.

The formula probably underestimates what Freud taught us: that all individuals are shaped involuntarily by yearnings, unintelligible fragments, fabrications and omissions rooted in childhood.

Yet the great strength of the anarchist emphasis on “self-affirmation and empowerment” is the agenda it continues to set: to recognise the strangeness of our involuntary love of power, to strive to overcome our voluntary servitude, to rid ourselves of the urge “to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” ( Foucault ).

The stress placed by anarchism on these themes, and on the principle that arbitrary power relations are contingent, and hence alterable, still rings true. In recent times, the anarchist sensibility has again come alive in many different global settings, from Greenpeace “ mind bombs ”, the M-15 movement in Spain, Taiwans’s Sunflower uprising to the punk band G.L.O.S.S. (“Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit”).

For the cause of liberty, all this is well and good. Except that anarchism has no special monopoly on these concerns. In practice, conceptually and politically speaking, democracy handles things better, or so I came to think.

Institutions

The following essays by Alex Prichard and Ruth Kinna and Saul Newman emphasise that the anarchist ideal of freedom rejects states, private property in market form, and the “hollow game” of democracy. Such institutions are deemed antithetical to freedom as non-domination.

Written constitutions, watchdog bodies, periodic elections, parliamentary representation, trial by jury, public service broadcasting, education, health and welfare protections: while all these (and other) institutions are motivated by the principle of equality, the anarchists in this series are inclined to dismiss them as mere instruments of disempowerment, as violators of the lives of individuals blessed ontologically with their own “ownness” ( Max Stirner’s Eigenheit ).

In his contribution to this dossier, Simon Tormey notes how this conviction unwittingly aligns anarchists with the “freedom of choice” and “possessive individualism” (Macpherson) ideology of contemporary neo-liberalism; he rightly emphasises the political foolishness of jettisoning institutions that can function as levers of resistance to injustice and subordination.

My encounters with anarchists taught me something else: in group settings, anarchists demand informality (“structurelessness” as Jo Freeman called it ), yet the lack of institutional rules makes everyone vulnerable to manipulation and takeovers by cunning, well-organised factions.

Strategic objections to anarchist ideas of freedom as “non-domination” are compelling; but, arguably, they don’t burrow deeply enough into why anarchism has no love of institutions. Philosophically speaking, anarchism was born of a 19th-century age blind to the embodied linguistic horizons within which individuation takes place from the moment we are born.

Karl Marx had no developed theory of language, yet he spotted (in Grundrisse ) that individuals “come into connection with one another only in determined ways”.

Rephrased, we could say, within any culture, that individuals resemble spiders entangled in laced webs of language that structure their time-space identities. What we think, who we are, how we represent ourselves to others and act on the world: all of this, and more, is framed by the linguistic horizons (Wittgenstein called them the language “scaffolding” ( Gerüst ) of our everyday lives.

It follows that notions of liberty vary according to the language games people play with others. Since individuals are chronically bound through language to the lives of others, the whole image of “free” individuals as “un-dominated by any other” is both a misleading fiction and impossible utopia. How “individuals” define and practise their “liberty” is shaped by their linguistic engagement with others.

And as these entanglements are infused with power relations, individuation is very much a political matter, a process defined by structured tensions and struggles over who gets what, when and how, and whether they should do so.

Complex liberty

The point is that institutions matter. Anarchists excel at criticising factual power, but their proposed counterfactual alternatives are typically weak. The “cult of the natural, the spontaneous, the individual” ( George Woodcock ) runs deep in their thinking.

Yes, in certain circumstances the “passion for destruction” ( Bakunin ) can be creative. But loose talk of “unions of egoists” ( Stirner ), “social communion” ( Proudhon ) and “camp rules” and “constitutionalism” (Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard’s iteration) falls wide of the mark.

Loose talk of liberty neglects the fundamental point that the empowerment of individuals, their exercise of freedom understood as “non-domination”, requires their protection from bossing and bullying by others. That is the meaning of the old maxim that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

More than a few ugly crimes have been committed in its name, which is why beautiful liberty requires restraint in order to be exercised well. Liberty is no simple thing. It is a political matter bound up with institutionalised struggles for equality among individuals, groups, networks and organisations.

The type of institutions matters. That’s the whole point of democracy: its power-monitoring, power-sharing institutions are designed to conjoin liberty with equality, in complex ways, in defence of citizens and their chosen representatives, in opposition to the disabling effects of arbitrary power.

Armed with the grammar of complex liberty tempered by complex equality, democrats warn of the dark side of anarchism, the dogmatic ism-conviction that in matters of liberty, language and institutions are trumped by the preference for simplicity over complexity.

There’s another sense in which the old anarchist ideology of the autonomous individual is today questionable: its neglect of the non-human. We’ve entered an age of eco-destruction and eco-renewal marked by rising public awareness that we human beings ineluctably live as animals in complex biomes not of our choosing. The contributions below are silent about this trend.

Why? The part-time anarchist in me suspects that it’s because their particular anarchist vision of freedom as “ownness” and non-domination is anthropocentric. Their liberty is the all-too-human licence freely to dominate nature .

If that’s so, then the old subject of anarchy and liberty is confronted by new democratic questions: is it possible to include the non-human in definitions of freedom as the unchecked propensity of humans to act on their worlds?

How might the “ownness” enjoyed by free individuals be brought back to Earth? Can these free individuals hereon be regarded as humble “actants” ( Bruno Latour )? Are people capable of living their lives in dignity, unhindered by arbitrary power, as equals, entangled in complex biomes they know are so much part of themselves that they must be their vigilant stewards?

You can read other articles in the series here .

• Political institutions
• Political theory
• Anthropocene
• Democracy Futures
• Democracy Futures: New Despotisms
• Democratic theory
• Whither Anarchy

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Anarchism is a political theory that is skeptical of the justification of authority and power. Anarchism is usually grounded in moral claims about the importance of individual liberty, often conceived as freedom from domination. Anarchists also offer a positive theory of human flourishing, based upon an ideal of equality, community, and non-coercive consensus building. Anarchism has inspired practical efforts at establishing utopian communities, radical and revolutionary political agendas, and various forms of direct action. This entry primarily describes “philosophical anarchism”: it focuses on anarchism as a theoretical idea and not as a form of political activism. While philosophical anarchism describes a skeptical theory of political legitimation, anarchism is also a concept that has been employed in philosophical and literary theory to describe a sort of anti-foundationalism. Philosophical anarchism can mean either a theory of political life that is skeptical of attempts to justify state authority or a philosophical theory that is skeptical of the attempt to assert firm foundations for knowledge.

1.1 Political Anarchism

1.2 religious anarchism, 1.3 theoretical anarchism, 1.4 applied anarchism, 1.5 black, indigenous, and decolonizing anarchism, 2.1 anarchism in the history of political philosophy, 2.2 absolute, deontological, and a priori anarchism, 2.3 contingent, consequentialist, and a posteriori anarchism, 2.4 individualism, libertarianism, and socialist anarchism, 3.1 nonviolence, violence, and criminality, 3.2 disobedience, revolution, and reform, 3.3. utopian communities and non-revolutionary anarchism, 4.1 anarchism is nihilistic and destructive, 4.2 anarchy will always evolve back into the state, 4.3 anarchism is utopian, 4.4 anarchism is incoherent, 4.5 philosophical anarchism is “toothless”, other internet resources, related entries, 1. varieties of anarchism.

There are various forms of anarchism. Uniting this variety is the general critique of centralized, hierarchical power and authority. Given that authority, centralization, and hierarchy show up in various ways and in different discourses, institutions, and practices, it is not surprising that the anarchist critique has been applied in diverse ways.

Anarchism is primarily understood as a skeptical theory of political legitimation. The term anarchism is derived from the negation of the Greek term arché , which means first principle, foundation, or ruling power. Anarchy is thus rule by no one or non-rule. Some argue that non-ruling occurs when there is rule by all—with consensus or unanimity providing an optimistic goal (see Depuis-Déri 2010).

Political anarchists focus their critique on state power, viewing centralized, monopolistic coercive power as illegitimate. Anarchists thus criticize “the state”. Bakunin provides a paradigm historical example, saying:

If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable—and this is why we are the enemies of the State. (Bakunin 1873 [1990: 178])

A more recent example comes from Gerard Casey who writes, “states are criminal organizations. All states, not just the obviously totalitarian or repressive ones” (Casey 2012: 1).

Such sweeping generalizations are difficult to support. Thus anarchism as political philosophy faces the challenge of specificity. States have been organized in various ways. Political power is not monolithic. Sovereignty is a complicated matter that includes divisions and distributions of power (see Fiala 2015). Moreover, the historical and ideological context of a given anarchist’s critique makes a difference in the content of the political anarchist’s critique. Bakunin was responding primarily to a Marxist and Hegelian view of the state, offering his critique from within the global socialist movement; Casey is writing in the Twenty-First Century in the era of liberalism and globalization, offering his critique from within the movement of contemporary libertarianism. Some anarchists engage in broad generalizations, aiming for a total critique of political power. Others will present a localized critique of a given political entity. An ongoing challenge for those who would seek to understand anarchism is to realize how historically and ideologically diverse approaches fit under the general anarchist umbrella. We look at political anarchism in detail below.

The anarchist critique has been extended toward the rejection of non-political centralization and authority. Bakunin extended his critique to include religion, arguing against both God and the State. Bakunin rejected God as the absolute master, saying famously, “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him” (Bakunin 1882 [1970: 28]).

There are, however, religious versions of anarchism, which critique political authority from a standpoint that takes religion seriously. Rapp (2012) has shown how anarchism can be found in Taoism. And Ramnath (2011) has identified anarchist threads in Islamic Sufism, in Hindu bhakti movements, in Sikhism’s anti-caste efforts, and in Buddhism. We consider anarchism in connection with Gandhi below. But we focus here on Christian anarchism.

Christian anarchist theology views the kingdom of God as lying beyond any human principle of structure or order. Christian anarchists offer an anti-clerical critique of ecclesiastical and political power. Tolstoy provides an influential example. Tolstoy claims that Christians have a duty not to obey political power and to refuse to swear allegiance to political authority (see Tolstoy 1894). Tolstoy was also a pacifist. Christian anarcho-pacifism views the state as immoral and unsupportable because of its connection with military power (see Christoyannopoulos 2011). But there are also non-pacifist Christian anarchists. Berdyaev, for example, builds upon Tolstoy and in his own interpretation of Christian theology. Berdyaev concludes: “The Kingdom of God is anarchy” (Berdyaev 1940 [1944: 148]).

Christian anarchists have gone so far as to found separatist communities where they live apart from the structures of the state. Notable examples include New England transcendentalists such as William Garrison and Adin Ballou. These transcendentalists had an influence on Tolstoy (see Perry 1973 [1995]).

Other notable Christians with anarchist sympathies include Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. In more recent years, Christian anarchism has been defended by Jacques Ellul who links Christian anarchism to a broad social critique. In addition to being pacifistic, Ellul says, Christian anarchism should also be “antinationalist, anticapitalist, moral, and antidemocratic” (Ellul 1988 [1991: 13]). The Christian anarchist ought to be committed to “a true overturning of authorities of all kinds” (Ellul 1988 [1991: 14]). When asked whether a Christian anarchist should vote, Ellul says no. He states, “anarchy first implies conscientious objection” (Ellul 1988 [1991: 15]).

Anarchist rejection of authority has application in epistemology and in philosophical and literary theory. One significant usage of the term shows up in American pragmatism. William James described his pragmatist philosophical theory as a kind of anarchism: “A radical pragmatist is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature” (James 1907 [1981: 116]). James had anarchist sympathies, connected to a general critique of systematic philosophy (see Fiala 2013b). Pragmatism, like other anti-systematic and post-Hegelian philosophies, gives up on the search for an arché or foundation.

Anarchism thus shows up as a general critique of prevailing methods. An influential example is found in the work of Paul Feyerabend, whose Against Method provides an example of “theoretical anarchism” in epistemology and philosophy of science (Feyerabend 1975 [1993]). Feyerabend explains:

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives. (Feyerabend 1975 [1993: 9])

His point is that science ought not be constrained by hierarchically imposed principles and strict rule following.

Post-structuralism and trends in post-modernism and Continental philosophy can also be anarchistic (see May 1994). So-called “post-anarchism” is a decentered and free-flowing discourse that deconstructs power, questions essentialism, and undermines systems of authority. Following upon the deconstructive and critical work of authors such as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and others, this critique of the arché goes all the way down. If there is no arché or foundation, then we are left with a proliferation of possibilities. Emerging trends in globalization, cyber-space, and post-humanism make the anarchist critique of “the state” more complicated, since anarchism’s traditional celebration of liberty and autonomy can be critically scrutinized and deconstructed (see Newman 2016).

Traditional anarchists were primarily interested in sustained and focused political activism that led toward the abolition of the state. The difference between free-flowing post-anarchism and traditional anarchism can be seen in the realm of morality. Anarchism has traditionally been critical of centralized moral authority—but this critique was often based upon fundamental principles and traditional values, such as autonomy or liberty. But post-structuralism—along with critiques articulated by some feminists, critical race theorists, and critics of Eurocentrism—calls these values and principles into question.

The broad critical framework provided by the anarchist critique of authority provides a useful theory or methodology for social critique. In more recent iterations, anarchism has been used to critique gender hierarchies, racial hierarchies, and the like—also including a critique of human domination over nature. Thus anarchism also includes, to name a few varieties: anarcha-feminism or feminist anarchism (see Kornegger 1975), queer anarchism or anarchist queer theory (see Daring et al. 2010), green anarchism or eco-anarchism also associated with anarchist social ecology (see Bookchin 1971 [1986]), Black and indigenous anarchisms and other anarchist critiques of white supremacy and Eurocentrism (to be discussed below); and even anarcho-veganism or “veganarchism” (see Nocella, White, & Cudworth 2015). In the anarcho-vegan literature we find the following description of a broad and inclusive anarchism:

Anarchism is a socio-political theory which opposes all systems of domination and oppression such as racism, ableism, sexism, anti-LGBTTQIA, ageism, sizeism, government, competition, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and punitive justice, and promotes direct democracy, collaboration, interdependence, mutual aid, diversity, peace, transformative justice and equity. (Nocella et al. 2015: 7)

A thorough-going anarchism would thus offer a critique of anything and everything that smacks of hierarchy, domination, centralization, and unjustified authority.

Anarchists who share these various commitments often act upon their critique of authority by engaging in nonconformist practices (free love, nudism, gender disruption, and so on) or by forming intentional communities that live “off the grid” and outside of the norms of mainstream culture. In extreme forms this becomes anarcho-primitivism or anti-civilizational anarchism (see Zerzan 2008, 2010; Jensen 2006). Alternative anarchist societies have existed in religious communes in post-Reformation Europe and in the early United States, in Nineteenth Century American utopian communities, the hippy communes of the Twentieth Century, anarchist squats, temporary autonomous zones (see Bey 1985), and occasional gatherings of like-minded people.

Given this sort of antinomianism and non-conformism it is easy to see that anarchism also often includes a radical critique of traditional ethical norms and principles. Thus radical ethical anarchism can be contrasted with what we might call bourgeois anarchism (with radical anarchism seeking to disrupt traditional social norms and bourgeois anarchism seeking freedom from the state that does not seek such disruption). And although some argue that anarchists are deeply ethical—committed to liberty and solidarity—others will argue that anarchists are moral nihilists who reject morality entirely or who at least reject the idea that there could be a single source of moral authority (see essays in Franks & Wilson 2010).

In more recent explorations and applications of anarchist thought, the anarchist critique has been related and connected to a variety of emerging theoretical issues and applied concerns. Hilary Lazar (2018) for example, explores how anarchism connects to intersectionality and issues related to multiculturalism. And Sky Croeser (2019) explores how anarchism is connected to the emerging technologies including the Internet. And there are anarchist elements in the development of shared technological and information, as for example in the development of cryptocurrencies, which create economies that outside of traditional state-based economic systems.

As mentioned above, among the varieties of applied anarchism we find anarchism associated with various liberation movements and critiques of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, and colonialism. This could be connected with feminist anarchism, women’s liberation movements, and an anarchist critique of patriarchy. We’ll focus here on the anarchist critique found in Black and indigenous liberation movements. Gandhi’s movement in India could be included here (as discussed below).

One focal point here is a claim about anarchist characteristics thought to be found in the social structures of indigenous peoples. Sometimes this is a romantic projection of anti-civilizational anarchists such as John Zerzan, who echoes Rousseau’s naive and ill-informed ideal of the “noble savage.” One must be careful to avoid essentializing claims made about indigenous cultures and political societies. The Inca and the Aztec empires were obviously not utopian anarchist collectives. Nonetheless, scholars of indigeneity affirm the anarchist critique of dominant hegemonies as part of the effort of liberation that would allow indigenous people a degree of self-determination (see Johnson and Ferguson 2019).

Black and indigenous anarchisms provide a radical critique, which holds that the global history of genocide, slavery, colonization, and exploitation rest upon the assumption of white supremacy. White supremacy is thus understood, from this point of view, as a presupposition of statism, centralization, hierarchy, and authority. The anarchist critique of white supremacy is thus linked to a critique of social and political systems that evolved out of the history of slavery and native genocide to include apartheid, inequality, caste/racial hierarchies, and other forms of structural racism. Some defenders of Black anarchism go so far as to suggest that when “Blackness” is defined in opposition to structures of white supremacy, there is a kind of anarchism woven into the concept. Anderson and Samudzi write,

While bound to the laws of the land, Black America can be understood as an extra-state entity because of Black exclusion from the liberal social contract. Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. (Anderson and Samudzi 2017: no page numbers)

This implies that the experience of Black people unfolds in a social and political world that its defined by its exclusion from power. A similar implication holds for indigenous people, who have been subjugated and dominated by colonial power. Liberation movements thus spring from a social experience that is in a sense anarchic (i.e., developed in exclusion from and opposition to structures of power). It is not surprising, then, that some liberatory activists espouse and affirm anarchism. The American activist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, for example, affirms anarchism in pursuit of Black liberation (Ervin 1997 [2016]). He explains that Black anarchism is different from what he describes as the more authoritarian hierarchy of the Black Panther party. He also argues against the authoritarian structure of religiously oriented Black liberation movements, such as that led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

A significant issue in Black and indigenous anarchisms is the effort to decolonize anarchism itself. Many of the key figures in the anarchist tradition are white, male, and European. The concerns of anarchists such as Kropotkin or Bakunin may be different from the concerns of African Americans or from the concerns of indigenous people in Latin America or elsewhere around the globe. One solution to this problem is to retrieve forgotten voices from within the tradition. In this regard, we might consider Lucy Parsons (also known as Lucy Gonzalez), a former slave who espoused anarchism. Parsons explained that she affirmed anarchism because the political status quo produced nothing but misery and starvation for the masses of humanity. To resolve this an anarchist revolution was needed. Parsons said,

Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty. (Parsons 1905 [2010])

2. Anarchism in Political Philosophy

Anarchism in political philosophy maintains that there is no legitimate political or governmental authority. In political philosophy anarchy is an important topic for consideration—even for those who are not anarchists—as the a-political background condition against which various forms of political organization are arrayed, compared, and justified. Anarchy is often viewed by non-anarchists as the unhappy or unstable condition in which there is no legitimate authority. Anarchism as a philosophical idea is not necessarily connected to practical activism. There are political anarchists who take action in order to destroy what they see as illegitimate states. The popular imagination often views anarchists as bomb-throwing nihilists. But philosophical anarchism is a theoretical standpoint. In order to decide who (and whether) one should act upon anarchist insight, we require a further theory of political action, obligation, and obedience grounded in further ethical reflection. Simmons explains that philosophical anarchists “do not take the illegitimacy of states to entail a strong moral imperative to oppose or eliminate states” (Simmons 2001: 104). Some anarchists remain obedient to ruling authorities; others revolt or resist in various ways. The question of action depends upon a theory of what sort of political obligation follows from our philosophical, moral, political, religious, and aesthetic commitments.

There is a long history of political anarchism. In the ancient world, anarchism of a sort can be found in the ideas of the Epicureans and Cynics. Kropotkin makes this point in his 1910 encyclopedia article. Although they did not employ the term anarchism, the Epicureans and Cynics avoided political activity, advising retreat from political life in pursuit of tranquility ( ataraxia ) and self-control ( autarkeai ). The Cynics are also known for advocating cosmopolitanism: living without allegiance to any particular state or legal system, while associating with human beings based upon moral principle outside of traditional state structures. Diogenes the Cynic had little respect for political or religious authority. One of his guiding ideas was to “deface the currency”. This meant not only devaluing or destroying monetary currency but also a general rejection of the norms of civilized society (see Marshall 2010: 69). Diogenes often mocked political authorities and failed to offer signs of respect. While Diogenes actively disrespected established norms, Epicurus counseled retreat. He advised living unnoticed and avoiding political life (under the phrase me politeuesthai —which can be understood as an anti-political admonition).

The assumption that anarchy would be unhappy or unstable leads to justifications of political power. In Hobbes’ famous phrase, in the stateless—anarchic—condition of “the state nature” human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Hobbes’ social contract—as well as other versions of the social contract theory as found for example in Locke or Rousseau—are attempts to explain how and why the political state emerges from out of the anarchic state of nature.

Anarchists respond by claiming that the state tends to produce its own sort of unhappiness: as oppressive, violent, corrupt, and inimical to liberty. Discussions about the social contract thus revolve around the question of whether the state is better than anarchy—or whether states and state-like entities naturally and inevitably emerge from out of the original condition of anarchy. One version of this argument about the inevitable emergence of states (by way of something like an “invisible hand”) is found in Nozick’s influential Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974). While Nozick and other political philosophers take anarchy seriously as a starting point, anarchists will argue that invisible hand arguments of this sort ignore the historical actuality of states, which develop out of a long history of domination, inequality, and oppression. Murray Rothbard has argued against Nozick and social contract theory, saying, “no existing state has been immaculately conceived” (Rothbard 1977: 46). Different versions of the social contract theory, such as we find in John Rawls’s work, view the contract situation as a heuristic device allowing us to consider justice from under “the veil of ignorance”. But anarchists will argue that the idea of the original position does not necessarily lead to the justification of the state—especially given background knowledge about the tendency of states to be oppressive. Crispin Sartwell concludes:

Even accepting more or less all of the assumptions Rawls packs into the original position, it is not clear that the contractors would not choose anarchy. (Sartwell 2008: 83)

The author of the present essay has described anarchism that results from a critique of the social contract tradition as “liberal social contract anarchism” (Fiala 2013a).

An important historical touchstone is William Godwin. Unlike Locke and Hobbes who turned to the social contract to lead us out of the anarchic state of nature, Godwin argued that the resulting governmental power was not necessarily better than anarchy. Locke, of course, allows for revolution when the state becomes despotic. Godwin builds upon that insight. He explained, “we must not hastily conclude that the mischiefs of anarchy are worse than those which government is qualified to produce” (Godwin 1793: bk VII, chap. V, p. 736). He claimed,

It is earnestly to be desired that each man should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is that we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society will permit. (Godwin 1793: bk III, chap. VII, p. 185–6)

Like Rousseau, who praised the noble savage, who was free from social chains until forced into society, Godwin imagined original anarchy developing into the political state, which tended on his view to become despotic. Once the state comes into being, Godwin suggests that despotism is the primary problem since “despotism is as perennial as anarchy is transitory” (Godwin 1793: bk VII, chap. V, p. 736).

Anarchism is often taken to mean that individuals ought to be left alone without any unifying principle or governing power. In some cases anarchism is related to libertarianism (or what is sometimes called “anarcho-capitalism”). But non-rule may also occur when there is unanimity or consensus—and hence no need for external authority or a governing structure of command and obedience. If there were unanimity among individuals, there would be no need for “ruling”, authority, or government. The ideas of unanimity and consensus are associated with the positive conception of anarchism as a voluntary association of autonomous human beings, which promotes communal values. One version of the anarchist ideal imagines the devolution of centralized political authority, leaving us with communes whose organizational structure is open-ended and consensual.

Given this emphasis on communal organization it is not surprising that political anarchism has a close historical association with communism, despite the connection mentioned above with free market capitalism. Authors such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Goldman developed their anarchism as a response to Marx and Marxism. One of the first authors to explicitly affirm anarchism, Pierre Proudhon, defended a kind of “communism”, which he understood as being grounded in decentralized associations, communes, and mutual-aid societies. Proudhon thought that private property created despotism. He argued that liberty required anarchy, concluding,

The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy. (Proudhon 1840 [1876: 286])

Following Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and the other so-called “classical anarchists”, anarchism comes to be seen as a focal point for political philosophy and activism.

Let’s turn to a conceptual analysis of different arguments made in defense of anarchism.

Anarchists often make categorical claims to the effect that no state is legitimate or that there can no such thing as a justifiable political state. As an absolute or a priori claim, anarchism holds that all states always and everywhere are illegitimate and unjust. The term “ a priori anarchism” is found in Simmons 2001; but it is employed already by Kropotkin in his influential 1910 article on anarchism, where he claims that anarchists are not utopians who argue against the state in a priori fashion (Kropotkin 1927 [2002: 285]). Despite Kropotkin’s claim, some anarchists do offer a priori arguments against the state. This sort of claim rests upon an account of the justification of authority that is usually grounded in some form of deontological moral claim about the importance of individual liberty and a logical claim about the nature of state authority.

One typical and well-known example of this argument is found in the work of Robert Paul Wolff. Wolff indicates that legitimate authority rests upon a claim about the right to command obedience (Wolff 1970). Correlative to this is a duty to obey: one has a duty to obey legitimate authority. As Wolff explains, by appealing to ideas found in Kant and Rousseau, the duty to obey is linked to notions about autonomy, responsibility, and rationality. But for Wolff and other anarchists, the problem is that the state does not have legitimate authority. As Wolff says of the anarchist, “he will never view the commands of the state as legitimate, as having a binding moral force” (Wolff 1970: 16). The categorical nature of this claim indicates a version of absolute anarchism. If the state’s commands are never legitimate and create no moral duty of obedience, then there can never be a legitimate state. Wolff imagines that there could be a legitimate state grounded in “unanimous direct democracy”—but he indicates that unanimous direct democracy would be “so restricted in its application that it offers no serious hope of ever being embodied in an actual state” (Wolff 1970: 55). Wolff concludes:

If all men have a continuing obligation to achieve the highest degree of autonomy possible, then there would appear to be no state whose subjects have a moral obligation to obey its commands. Hence, the concept of a de jure legitimate state would appear to be vacuous, and philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man. (Wolff 1970: 17)

As Wolff puts it here, there appears to be “no state” that is legitimate. This claim is stated in absolute and a priori fashion, a point made by Reiman in his critique of Wolff (Reiman 1972). Wolff does not deny, by the way, that there are de facto legitimate states: governments often do have the approval and support of the people they govern. But this approval and support is merely conventional and not grounded in a moral duty; and approval and support are manufactured and manipulated by the coercive power and propaganda and ideology of the state.

We noted here that Wolff’s anarchism is connected to Kant. But Kant is no anarchist: he defended the idea of enlightened republican government in which autonomy would be preserved. Rousseau may be closer to espousing anarchism in some of his remarks—although these are far from systematic (see McLaughlin 2007). Some authors view Rousseau as espousing something close to “ a posteriori philosophical anarchism” (see Bertram 2010 [2017])—which we will define in the next section. Among classical political philosophers, we might also consider Locke in connection with “libertarian anarchism” (see Varden 2015) or Locke as offering a theory “on the edge of anarchism”, as Simmons has put it (Simmons 1993). But despite his strong defense of individual rights, the stringent way he describes voluntary consent, and his advocacy of revolution, Locke believes that states can be defended based upon the social contract theory.

Leaving the canonical authors of Western political philosophy aside, the most likely place to find deontological and a priori anarchism is among the Christian anarchists. Of course, most Christians are not anarchists. But those Christians who espouse anarchism usually do so with the absolute, deontological, and a priori claims of the sort made by Tolstoy, Berdyaev, and Ellul—as noted above.

A less stringent form of anarchism will argue that states could be justified in theory—even though, in practice, no state or very few states are actually legitimate. Contingent anarchism will hold that states in the present configuration of things fail to live up to the standards of their own justification. This is an a posteriori argument (see Simmons 2001) based both in a theoretical account of the justification of the state (for example, the social contract theory of liberal-democratic theory) and in an empirical account of how and why concrete states fail to be justified based upon this theory. The author of the present article has offered a version of this argument based upon the social contract theory, holding that the liberal-democratic social contract theory provides the best theory of the justification of the state, while arguing that very few states actually live up to the promise of the social contract theory (Fiala 2013a).

One version of the contingent anarchist argument focuses on the question of the burden of proof for accounts that would justify political authority. This approach has been articulated by Noam Chomsky, who explains:

[This] is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. Sometimes the burden can be met. (Chomsky 2005: 178)

Chomsky accepts legitimate authority based in ordinary experience: for example, when a grandfather prevents a child from darting out into the street. But state authority is a much more complicated affair. Political relationships are attenuated; there is the likelihood of corruption and self-interest infecting political reality; there are levels and degrees of mediation, which alienate us from the source of political authority; and the rational autonomy of adults is important and fundamental. By focusing on the burden of proof, Chomsky acknowledges that there may be ways to meet the burden of proof for the justification of the state. But he points out that there is a prima facie argument against the state—which is based in a complex historical and empirical account of the role of power, economics, and historical inertia in creating political institutions. He explains:

Such institutions face a heavy burden of proof: it must be shown that under existing conditions, perhaps because of some overriding consideration of deprivation or threat, some form of authority, hierarchy, and domination is justified, despite the prima facie case against it—a burden that can rarely be met. (Chomsky 2005: 174)

Chomsky does not deny that the burden of proof could be met. Rather, his point is that there is a prima facie case against the state, since the burden of proof for the justification of the state is rarely met.

Contingent anarchism is based in consequentialist reasoning, focused on details of historical actuality. Consequentialist anarchism will appeal to utilitarian considerations, arguing that states generally fail to deliver in terms of promoting the happiness of the greater number of people—and more strongly that state power tends to produce unhappiness. The actuality of inequality, classism, elitism, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression can be used to support an anarchist argument, holding that even though a few people benefit from state power, a larger majority suffers under it.

There is a significant difference between anarchism that is offered in pursuit of utilitarianism’s greater happiness ideal and anarchism that is offered in defense of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. As we shall see in the next section, individualist anarchists are primarily concerned with the tendency of utilitarian politics to sacrifice the rights of individuals in the name of the greater good.

Before turning to that conception of anarchism, let’s note two classical authors who offer insight into utilitarian anarchism. Godwin articulated a form of anarchism that is connected to a utilitarian concern. Godwin’s general moral thought is utilitarian in basic conception, even though he also argues based upon fundamental principles such as the importance of liberty. But Godwin’s arguments are a posteriori , based upon generalizations from history and with an eye toward the future development of happiness and liberty. He writes:

Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present. (Godwin 1793: bk V, ch. I, p. 380)

This claim is similar to Chomsky’s insofar as it recognizes the complicated nature of the historical dialectic. The goal of political development should be in a direction that goes beyond the state (and toward the development of individual reason and morality). But in our present condition, some form of government may be “a necessary evil”, which we ought to strive to overcome. The point here is that our judgments about the justification of the state are contingent: they depend upon present circumstances and our current form of development. And while states may be necessary features of the current human world, as human beings develop further, it is possible that the state might outlive its usefulness.

We should note that utilitarian arguments are often used to support state structures in the name of the greater good. Utilitarian anarchists will argue that states fail to do this. But utilitarian conclusions are not usually based upon a fundamental appeal to moral principles such as liberty or the rights of the individual. Thus Bentham described claims about human rights as “anarchical fallacies” because they tended to lead toward anarchy, which he rejected. Bentham described the difference between a moderate utilitarian effort at reform and the anarchist’s revolutionary doctrine of human rights, saying that

the anarchist setting up his will and fancy for a law before which all mankind are called upon to bow down at the first word—the anarchist, trampling on truth and decency, denies the validity of the law in question,—denies the existence of it in the character of a law, and calls upon all mankind to rise up in a mass, and resist the execution of it. (Bentham 1843: 498)

More principled deontological anarchism will maintain that states violate fundamental rights and so are not justified. But utilitarian anarchism will not primarily be worried about the violation of a few people’s rights (although that is obviously a relevant consideration). Rather, the complaint for a utilitarian anarchist is that state structures tend to produce disadvantages for the greater number of people. Furthermore what Oren Ben-Dor calls “utilitarian-based anarchism” is based upon the idea that there is no a priori justification of the state (Ben-Dor 2000: 101–2). For the utilitarian, this all depends upon the circumstances and conditions. Ben-Dor calls this anarchism because it rejects any a priori notion of state justification. In other words, the utilitarian anarchist does not presume that states are justifiable; rather a utilitarian anarchist will hold that the burden of proof rests upon the defender of states to show that state authority is justifiable on utilitarian grounds, by bringing in historical and empirical data about human nature, human flourishing, and successful social organization.

Forms of anarchism also differ in terms of the content of the theory, the focal point of the anarchist critique, and the imagined practical impact of anarchism. Socialist forms of anarchism include communist anarchism associated with Kropotkin and communitarian anarchism (see Clark 2013). The socialist approach focuses on the development of social and communal groups, which are supposed to thrive outside of hierarchical and centralized political structures. Individualist forms of anarchism include some forms of libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism as well as egoistically oriented antinomianism and non-conformism. The individualistic focus rejects group identity and ideas about social/communal good, while remaining firmly rooted in moral claims about the autonomy of the individual (see Casey 2012).

Individualistic anarchism is historically associated with ideas found in Stirner who said, “every state is a despotism” (Stirner 1844 [1995: 175]). He argued that there was no duty to obey the state and the law because the law and the state impair self-development and self-will. The state seeks to tame our desires and along with the church it undermines self-enjoyment and the development of unique individuality. Stirner is even critical of social organizations and political parties. While not denying that an individual could affiliate with such organizations, he maintains that the individual retains rights and identity against the party or social organization: he embraces the party; but he ought not allow himself to be “embraced and taken up by the party” (Stirner 1844 [1995: 211]). Individualist anarchism has often been attributed to a variety of thinkers including Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and Thoreau.

Individualist anarchism also seems to have something in common with egoism of the sort associated with Ayn Rand. But Rand dismissed anarchism as “a naïve floating abstraction” that could not exist in reality; and she argued that governments properly existed to defend people’s rights (Rand 1964). A more robust sort of pro-capitalist anarchism has been defended by Murray Rothbard, who rejects “left-wing anarchism” of the sort he associates with communism, while applauding the individualist anarchism of Tucker (Rothbard 2008). Rothbard continues to explain that since anarchism has usually been considered as being primarily a left-wing communist phenomenon, libertarianism should be distinguished from anarchism by calling it “non-archism” (Rothbard 2008). A related term has been employed in the literature, “min-archism”, which has been used to describe the minimal state that libertarians allow (see Machan 2002). Libertarians are still individualists, who emphasize the importance of individual liberty, even though they disagree with full-blown anarchists about the degree to which state power can be justified.

It is worth considering here, the complexity of the notion of liberty under consideration by appealing to Isaiah Berlin’s well-known distinction between negative and positive liberty (Berlin 1969). Some individualist anarchists appear to focus on negative liberty, i.e., freedom from constraint, authority, and domination. But anarchism has also been concerned with community and the social good. In this sense, anarchists are focused on something like positive liberty and concerned with creating and sustaining the social conditions necessary for actualizing human flourishing. In this regard, anarchists have also offered theories of institutional rules and social structures that are non-authoritarian. This may sound paradoxical (i.e., that anarchists espouse rules and structures at all). But Prichard has argued that anarchists are also interested in “freedom within” institutions and social structures. According to Prichard rather than focusing on state-authority, anarchist institutions will be be open-ended processes that are complex and non-linear (Prichard 2018).

We see then, that individualist anarchism that focuses only on negative liberty is often rejected by anarchists who are interested in reconceiving community and restructuring society along more egalitarian lines. Indeed, individualistic anarchism has been criticized as merely a matter of “lifestyle” (criticized in Bookchin 1995), which focuses on dress, behavior, and other individualistic choices and preferences. Bookchin and other critics of lifestyle individualism will argue that mere non-conformism does very little to change the status quo and overturn structures of domination and authority. Nor does non-conformism and lifestyle anarchism work to create and sustain systems that affirm liberty and equality. But defenders of lifestyle non-conformism will argue that there is value in opting out of cultural norms and demonstrating contempt for conformity through individual lifestyle choices.

A more robust form of individualist anarchism will focus on key values such as autonomy and self-determination, asserting the primacy of the individual over and against social groups as a matter of rights. Individualist anarchists can admit that collective action is important and that voluntary cooperation among individuals can result in beneficial and autonomy preserving community. Remaining disputes will consider whether what results from individual cooperation is a form of capitalism or a form of social sharing or communism. Libertarian anarchists or anarcho-capitalists will defend free market ideas based upon individual choices in trading and producing goods for market.

On the other hand, socialist or communistically oriented anarchism will focus more on a sharing economy. This could be a large form of mutualism or something local and concrete like the sharing of family life or the traditional potlatch. But these ideas remain anarchist to the extent that they want to avoid centralized control and the development of hierarchical structures of domination. Unlike state-centered communism of the sort developed by Marxists, anarchist communism advocates decentralization. The motto of this approach comes from Kropotkin: “all for all”. In The Conquest of Bread (1892) Kropotkin criticizes monopolistic centralization that prevents people from gaining access to socially generated wealth. The solution is “all for all”: “What we proclaim is the Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!” (Kropotkin 1892 [1995: 20]). The communist idea that all humans should enjoy the fruits of the collective human product shares something with the Marxist idea of “to each according to his need” (Marx 1875). But Kropotkin argues for the need to evolve beyond centralized communist control—what he criticizes as mere “collectivism”—and toward anarchist communism:

Anarchy leads to communism, and communism to anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality. (Kropotkin 1892 [1995: 31])

Kropotkin argues that the communal impulse already exists and that the advances in social wealth made possible by the development of individualistic capitalism make it likely that we will develop in the direction of communal sharing. He argues that the tendency of history is away from centralized power and toward equality and liberty—and toward the abolition of the state. Kropotkin’s communist anarchism is based upon some historical and empirical claims: about whether things can actually be arranged more satisfactorily without state intervention; and about whether states really do personify injustice and oppression. Libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism also think that the free market will work to adequately maximize human well-being and help individuals to realize their own autonomy. But for the socialist and communist anarchists, the question of individual self-realization is less important than the idea of social development. Kropotkin’s “all for all” indicates a moral and ontological focus that is different from what we find among the individualists.

Socialist and communally focused forms of anarchism emphasize the importance of social groups. For example, families can be viewed as anarchic structures of social cooperation and solidarity. A social anarchist would be critical of hierarchical and domineering forms of family organization (for example, patriarchal family structure). But social anarchists will emphasize the point that human identity and flourishing occur within extended social structures—so long as it remains a free and self-determining community.

The tension between individualist and socialist anarchism comes to a head when considering the question of the degree to which an individual ought to be subordinated to the community. One problem for so-called “communitarian” theories of social and political life is that they can result in the submergence of individuals into the communal identity. Individualists will want to struggle against this assault upon autonomy and individual identity. Communalists may respond, as Clark does, by claiming that the ideal of a genuine community of autonomous individuals remains a hoped for dream of an “impossible community” (Clark 2013). On the other hand communally focused theorists will point out that individual human beings cannot exist outside of communal structures: we are social animals who flourish and survive in communities. Thus radical individualism also remains a dream—and as more politically oriented anarchists will point out, individualism undermines the possibility of organized political action, which implies that individualist anarchists will be unable to successfully resist political structures of domination.

3. Anarchism and Political Activity

Anarchism forces us to re-evaluate political activity. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato held that human beings flourished within just political communities and that there was a virtue in serving the polis. Modern political philosophy tended to hold, as well, that political action—including obedience to the law and the ideal of a rule of law—was noble and enlightened. In Hegelian political philosophy, these ideas combine in a way that celebrates citizenship and service to the state. And in contemporary liberal political philosophy, it is often presumed that obedience to the law is required as a prima facie duty (see Reiman 1972; Gans 1992). Anarchists, of course, call this all into question.

The crucial question for anarchists is thus whether one ought to disengage from political life, whether one ought to submit to political authority and obey the law, or whether one ought to engage in active efforts to actively abolish the state. Those who opt to work actively for the abolition of the state often understand this as a form of “direct action” or “propaganda of the deed”. The idea of direct action is often viewed as typical of anarchists, who believe that something ought to be done to actively abolish the state including: graffiti, street theater, organized occupations, boycotts, and even violence. There are disputes among anarchists about what ought to be done, with an important dividing line occurring with regard to the question of violence and criminal behavior.

Before turning to that discussion, let’s note one further important theoretical distinction with regard to the question of taking action, connected to the typology offered above: whether action should be justified in consequentialist or non-consequentialist terms. Franks has argued that anarchist direct action ought to exemplify a unity of means and ends (Franks 2003). On this view, if liberation and autonomy are what anarchists are pursuing, then the methods used to obtain these goods must be liberationist and celebrate autonomy—and embody this within direct action. Franks argues that the idea that “the end justifies the means” is more typical of state-centered movements, such as Bolshevism—and of right-wing movements. While some may think that anarchists are willing to engage in action “by any means necessary”, that phraseology and the crass consequentialism underlying it is more typical of radical movements which are not anarchist. Coercive imposition of the anarchist ideal re-inscribes the problem of domination, hierarchy, centralization, and monopolistic power that the anarchist was originally opposed to.

One significant philosophical and ethical problem for politically engaged anarchists is the question of how to avoid ongoing cycles of power and violence that are likely to erupt in the absence of centralized political power. One suggestion, mentioned above, is that anarchists will often want to emphasize the unity of means and ends. This idea shows why there is some substantial overlap and conjunction between anarchism and pacifism. Pacifist typically emphasize the unity of means and ends. But not all pacifists are anarchists. However, we mentioned above that there is a connection between anarchism and Christian pacifism, as found in Tolstoy, for example. Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy and the anarchists. Although Gandhi is better known as an anti-colonial activist, Marshall includes Gandhi among the anarchists (Marshall 2010: chapter 26). It is possible to reconstruct anti-colonial movements and arguments about self-determination and home rule as a kind of anarchism (aimed at destroying colonial power and imperial states). Gandhi noted that there were many anarchists working in India in his time. In saying this, Gandhi uses the term anarchism to characterize bomb-throwing advocates of violence. He says: “I myself am an anarchist, but of another type” (Gandhi 1916 [1956: 134]). Gandhian anarchism, if there is such a thing, embraces nonviolence. In general nonviolent resistance as developed in the Tolstoy-Gandhi-King tradition fits with an approach that turns away from political power and views the state as a purveyor of war and an impediment to equality and human development.

Objecting to this anarcho-pacifist approach are more militant activists who advocate direct action that can include sabotage and other forms of political violence including terrorism. Emma Goldman explains, for example, that anti-capitalist sabotage undermines the idea of private possession. While the legal system considers this to be criminal, Goldman contends it is not. She explains,

it is ethical in the best sense, since it helps society to get rid of its worst foe, the most detrimental factor of social life. Sabotage is mainly concerned with obstructing, by every possible method, the regular process of production, thereby demonstrating the determination of the workers to give according to what they receive, and no more. (Goldman 1913 [1998: 94])

Goldman struggled with the question of violence through the course of her career. Early on she was a more vocal proponent of revolutionary violence. She began to rethink this later. Nonetheless, like other anarchists of her generation, she attributed violence to the state, which she opposed. She writes:

I believe that Anarchism is the only philosophy of peace, the only theory of the social relationship that values human life above everything else. I know that some Anarchists have committed acts of violence, but it is the terrible economic inequality and great political injustice that prompt such acts, not Anarchism. Every institution today rests on violence; our very atmosphere is saturated with it. (Goldman 1913 [1998: 59])

Goldman views anarchist violence as merely reactive. In response to state violence, the anarchists often argued that they were merely using violence in self-defense. Another defender of violence is Malatesta who wrote that the revolution against the violence of the ruling class must be violent. He explained:

I think that a regime which is born of violence and which continues to exist by violence cannot be overthrown except by a corresponding and proportionate violence. (Malatesta 1925 [2015: 48])

Like Goldman, Malatesta warned against violence becoming an end in itself and giving way to brutality and ferocity for its own sake. He also described anarchists as preachers of love and advocates of peace. He said,

what distinguishes the anarchists from all others is in fact their horror of violence, their desire and intention to eliminate physical violence from human relations. (Malatesta 1924 [2015: 46])

But despite this rejection of violence, Malatesta advocates violence as a necessary evil.

Anarchist violence appears as the violence of an individual against the state. It is easy to see why such violence would be characterized as terroristic and criminal. For an individual to declare war against the state and take action to disrupt the state is criminal. And thus anarchists have also been interested in a critique of crime and criminality—arguing that it is the law and the legal system that creates and produces crime and criminality. This critique was advanced by Kropotkin as early as the 1870s, when he called prisons “schools for crime”. Similar ideas are found in Foucault and in more recent criticisms of mass incarceration. Contemporary anarchists will argue that mass incarceration is an example of state power run amok.

The question of violence leads us to a further issue: the question of obedience, disobedience, resistance, and political obligation. Much could be said here about the nature of political obligation and obedience: including whether obedience is merely pragmatic and strategic or based upon notions about loyalty and claims about identification with the nation and its laws. But it is clear that anarchists have no principled reason for political obedience. If the anarchist views the state as illegitimate, then obedience and participation are merely a matter of choice, preference, and pragmatism—and not a matter of loyalty or duty.

Christian anarchists will look, for example, to the case of Jesus and his idea of rendering unto Caesar what is due to Caesar (Matthew 22:15–22). The anarchist interpretation of this passage claims that this is an indication both of Jesus’s disaffection with the state and with his grudging acquiescence to political authority. Christoyannopoulos argues, “Jesus’ political subversion is carried out through submission rather than revolt” (Christoyannopoulos 2010: 156). The crucifixion, on this interpretation, is a subversive event, which “unmasks” political power as “demonic” and illegitimate. Jesus does not recognize the ultimate moral and religious authority of Caesar or Pilate. But he goes along with the political regime. Thus some anarchists may simply be compliant and submissive.

But politically motivated anarchists encourage resistance to state power, including strategic and principled disobedience. Such disobedience could involve symbolic actions—graffiti and the like—or acts of civil resistance, protests, tax resistance and so on—up to, and possibly including, sabotage, property crime, and outright violence. Again, there is overlap with the discussion of violence here, but let’s set that question aside and focus on the notion of civil disobedience.

One important example is found in Thoreau, who famously explained his act of disobedience by tax resistance as follows:

In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases. (Thoreau 1849 [1937: 687])

Thoreau’s disobedience is principled. He recognizes that a declaration of war against the state is a criminal act. He willingly goes to jail. But he also admits that he will cooperate with the state in other cases—since there is something advantageous about cooperation. This indicates the complexity of the question of cooperation, protest, and disobedience. Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience” (1849), is often viewed as an anarchist manifesto. Kropotkin discussed him as an anarchist (Kropotkin 1927 [2002]). And Tolstoy admired his act of civil disobedience—as did Gandhi.

Anarchists continue to discuss strategies and tactics of disobedience. One problem throughout this discussion is the degree to which disobedience is effective. If there were to be successful anarchist campaigns of disobedience they would have to be organized and widespread. Whether such campaigns would actually work to disassemble the state apparatus remains an open question.

Until their dreamed-of revolution comes, anarchist must consider the degree to which cooperation with the state involves “selling out” to the political status quo. Perhaps there are reforms and short-term gains that can be obtained through traditional political means: voting, lobbying legislators, etc. But anarchists have often held to an all-or-nothing kind of approach to political participation. We noted above that the Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul has said that he does not vote because anarchy implies conscientious objection. But herein lies a strategic conundrum. If progressively minded anarchists opt out of the political system, this means that less enlightened policies will prevail. By not voting or otherwise engaging in ordinary politics, the anarchist ends up with a system that he or she will be even less happy with than if he or she had actively participated in the system.

This is, really, a problem of revolution versus reform. The revolutionary wants revolution now, believing that it will occur by way of direct action of various sorts. Perhaps the revolutionary is also thinking that the psychological, cultural, and spiritual evolution toward revolutionary consciousness can only occur when direct action is taken: in order for anarchism to emerge, the anarchist may think, one ought to behave and think like an anarchist. But without a concerted and nation-wide revolution, revolutionary action begins to look like mere selfishness, Epicurean opting out, or what Bookchin criticized as “lifestyle anarchism”. Meanwhile those reform-minded folks who work within the system of political power and legality can end up supporting a system that they have doubts about. This philosophical problem of reform vs. revolution exists for all radical political agendas. But the problem is especially acute for anarchists, since anarchism is often an all-or-none proposition: if the state is justified then gradualism and reformism make sense; but if no state can be justified, then what is sometimes called “reformist anarchism” is a non-starter (see L. Davis 2012).

Many anarchists are revolutionaries who want change to be created through direct action. But given our preceding discussion of violence, disobedience, and the potential for success of revolutionary activity, the question arises about opting-out of political life. The Epicureans and Cynics pointed in this direction. The history of anarchism is replete with efforts to construct anarchist communes that are independent and separated from the rest of state centered political life.

We might pick up the history here with the Christian anarchists and pacifists of the Reformation: the Mennonites, for example; or the Quakers who refused to doff their hats for political authorities and who sought a refuge in Pennsylvania. Indeed, there is an anarchist thread to the colonization of North America, as those who were disgruntled with European political and religious hierarchy left for the “new world” or were forced out by the European authorities. In the Seventeenth Century, Anne Hutchinson was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and forced to found a new community, when she concluded that the idea of government was flawed. Hutchinson is considered as one of the first anarchists of North America (see Stringham 2007). Separatist communities were founded by the New England abolitionists and transcendentalists, by Josiah Warren, and by others.

Anarchist communes were formed in Europe during the Nineteenth Century and in Spain during the 1930s. There have been ongoing movements and organizations of indigenous peoples and others who inhabit the margins of mainstream political life. In the 1960s and 70s, anarchist separatism was reiterated in the Hippy communes and attempts to live off the grid and get back to nature. Alternative communes, squats, and spontaneous gatherings continue to occur.

Separatist communities have to consider: the degree to which they give up on anarchist direct action against dominant political forces, the extent to which they have to accommodate themselves to political reality, and the risk that customary hierarchies will be reinstated within the commune. For the revolutionary anarchist, separatism is a strategy of avoidance that impedes political action. Separatist communes must often obey the rules of the dominant political organization in order to trade and get connected to the rest of the world. Finally, a complaint made about separatist communes is that they can end up being structured by sexist, classist, and other hierarchical organizing principles. One might argue that until the dominant culture is revolutionized, separatism will only be a pale reflection of the anarchist ideal. And yet, on the other hand, advocates of separatism will argue that the best way for anarchist ideals to take hold is to demonstrate that they work and to provide an inspiration and experimental proving ground for anarchism.

If revolutionary activity is taken off the table, then anarchists are left with various forms of gradualism and reformism. One way this might occur is through the creation of “temporary autonomous zones” such as those described by Bey. Along these lines David Graeber provides a description of the cultural and spiritual work that would be required in order to prepare the way for anarchist revolution. Graeber says that this would require “liberation in the imaginary”, by which he means that through activism, utopian communities, and the like there can be a gradual change in the way political power is imagined and understood (Graeber 2004). Revolutionary anarchists will respond to this by arguing that liberation in the imaginary is simply imaginary liberation: without actual change in the status quo, oppression and inequality continue to be a problem.

4. Objections and Replies

Let’s conclude by considering some standard objections to anarchism and typical replies.

Objection: This objection holds that anarchism is merely another name for chaos and for a rejection of order. This objection holds that anarchists are violent and destructive and that they are intent on destroying everything, including morality itself.

Reply: This objection does not seem to recognize that anarchists come in many varieties. Many anarchists are also pacifists—and so do not advocate violent revolution. Many other anarchists are firmly committed to moral principles such as autonomy, liberty, solidarity, and equality. Some anarchists do take their critique of arché in a nihilistic direction that denies ethical principles. But one can be committed to anarchism, while advocating for caring communities. Indeed, many of the main authors in the anarchist tradition believed that the state and the other hierarchical and authoritarian structures of contemporary society prevented human flourishing.

Objection : This objection holds that anarchism is inherently unstable. Hobbes and other early modern social contract theories maintain that the state emerges as a necessary response to natural anarchy which keeps order and protects our interests. A different theory comes from Nozick, who argues that the “night-watchman state” would emerge out of anarchy by an invisible hand process: as people will exercise their liberty and purchase protection from a protection agency, which would eventually evolve into something like a minimal state.

Reply : Anarchists may argue that the state of nature is simply not a state of war and so that Hobbes’s description is false. Some anarcho-primitivists will argue that things were much better for human beings in the original state of nature in small communities living close to the land. Other anarchists might argue that the disadvantages of state organizations—the creation of hierarchies, monopolies, inequalities, and the like—simply outweigh the benefits of state structures; and that rational agents would choose to remain in anarchy rather than allow the state to evolve. Some anarchists may argue that each time a state emerges, it would have to be destroyed. But others will argue that education and human development (including technological development) would prevent the reemergence of the state.

Objection : This objection holds that there simply is no way to destroy or deconstruct the state. So exercises in anarchist political theory are fruitless. It would be better, from this point of view to focus on critiques of hierarchy, inequality, and threats to liberty from within liberal or libertarian political theory—and to engage in reforms that occur within the status quo and mainstream political organization.

Reply : Ideal theory is always in opposition to non-ideal theory. But utopian speculation can be useful for clarifying values. Thus philosophical anarchism may be a useful exercise that helps us understand our values and commitment, even though political anarchism has no hope of succeeding. Furthermore, there are examples of successful anarchist communities on a small local scale (for example, in the separatist communities discussed above). These concrete examples can be viewed as experiments in anarchist theory and practice.

Objection : This objection holds that a political theory that abolishes political structures makes no sense. A related concern arises when anarchism is taken to be a critique of authority in every case and in all senses. If anarchists deny then that there can be any arché whatsoever, then the claim contradicts itself: we would have a ruling theory that states that there is no ruling theory. This sort of criticism is related to standard criticisms of relativism and nihilism. Related to this is a more concrete and mundane objection that holds that there can be no anarchist movement or collective action, since anarchism is constitutionally opposed to the idea of a movement or collective (since under anarchism there can be no authoritative ruler or set of rules).

Reply : This objection only holds if anarchism is taken to be an all-or-nothing theory of the absolutist variety. Political anarchists do not necessarily agree with the skeptical post-foundationalist critique which holds that there can be no ruling principle or authority whatsoever. Rather, political anarchists hold that there are legitimate authorities but that political power quickly loses its authoritativeness and legitimacy. Furthermore, anarchists tend to advocate for a principle and procedure for organization based upon voluntarism and mutual aid, as well as unanimity and/or consensus. From this point of view anarchist communities can work very well, provided that they avoid coercive authority. To support this point anarchists will point to historical examples of successful anarchist communes. They will also point to ordinary human relations—in families and civil society relationship—which operate quite well apart form coercive and hierarchical political authority

Objection : One objection to philosophical anarchism of the sort discussed throughout this essay is that it remains merely theoretical. Some political anarchists have little patience for abstract discourses that do not engage in direct action. One worry about philosophical anarchism is that in failing to act—and in failing to take responsibility for the actions that ought to follow from thought—philosophical anarchism remains a bourgeois convenience that actually serves the status quo. Thus when philosophical anarchists remain uncommitted in terms of the concrete questions raised by anarchism—whether they should obey the law, whether they should vote, and so on—they tend to support the interests of defenders of the status quo.

Reply : In response to this objection, one might defend the importance of philosophical reflection. It is important to be clear about principles and ideas before taking action. And with anarchism the stakes are quite high. The puzzles created by philosophical anarchism are profound. They lead us to question traditional notions of sovereignty, political obligation, and so on. They lead us to wonder about cultural and ethical conventions, including also our first principles regarding the theory and organization of social life. Given the difficulty of resolving many of these questions, the philosophical anarchist may hold that caution is in order. Moreover, the philosophical anarchist might also defend the importance of wonder. The anarchist critique gives us reason to wonder about much that we take for granted. Wonder may not change the world in immediate ways or lead to direct action. But wonder is an important step in the direction of thoughtful, ethical action.

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5.1: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Robert Nozick)

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25 Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Robert Nozick)

Robert Nozick 50 (/ˈnoʊzɪk/; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971). They were colleagues at Harvard, and Nozicke took up the naturally opposing side Rawls: a state that infringes on too many liberties is unjustified, so getting as close to anarchy (in the sense of “no government”) is the only justifiable state.

For Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Nozick received a National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion. There, Nozick argues that only a minimal state "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on" could be justified without violating people's rights. For Nozick, a distribution of goods is just if brought about by free exchange among consenting adults from a just starting position, even if large inequalities subsequently emerge from the process. Nozick appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as ends (what he termed 'separateness of persons'), not merely as a means to some other end.

Nozick challenged the partial conclusion of John Rawls' Second Principle of Justice of his A Theory of Justice , that "social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society." Anarchy, State, and Utopia claims a heritage from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and seeks to ground itself upon a natural law doctrine, but reaches some importantly different conclusions from Locke himself in several ways.

Most controversially, Nozick argued that a consistent upholding of the non-aggression principle would allow and regard as valid consensual or non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults. He rejected the notion of inalienable rights advanced by Locke and most contemporary capitalist-oriented libertarian academics, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the typical notion of a "free system" would allow adults to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia 51

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a 1974 book by the American political philosopher Robert Nozick. It won the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion, has been translated into 11 languages, and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" (1945–1995) by the U.K. Times Literary Supplement .

In opposition to A Theory of Justice (1971) by John Rawls, and in debate with Michael Walzer, Nozick argues in favor of a minimal state, "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on." When a state takes on more responsibilities than these, Nozick argues, rights will be violated. To support the idea of the minimal state, Nozick presents an argument that illustrates how the minimalist state arises naturally from anarchy and how any expansion of state power past this minimalist threshold is unjustified.

Nozick's entitlement theory, which sees humans as ends in themselves and justifies redistribution of goods only on condition of consent, is a key aspect of Anarchy, State, and Utopia . It is influenced by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Hayek.

The book also contains a vigorous defense of minarchist libertarianism against more extreme views, such as anarcho-capitalism (in which there is no state and individuals must contract with private companies for all social services). Nozick argues that anarcho-capitalism would inevitably transform into a minarchist state, even without violating any of its own non-aggression principles, through the eventual emergence of a single locally dominant private defense and judicial agency that it is in everyone's interests to align with, because other agencies are unable to effectively compete against the advantages of the agency with majority coverage. Therefore, he felt that, even to the extent that the anarcho-capitalist theory is correct, it results in a single, private, protective agency which is itself a de facto "state". Thus anarcho-capitalism may only exist for a limited period before a minimalist state emerges.

Philosophical activity

The preface of Anarchy, State, and Utopia ( ASU ) contains a passage about "the usual manner of presenting philosophical work"—i.e., its presentation as though it were the absolutely final word on its subject. Nozick believes that philosophers are really more modest than that and aware of their works' weaknesses. Yet a form of philosophical activity persists which "feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape." The bulges are masked or the cause of the bulge is thrown far away so that no one will notice. Then " Quickly , you find an angle from which everything appears to fit perfectly and take a snapshot, at a fast shutter speed before something else bulges out too noticeably." After a trip to the darkroom for touching up, "[a]ll that remains is to publish the photograph as a representation of exactly how things are, and to note how nothing fits properly into any other shape." So how does Nozick's work differ from this form of activity? He believed that what he said was correct, but he doesn't mask the bulges: "the doubts and worries and uncertainties as well as the beliefs, convictions, and arguments."

Why state-of-nature theory?

In this chapter Nozick tries to explain why investigating a Lockean state of nature is useful to understand if there should be a state in the first place. If one can show that an anarchic society is worse than one that has a state we should choose it whenever possible. To convincingly compare the two, he argues, one should focus not on an extremely pessimistic nor on an extremely optimistic view of that society. Instead, one should:

[...] focus upon a nonstate situation in which people generally satisfy moral constraints and generally act as they ought [...] this state-of-nature situation is the best anarchic situation one reasonably could hope for. Hence investigating its nature and defects is of crucial importance to deciding whether there should be a state rather than anarchy.

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Reprint Edition 2013, p.5

Nozick's plan is to first describe the morally permissible and impermissible actions in such a non-political society and how violations of those constraints by some individuals would lead to the emergence of a state. If that would happen, it would explain the appearance even if no state actually developed in that particular way.

He gestures towards perhaps the biggest bulge when he notes (in Chapter 1, "Why State-of-Nature Theory?") the shallowness of his "invisible hand" explanation of the minimal state, deriving it from a Lockean state of nature, in which there are individual rights but no state to enforce and adjudicate them. Although this counts for him as a "fundamental explanation" of the political realm because the political is explained in terms of the nonpolitical, it is shallow relative to his later "genealogical" ambition (in The Nature of Rationality and especially in Invariances ) to explain both the political and the moral by reference to beneficial cooperative practices that can be traced back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and beyond. The genealogy will give Nozick an explanation of what is only assumed in ASU: the fundamental status of individual rights. Creativity was not a factor in his interpretation.

The state of nature

Nozick starts this chapter by summarizing some of the features of the Lockean state of nature. An important one is that every individual has a right to exact compensation by himself whenever another individual violates his rights. Punishing the offender is also acceptable, but only inasmuch as he (or others) will be prevented from doing that again. As Locke himself acknowledges, this raises several problems, and Nozick is going to try to see to what extent can they be solved by voluntary arrangements. A rational response to the "troubles" of a Lockean state of nature is the establishment of mutual-protection associations, in which all will answer the call of any member. It is inconvenient that everyone is always on call, and that the associates can be called out by members who may be "cantankerous or paranoid". Another important inconvenience takes place when two members of the same association have a dispute. Although there are simple rules that could solve this problem (for instance, a policy of non intervention) most people will prefer associations that try to build systems to decide whose claims are correct.

In any case, the problem of everybody being on call dictates that some entrepreneurs will go into the business of selling protective services (division of labor). This will lead ("through market pressures, economies of scale, and rational self interest") to either people joining the strongest association in a given area or that some associations will have similar power and hence will avoid the costs of fighting by agreeing to a third party that would act as a judge or court to solve the disputes. But for all practical purposes, this second case is equivalent to having just one protective association. And this is something "very much resembling a minimal state". Nozick judges that Locke was wrong to imagine a social contract as necessary to establish civil society and money. He prefers invisible-hand explanations, that is to say, that voluntary agreements between individuals create far reaching patterns that look like they were designed when in fact nobody did. This explanations are useful in the sense that they "minimize the use of notions constituting the phenomena to be explained". So far he has shown that such "invisible hand" would lead to a dominant association, but individuals may still justly enforce their own rights. But this protective agency isn't yet a state. At the end of the chapter Nozick points out some of the problems of defining what a state is, but he says:

We may proceed, for our purposes, by saying that a necessary condition for the existence of a state is that it (some person or organization) announce that, to the best of its ability [...] it will punish everyone whom it discovers to have used force without its express permission.

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Reprint Edition, 2013, p. 24

The protective agencies so far don't make any such announcement. Furthermore, it doesn't offer the same degree of protection to all its clients (who may purchase different degrees of coverage) and the individuals who don't purchase the service (the "independents") don't get any protection at all (spillover effects aside). This goes against our experience with states, where even tourists typically receive protection. Therefore, the dominant protective agency lacks the monopoly on the use of force and fails to protect all people inside its territory.

Moral constraints and the state

Nozick arrives at the night-watchman state of classical liberalism theory by showing that there are non-redistributive reasons for the apparently redistributive procedure of making its clients pay for the protection of others. He defines what he calls an ultraminimal state, which would not have this seemingly redistributive feature but would be the only one allowed to enforce rights. Proponents of this ultraminimal state don't defend it on the grounds of trying to minimize the total of (weighted) violations of rights (what he calls utilitarianism of rights). That idea would mean, for example, that someone could punish another person he or she knows to be innocent in order to calm down a mob that would otherwise violate even more rights. This is not the philosophy behind the ultraminimal state. Instead, its proponents hold its members' rights are a side-constraint on what can be done to them. This side-constraint view reflects the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means, so the rights of one individual cannot be violated to avoid violations of the rights of other people. Which principle should we choose, then? Nozick won't try to prove which one is better. Instead, he gives some reasons to prefer the kantian view and later points to problems with classic utilitarianism.

The first reason he gives in favor of the kantian principle is that the analogy between the individual case (in which we choose to sacrifice now for a greater benefit later) and the social case (in which we sacrifice the interests of one individual for the greater social good) is incorrect:

There are only individual people, different individual people with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. [...] Talk of an overall social good covers this up. (Intentionally?). To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice [...].

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Reprint Edition, 2013, p. 33

A second reason focuses on the non-aggression principle. Are we prepared to dismiss this principle? That is, can we accept that some individuals may harm some innocent in certain cases? (This non-aggression principle does not include, of course, self-defense and perhaps some other special cases he points out).

He then goes on to expose some problems with utilitarianism by discussing whether animals should be taken into account in the utilitarian calculation of happiness, if that depends on the kind of animal, if killing them painlessly would be acceptable, and so on. He believes that utilitarianism is not appropriate even with animals.

But Nozick's most famous argument for the side-constraint view against classical utilitarianism and the idea that only felt experience matters is his Experience Machine thought experiment. It induces whatever illusory experience one might wish, but it prevents the subject from doing anything or making contact with anything. There is only pre-programmed neural stimulation sufficient for the illusion. Nozick pumps the intuition that each of us has a reason to avoid plugging into the Experience Machine forever. This is not to say that "plugging in" might not be the best all-things-considered choice for some who are terminally ill and in great pain. The point of the thought experiment is to articulate a weighty reason not to plug in, a reason that should not be there if all that matters is felt experience.

Prohibition, compensation, and risk

The procedure that leads to a night-watchman state involves compensation to non-members who are prevented from enforcing their rights, an enforcement mechanism that it deems risky by comparison with its own. Compensation addresses any disadvantages non-members suffer as a result of being unable to enforce their rights. Assuming that non-members take reasonable precautions and adjusting activities to the association's prohibition of their enforcing their own rights, the association is required to raise the non-member above his actual position by an amount equal to the difference between his position on an indifference curve he would occupy were it not for the prohibition, and his original position.

The purpose of this comparatively dense chapter is to deduce what Nozick calls the Compensation Principle. That idea is going to be key for the next chapter, where he shows how (without any violation of rights) an ultraminimal state (one that has a monopoly of enforcement of rights) can become a minimal state (which also provides protection to all individuals). Since this would involve some people paying for the protection of others, or some people being forced to pay for protection, the main element of the discussion is whether these kinds of actions can be justified from a natural rights perspective. Hence the development of a theory of compensation in this chapter.

He starts by asking broadly what if someone "crosses a boundary" (for instance, physical harm). If this is done with the consent of the individual concerned, no problem arises. Unlike Locke, Nozick doesn't have a "paternalistic" view of the matter. He believes anyone can do anything to himself, or allow others to do the same things to him.

But what if B crosses A's boundaries without consent? Is that okay if A is compensated?

What Nozick understands by compensation is anything that makes A indifferent (that is, A has to be just as good in his own judgement before the transgression and after the compensation) provided that A has taken reasonable precautions to avoid the situation. He argues that compensation isn't enough, because some people will violate these boundaries, for example, without revealing his identity. Therefore, some extra cost has to be imposed on those who violate someone else's rights. (For the sake of simplicity this discussion on deterrence is summarized in another section of this article).

After discussing the issue of punishment and concluding that not all violations of rights will be deterred under a retributive theory of justice (which he favors) Nozicks returns to compensation. Again, why don't we allow anyone to do anything provided he or she gives full compensation afterwards? There are several problems with that view.

Firstly, if some person gets a big gain by violating another's rights and he then compensates the victim up to the point where he or she is indifferent, the infractor is getting all the benefits that this provides. But one could argue that it would be fair for the felon to give some compensation beyond that, just like in the marketplace, where the buyer doesn't necessarily just pay up to the point where the seller is indifferent from selling or not selling. There is usually room for negotiation, which raises the question of fairness. Every attempt to make a theory of a fair price in the marketplace has failed, and Nozick prefers not to try to solve the issue. Instead, he says that, whenever possible, those negotiations should take place, so that the compensation is decided by the people involved. But when one cannot negotiate, it is unclear whether all acts should be accepted if compensation is paid.

Secondly, allowing anything if compensation is paid makes all people fearful. Imagine that someone could break your arm at any point and then pay you a compensation. The other people would fear the same happening to them. This raises important problems:

• Making the assaulters pay not only for the damage but also for the fear that the assaulted had before that won't do, as the assaulter is not the only responsible of that fear.
• If that was the way to compensate, non assaulted people would be left uncompensated for the fear they have.
• One cannot compensate anyone for fear after the fact because we remember the fear we had as less important than it actually was. Because of that, what should be calculated instead is what Nozick calls "Market Compensation", which is the compensation that would be agreed upon if the negotiations took place before the fact. But this is impossible, according to Nozick.

The conclusion of these difficulties, particularly the last one, is that anything that produces general fear may be prohibited. Another reason to prohibit is that it would imply using people as a means, which violates the kantian principle that he defended earlier.

But if so, what about prohibiting all boundary crossing that isn't consented in advance ? That would solve the fear problem, but it would be way too restrictive, since people may cross some boundaries by accident, unintentional acts, etc.) and the costs of getting that consent may be too high (for instance if the known victim is on a trip in the jungle). What then? "The most efficient policy forgoes the fewest net beneficial acts; it allows anyone to perform an unfeared action without prior agreement, provided the transaction costs of reaching a prior agreement are greater, even by a bit, than the costs of the posterior compensation process."

Note that a particular action may not cause fear if it has a low probability of causing harm. But when all the risky activities are added up, the probability of being harmed may be high. This poses the problem that prohibiting all such activities (which may be very varied) is too restrictive. The obvious response, that is, establishing a threshold value V such that there is a violation of rights if p ⋅ H ≥ V {\displaystyle p\cdot H\geq V} (where p is the probability of harming and H is the amount of harm that could be done) won't fit a natural-rights position. In his own words:

This construal of the problem cannot be utilized by a tradition which holds that stealing a penny or a pin or anything from someone violates his rights. That tradition does not select a threshold measure of harm as a lower limit, in the case of harms certain to occur

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Reprint Edition, 2013, p.75

Granted, some insurance solutions will work in these cases and he discusses some. But what do you do with people who don't have the means to buy insurance or compensate other people for the risks of his actions? Do you forbid them to do it?

Since an enormous number of actions do increase risk to others, a society which prohibited such uncovered actions would ill fit a picture of a free society as one embodying a presumption in favor of liberty, under which people permissibly could perform actions so long as they didn't harm others in specified ways. [...] to prohibit risky acts (because they are financially uncovered or because they are too risky) limits individual's freedom to act, even though the actions actually might involve no cost at all to anyone else.

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Reprint Edition, 2013, p. 78

(This is going to have important consequences in the next chapter).

So Nozick's conclusion is to prohibit specially dangerous actions that are generally done and compensating the specially disadvantaged individual from the prohibition. This is what he calls the Principle of Compensation. For example, it is allowed to forbid epileptics from driving, but only if they are compensated exactly for the costs that the disadvantaged has to assume (chauffeurs, taxis). This would only take place if the benefit from the increased security outweighs these costs. But this is not a negotiation. The analogy he gives is blackmail: it isn't right to pay a person or group to prevent him from doing something that otherwise would give him no benefit whatsoever. Nozick considers such transactions as "unproductive activities". Similarly, (it should be deduced) it is not right for the epileptic to negotiate a payment for not doing something risky to other people.

However, Nozick does point to some problems with this principle. Firstly, he says that the action has to be "generally done". The intention behind that qualification is that eccentric and dangerous activities shouldn't be compensated. His extreme example is someone who has fun playing Russian roulette with the head of others without asking them. Such action must be prohibited, with no qualifications. But one can define anything as a "generally done" action. The Russian roulette could be considered "having fun" and hence be compensated. Secondly, if the special and dangerous action is the only way a person can do something important to him (for instance, if it is the only way one can have fun or support himself) then perhaps it should be compensated. Thirdly, more generally, he recognizes he doesn't have a theory of disadvantage, so it is unclear what counts as a "special disadvantage".

This has to be further developed, because in the state of nature there is no authority to decide how to define these terms (see the discussion of a similar issue in p. 89).

[...] nor need we state the principle exactly. We need only claim the correctness of some principles, such as the principle of compensation, requiring those imposing a prohibition on risky activities prohibited to them. I am not completely comfortable presenting and later using a principle whose details have not been worked out fully [...]. I could claim that it is all right as a beginning to leave a principle in a somewhat fuzzy state; the primary question is whether something like it will do.

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Reprint Edition, 2013, p. 87

Non-member independents might group together and agree to a procedure for private enforcement of rights, so as to reduce the total danger to a point below the threshold at which the association would be justified in prohibiting it. This procedure fails because of the rationality of being a free rider on such grouping, taking advantage of everyone else's restraint and going ahead with one's own risky activities. In a famous discussion he rejects H. L. A. Hart's "principle of fairness" for dealing with free riders, which would morally bind them to cooperative practices from which they benefit. You may not charge and collect for benefits you bestow without prior agreement.

"As the most powerful applier of principles which it grants everyone the right to apply correctly ," Nozick concludes, the dominant protection agency "enforces its will, which, from the inside, it thinks is correct." Its strength makes it the only enforcer and judge of its clients. "Claiming only the universal right to act correctly," it acts correctly according to its own lights, which happen to be the only lights with the strength so to act. It provides independents with protective services against its clients. It provides this compensation only to those who would be disadvantaged by purchasing protection for themselves, and only against its own paying clients on whom the independents are forbidden from self-help enforcement. This is a disincentive to free riding. "The more free riders there are, the more desirable it is to be a client always protected by the agency." The equilibrium is moved towards almost universal participation in the agency's protective scheme.

Further considerations on the argument for the state

A discussion of pre-emptive attack leads Nozick to a principle that excludes prohibiting actions not wrong in themselves, even if those actions make more likely the commission of wrongs later on. This provides him with a significant difference between a protection agency's prohibitions against procedures it deems unreliable or unfair, and other prohibitions that might seem to go too far, such as forbidding others to join another protective agency. Nozick's principle does not disallow others from doing so.

Distributive justice

Nozick's discussion of Rawls's theory of justice raised a prominent dialogue between libertarianism and liberalism. He sketches an entitlement theory, which states, "From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen". It comprises a theory of (1) justice in acquisition; (2) justice in rectification if (1) is violated (rectification which might require apparently redistributive measures); (3) justice in holdings, and (4) justice in transfer. Assuming justice in acquisition, entitlement to holdings is a function of repeated applications of (3) and (4). Nozick's entitlement theory is a non-patterned historical principle. Almost all other principles of distributive justice (egalitarianism, utilitarianism) are patterned principles of justice. Such principles follow the form, "to each according to..."

Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument is an attempt to show that patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty. He asks us to assume that the original distribution in society, D1, is ordered by our choice of patterned principle, for instance Rawls's Difference Principle. Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Chamberlain 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur). Chamberlain now has $250,000, a much larger sum than any of the other people in the society. This new distribution in society, call it D2, obviously is no longer ordered by our favored pattern that ordered D1. However Nozick argues that D2 is just. For if each agent freely exchanges some of his D1 share with the basketball player and D1 was a just distribution (we know D1 was just, because it was ordered according to your favorite patterned principle of distribution), how can D2 fail to be a just distribution? Thus Nozick argues that what the Wilt Chamberlain example shows is that no patterned principle of just distribution will be compatible with liberty. In order to preserve the pattern, which arranged D1, the state will have to continually interfere with people's ability to freely exchange their D1 shares, for any exchange of D1 shares explicitly involves violating the pattern that originally ordered it.

Nozick analogizes taxation with forced labor, asking the reader to imagine a man who works longer to gain income to buy a movie ticket and a man who spends his extra time on leisure (for instance, watching the sunset). What, Nozick asks, is the difference between seizing the second man's leisure (which would be forced labor) and seizing the first man's goods? "Perhaps there is no difference in principle," Nozick concludes, and notes that the argument could be extended to taxation on other sources besides labor. "End-state and most patterned principles of distributive justice institute (partial) ownership by others of people and their actions and labor. These principles involve a shift from the classical liberals' notion of self ownership to a notion of (partial) property rights in other people."

Nozick then briefly considers Locke's theory of acquisition. After considering some preliminary objections, he "adds an additional bit of complexity" to the structure of the entitlement theory by refining Locke's proviso that "enough and as good" must be left in common for others by one's taking property in an unowned object. Nozick favors a "Lockean" proviso that forbids appropriation when the position of others is thereby worsened. For instance, appropriating the only water hole in a desert and charging monopoly prices would not be legitimate. But in line with his endorsement of the historical principle, this argument does not apply to the medical researcher who discovers a cure for a disease and sells for whatever price he will. Nor does Nozick provide any means or theory whereby abuses of appropriation—acquisition of property when there is not enough and as good in common for others—should be corrected.

The Difference Principle

Nozick attacks John Rawls's Difference Principle on the ground that the well-off could threaten a lack of social cooperation to the worse-off, just as Rawls implies that the worse-off will be assisted by the well-off for the sake of social cooperation. Nozick asks why the well-off would be obliged, due to their inequality and for the sake of social cooperation, to assist the worse-off and not have the worse-off accept the inequality and benefit the well-off. Furthermore, Rawls's idea regarding morally arbitrary natural endowments comes under fire; Nozick argues that natural advantages that the well-off enjoy do not violate anyone's rights and therefore have a right to them, on top of his statement of Rawls's own proposal that inequalities be geared toward assisting the worse-off being morally arbitrary in itself.

Original position

Nozick's opinions on historical entitlement ensures that he naturally rejects the Original Position since he argues that in the Original Position individuals will use an end-state principle to determine the outcome, whilst he explicitly states the importance of the historicity of any such decisions (for example punishments and penalties will require historical information).

Equality, envy, and exploitation

Nozick presses "the major objection" to theories that bestow and enforce positive rights to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on. "These 'rights' require a substructure of things and materials and actions," he writes, "and 'other' people may have rights and entitlements over these."

Nozick concludes that "Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics."

Demoktesis is a thought-experiment designed to show the incompatibility of democracy with libertarianism in general and the entitlement theory specifically. People desirous of more money might "hit upon the idea of incorporating themselves, raising money by selling shares in themselves." They would partition such rights as which occupation one would have. Though perhaps no one sells himself into utter slavery, there arises through voluntary exchanges a "very extensive domination" of some person by others. This intolerable situation is avoided by writing new terms of incorporation that for any stock no one already owning more than a certain number of shares may purchase it. As the process goes on, everyone sells off rights in themselves, "keeping one share in each right as their own, so they can attend stockholders' meetings if they wish." The inconvenience of attending such meetings leads to a special occupation of stockholders' representative. There is a great dispersal of shares such that almost everybody is deciding about everybody else. The system is still unwieldy, so a "great consolidational convention" is convened for buying and selling shares, and after a "hectic three days (lo and behold!)" each person owns exactly one share in each right over every other person, including himself. So now there can be just one meeting in which everything is decided for everybody. Attendance is too great and it's boring, so it is decided that only those entitled to cast at least 100,000 votes may attend the grand stockholders' meeting. And so on. Their social theorists call the system demoktesis (from Greek δῆμος demos , "people" and κτῆσις ktesis , "ownership"), "ownership of the people, by the people, and for the people," and declare it the highest form of social life, one that must not be allowed to perish from the earth. With this "eldritch tale" we have in fact arrived at a modern democratic state.

A framework for Utopia

The utopia mentioned in the title of Nozick's first book is a meta-utopia, a framework for voluntary migration between utopias tending towards worlds in which everybody benefits from everybody else's presence. This is meant to be the Lockean "night-watchman state" writ large. The state protects individual rights and makes sure that contracts and other market transactions are voluntary. The meta-utopian framework reveals what is inspiring and noble in this night-watchman function. They both contain the only form of social union that is possible for the atomistic rational agents of Anarchy, State, and Utopia , fully voluntary associations of mutual benefit. The influence of this idea on Nozick's thinking is profound. Even in his last book, Invariances , he is still concerned to give priority to the mutual-benefit aspect of ethics. This coercively enforceable aspect ideally has an empty core in the game theorists' sense: the core of a game is all of those payoff vectors to the group wherein no subgroup can do better for itself acting on its own, without cooperating with others not in the subgroup. The worlds in Nozick's meta-utopia have empty cores. No subgroup of a utopian world is better off to emigrate to its own smaller world. The function of ethics is fundamentally to create and stabilize such empty cores of mutually beneficial cooperation. His view is that we are fortunate to live under conditions that favor "more-extensive cores", and less conquest, slavery, and pillaging, "less imposition of noncore vectors upon subgroups." Higher moral goals are real enough, but they are parasitic (as described in The Examined Life , the chapter "Darkness and Light") upon mutually beneficial cooperation.

In Nozick's utopia if people are not happy with the society they are in they can leave and start their own community, but he fails to consider that there might be things that prevent a person from leaving or moving about freely. Thomas Pogge states that items that are not socially induced can restrict people's options. Nozick states that for the healthy to have to support the handicapped imposes on their freedom, but Pogge argues that it introduces an inequality. This inequality restricts movement based on the ground rules Nozick has implemented, which could lead to feudalism and slavery, a society which Nozick himself would reject. David Schaefer notes that Nozick himself claims that a person could sell himself into slavery, which would break the very ground rule that was created, restricting the movement and choices that a person could make.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia came out of a semester-long course that Nozick taught with Michael Walzer at Harvard in 1971, called Capitalism and Socialism . The course was a debate between the two; Nozick's side is in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Walzer's side is in his Spheres of Justice (1983), in which he argues for "complex equality".

Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist, criticizes Anarchy, State, and Utopia in his essay "Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State" on the basis that:

• No existing State has been "immaculately conceived" in the way envisaged by Nozick;
• On Nozick's account the only minimal State that could possibly be justified is one that would emerge after a free-market anarchist world had been established;
• Therefore, Nozick, on his own grounds, should become an anarchist and then wait for the Nozickian invisible hand to operate afterward; and
• Even if any State had been founded immaculately, the fallacies of social contract theory would mean that no present State, even a minimal one, would be justified.
• His claim that "liberty upsets patterns" is inconsistent with his own view of liberty. Nozick holds a "Lockean" conception of liberty, where liberty is simply "the right to do, that which you have a right to do". Thus a restriction only infringes upon liberty if it infringes upon rights. Thus to examine whether enforcing a pattern violates liberty we must examine whether the pattern includes the right freely to transfer goods in whatever way the holder wishes. But there is no reason to suppose that all patterns include this right. Thus enforcing a pattern need not restrict liberty at all.

The American legal scholar Arthur Allen Leff criticized Nozick in his 1979 article "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law". Leff stated that Nozick built his entire book on the bald assertion that "individuals have rights which may not be violated by other individuals", for which no justification is offered. According to Leff, no such justification is possible either. Any desired ethical statement, including a negation of Nozick's position, can easily be "proved" with apparent rigor as long as one takes the licence to simply establish a grounding principle by assertion. Leff further calls "ostentatiously unconvincing" Nozick's proposal that differences among individuals will not be a problem if like-minded people form geographically isolated communities.

Philosopher Jan Narveson described Nozick's book as "brilliant".

Cato Institute fellow Tom G. Palmer writes that Anarchy, State, and Utopia is "witty and dazzling", and offers a strong criticism of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice . Palmer adds that, "Largely because of his remarks on Rawls and the extraordinary power of his intellect, Nozick's book was taken quite seriously by academic philosophers and political theorists, many of whom had not read contemporary libertarian (or classical liberal) material and considered this to be the only articulation of libertarianism available. Since Nozick was writing to defend the limited state and did not justify his starting assumption that individuals have rights, this led some academics to dismiss libertarianism as 'without foundations,' in the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. When read in light of the explicit statement of the book's purpose, however, this criticism is misdirected".

Libertarian author David Boaz writes that Anarchy, State, and Utopia , together with Rothbard's For a New Liberty (1973) and Ayn Rand's essays on political philosophy, "defined the 'hard-core' version of modern libertarianism, which essentially restated Spencer's law of equal freedom: Individuals have the right to do whatever they want to do, so long as they respect the equal rights of others."

In the article "Social Unity and Primary Goods", republished in his Collected Papers (1999), Rawls notes that Nozick handles Sen's Liberal Paradox in a manner that is similar to his own. However, the rights that Nozick takes to be fundamental and the basis for regarding them to be such are different from the equal basic liberties included in justice as fairness and Rawls conjectures that they are thus not inalienable.

In Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007), Rawls notes that Nozick assumes that just transactions are "justice preserving" in much the same way that logical operations are "truth preserving". Thus, as explained in Distributive justice above, Nozick holds that repetitive applications of "justice in holdings" and "justice in transfer" preserve an initial state of justice obtained through "justice in acquisition or rectification". Rawls points out that this is simply an assumption or presupposition, and requires substantiation. In reality, he maintains, small inequalities established by just transactions accumulate over time and eventually result in large inequalities and an unjust situation.

John Stuart Mill

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

On Liberty: Introduction

On liberty: plot summary, on liberty: detailed summary & analysis, on liberty: themes, on liberty: quotes, on liberty: characters, on liberty: terms, on liberty: symbols, on liberty: literary devices, on liberty: theme wheel, brief biography of john stuart mill.

Historical Context of On Liberty

Other books related to on liberty.

• Full Title: On Liberty
• When Written: 1854-1859
• Where Written: England and France
• When Published: 1859
• Literary Period: Victorian
• Genre: Political Essay
• Antagonist: Social and Political Tyranny
• Point of View: First Person

Extra Credit for On Liberty

Ladies’ Man. Thanks in part to his relationship with Harriet Taylor, Mill passionately supported women’s rights in essays and speeches, which was unusual for a man in the Victorian Era. In fact, he became the first member of Parliament to introduce a major petition for women’s suffrage in June 1866. This led to the first debate over whether to give women the right to vote, but Parliament did not pass the bill.

Brainiac. Mill’s childhood education was undoubtedly odd, but it produced some amazing results. Mill began learning Greek when he was just three years old and was fluent in both Greek and Latin by 10 years old. His father even put him in charge of teaching both languages to his younger siblings.

Liberty and Rights in Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”

This conference examined Nozick's seminal text on the proper scope of government and individual liberty, along with critiques from a variety of perspectives both sympathetic and antagonistic to his project.

READING LIST

Conference readings.

Paul, Jeffrey, eds. Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia , New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1981.

Schmidtz, David, eds. Robert Nozick . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cohen, G. A. Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Kukathas, Chandran. The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia . New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974.

Waldron, Jeremy, “Nozick and Locke: Filling the Space of Rights” In Natural Rights Liberalism from Locke to Nozick , edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, and Jeffrey Paul, 81-101. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

On The Rule of The Road | Summary and Analysis

On The Rule of The Road by A.G. Gardiner is a witty essay in a comic style that deals with one’s public responsibilities and civic sense. The central idea of the essay is that the protection of every person’s freedom involves the limitation of the liberty enjoyed by all. Liberty is not chaos, and it is not unbridled freedom. A.G. Gardiner gives us the meaning of true liberty , and how it necessitates a measure of control . The essay is characterized by its simplicity, and the relevance of the content at the time of its publishing meant that it would catch the eye of many.

To read the text of the essay, click here.

On The Rule of The Road | Summary

An old lady was walking carelessly in the middle of the road, and when told that she should walk on the pavement, she responds that because she has liberty, she has the power to do anything she likes. However, if that were true, then the world would be chaos. Anarchy would exist over liberty because if everyone was free to do as they pleased, nobody would have any kind of protection. So, it is essential to not lose ourselves in the concept of liberty and understand what the rule of the road is.

A policeman enforcing the laws of the land, or more specifically, the rules of the road, is a symbol of freedom , not a symbol of dictatorship. One may believe that such law enforcement is infringing on their freedom, but a reasonable person will also understand that law enforcement is what allows a semblance of order to exist in the world, which in turn supports true liberty. We can see that liberty is a social contract, an acceptance of everyone’s needs and an accommodation of them.

However, when what one does is unrelated to anyone else’s liberty, then there are no restrictions to worry about. The way you choose to dress, or the style in which you choose to portray yourself, or when you sleep, wake up, eat, bathe, and what religion you follow are completely irrelevant with regard to another person’s liberty, and so does not require any sort of regulation. Yet, once this lack of regulation impinges upon someone else’s freedom, that is where the line of your restriction-less liberty ends. If you want to learn to play the trombone, it’s completely up to you, and you do not require anyone’s say-so. If you practice that trombone in the wee hours of the morning, thereby disturbing family and neighbours, then there is a problem. It is easy to point out the mistakes of others when they infringe upon our liberty, but not as easy for us to be conscious of not infringing upon theirs. A civilized person will be civilized in matters both big and small. They will follow the rules of the road, and they contribute to the little things that make life for everyone that much sweeter. Consideration for one another is integral to real liberty.

On The Rule of The Road | Analysis

In this text, a single example is used as a thread throughout the essay, that is, the titular “ Rule of the Road ”. This single example is used to explain liberty, and it is a metaphor for all the regulations that exist to protect one’s liberty. This seemingly insignificant rule or example has a big impact in the big picture, as it represents the little things each person must adhere to in order to support the structure of life.

Liberty exists when a person is free from oppression from authority and free from restrictions imposed on their behaviour, political views, decisions, and so on. It gives people the power to act as they want to, and this is how they become “ liberty-drunk ”. People reach a point of not being able to relinquish their freedom, even at the cost of someone else’s freedom. Liberty for the civilized is a willingness to restrain or restrict themselves out of consideration for the comfort and needs of another person. Anarchy exists when there is an absence, or ignorance, of rules or controls. It is a political ideal of absolute freedom of every individual, without a care for the needs of others. It is, colloquially, a state of confusion due to the absence of any regulation.

The mention of “ social contract ” is in reference to the Social Contract Theory by philosopher John Locke . This theory contains the idea that people in a society live together with the mutual agreement of certain rules or regulations that will be followed. It shows that people themselves decide to live under a moral and political rule that has been reasonably set and thus form a society. Liberty is a social contract because liberty for everyone requires restraint from everyone, and this is an agreement between all the people in society to curtail their individual liberty in the interest of mass liberty.

The essay begins with an anecdote, and it is one that easily sums up the content that follows it. In this anecdote, the woman’s idea of freedom did not seem to include the fact that people on the road have the same liberty to drive straight into her, because she was on a public road. The cars on the road are respecting her liberty to be alive and unhurt, while she disrespects their liberty to have a safe and peaceful drive. Liberty in society requires mutual respect , and thus this example is used by the author to show us why the consideration of others is so integral to community liberty. “ Petrograd ” is the old name for St. Petersburg, which is a city in Russia. The anecdote about the woman is set in Russia.

The two main concepts of liberty have been laid out in this essay, that is, individual liberty and community liberty. The author uses several examples of personal liberty and ends with the example of playing the trombone. The trombone example is used to show how the illusion of individual liberty can interfere with community liberty. As the saying goes, your freedom ends where my nose begins. The personal liberty of one person can never infringe upon the personal liberty of another. Any overlap requires consideration for each other and regulation of each one’s individual liberty. The willingness to participate freely in a society without feeling the need to be chaotic is the hallmark of a civilized human in a liberalized world. A “ Maelstrom ” is a state of confusion or chaos. The lack of regulation will lead to this sort of violet turmoil that is inescapable.

The crux of this essay is that a truly liberal world requires that people be considerate of each other. This requires that each person determines the impact of their actions on others, and on society as a whole. The point is not to look out at others and see their shortfalls, but to look within and resolve our own. This essay reinforces this as it begins with the recognition of another person’s mistakes and ends with the assertion that it is simple to see where others fall, but difficult to recognize our own inadequacies. Liberty in society requires the sacrifice of individual desires to support the greater good. Consideration for other people and sacrifice of one’s own liberty go hand in hand, and the compromises and agreements that the population accepts becomes the social norm and the expected behaviour.

Little drops of water make the mighty ocean, as Julia Carney says. In this context, it is the little changes that people make that provide freedom for everyone. It is not commonplace for a person to have an opportunity to undertake an immense or heroic sacrifice for the freedom of the general population, but the little everyday sacrifices that people cumulate into a sweeter life for all involved.

In this essay, when speaking about the freedom to play the trombone, the author saying “ If I went to the top of Everest ” is the usage of hyperbole . It is a wild exaggeration in order to get the point across, and also adds a slight comedic effect

“ It means that in order that the liberties of all may be preserved, the liberties of everybody must be curtailed ” is an oxymoronic statement that catches the attention of the reader by its perceived contradiction. However, this contradiction is resolved through the explanations of the story.

On The Rule of The Road | About The Author

A.G. Gardiner, or Alfred George Gardiner, was born on 2 June 1865, in Essex, England.

He was well known as an author, journalist, and editor who wrote and published several essays that are recognized for their quality and content. In 1902, he became the editor of the Daily News , and under him, it grew into one of the most popular liberal journals. He also published essays under the pseudonym “ Alpha of the Ploughs ”.

His writing style is simple, graceful, and humorous, and is characterized by his ability to pass on basic truths in a comedic way. He was an activist for a minimum wage in industry and chaired the “ National Anti-Sweating League ”, an advocacy group for this campaign.

Some of his notable works are “ Pebbles on the Shore ” and “ The Variety of Old Age ”

He died on 3 March 1946, in Buckingham, England.

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Table of contents.

On the Rule of the Road Summary in English by A.G. Gardiner

Back to: Tamil Nadu Class 12 English Guide & Notes

In ‘On the Rule of the Road’ Gardiner emphasizes the necessity of certain constraints on individual liberty, if society is to function in a truly civilized manner. According to him, liberty is not a personal affair only, it is also a social contract. A.G. Gardiner defines the “Rule of the Road” in the following way:

It means that in order that the liberties of all may be preserved, the liberties of everybody must be curtailed.

In other words, each person must have some limits on his or her freedom in order to enjoy the freedom that comes from social order. The author concludes the essay by saying that both anarchist and socialist must be a judicious mix. We need to preserve individual liberty as well as social freedom. It is in the small matter of behaviour in observing the rule of the road, we pass judgment on ourselves and declare that we are civilised or uncivilised.

On The Rule of The Road by A.G. Gardiner is a witty essay in a comic style that deals with one’s public responsibilities and civic sense. The central idea of the essay is that the protection of every person’s freedom involves the limitation of the liberty enjoyed by all. Liberty is not chaos, and it is not unbridled freedom. A.G. Gardiner gives us the meaning of true liberty, and how it necessitates a measure of control.

The essay is characterized by its simplicity, and the relevance of the content at the time of its publishing meant that it would catch the eye of many. An old lady was walking carelessly in the middle of the road, and when told that she should walk on the pavement, she responds that because she has liberty, she has the power to do anything she likes.

However, if that were true, then the world would be chaos. Anarchy would exist over liberty because if everyone was free to do as they pleased, nobody would have any kind of protection. So, it is essential to not lose ourselves in the concept of liberty and understand what the rule of the road is.

Also understand that law enforcement is what allows a semblance of order to exist in the world, which in turn supports true liberty. We can see that liberty is a social contract, an acceptance of everyone’s needs and an accommodation of them.

In this text, a single example is used as a thread throughout the essay, that is, the titular “ Rule of the Road ”. This single example is used to explain liberty, and it is a metaphor for all the regulations that exist to protect one’s liberty. This seemingly insignificant rule or example has a big impact in the big picture, as it represents the little things each person must adhere to in order to support the structure of life.

Liberty exists when a person is free from oppression from authority and free from restrictions imposed on their behaviour, political views, decisions, and so on. It gives people the power to act as they want to, and this is how they become “ liberty-drunk ”. People reach a point of not being able to relinquish their freedom, even at the cost of someone else’s freedom.

Liberty for the civilized is a willingness to restrain or restrict themselves out of consideration for the comfort and needs of another person. Anarchy exists when there is an absence, or ignorance, of rules or controls. It is a political ideal of absolute freedom of every individual, without a care for the needs of others. It is, colloquially, a state of confusion due to the absence of any regulation.

The rule of the road means that in order “to preserve the liberties of all the liberties of everybody must be curtailed”. When the policeman put out his hand at Piccadilly circus street, we must not think that our liberty has been violated.

Liberty Is Not Anarchy Essay

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English Dreams in American Soil

Many English Enlightenment ideals came to fruition only in America.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the Enlightenment is increasingly depicted in a negative light. Some in the postliberal New Right largely view the Enlightenment as the beginning of the decline of the West. Instead of celebrating capitalism, liberalism, and empirical science as forces that propelled the West and the wider world, they view these Enlightenment phenomena as the root of selfish individualism, rapacious monetary policies, and destructive and enslaving technology. For some on the political left, the Enlightenment was a horrific period of colonialism and the emergence of Western nations as rulers of the globe.

The situation is, of course, much more complex. The Enlightenment means many things, but it was especially crucial to the emergence of English liberty. In his recent work, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream , English historian Peter Moore presents a fascinating and complex analysis of the English roots of American liberty. Moore begins his work with the clever statement: “Britain first dreamed the Enlightenment dream, but it was America that made it happen.” Moore notes that Britain was regarded as the great revolutionary nation for most of the eighteenth century. The revolutionary ethos of Britain began with the 1688 Glorious Revolution, which gave birth to the 1689 Bill of Rights. Britain was known throughout the eighteenth century as a land of progress, freedom, and science, populated as Moore notes, by figures such as Joseph Addison and Sir Isaac Newton.

During the 1760s, however, American colonists developed the notion of a plot against their liberty. The notion of a conspiracy against liberty, Moore argues, is rooted in the coronation of King George III in 1760, in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and also in subsequent taxes levied on the colonies in 1765 and 1767. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is about how Britain helped give birth to the American Revolution. Moore argues that the Enlightenment provided the West with a new vision of life, which included freedom and ambition in a (largely but not entirely) secular context. This view was, of course, rooted in liberty and tied to the notion of the possibility of happiness in this life. For Moore, all of these ideas, which seem so distinctly American, are in fact deeply rooted in the English tradition. Moore sees England as the ultimate seedbed of liberty as well as the locus of the creation of a new way of life focused on enjoyment in the here and now of the secular world. 

Moore’s Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is structured around the lives of several major British and American figures, including better-known luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson as well as lesser-known figures like Catherine Macaulay and John Wilkes.

Moore’s Benjamin Franklin is a complex figure who reflects the Enlightenment life of ambition. His life was geared around social advancement and success as a publisher and later an inventor. He was a working man, whose body was shaped by the labor attendant to printing, but he dressed well and was widely known as an intellectual. He was born in Boston to Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler. After working for his father, Ben Franklin made his way to Philadelphia in a near penniless state but was, in a very Enlightenment fashion, able to climb his way up the ladder of progress to near the heights of Pennsylvania society. Franklin first established himself in newspaper publishing–another quintessentially Enlightenment trade. Newspapers like Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette opened up a world to the general public that had previously been very restricted. As Moore notes, people before that time had often lived relatively provincial lives rooted in their local community. Now, newspapermen like Ben Franklin could narrate tales, for instance, by relating the latest exploits of the Kellymount Gang in County Kilkenny, Ireland to Irish immigrants living in Philadelphia. Franklin also utilized his publications to wage war against his literary and political rivals.

Ultimately, America became the land in which English liberty took root and developed into a bloody revolution.

One of the most crucial figures in the Enlightenment Anglophone world who took advantage of the newspaper’s power was the radical John Wilkes. A notorious libertine and radical, Wilkes founded the newspaper, The North Briton . Because of his writings, Wilkes drew the ire of the 3rd Earl of Bute, John Stuart, as well as King George III. Wilkes was eventually arrested for his writings and became a cause celebre for radical liberty. Wilkes went into exile and later returned to become Alderman of London and later Lord Mayor of London. Wilkes represents the wild and radical side of Moore’s depiction of the Enlightenment notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He demonstrates the tremendous power of the emergent press which can turn ordinary men into celebrities, strongly influencing the opinion of the public. Moreover, Wilkes represents the newfound Enlightenment ability of humans to challenge and even defeat the dominant monarch and aristocratic order.

If the American Benjamin Franklin and the English John Wilkes were the faces of the emergent, liberal Enlightenment man, the English Samuel Johnson was the quintessential Enlightenment conservative. Johnson, the son of a Staffordshire bookseller, was a volatile bibliophile, who, as Moore puckishly remarks, would fit Victor Hugo’s observation, “He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.” Johnson, the author of the famous Dictionary of the English Language , was the star of the social clubs of London (another Enlightenment phenomenon). Although an Anglican Tory, Johnson was vehemently opposed to slavery (he thus was more an Enlightenment conservative than a harsh reactionary). Johnson did, however, detest the Whigs whom he thought too optimistic and too ready to dismiss traditional British culture and values. Johnson was also strongly opposed to Enlightenment deism. However, Moore makes special note of Johnson’s 1773 novella, The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia , as strongly reflecting the Enlightenment pursuit of happiness, albeit with a strong element of traditional Christianity.

Set in the African kingdom of Abyssinia, The History of Rasselas tells the story of a prince who travels in search of happiness. Rasselas was born in “Happy Valley” where every human desire was present to him. However, secular comforts were not enough for Rasselas. Rasselas, along with his sister and the poet Imlac, travel the world in search of happiness, but it always slips through their grasp. Johnson’s overall point is that happiness is fleeting; the more one attempts to find it, the more elusive it becomes. Moore notes that Johnson’s Rasselas influenced Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of the pursuit of happiness as a quest that may not have an ultimate conclusion. This reflection is very curious and perhaps reveals a key lacuna in secular Enlightenment thinking. Having the freedom of mobility (both geographic and economic) facilitated tremendous financial success for many in the Enlightenment. Moreover, greater freedom of the press and inquiry arguably allowed for some important developments in human thinking. However, this freedom in itself did not lead to human happiness.

Ultimately, America became the land in which English liberty took root and developed into a bloody revolution. This revolution, though not as brutal as the later French Revolution, was nonetheless a major event in human history that put Enlightenment ideas into practice and created a new republic (as opposed to the English constitutional monarchy). However, since the advent of the American Revolution, the question of what exactly American liberty is has been debated. Some, such as more radical libertarians and libertines, have argued for an approach derived from the life and work of John Wilkes: liberty means radical freedom to do what one wants with little or no restriction. Others, such as Christian conservatives and, now, post-liberals, have argued for a view similar to that of Samuel Johnson: some moderate Enlightenment ideas should shape human life, but Christianity and traditional hierarchical social formation should provide a check on Enlightenment radicalism. Finally, others have argued for the moderate approach of Benjamin Franklin, using Enlightenment rationalism and moderation to guide one’s life. Throughout most of American history, these views have coexisted in tension with only occasional flare-ups (one of the most pronounced being the American Civil War). However, in the twenty-first century, it increasingly seems that these views can no longer stay in a relatively stable tension, and we are now, again, entering into a period of revolution.

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Why Is Charlie Kirk Selling Me Food Rations?

The Turning Point USA founder hosts a podcast that is dire and polemical—especially the ads.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show . “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

Listening to Kirk’s show—which is among the most popular podcasts on the right—can be unsettling, even if you are a conservative. In the past year, the founder of Turning Point USA has uploaded episodes with titles such as “The Great Replacement Isn’t Theory, It’s Reality” and “The Doctors Plotting to Mutilate Your Kids.” He has also conducted friendly interviews with a blogger who once described slavery as “a natural human relationship,” and discussed crime stats with the white supremacist Steve Sailer in a way that veered toward race science. (Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Kirk, declined to comment for this story.)

But the advertisements Kirk reads are sometimes more dire and polemical than what he and his guests talk about during the show. “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits. These ads espouse conservative values and talking points, mostly in service of promoting brands such as Blackout Coffee, which sells a “2nd Amendment” medium-roast blend and “Covert Op Cold Brew.” The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

Some brands, of course, speak the language of Democrats, touting their climate commitments and diversity efforts. But when I listened to left-of-center podcasts, including Pod Save America , Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast , and MSNBC’s Prosecuting Donald Trump , I mostly heard ads from an assortment of nonpartisan brands such as Ford, Jefferson’s Ocean Aged at Sea Bourbon, eHarmony, and SimpliSafe. The closest equivalent I found was Cariuma, a sustainable shoe brand that sponsors Pod Save America .

The right, meanwhile, has long hawked products that you don’t typically see advertised on mainstream outlets and shows. In 2007, the historian Rick Perlstein chronicled a far-fetched investment opportunity involving stem cells and placentas advertised on the far-right website Newsmax . Supplements and gold have become part of conservative-advertising canon, as the writer Sam Kriss summed up in his recent essay on the ads that appear in National Review ’s print magazine: “The same apocalyptic note [ran] through all these ads. The hospitals will shut down, the planet will freeze over, you personally are getting old and dying—and now your money might be worthless if you haven’t put it all in gold.”

Some of Kirk’s ads hit the same beats. At times, they sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.” How? By renting access to “all three major networks” via a business deal with T-Mobile, a company that has positioned itself as at least nominally left of center on some issues .

If listeners are feeling charitable, Kirk has options for them too. “Hey, everybody, exciting news. Very, very important. Uh, we are saving babies with PreBorn,” Kirk opened up a dollar-matching promo for a group raising money for ultrasounds, apparently having managed to quantify the precise dollar amount it would take to stop a woman from having an abortion. “For a one-time, $15,000 gift, you’ll provide not just one ultrasound machine, but two, saving thousands of babies for years to come; $280 saves 10 babies; $28 a month saves a baby a month, for less than a dollar a day.”

Conservative podcasts have become mega popular in recent years, and are some of the most trusted sources of news on the right : Kirk’s show ranks as the 12th-most-popular “news” podcast on Spotify right now. The show is also syndicated on radio stations across the country and posted on YouTube, where Kirk has 1.7 million subscribers. And although conservative influencers including Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, and Jack Posobiec also promote gold or supplements (or both) on their own shows, Kirk’s ads were the most varied of the conservative-podcast ads I listened to. Some conservatives, however, want no part of these kinds of ads. Earlier this month, the right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder made fun of his contemporaries for hawking “shitty supplements.” Most of it is “selling you crap you don’t need from people who don’t care about you!” Crowder yelled at the end of a four-minute rant on the matter.

The ads reflect the new paradigm of advertising. In previous decades, ads had to appeal to whole segments of the population—and products were made with that in mind. That some readers of Vanity Fair might want a Givenchy handbag, and some readers of Sports Illustrated might want Callaway golf clubs, was as targeted as ads could get. Now the country has fractured into partisan subgroups, and companies have access to reams of analytics that enable them to target ever more precise demographics. Through shows like Kirk’s, brands such as Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile can reach their relatively niche audiences more easily than ever. (Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But something else is happening too. Kirk and the rest of the conservative-podcast ecosystem aren’t just selling wares. The ads, with some exceptions, are not like ads for beer or pickup trucks that detract from the action while one watches, say, a football game. Rather, conservative ads are constitutive. They enhance and reinforce the arguments that Kirk and others are already making on their podcasts—that Black people are prone to crime, whiteness is getting excised, abortion is murder, and the United States is unstable and on the verge of collapse. The commercial breaks are the final screws needed to construct a self-contained conservative chamber. Kirk has ensconced himself in a world in which he’ll likely never face external pressures to self-moderate in the way that, say, Rush Limbaugh occasionally did when he went too far beyond the tastes of mainstream advertisers.

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When you’re listening to Kirk talk about Blackout Coffee, you can also look down and see the steam coming off your own cup of Blackout Coffee, and relax while its caffeine helps you “be awake not woke .” You can open a new browser tab and check in on your portfolio, whose wealth managers are endorsed by Kirk, and then look at the price of gold and think about your own supply procured from a company that Kirk himself vetted “from top to bottom.” You can even stop listening to Kirk, go out to your backyard, and make a call, knowing that you’re doing so as a freedom-loving conservative with your Patriot Mobile phone plan.

On The Charlie Kirk Show , there is no longer a gap between the real world and what is playing inside listeners’ headphones. Kirk’s fans can make fewer and fewer compromises on their views and burrow themselves more deeply in the womb of reactionary politics. And with the coupon code “Charlie,” listeners can get a discount to buy something else that will allow them to further immerse themselves inside of it.