The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought

Gary Chartier, Chad Van Schoelandt, Gary Chartier, Chad Van Schoelandt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351733588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This Handbook offers an authoritative, up-to-date introduction to the rich scholarly conversation about anarchy—about the possibility, dynamics, and appeal of social order without the state. Drawing on resources from philosophy, economics, law, history, politics, and religious studies, it is designed to deepen understanding of anarchy and the development of anarchist ideas at a time when those ideas have attracted increasing attention.

The popular identification of anarchy with chaos makes sophisticated interpretations—which recognize anarchy as a kind of social order rather than an alternative to it—especially interesting. Strong, centralized governments have struggled to quell popular frustration even as doubts have continued to percolate about their legitimacy and long-term financial stability. Since the emergence of the modern state, concerns like these have driven scholars to wonder whether societies could flourish while abandoning monopolistic governance entirely.

Standard treatments of political philosophy frequently assume the justifiability and desirability of states, focusing on such questions as, What is the best kind of state? and What laws and policies should states adopt?, without considering whether it is just or prudent for states to do anything at all. This Handbook encourages engagement with a provocative alternative that casts more conventional views in stark relief.

Its 30 chapters, written specifically for this volume by an international team of leading scholars, are organized into four main parts:

I. Concept and Significance
II. Figures and Traditions
III. Legitimacy and Order
IV. Critique and Alternatives

In addition, a comprehensive index makes the volume easy to navigate and an annotated bibliography points readers to the most promising avenues of future research.

Part I

Concept and Significance

1

Anarchism, Anarchists, and Anarchy

Paul McLaughlin

I. Introduction

What is the social philosophy of anarchism? What is its relationship to the social action of anarchists? And what is its relationship to the social vision of anarchy? These are the three questions I address conceptually in this chapter. Depending on one’s point of view, one might regard it as necessary (or not) to address some of these questions simultaneously. In particular, one might hold that answering the anarchism question requires that we address the anarchists question or the anarchy question. Or, if one is minded as I am, one might regard these questions as independent affairs and the anarchism question as answerable in itself. In this chapter, I will attempt to justify the latter point of view in large part by demonstrating what is wrong with the former. In effect, I will attempt at a conceptual level to divorce “anarchism” from “anarchists” and “anarchy.”

What motivates this attempt is original doubt about two prominent conceptions of anarchism. The first is a political conception that conflates “anarchism” with what might more accurately be termed “anarchist-ism.” The second is a philosophical conception that conflates “anarchism” with what might more accurately be termed “anarchy-ism.” I will analyze and critique both of these conceptions below. But the original doubt here concerns not just possible intellectual error—or misconception of anarchism—but also a certain undesirable practical and theoretical sectarianism that is grounded on the apprehension of, for example, supposedly defining anarchist practices or values. The worry, in other words, is unjustified or even arbitrary exclusion by some (“true anarchists”) of others (“false anarchists”) from the political and/or philosophical community of anarchism. Needless to say, any account of anarchism will be exclusive. The point here is that exclusion requires justification on non-arbitrary grounds (other than, for example, a particular individual’s preferred tactics or personal ethics).

In undertaking such work, one is invariably challenged—at least within this community—over the possibility and/or desirability of conceptual analysis as such, or the conceptual analysis of political terms more particularly, or even the conceptual analysis of anarchism itself. For example, Noam Chomsky maintains:

The terms of political discourse are hardly models of precision. Considering the way terms are used, it is next to impossible to give meaningful answers to such questions as ‘what is socialism?’ Or capitalism, or free markets, or others in common usage. That is even truer of the term ‘anarchism.’ It has been subject to widely varied use, and outright abuse both by bitter enemies and those who hold its banner high, so much so that it resists any straightforward characterization.¹

This is no denial of the possibility or desirability of conceptual analysis as such. Nor is it a denial of the desirability of the conceptual analysis of political terms including “anarchism.” But it is a denial of the possibility of the conceptual analysis of anarchism in particular among political terms, of analysis that might yield a “straightforward characterization” or definition of the term.

A stronger claim is made by Benjamin Franks, who insists that “it is misguided to attempt to find ahistorical and universal, decontested concepts [or to fix] the meaning[s] of terms [by identifying] necessary and sufficient conditions” for their application.² I take this assertion of misguidedness to be a denial of possibility. In other words, I take Franks to deny the possibility of conceptual analysis of political terms at the very least, if not conceptual analysis as such. Moreover, I also take him to deny the desirability of conceptual analysis—not merely because it is impossible (which may also be Chomsky’s position with respect to political terms), but also because “fixing” meaning would be objectionable—or objectionable from an anarchist perspective—even if it were possible. To fix meaning is an act of linguistic authoritarianism, an act whereby one party (the analytic philosopher) imposes “necessary and sufficient conditions” on all others (including anarchist activists).

Let us grant for present purposes the impossibility and undesirability of conceptual analysis understood in Franks’s narrow sense. Let us admit that it is impossible to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of (at least political) terms and that it is undesirable to fix and impose (at least political) meaning. However, we may still defend conceptual analysis in quite a different, explicative, sense, borrowing from and going beyond Rudolf Carnap (in a normative direction) in doing so.³ “Explication” involves the tightening up of “everyday” (say, political) language for “scientific” (say, evaluative) purposes:

The task of explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one … The [inexact concept] may belong to everyday language or to a previous stage in the development of scientific language. The [exact one] must be given by explicit rules for its use, for example, by a definition which incorporates it into a well-constructed system of scientific either logico-mathematical or empirical concepts.⁴

The explicative process of “tightening up” is not intended to reveal essential conceptual truths but to yield more precise and theoretically fruitful concepts that are still familiar from ordinary use within given linguistic communities. These concepts may be specified in terms of seemingly necessary and other more contentious conditions for their use. The former are measures of everyday familiarity; the latter, possible additional requirements for scientific fruitfulness. What result from this explicative process are non-arbitrary stipulative definitions of terms. These definitions are “auditable” as such, to test their non-arbitrariness.

The task of a concept audit is … to see to it that the conceptual resources put at a philosopher’s disposal by … pre-established usage have been adequately employed and the prevailing distinctions and connections duly acknowledged.⁵

In other words, anything and everything does not go with conceptual analysis understood in this sense. Ordinary use is to be respected to the greatest possible degree compatible with theoretical employment.

To return to Chomsky’s remarks that “terms of political discourse are hardly models of precision” and that “it is next to impossible to give meaningful answers” to questions of political definition: the point of explicative analysis here is to make the imprecisions of ordinary political discourse more precise and ideally (as a regulative ideal) to render them as “models of precision”; and it is possible to provide a meaningful analysis of political discourse by such means, as I hope to demonstrate. That is to say, whatever might be said of conceptual analysis in Franks’s narrow sense, I wish to assert: first, the possibility of conceptual analysis qua explication, or the possibility of pinning down political meaning in given linguistic contexts; and, second, the desirability of conceptual analysis qua explication, or the desirability of doing this for particular theoretical (if not other political and practical) purposes. (One might even go further here and assert the necessity of conceptual analysis qua explication for the achievement of such purposes.) A minimal theoretical purpose of conceptual analysis, as I understand it here, is to prevent semantic confusion in the investigation of political phenomena (such that, for example, philosophers may be talking past one another in attempting to evaluate them).

II. On “Anarchist-ism”

Conceptual analysis is not, of course, universally rejected, even by anarchists. There are scholars who have sought to define “anarchism” in very different ways. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt have argued that conceptual analysis can and should be undertaken for the internal purpose of “identify[ing] the common features of the subject under definition”—thereby “enabling effective analysis and research”—and for the external purpose of “clearly delineat[ing] the category being defined from other categories.”⁶ Thus, conceptual analysis can disclose the shared and distinguishing features of anarchism for theoretical purposes. However, they are insistent that the resulting definition should not be too inclusive. Conceptually, their worry is that “a range of quite different and often contradictory ideas and movements [might] get conflated,” which would lead to the view that there is “something necessarily incoherent about anarchism.” They also worry that anarchism might be regarded as “a movement existing throughout history,” rather than “a relatively recent phenomenon” (of a specific communist and revolutionary character).⁷ This historical point is central to their analysis, as van der Walt underscores:

It is a matter of record … that the anarchist movement appeared as something new to its contemporaries, rivals, and adherents; with this appearance, anarchism first became the topic of scholarly enquiry, police investigation, and media attention. Even writers favouring exceedingly loose definitions of ‘anarchism’ concede that ‘anarchism’ did not previously exist as a ‘political force’ …. The very question of whether there were earlier or ‘different schools, currents and tendencies’ of anarchism, or an anarchist ‘orientation’ ‘throughout human history’ could not even be posed before this moment.⁸

Schmidt and van der Walt claim that anarchism only came into existence once it was recognized as a new political force in the 1860s. Curiously, it did not exist when it was first proclaimed and expounded as a social philosophy in the 1840s or when this philosophy was developed under other names prior to the 1840s (by the end of eighteenth century, if not earlier). Thus, anarchism is strictly identifiable with the recognized anarchist movement, or the collective socio-political action of anarchists, from the late nineteenth century onward.

Like Schmidt and van der Walt, Uri Gordon accepts the possibility and desirability of conceptual analysis. He endorses what he calls “Anglo-American … methods and conventions” such that his study of anarchism “chiefly takes the form of analyzing concepts and arguments, making distinctions and giving examples, all with the intention of driving home some point.”⁹ The account he offers of anarchism is less historically rooted and more contemporary and evolving than that of Schmidt and van der Walt. Nevertheless, like them he identifies anarchism with a “social movement” that is animated by a particular “political culture” and generative of a “collection of ideas.”¹⁰ Whatever may be said about anarchism as a theory, it is one that is “grounded in practice.”¹¹ Anarchism is therefore ultimately about what anarchists continue to do collectively as a movement.

Many other scholars have emphasized socio-political action in their analyses of anarchism. For example, David Morland, while skeptical about the conceptual analysis of anarchism (which appears to constitute “an essentially contested concept”¹²), claims that it is possible to say at least one thing about “the very nature of anarchism”: as “an ideology it is an active creed” and anarchists “have been, by their very nature, inclined towards activism.”¹³ What Schmidt and van der Walt and Gordon add to this activist condition is a collective condition. Anarchism is not just about the activism of certain individuals, but such activism at a collective level. Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Concept and Significance
• PART II: Figures and Traditions
• PART III: Legitimacy and Order
• PART IV: Critique and Alternatives
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index