Journal of Political Ideologies

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Anarchism and non-domination

Ruth Kinna & Alex Prichard

To cite this article: Ruth Kinna & Alex Prichard (2019): Anarchism and non-domination, Journal of
Political Ideologies

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2019.1633100

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JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2019.1633100

Anarchism and non-domination

Ruth Kinnaa and Alex Prichardb
a
POLIS, School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK; bDepartment of Politics,
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

ABSTRACT
In this article we recover the classical anarchist deployment of repub-
lican tropes of non-domination, tyranny and slavery, to expose the
conservative limits of the contemporary neo-Roman republican revival.
For the anarchists, the modern nation state and the institution of
private property are antithetical to freedom as non-domination, acting
as structural constraints to freedom rather than the means for its
realisation. We re-examine the grounds of this critique to advance
two arguments. First, that a commitment to either the state or private
property represents an unwarranted positive moral and ethical com-
mitment that skews the negative theory of freedom contemporary
republicans seek to develop. Second, the prior moral commitment to
the state renders neo-Roman republicanism fundamentally conserva-
tive. Anarchist theories of freedom as non-domination push much
further than the contemporary republican revival seems to permit,
opening new possibilities for institutional and constitutional innova-
tion while remaining consistent with the core republican normative
value of non-domination.

Introduction
With the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, both republicanism and
anarchism have seen something of a revival in fortunes, both coming to prominence espous-
ing a normative political philosophy that equates freedom with non-domination. In con-
temporary political theory, republicanism has by far attracted the most scholarly interest.
Associated with Quentin Skinner’s third concept of liberty and Philip Pettit’s neo-Roman
view, the republican conception of freedom as non-domination prioritises the rejection of
arbitrary interference over non-interference.1 Distinguished from the taxonomy of positive
and negative liberty outlined by Isaiah Berlin, it is associated with independence: to be non-
dominated, Skinner argues, is ‘to be possessed of a power to act according to your own will
rather than being obliged to live in dependence on the will of someone else’.2 Essential to this
conception is an affective language of emancipation from slavery and slavish toadying to the
powers that be. Non-domination describes the move from dominium to libertas, from the
status of servus to liber. Law and constitutional provisions are central to this move but also
double as means for checking the powers of majorities, minorities and individuals. It is the
presence of laws and an established constitutional framework, benchmarks for political
agency, which ensure that none is able to arbitrarily interfere in the free decisions of others.

CONTACT Ruth Kinna [email protected]

© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
2 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

The concept of non-domination also has a place in modern anarchism. Uri Gordon,
one of the leading theorists of anarchist movement politics, has shown that anarchists
routinely identify and challenge the plural and intersecting ‘regimes of domination’ that
structure modern life.3 Gordon continues, ‘any act of resistance is, in the barest sense,
“anarchist” when it is perceived by the actor as a particular actualisation of a more
systemic opposition to domination’.4 Saul Newman, equally influential in contemporary
postanarchist theory, argues that anarchism is a ‘project [. . .] of exposing the contin-
gency and arbitrariness of our current social arrangements, the ways they are estab-
lished through multiple dominations and exclusions.’5
Just as the anarchist revival of traditionally republican tropes has been overlooked by
most political theorists, contemporary anarchists have advanced their conception with-
out any engagement with the comparable neo-Roman lexicon. The contemporary
anarchist neglect of republicanism is particularly unfortunate because it also points to
the sidelining of a historical anarchist critique of republicanism. Gordon, like David
Graeber, traces the roots of today’s anarchist networks to the radicalism of the sixties,
and minimises the links to the 19th and early 20th centuries anarchist traditions;
Newman’s concern to expose the perceived epistemological and philosophical short-
comings of 19th century theory actively dissuades reflection on these historical links.6
Although anarchism provides a powerful critical lens to expose the limits of republican
theory on republican grounds, this critique remains buried in the history of ideas. By
resurrecting it, our aim is to reformulate it by anarchizing the republican concept of
freedom as non-domination.
For Pettit, freedom as non-domination is a negative principle. This means that it is
detached from any particular vision of the good and acts as a benchmark against which
to judge different constitutional arrangements and assess their ability to maximize
negative freedoms. Accordingly, Pettit argues that ‘environmentalism, feminism, soci-
alism, and multiculturalism’ might all ‘be cast as republican causes’, since each sets out
the negative conditions which freedom as non-domination ought to meet, whether
freedom from environmental degradation or vulnerability, patriarchy, or the vicissi-
tudes of capitalism.7 The critical purchase of freedom as non-domination then extends
from the rigorousness of the tests it sets to assess the freedom-enhancing properties of
political institutions.8 In this article, we explore how anarchist socialists have responded
to the republican call. We recover an anarchist critique of republican institutions to
reflect on the robustness of the conceptual test that contemporary republicans use to
evaluate the non-dominating properties of their preferred institutional arrangements.
The discussion turns on the question: ‘which institutions do best by freedom?’9 For Pettit,
this necessarily remains an open question. Anarchists argue that the state and private property
are freedom-curtailing institutions. For most republicans, the state and private property are
essential background conditions for freedom as non-domination.10 The state is like ‘gravity’11
or ‘the laws of physics’,12 Pettit argues. Private property is likewise a regime ‘akin to the natural
environment’.13 Pettit’s schema forces contemporary theorists of non-domination to theorize
freedom within their confines, taking states and private property to be empirical conditions,
not normative benchmarks, and yet, on further analysis, we see that in fact, this defence of
state and private property dilutes the critical purchase of republican theory.
The anarchist view we advance here is that these two institutions underpin our
current predicaments and conceptually limit our ways of thinking about alternatives. In
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 3

and of itself, this is hardly an original claim, but what the recovery of anarchist ideas
shows us is that there are strong republican grounds for rejecting both institutions and
that freedom as non-domination can be retained as a normative benchmark for future
constitutional post-statist and post-capitalist design.14
In advancing the anarchist position, we extend two important friendly critiques of
the neo-Roman republican turn. The first is that neo-Roman republicanism tacitly
endorses a near limitless state, through enabling the state to provide constitutional
constraints against all manner of relations of dominations, some of which are non-
arbitrary, like the care of the young and vulnerable.15 The second is that neo-Roman
republicanism has failed to take account of republican critiques that highlighted the
structural constraints on freedom caused by private ownership of the means of produc-
tion. This is the argument Alex Gourevitch advances in his recent analysis of the 19th-
century union, the ‘red republican’ Knights of Labor.16
Following a broadly contextualist method,17 our aim is to show how Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809–1865), Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921)
and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), key figures in the historical anarchist tradition18 developed
the language of slavery, domination and non-domination, central to 19th century repub-
licanism, to advance what became known as anarchism. The anarchists almost universally
argued that private property was a ‘transformation’ of slavery from chattel to wage slavery,
and that defending exclusive claims to ownership necessitated a state. Because the con-
stitutional and legal frameworks of statism cemented structural injustice, anarchists argued
that freedom from domination required the abandonment of these two institutions. Our
aim in this article is to undertake the preliminary task of advancing an anarchist critique of
republicanism that has been ignored by historians and political theorists, rather than trace
the plural alternatives to statehood that have been advanced in anarchist literature.19 The
19th century anarchist critique of republicanism we outline here pushes debates about
alternatives to the contemporary world order in ways that are congruent with the general
commitment to freedom as non-domination.
This analysis also achieves three wider, though no less important correctives. First, locating
the emergence of anarchism from within republicanism corrects the standard anachronistic
historiography of anarchism that sees it as a tradeoff between liberalism and socialism.20
Second, the recovery of this republican heritage allows us to open up an important vein of
constitutional theorizing in anarchist thought. Anarchists tend to see empowerment as the key
to social change,21 but our account suggests that empowerment without constitutional
provision is normatively stunted. Finally, this synthetic conceptual history of the emergence
of anarchism provides a normative and political challenge to the implicit and explicit politics
of the neo-Roman recovery in contemporary political theory.22 Our politicization and
recuperation of the anarchist account of domination is intended to make the contemporary
neo-Roman recovery seem conservative, moralized and historically stunted. It is arbitrary on
account of its refusal to explore the 19th century tradition of republican thought, and
moralized in so far as it requires a normative and political commitment to the state to
guarantee private property ownership. This undercuts the negative credentials of the theory
of freedom neo-Romans advance, and sheds light on the fundamentally conservative nature of
the republican critique.23 The neo-Roman reluctance to accommodate 19th century repub-
lican thinking is telling.24 The effect is to detach republicanism from material and intellectual
transformations central to the emergence of contemporary capitalism. If we want to make
4 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

sense of modern society, these processes are at least as significant to us as the wars of American
independence and the aspirations of the commonwealthmen.25

Anarchism and the republican tradition

For Pettit, Rousseau’s communitarian unicameralism marks the end of the Roman
tradition in European thought, and the point of departure for liberalism which subse-
quently dominated political thought.26 It is broadly for this reason that he and others
look backwards from the 18th century, rather than look forward to the 19th century to
develop their conception of freedom. Historical accounts of French republicanism are
not so quick to draw this line. The bifurcation of republicanism into Jacobin and liberal
varieties has tended to dominate the historiography27 since replicated in accounts of the
emergence of liberalism and Marxism in the United States.28 However, not even
forward-looking historians who accept the ‘extremely elastic’29 nature of republicanism
stretch it to include anarchism. Hazareesingh admits Proudhon’s association with the
republican tradition, only to dismiss him on account of his systematic anti-feminism.30
Perhaps more important is the fact that Proudhon could not be said to have ‘founded’
any republic for it is undoubtedly the case that the centrality of the American and
French Revolutions, and the subsequent experimental tendencies of republicans with
constitutional and institutional arrangements, define republicanism’s modern origins.31
One of the virtues of Pettit’s conceptual corrective to the approaches adopted in the
history of ideas is that it offers a different way of thinking about the scope of republican
traditions. By examining the language of freedom, slavery and non-domination, rather than
the political project of republican statebuilding, Pettit provides a far broader framing of
republicanism and its historical concerns than the mainstream. This opening has been
exploited by Alex Gourevitch.32 Recovering the rich history of the Knights of Labor,
Gourevitch has shown how the language of domination and slavery was adopted to define
a red republican position that equated freedom as non-domination with the rejection of
‘free labour contracts’ and the constitutional protection of private property. Anarchists also
used this language, adopting it at least forty years before the Knights organized.
From the end of the restoration period and up to the beginning of the Second
Empire (1830–1851), anarchist thought was shaped by an engagement with the major
currents of republicanism: the Jacobin republican socialism of Louis Blanc, the liberal
republicanism of Adolphe Thiers and Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, Jules Barni and
Charles Renouvier, and the economics of J.B. Say.33 As Stephen Vincent and Alex
Prichard have shown,34 not only did Proudhon engage directly with these tendencies in
republican thought, he also engaged with the leading political philosophies of the age,
specifically the writings of Rousseau, Kant and Comte. Likewise, Bakunin’s anarchism
was shaped as much by his critique of Mazzini as it was by his fall-out with Marx.35 The
rise of republican nationalism was an important spur for the development of his anti-
theological, socialist federalism. Only three years before the bloody repression of the
Paris Commune in 1871, Bakunin shared a stage with Hugo, Giuseppi Garibaldi and
Barni in the ill-fated congress of the League for Peace and Democracy.
Anarchists honed the language of domination and slavery in the late 19th century in
a milieu shaped by debates about abolition of slavery and serfdom, during the consolidation
and enforcement of the institution of private property, the commodification of labour and the
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 5

emergence of the modern nation state. Albert Parsons, one of the Chicago anarchists martyred
in 1887 when he was tried and executed for professing anarchist ideas embraced the civil and
political liberties established in the course of the French Revolution but rejected the economic
‘subjection and dependence’ extending from property ownership and ‘formally entrenched
behind the bulwarks of statute law and government’. Using Proudhon to develop the critique
of wage-labour dependency that resonated with the Knights of Labor, he declared himself an
anarchist and constitutionalist and described anarchism heir to French revolutionary repub-
licanism: ‘We stand upon the right of free speech, of free press, of public assemblage,
unmolested and undisturbed. We stand upon the constitutional right of self-defense, and
we defy the prosecution to rob the people of America of these dearly bought rights’.36
As Carl Levy notes, anarchists also made common cause with the ‘radical federalist
and internationalist’ movements contained within republicanism37 to advance alterna-
tive constitutional arrangements. Proudhon was almost alone in using the language of
constitutionalism to elaborate his ideas, but the principles of the decentralized federa-
tion and ‘free’ or ‘voluntary’ agreement that he recommended were taken up widely by
later 19th and 20th century anarchists and anarchist syndicalists. His ideas found fertile
soil in the land of the cacique system and latifundismo.38 Indeed, Spanish republicanism
and federalism were profoundly shaped by Proudhon’s anarchism, most notably
through the influence of the Catalan Francesc Pi i Margal (1824–1901) and the
Galician Ramon de La Sagra (1798–1871). Margal translated two of Proudhon’s
works on constitutional politics into Spanish before becoming president of the first
Spanish republic in 1875. De la Sagra, a close friend of Proudhon’s, established El
Porvenir in 1848, one of the first anarchist journals, before founding sociology as an
academic discipline in Spain, serving on the board of Proudhon’s ill-fated Bank of the
People, and then as a Spanish politician.39
Following the collapse of the Paris Commune and the massacre of 20,000 commu-
nards by the French state in 1871, anarchists and other radicals who organized in the
First International, including the nascent Marxist camp, dropped all reference to
republicanism.40 From this time, oppressed peoples were more likely to associate
republicanism with colonization, racism and imperialism than freedom against
tyranny.41 This re-alignment of anarchism against republicanism helps explain why
contemporary theorists have little or no knowledge of the anarchist heritage of the
republican tradition, even though anarchists still use a language of freedom, domination
and slavery that all contemporary republicans would recognize. Making up for this
neglect re-links anarchism to wider and more established currents in contemporary
political theory, opening up new lines of critical analysis within it.

Private property, domination and the ‘transformation of slavery’

In order to make sense of the conceptual innovations the anarchists introduced, we
return to Rousseau and reconstruct, from the anarchist’s rejection of his ideas, the
legacy of republicanism therein. The anarchists were attracted and repelled by Rousseau
in equal measure. On the one hand, they endorsed Rousseau’s rejection of Pufendorf’s
claim that it is legitimate to sell oneself into slavery, to renounce one’s freedom as one
would one’s property. On the other, they objected to Rousseau’s framing of property as
a convention that must be regulated by law. This formulation resolved the paradox that
6 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

arises from Rousseau’s critique of inequality and the nature of first possessory claims,
which he advances in the Discourse on Inequality and his defence of property in The
Social Contract.42 But it did not placate the anarchists, who continued to argue, with
Rousseau, that both property and slavery do ‘violence to nature’,43 and they also
rejected his contention that the reign of force ends where law begins.
We consider the argument against law and the state below, but first, examine the way
Proudhon and Bakunin related property to slavery. Proudhon’s argument was that the
introduction of constitutional rights to private property and the exploitative systems these
entrenched in the post-revolutionary period precipitated the transformation of slavery into
wage-slavery. Remembered best for the epithet ‘property is theft!’ Proudhon opened his
defining work of anarchist political theory by conjoining property with slavery. Invoking
republican ideas about the virtues of independence, Proudhon explained:

If I had to answer the following question, ‘What is slavery?’ and if I should respond in one
word, ‘It is murder’, my meaning would be understood at once. I should not need a long
explanation to show that the power to deprive a man of this thought, his will, and his
personality is the power of life and death. So why to this other question, ‘What is
Property?’ should I not answer in the same way, ‘It is theft!’, without fearing to be
misunderstood, since the second proposition is only a transformation of the first.44

Private title in things, Proudhon argued, facilitated the theft of property and value from those
who produced it. Whereas under systems of primitive accumulation property is seized, and
slavery produces without recompense, under capitalism, labourers work to produce, but the
title to the capital and the exclusive domain over property ensures that the product of labour
never remains with the labourer, and that the labourer remains as dependent on the master as
the slave had been prior to emancipation. Proudhon argued that the transformation of
slavery, from chattel to wage labour, and the theft of the product of labour resulted from
the legal appropriation of property as an exclusive right of dominion:

When the Emancipation of the Slave was proclaimed, the proprietor lost the man and kept the
land; just as today, in freeing the blacks, we leave the master his property in land and stock.
Nevertheless, from the standpoint of ancient law as well as of natural and Christian right, man,
born to labour, cannot dispense with the implements of Labour; the principle of Emancipation
involved an agrarian law which guarantees them to him and protects him in their use: otherwise,
this pretended Emancipation was only an act of hateful cruelty, an infamous deception [. . .] The
result was that the emancipated slave, and, a few centuries later, the enfranchised serf, without
means of existence, was obliged to become a tenant and pay tribute.45

Passages such as these can be found throughout the anarchist literature. Tolstoy, who
corresponded with one of the sons of the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison,46
described the transformation in a worked example of the master–slave relationship
before and after the abolition. Even though the ‘slaver owner’ was deprived of ‘slave
John, whom he can send to the cesspool to clear out his excrements’, Tolstoy noted, he
still had money ‘to be a benefactor’ to ‘anyone out of hundreds of Johns . . . giving him
the preference and allowing him, rather than another, to climb down into the
cesspool.’47 For Bakunin too, ‘[t]he truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply
a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom – voluntary from the
juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense – broken up by
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 7

momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it

is real slavery.’48
Making common cause with the red republicans in America, anarchists rejected the
free labour contracts that abolitionists like Garrison championed. Yet in contrast to the
Knights of Labor, who used the critique of free labour contracts to focus on the effects
of property ownership – the extraction of surplus value – the anarchists contended that
domination is inherent in the claim to exclusive ownership.49 Further parting company
with red republicans, the anarchists rejected the possibility of universalising republican
freedom through state regulation. Proudhon’s aim was rather to ‘REPUBLICANIZE
[. . .] PROPERTY’50 to ‘republicanize specie, by making every product of labour ready
money’.51
As a critic of republicanism Proudhon argued for the removal of the possibility of
dominium inherent to the possibility of the privateness of property. This explicitly
struck at the heart of classical Roman accounts of property. For the Romans, as for the
Greeks,52 the very possibility of privateness of property, the ability to alienate and to
exchange title was dependent on the prior notion of total dominium. Meum esse,
a claim to dominium and absolute exclusivity or sovereignty over a thing is central to
the possibility of the privateness of property for without this, the property could not be
said to be alienable and transferable.53 It underpinned and was epitomised by the
institution of slavery. Proudhon’s argument was that the exercise of domination,
experienced as dependency on a master by chattel and wage slaves alike extended
from the exclusive right to private property that meum esse enshrined.54
Republicanizing property meant abandoning this exclusive right and granting only
the limited right to property on the basis of use.
In contrast to classical republicans, neo-Romans do not treat inequality as natural
and of course reject chattel slavery, but they concur that private property does not
itself entail domination. Further departing from a strict Roman republicanism con-
temporary neo-Romans seek to redress the egregious inequalities that result from
historic distributions of private property, and the potentially dominating practices of
agents who benefit from this distribution. The typical solution is progressive taxation
or a universal basic income.55 This third way aligns republicanism with welfarism
and, as Nelson has forcefully argued, it is ‘wholly incompatible’ with the Roman view
of non-domination.56 Redistribution is designed to ensure that there is no structural
domination of the poor by the rich, but in the standard republican account, it
ensures the domination of the rich by the poor. The anarchist critique that extends
from Proudhon’s rejection of republicanism is that for as long as private property is
constitutionally guaranteed, dominion is only weighted one way or another and
domination ensues.
By analyzing bourgeois property relations from the perspective of domination and
freedom rather than marginal utility and value theory, Proudhon’s arguments also
highlight the limits of the left-republican position that Alex Gourevitch extracts from
his history of the Knights of Labor. Gourevitch is concerned with workplace domina-
tion as a microcosm of social domination more broadly, and talks of ‘social domination’
as structural.57 He takes this from Marx. For Marx, such relations of domination persist
beneath the state in what he called ‘civil society’. Gourevitch is right that the labour
contract is fundamentally and irreversibly exploitive and that ‘[n]o matter how equal
8 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

the two parties are when making the contract, that equality disappears once the contract
is made.’58 Gourevitch shows in detail how constitutional guarantees of private prop-
erty, not just asymmetries of power, work to the advantage of the bourgeoisie, enforcing
the structural domination of the propertyless or poor. Yet echoing the critique devel-
oped by the Knights of Labor, Gourevitch turns to the state to remedy this structural
domination, effectively detaching the constitutional defence of private property from
the right to personal dominion. Proudhon would have agreed that key social relations
of power are left unmolested by republican constitutionalism – indeed the latter is the
enforcement of the former – but his view that the background constitutional defence of
private property underpinned the transformation of slavery into wage slavery pointed
to a rejection of the transfer of the right of dominion to the state. It is only by removing
this right that we can ensure domination is removed. Indeed, as we now show, this right
of dominium is central to state sovereignty, itself central to the ability to enforce the
constitutional right to private property.

Structural domination and the state

In much contemporary political theory, anarchism is still haunted by libertarianism and
philosophical anarchism. As is well known, the first group proscribes state interference
on the basis of a prior commitment to property in the self and an absolute defence of
private property in general.59 The latter group, including writers ranging from Robert
Paul Wolff to John Simmons,60 largely ignores the question of private property and
focuses on the problem of political obligation. As Nathan Jun has recently pointed out,
it is rare to find anyone interested in either form of anti-statism who engages with the
lived traditions or political philosophy of anarchism.61
We should not, therefore, find it surprising that anti-state arguments in contempor-
ary republican political theory tend to face towards the niche libertarian view or that the
framing of the argument about the state replicates the terms of this established debate.
In both, state theory turns on the justification of a stark alternative. Wolff’s dichotomy
between autonomy and authority is mirrored in Pettit’s choice of the ‘freedom of the
heath’ or the freedom of the ‘city’.62 Only the latter is a properly political community,
and the near universal alternative to the state is an ‘apolitical order’.63
The state, it is held, is a commonwealth where citizens are compelled to the political
community by their material obligation to constitutionalize. This entails the establish-
ment of and obedience to laws, ‘an empire of laws, not of men’ as Pettit puts it.64 Laws
in turn entail the monopolization of force and thus a clear distinction between inside
and outside, or the constitution of international politics as a distinct and problematic
domain of political life, which compels us to arms.65 The non-state is either
a Hobbesian condition which ‘approximates to permanent civil war’, a ‘state of nature’,
‘balance of deterrence’, ‘war of all against all’ or one in which ‘reciprocal powers’ with
no formal delimitation of their roles and functions will dominate.66 In this version,
anti-statists are voluntarists who misunderstand Locke’s warnings about the ‘inconve-
niences’ of the state of nature. Pettit imagines that a form of constitutionalism might
plausibly emerge from this a-legal order, but it would be a system of ‘antipower’,67 that
is, an overwhelming deployment of power that actively controls or eliminates the
arbitrary power of some over others. Gourevitch uses similar tropes. In his closing
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 9

remarks on the Knights of Labor, he detects a certain naivety in the movement’s

‘voluntaristic’ tendencies.68 The Knights were wrongly suspicious of state power and
dissuaded from establishing political parties.
The binary choice, state/non-state explains why Pettit contends that living with the
state is like living with ‘the laws of physics’,69 or ‘[l]ike having to live in the presence of
gravity’.70 This view is reinforced by the state’s interventionist role which injects
goodness into naturalness. As Pettit puts it: ‘[u]nregulated by the agency of a state,
wealth and power tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. As by an “iron law”, to
quote a recent historian [Fukuyama] of political order, “the rich tend to get richer, in
the absence of state intervention”. It is extremely unlikely that any spontaneous norms
could resist the effects of growing economic accumulation and ensure the resourcing of
basic liberties for the poor as well as the rich’.71 Yet this account of intervention relies
on prior understandings of accumulation predicated on a specific conception of the
nature of property and the alienation of surplus. In other words, Pettit only needs
a state because of the special ways that private property operates. Absent the latter,
there need to be other reasons for a state, or none at all.
The important point to emerge here is that the (absent) historical sociology of the state
structures the republican argument: law is a system which regulates our interactions in
this sub-optimal, if realistic, status quo, and violence must be monopolized, ironically to
enforce right. In the next three sub-sections, we outline the anarchist sociology of the
state and explore the critique of law and violence it elicits. Our aim is to show that Pettit’s
claim that the efficiency savings of ‘having a state’72 outweigh the loss of liberty this entails
is a false choice. The absorption of the history of state formation in a theorization of
a state/non-state dichotomy tricks us into thinking that the anarchist critique supports an
unrealistic, dangerous idea of abolition. While the anarchist critique is unstinting, it
focuses on processes of state formation that are open to change and constitutional
redesign. It thus provides a normative critique of the state which encourages us not to
give up on the attempt to properly interrogate ‘which institutions do best by freedom’.
And it first did so deploying the language of slavery, domination and freedom.

The distinctiveness of the anarchist historical sociology of the state

The thrust of the classical anarchist argument is that the state’s dominating force is not
independent of the institution of private property which it upholds. Understanding that
this relationship is a dynamic historical one gives anarchists insights into the ways that
contemporary states continue to sustain structural forms of domination. Their critique
has deep roots and it has been a major bone of contention in revolutionary socialist
circles since the 1860s.
As historians have often observed, this disagreement emerged from a shared critique
of exploitation and wage slavery. Bakunin and Marx agreed that law is permissive of
domination in what Marx called ‘civil society’. ‘Juridically’, Bakunin noted in a review
of Capital, capitalists and workers are both equal ‘but economically the worker is the
serf of the capitalist, even before the market transaction has been concluded’.73 This
voluntary servitude, contract slavery, to which Rousseau objected, is central to the
capitalist labour market.74 Like Marx, Bakunin recognized that this structural condition
compels all social classes – factory owners, the bourgeoisie and state functionaries –
10 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

making all slaves to the logic of property and the market: ‘there is hardly an industrial
enterprise’ Bakunin argued, ‘wherein the owner, impelled on the one hand by the two-
fold instinct of an unappeasable lust for profits and absolute power, and on the other
hand, profiting by the economic dependence of the worker, does not set aside the terms
stipulated in the contract and wring some additional concessions in his own favor’.75
As we have seen, left republicans like Gourevitch draw on this account of the
relationship between worker and capitalist and conclude from it that the state might
yet realize a non-dominating condition of social relations through the correct deploy-
ment of constitutional political power ‘in order to redistribute ownership and
control’.76 But it is on this point that Bakunin and later anarchists departed from Marx.
The idea that the state was a system of domination was a unifying thread in
Bakunin’s writing. While still a republican fellow-traveller, he described the state as
‘nothing but [. . .] domination and [. . .] exploitation, well-regulated and systematized’.77
Two years later, by now mixing with Marx, Bakunin used class idioms to express the
same idea: ‘bourgeois domination’ he contended, ‘is the slavery of the proletariat’.78 In
Statism and Anarchy, a text directed against Marx, Bakunin revived the languages of
republicanism to argue that the structural domination of capital and the state are
mutually constitutive: ‘If there is a State, then necessarily there is domination and
consequently slavery. A State without slavery . . . is inconceivable – that is why we are
the enemies of the State’.79
The distinctiveness of the anarchist conception of the state that Bakunin outlined
remained hazy in the fluid and often feverish politics of 19th century socialism. But it
complicated and pushed further than Marx’s analysis of economic forces, towards the
analysis of parallel processes of territoriality, monopoly and centralization.80 The con-
clusion Bakunin drew from the Commune, for example, was that anarchists and
Marxists both envisaged the ‘creation of a new social order based solely on the
organisation of collective work’ and ‘the collective appropriation of the instruments
of labour’. The difference was that ‘communists believe they should organise the
workers’ strength to take over the political power of the states’ and the ‘revolutionary
socialists organised with a view to the destruction, or, if one want a more polite word,
the liquidation of the states’.81 Believing ‘every political state’ to be ‘nothing but
organized domination for the benefit of one class, to the detriment of the masses’, he
warned that the proletariat would ‘in its turn become a new dominating and exploiting
class’ should it ever attempt to seize state power.82
Anarchists also rejected Marx’s view that the state was an historic achievement.83 For
them, forms of statelessness were historic achievements, for the state entailed the
centralization of power and domination, and the diminution of decentralization and
complexity. It was a system of monopoly and colonization that gradually, but forcibly,
extended its responsibilities across social, cultural, religious and political realms.
Anarchists anticipated Weber as much as they developed Marx.84 As Bakunin put it:

The bourgeoisie and its diverse social and political organisations in industry, agriculture,
banking and commerce, just as in all the administrative, financial, judicial, university,
police and military functions of the State, is tending to weld itself further and further
each day into a truly dominant oligarchy and a countless mass of creatures who are more
or less vainglorious and more or less fallen, living in a perpetual illusion and pushed back
inevitably more and more into the proletariat by an irresistible force, that of present-day
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 11

economic development, and reduced to serving as blind instruments of this all-powerful

oligarchy.85

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

years after Bakunin’s death,86 it was still at odds with prevailing currents in Marxist
political theory which revolved around questions of relative autonomy and the state’s
ontological status.87

Law, violence and the state

Bakunin’s conception of the process of state’s formation reinforced Proudhon’s view that
the state was always already implicated in domination by the logic of the constitutional
defence of private property. This challenged the legitimizing stories that underpinned
liberal and republican accounts of the state’s origins. The state did not provide universal
transcendent order, as modernists proclaimed, only order of a particular kind.88 Pressing
this analysis, Kropotkin linked the monopoly and colonization of the state directly to the
imposition of law, showing how the promise of instituting private property motivated
political, military and religious elites to codify laws that would cement their privileges.
The revival of the Roman tradition secured this change. Formal commitments to rights
and freedom seduced the citizens of newly constituted states, yet as Bakunin remarked,
the people understood the meaning of ‘equality, freedom, justice, human dignity, mor-
ality and the well-being of individuals’ quite differently from the lawyers empowered to
give them content.89 The vagaries of the language enabled elites to turn republican
thinking on its head. Law and the state were the tools elites used to craft the movement
from freedom to slavery: Roman law never protected peoples from tyranny nor rescued
them from chaos. It transformed ‘a confederation of citizens’ into ‘a flock of subjects’,90
consolidating power, delimiting it and explaining its material distribution.
Anarchists agreed with republicans that force was required to underwrite the law
but saw the monopoly of violence as a cultural phenomenon which structured justice
and law, not a separate requirement for law’s protection. Arguing that our institu-
tions of justice are radically ‘infected with violence’,91 Proudhon coined the term
militarisme to describe the integration of war making functions with state-building.92
Later anarchists developed alternative conceptions of war, but generally absorbed
Proudhon’s understanding of state violence. For Bakunin ‘[s]overeignty, the drive
toward absolute domination, is inherent in every State; and the first prerequisite for
this sovereignty is the comparative weakness, or at least the submission of neighbor-
ing states.’93 Whether or not states regularly used armed force, the monopoly of
violence placed the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’ on a continuum of relations of
violence.
The transformation of slavery into wage-slavery ran alongside the transformation of
arbitrary monarchical rule into the regularized militarized domination of representative
governments. The State, as Kropotkin put it, was a ‘power placed above society . . .
a territorial concentration and a concentration of many or even all functions of the life of
society in the hands of the few’.94 It was an ‘engine for stealing wealth by commanding
the military’.95 And as law fixed property relations it not only cemented wage slavery
through labour contracts, it also regularized prevailing local moral norms to determine
12 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

the boundaries of legitimate action in ways that benefited elites. Appropriating the
republican language of slavery, anarchists showed that they were fully attuned to what is
now referred to as the intersectional nature of oppressions; legal domination
entrenched patriarchy through the regulation of marriage contracts and racism,
through colonial expansion within and without the state’s territorial boundaries.
Rudolf Rocker later quoted approvingly from the constitution of the IWW (1906),
which portrayed the law as an instrument of ‘outright slavery’,96 Elisée Reclus examined
the effects of abolitionism in America and argued that the continued existence of
supremacist cultures meant that ex-slaves were not merely exploited as workers, but
in special ways as black workers.97 Voltarine de Cleyre similarly probed the nature of
sex slavery and the relationship to chattel and wage-slavery.98 And so this trope
persisted well into the first half of the 20th century.
Prior to the two World Wars, universal suffrage and welfare states, this process of the
transformation of slavery and the consolidation of state power to embed capitalist
property relations, seemed self-evidently unjust, and the critique of republican language
perfectly natural and deeply political. Tolstoy was one of the most vociferous critics of law
and the state in this respect. In the presence of the law as established by and through
states, slavery is inevitable, he argued, precisely because those who are governed by laws
never write them, and their imposition necessitates brute force. States extract taxes to
fund conquest, which is itself dependent on the prior establishment of secure adminis-
trative systems and the cooperation of the propertied elites, whether landholders drawing
from serfs or factory owners drawing from their workforce. Law can never be the
guarantor of liberty, as republicans argue, because the interests it ‘tracks’, to use Pettit’s
phrase, are always mediated by background conditions of domination that are removed
from public scrutiny. Echoing Proudhon, Tolstoy designated ‘(l)and, taxes and property’
as the three ‘sets of laws’ that explained ‘the slavery of our times’.99 Presumed or tacit
consent necessarily involved structural violence. ‘It cannot be otherwise. For laws are
demands to obey certain rules and to compel some people to obey certain rules can only
be done by laws, by deprivation of liberty and by murder’.100

The state and domination

In the context of contract theory, Pettit’s claim that ‘laws create the freedom enjoyed by
citizens’ looks compelling.101 Set alongside the anarchists’ historical sociology, it is less
persuasive. The anarchist account of state-formation supports a conception of anarchy
that mainstream political theory typically reduces to an abstract condition whose
leading features can be deduced from the state’s absence. Neo-Roman republicanism
does not challenge this dominant approach. Anarchy, for anarchists, is not a lawless
condition best thought of as nasty or inconvenient. No such order exists in interna-
tional relations and modern anthropology indicates that it is an inaccurate description
of the cultures of stateless peoples.102 Recent scholarship, showing how the revival of
the Roman legal tradition by 18th-century republicans established particular types of
political community, rather than political community in general, adds weight to the
anarchist critique.103 Recovering the anarchist sociology of the state explains why, for
anarchists, domination, otherwise conceptualized as dominus, exclusive and absolute
control and jurisdiction, is at the heart of private property and statehood. These
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 13

institutions are not historical accidents or transhistorical a priori. They are the cumu-
lative and often unintended effect of political decisions taken by republicans and others
to structure world politics in the interests of the propertied elites. Domination is
ideologically and structurally core to modern states and any attempt to realize non-
domination as a transformative principle must at the very least call into question these
two institutions.

Democratising the constitution: can it be done?

Armed with their critique of the state, 19th century anarchists denied the possibility of
democratizing the constitution but advocated the democratic republicanization of
property as a means to challenge the powers of the constitution that states guaranteed.
While some modern political theorists voice deep concerns about the undemocratic
nature of neo-Roman republicanism, they also suggest that there is scope for the
democratic reform of republican constitutions. In this last section, we show how the
anarchist theory of the state shapes a very different conception of democratic change.
As John McCormick argues, neo-Roman republicanism constitutionalizes without
democratizing.104 Invoking Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’,105 McCormick contends that
the popular selection of groups of elites in democracies is structurally embedded through
republican constitutionalism. Reversing the neo-Roman argument that ‘republicanism is the
completion of democracy’, Nadia Urbinati similarly argues that in the absence of ‘an equal
relationship of power among citizens’ and ‘an effective right to express one’s opinions [. . .]
legal liberty and due process of law are not secure acquisitions’.106 This demands a fuller
participation. This line of argument underpins a number of different proposals to democratize
republicanism. McCormick’s specific demand is for a new people’s tribune, and radical
democratic innovations, to reconstruct republicanism ‘almost beyond the point of
recognition’.107
The anarchist critique of neo-Roman republicanism suggests that ‘almost’ is the
operative word, for the democratic deficit that McCormick, Urbinati and others identify
in neo-Roman republicanism operates at the level of the constitution. The limits of
republicanism are indeed marked by the active discouragement of participation and the
curtailment of democratic processes, but also by the systems of power that the modern
constitution cements and within which democratic processes operate. It is for this
reason that anarchists have typically rejected electoral politics, even though many
contemporary anarchists would endorse the participatory and deliberative forms of
democracy that McCormick and others call for.
Often dismissed as a juvenile response to authority, the anarchist rejection of electoral
politics and representative democracy is a function of the depth of the problems democracy
is asked to resolve: the institution of private property, the structures and processes of
domination that maintaining this constitutional arrangement demands, and the ways in
which sustaining this central form of domination then percolates into other, no less
important, areas of social life. This is a labour of Sisyphus.
In attacking the republican constitution, anarchists neither rejected democracy nor con-
stitutional politics. Instead, they sought to detach constitutional politics from relationships
grounded in the forms of slavery that inhered from private property and the state. Proudhon’s
argument was not that there should be no property, for this would be tantamount to Athenian
14 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

or Jacobin communism and require a seemingly limitless state to enforce it.108 He proposed
limitless possessory claims, negotiated democratically between groups and individuals.109
Rather than title being exclusive and based on dominium, property would be democratically
negotiated in infinitely plural ways, both in productive relations and exchange relations too. It
is this democratic republicanization of property which, ironically, destroys its exclusivity.
Accomplishing the abolition of property entails the curtailment of proprietary rights, dom-
inus, by law, routinely and constitutionally.110 All ownership thus becomes possession, with
no absolute right to ownership of anything. This communal negotiation of title is vital to
freedom as non-domination, distinguishing the ‘free man’ from the ‘slave’.
Proudhon’s anarchist proposal demands continuous democratic vigilance and
a constitutional framework that facilitates interventions that are non-dominating. Indeed,
in Proudhon’s politics, democracy is freed from an exclusively ‘political’ realm into the
complex groupings of society. It becomes central to every purposeful political group, not
just the state.111 Republicans might object that this is hardly feasible. Pettit rightly warns that
any distribution of property that has to be maintained by continual government intervention
is extremely taxing from the point of view of non-domination.112 However, this is exactly what
Roman accounts of private property, or Athenian inspired collectivist property relations,
require: the meddling state so abhorred by libertarians. Democratizing property along the
lines Proudhon suggested, that is mutualistically, horizontally and though bilateral and multi-
lateral contract, would obviate the need for a state to enforce any one particular regime over
another. Indeed, such is the cost to the state of maintaining private property that taxation for
this purpose is the sine qua non of policing and the military, namely, the protection agencies
that guard the title that accrues to sovereignty and colonial occupation. It is against this
background that we need to understand anarchist criticisms of constitutionalization, the state
and conventional accounts of democracy.
Pettit is surely right to fear populist and extra constitutional means for revising the
constitution in favour of dominant majorities or minorities. Yet if republicanism does
not foster civic virtue, the neglected question is how vocal minorities and disenfran-
chised majorities who are neither propertied nor politically powerful can revise the
constitution. Pettit’s contention that private property constitutes the ‘natural environ-
ment’ and that living in a state is like ‘living under the laws of physics’ drastically limits
the potential for democratic innovation. It invites charges of both utopianism and
conservatism at once, and this is, at its core, the problem with neo-Roman conceptions
of property and statehood.
Unless the state removes dominium in property, inequality and social discord will
increase. If states restrict property, then private property itself, as Proudhon observed,
becomes ‘impossible’, and the domination of the propertied is inevitable.113 As Bakunin
argued, no state ‘not even the reddest republic’ is capable of giving the people ‘what
they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs
from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above’.114

Towards anarchist constitutionalism

In this article, we have recovered a set of arguments that challenge the notion that freedom
from domination must work within the intellectual and political parameters of the modern
nation state and capitalism. Such is the dominance of the modern nation state in our
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 15

contemporary understandings of politics and freedom, that thinking imaginatively about

non-domination without the state has become difficult, to say the least. The role of political
theory is surely to expose and to uncover, as well as to build and justify, and to the extent
that the anarchists are able to pierce the assumptions of modern politics, it is incumbent
upon political theorists to engage with anarchist arguments about what politics might be.
We have tinkered long enough and the return to a new constellation of authoritarian,
populist, neoliberal and autarkic world leaders suggest we need radically rethink the
benefits of our current liberal institutions. We hope that the anarchist account here
makes a political case for much more radical institutional re-design.
Centrally, we must accept that any attempt to think about freedom as non-domination and
from dependency must question the necessity of the state and the exclusive right to private
property. The alternative simply prefigures our conception of which institutions might do best
by freedom and forecloses our political imagination. Our purpose in this article has not been
to detail that alternative, only to challenge the republican arguments for constraining the
concept freedom as non-domination by conflating it with a set of contingent historical
constitutional arrangements. In advancing this critique, our review of the history of anarchist
ideas dovetails with the left-libertarian argument that the concept of freedom as non-
domination developed by neo-republicans is moralized.115 For Ian Carter,116 the negative
credentials of the republican theory of freedom are compromised by the claim that some
obstacles to doing whatever you like are morally acceptable – specifically obstacles like
imprisonment by states who track your avowed interests. Pettit’s blunt retort to his critics is
that ‘there is no substance to the claim that the republican theory of freedom I favor is
moralized’,117 but this is clearly not the case. The legitimacy of the state cannot be defended
with reference to the principle of non-domination, for this implies that a whole range of
secondary moral and ideological commitments come into play, some of which will evoke
substantive conceptions of the good, outlawed by a pure negative theory of freedom as non-
domination. To defend the state and the constitutional guarantee of private property disables
vigilance of institutionally embedded, dominating social relationships and perpetuates forms
of slavery linked to dependency.
This observation does not suggest easy resolution. Indeed, it is doubtful that there is any
resolution. When anarchists illuminated the shortcomings of republican constitutionalism
they asked questions about the extent to which non-domination could be guaranteed by any
constitutional arrangement. The 19th century anarchist critique does not hold out the promise
of a non-moralized theory of freedom. Rather it opens up the possibility of using anarchy as
a constitutional principle, that is, to provide a concept of non-domination capable of testing
the freedom-enhancing properties of actually existing states.
Anarchism not only exposes how deeply the neo-Roman account of freedom as non-
domination is moralised, it also uncovers a much wider set of dubious assumptions about
freedom and politics. The richness of republican political theory and its emancipatory force is
revealed through the recovery of anarchist analysis. While it should be clear from the forgoing
discussion that anarchists deployed a coherent and sustained critique of the republican
concept of freedom as non-domination, much more needs to be done to tease out the
constitutional implications of that critique and to re-link anarchism to the history of political
thought more broadly. If the constitutional question is not reopened, beyond the narrow
confines of the state, then domination and tyranny are all we can expect.
16 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

Notes
1. Classic statements of the contemporary neo-Roman republican tradition include P. Pettit, Just
Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014).
P. Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012); P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and
Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); M. van Gelderen, and Q. Skinner, Republicanism and
Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002). M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner, The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Key secondary literatures include:
C. Laborde and J. W. Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008);
I. Honohan and J. Jennings, Republicanism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2006).
2. Q. Skinner, ‘Freedom as the absence of arbitrary power’, in Laborde and Maynor, ibid., p. 86.
3. U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London:
Pluto Press, 2008), p. 33.
4. Ibid, p. 34.
5. S. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010),
p. 64.
6. Gordon, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 5; D. Graeber, ‘The new anarchists’, New Left Review, 13 (2002),
pp. 61–73; S. Newman, ‘Crowned anarchy: postanarchism and international relations
theory’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 40 (2012), p. 272.
7. Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 134.
8. Skinner, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 83–101.
9. Pettit, Republicanism, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 100.
10. Neo-Roman republicans have been concerned to defend their conservative credentials
from the libertarian right, rather than the left. For example, S. Slaughter, Liberty Beyond
Neo-Liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalising Age
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), P. Pettit, ‘Freedom in the market’, Politics,
Philosophy & Economics, 5, no. 2 (2006), pp. 131–149.
11. Pettit, On the People’s Terms, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 162.
12. Ibid., p. 161.
13. Pettit, ‘Freedom in the market’, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 140.
14. M. Egoumenides, Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation (London: Bloomsbury,
2014).
15. M. Friedman, ‘Pettit’s civic republicanism and male domination’, in Laborde and Maynor,
op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 259–265.
16. A. Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 40–41.
17. D. Runciman, ‘History of political thought: the state of the discipline’, British Journal of
Politics and International Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 84–104.
18. We focus on the writings of three of the key exponents identified by P. Eltzbacher, The
Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers, Benjamin R. Tucker
(Trans.) (New York: Dover Books, 2004/1908). For a critical discussion see L. Van der
Walt, and M. Schmidt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and
Syndicalism, Counterpower (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009).
19. The revival in interest in anarchist political thought since the end of the Cold War has
been staggering. A key resource are the annotated bibliographic chapters in R. Kinna, The
Continuum Companion to Anarchism (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 353–450.
20. D. E. Apter, ‘The old anarchism and the new – some comments’, in Anarchism Today
(London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 1–13; R. Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto,
1989). In this enterprise, we follow A. Kalyvas and I. Katznelson’s revisionist historiogra-
phy of the emergence of liberalism. Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 17

21. Gordon, op. cit., Ref. 3, p, 61; S. Newman, ‘Postanarchism: a politics of anti-
politics’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3 (2011), pp. 313–327; P. McLaughlin, Anarchism
and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2007); S. Clark, Living without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist Utopia,
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 67.
22. P. Kelly, ‘Rescuing political theory from the tyranny of history’, in Jonathan Floyd and Marc
Stears (Eds) Political Philosophy Versus History?: Contextualism and Real Politics in
Contemporary Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 13–37.
23. There are clear positive grounds on which a critique of republicanism could be advanced. We
do not pursue these here. For one outstanding example of this, see J. P. Clark, The Impossible
Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 53–92.
24. A. Gourevitch, ‘Labor republicanism and the transformation of work’, Political Theory, 41
(2013), pp. 593–594; Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, op cit., Ref. 16, p. 9.
25. There is a substantial left-republican literature. See for example C. Laborde,
‘Republicanism and global justice’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (2010), pp.
48–69; P. Markell, ‘The insufficiency of non-domination’, Political Theory, 36 (2008), pp.
9–36; S. White, ‘The republican critique of capitalism’, Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy, 14 (2011), pp. 561–579.
26. Pettit, Just Freedom, op. cit., Ref. 1., pp. 11–13.
27. S. Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994); J. Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France
Since the Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
28. Kalyvas and Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings, op. cit., Ref. 20; N. Fischer, Marxist Ethics
within Western Political Theory: A Dialogue with Republicanism, Communitarianism and
Liberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).
29. Hazareesingh, Political Traditions, op. cit., Ref. 27, p. 66.
30. S. Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century
French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 216, 290.
31. See, for example, R. Bellamy. ‘The political form of the constitution: the separation of
powers, rights and representative democracy’, Political Studies, 44, no. 3 (1996), p. 436.
Whether because they have been interpreted as the poor cousins to Marx (P. Thomas, Karl
Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1980), generic anti-statists (cf.
N. Jun, ‘On philosophical anarchism’, Radical Philosophy Review, 19 (2016), pp. 551–567),
or simply terrorists (R. Kinna, Early Writings on Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2006)),
ignoring anarchism seems perfectly acceptable in contemporary political science.
32. A. Gourevitch, ‘Labor and republican liberty’, Constellations, 18, no. 3 (2011), pp. 431–454;
Gourevitch, ‘Labor republicanism’, op. cit., Ref. 24; Gourevitch, Slavery to the Cooperative
Commonwealth, op. cit., Ref. 16.
33. L. Lobère, Louis Blanc: His Life and His Contribution to The Rise of French Jacobin Socialism
(Illinois: Northwestern University Press: 1961); Jennings, op. cit., Ref. 27, pp. 269–276.
34. S. K. Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984); A. Prichard, Justice, Order and Anarchy. The International
Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: Routledge, 2013).
35. T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1988).
36. A. Parsons, Haymarket Statements of the Accused, [1886] online at https://www.marxists.
org/subject/mayday/articles/speeches.html#PARSONS.
37. C. Levy, ‘Anarchism, Internationalism and Nationalism in Europe, 1860–1939ʹ, Australian
Journal of Politics and History, 50, no. 3 (2004), p. 333.
38. E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain: Origins of the Civil War
(London/New Haven: Yale University Press 1970); T. Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia,
1868–1903 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
39. G. Bourde, ‘La Sagra, sabio y utopista’, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José
Martí, 3 (2015), pp. 109–150.
18 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

40. J. -J. Becker, ‘La Gauche et l’idée de la guerre’, in J.-J. Becker and G. Candar (Eds) Histoire des
Gauches en France: Volume 1, L’héritage du XIXe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), pp.
522–530; P. Darriulat, Les Patriotes: La gauche républicaine et la nation 1830–1870 (Paris:
Éditions Du Seuil, 2001).
41. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1969).
42. C. Pierson, ‘Rousseau and the paradoxes of property’, European Journal of Political Theory,
12 (2013), pp. 409–424.
43. J. -J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, F. Philip (Trans.) and Patrick
Coleman (Ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 75.
44. P. -J. Proudhon, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of
Government, D. R. Kelley and B. G. Smith (Trans) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, [1840] 1994), p. 13.
45. P. -J. Proudhon, ‘Letter to Bastiat’, [1850] in Benjamin Tucker (Trans.) and Iain McKay (Ed.)
Property Is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011), p. 523.
46. L. Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 3. On Garrison see also Gourevitch, Slavery to
the Cooperative Commonwealth, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 41–45.
47. L. Tolstoy, ‘The Slavery of Our Times’, in David Stephens (Ed.) Government is Violence
Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism (London: Phoenix Press, 1990 [1900]), pp. 129, 136.
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 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 19

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20 R. KINNA AND A. PRICHARD

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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Ian Carter, Dario Castiglione, Keith Dowding, Benjamin Franks, Ana Juncos
Garcia, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Bruno Leipold, Phil Parvin, Christina Oelgemoller, Thomas
Swann and Andy Schapp for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. The
paper benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of JPI’s reviewers and participants at
the Exeter Political Theory Reading Group, the Anarchist Studies Network Conference
(Loughborough), the Association of Political Theory Conference, the Kent Critical Legal
Conference, the Political Studies Association Convention; at the workshops on freedom at the
University of Sydney and the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of
Westminster and a political theory seminar at the University of St. Andrews.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
Research for this paper was undertaken as part of the project 'Anarchy as a Constitutional
Principle: Constitutionalising in Anarchist Politics' funded by the ESRC Transformative Research
Award ES/N006860/1.