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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
they are commanded to do it. Running these ideas together, Wolff
argued that authority was incompatible with autonomy. Because he
also held that individuals had a duty to be autonomous, he concluded
that the concept of a legitimate state was a contradiction in terms. 24
Wolff’s argument about the duty to be autonomous has been widely
disputed. Yet his main point – that command is incompatible with
reason and that the state, by inhibiting individuals from acting in
accordance with their conscience and stripping them of responsibility
for the choices and judgements they make – holds whether or not
individuals are said to have this duty. And though Wolff’s position was
strictly philosophical, his critique of state authority has a broad
appeal. As Emma Goldman argued ‘[a]narchism urges man to think,
to investigate, to analyze every proposition’. The authority of the state
prohibits and frustrates this endeavour. Similarly Rand argued:
A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not
subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or
controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to
anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or ‘welfare’. 25
In sum: anarchists since Godwin have complained that state authority
forces individuals to do things they believe to be wrong and commands
them to do things that they might otherwise agree to do. It
not only makes hypocrites of its citizens but infantilizes them in the
process.
The second critique, that authority stifles creativity, has two
dimensions. Both focus on the notion of individuality, but one
critique is concerned with issues of dependency whilst the other
examines questions of expression. Falling into the first category,
Kropotkin understood the problem of individuality as a problem of
‘free initiative and free agreement’. In his view, the exercise of state
authority – reinforced by the Church – had so disciplined and
organized individuals that they had lost the habit of acting for
themselves. The state had become ‘the master of all the domains of
human activity’. Individuals had little sense that they were
independent beings, and still less that they could co-operate interdependently
to achieve common goals. In response to the critics of
anarchism who argued that authority was necessary to secure order,
Kropotkin replied:
We are told we are too slavish, too snobbish, to be placed under free
institutions; but we say that because we are indeed so slavish we