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anarchist rejections of the state 81
summary
This chapter has examined some leading conceptions of government,
authority, power and liberty. There are three key findings:
1. Anarchists reject the state because they believe it to be iniquitous
and unnecessary; because it inhibits the expression of freedom,
most importantly, through exploitation and alienation.
2. Anarchists typically reject all forms of government, authority
and power but accept the possibility of self-government,
acknowledge the role of natural authority and rely on notions of
collective or individual power to accomplish the state’s abolition.
3. Anarchists typically identify anarchism with liberty, but have
different ideas about what it means to be free and are divided
about whether communitarianism or libertarianism offers the
best conditions for the realization of liberty.
further reading
Michael Bakunin, God and the State, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/
Anarchist_Archives
George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of
Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, http://www.spunk.org.texts/
writers.debord/sp000547.txt
Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/
Anarchist_Archives
John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto
Press, 1998)
Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism
(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)
Jon Purkis and James Bowen (eds), Twenty-First Century Anarchism
(London: Cassell, 1997)
William Reichert, ‘Anarchism, Freedom and Power’, Ethics, 79 (2),
1969: 139–49
William Reichert, ‘Towards a New Understanding of Anarchism’,
Western Political Quarterly, 20, 1967: 856–65
Alan Ritter, ‘The Anarchist Justification of Authority’ in