Wolff's Defence of Philosophical Anarchism

Abstract

Anarchism is not given any serious status in the great texts of political philosophy until Hobbes' Leviathan. There it is mentioned and described as the state of nature . We find no advocacy of anarchism, however, until the time of the French Revolution (e.g., in Godwin). In the nineteenth century, the century of isms , the term 'anarchism' came into common use. It was perhaps first used in an approving way by Proudhon, who adopted the term to describe his own political beliefs. One important point about this new usage was that anarchism largely lost its connotation of chaos-of disorder and insecurity-at least among those who advocated it. From the point of view of its defenders, anarchism would be the selfregulation of a social order or of a group of persons or of the single individual, where self-regulation was distinguished from coercive regulation by institutions of the State (e.g., army, police, laws, courts, and jails). In a word, anarchism would be a desirable state of society without government. There is, of course, more complexity to the theory of anarchism than this brief capsulation could indicate. I am referring here, in particular, to the many proposals for decentralized social organization put forward by anarchists historically: the industrial worker syndicates , the artisan mutualist societies, the agrarian communes, co-operative societies of all sorts. Now I do not want to denigrate the significance of these suggestions, or of the utopian impulse in general. But the point is that the existence, and even the desired quality of life, of any one of these social arrangements is probably consistent with the existence of government. Hence, it is to some purpose that the negative character of anarchism has been stressed. For it is no accident that anarchism, as the name itself implies, is best understood by reference to what it is against. Moreover, given that the radically individualistic devil-take-the-hindmost anarchist of the Right would tend to reject the social ideals of the egalitarian, communityoriented anarchist of the Left, it may well be that the only thing that all anarchists have in common is what anarchism denies. In any case, this negative side of theoretical anarchism would appear to be a necessary adjunct of any positive scheme that the anarchist might want to advance. One of the characteristic ways, and perhaps the most persuasive way, in which this denial side of anarchism has been expressed is in the claim that no government can be legitimate . This proposition states, I think, the essence of what the philosophical anarchist is committed to.