Anarchy and Nature

Proudhon’s life’s work can be interpreted as an attempt to defend the reality and ubiquity of anarchy and the impossibility of ‘the absolute’, using philosophy of science, moral philosophy and history.Footnote ²² The question that preoccupied him was how to reconcile the plurality of peoples with the need for social coordination and unity; or how to enable the articulation of justice in the context of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation? His approach to the reality or otherwise of social pluralism, and what to do with it, was a key contribution to wider nineteenth-century discussions of the ‘social question’.Footnote ²³

Proudhon interpreted anarchy through the looking glass of what he called ‘cosmotheology’, or the theological foundations of the historical construction of order. This worked in two ways. First, he argued, all that is rationally impenetrable is ‘divine’, and has been so historically and remains so today. For example, war is ‘divine’ in these terms, and it remains so until we have given it an empirical, phenomenological footing.Footnote ²⁴ Second, cosmotheology highlighted the tendency of enlightenment thought to replicate the eschatology and theodicy of the Church by simply secularising its main claims. Modern political thought, he argued, tended to explain evil in terms of a stimulus for the rational unfurling of the good, and a transcendence of the conditions of the present (theodicy). Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and Saint Simon’s positivist end times, for example, were secularised eschatology, where science and history finally unified, and the ‘government of persons’ would be replaced with the ‘administration of things’.Footnote ²⁵ Saint Simon’s acolyte Comte, offered a neo-Platonic cabal of Priest Scientists to rule in the interests of all, and even invited Proudhon to join in this great pantheon of Positivism. Proudhon rejected Comte in terms similar to those he used to rebuff Marx’s invitation to join the communist vanguard.Footnote ²⁶

Philosophy, from Socrates through the Reformation and Enlightenment, had, Proudhon argued, evolved ‘into a science of causes’.Footnote ²⁷ Where previously law and the Decalogue had operated as a bedrock of reason, the critique of religious dogma had led political philosophers and law makers to a fundamental uncertainty of belief and, then, to lament the fact that politics and the exercise of force are too much like ‘art, which is to say something essentially arbitrary’. Philosophy, in existential crisis, then aped the natural sciences by searching for laws of reason, or right, to ground legislation in an objective, non-metaphysical ‘idea of authority’.Footnote ²⁸ Given that ‘divine will’ established all things, and that man is part of nature, ascertaining those laws would ensure that the ‘will of the sovereign’ was also the will of God. Proudhon concluded that the movement from religion to philosophy was minimal. Indeed, he described Rousseau, Plato and a host of others as religious philosophers.

The metaphysical age, which Proudhon associated most clearly with Kant, was the attempt to conjoin both the ideal and the real in a critical philosophy. No matter how improbably, this presupposed the possibility of the convergence of the laws of nature with those of human thought. Ultimately, it reproduced the absolute: a divine and final point of authority: this time in human reason. Rejecting or questioning a natural, transcendent or pure origin of thought inevitably pushes us towards anarchy. In the Philosophy of Progress (1853), written while he was incarcerated in Saint Pélagie prison for criticising Louis Napoleon, Proudhon noted the following in passing:

‘Demonarchizing the Universe’ was the precondition of progress, Proudhon argued.

This philosophy of science mirrors Proudhon’s Heraclitan philosophy of history: ‘Nothing persists, said the ancient sages, everything changes, everything flows, everything becomes; consequently, everything remains and everything is connected; by further consequence, the entire universe is opposition, balance, equilibrium’.Footnote ³² He continued that: ‘Movement exists: this is my fundamental axiom’.Footnote ³³ ‘What I maintain is that we cannot preserve the status quo’.Footnote ³⁴ ‘God […] immutable, infinite, eternal, absolute […], cannot be; but the social being, grouped, organized, perfectible, progressive, whose essence is to become, always, is’.Footnote ³⁵

Proudhon’s approach to the philosophy of science left a deep mark on anarchist thought. Bakunin adopted the term ‘antitheologism’ to distinguish anarchist science from dogmatic belief. Using organised Christianity and idealism as his foil, he defined theologism as the view that perfection lay in the divine, that the divine was knowable through revelation and that order led to salvation, demanding both obedience and sacrifice. Like Proudhon, Bakunin defended science as an instrument of genuine discovery. The mainlines of his thought were set out in God and the State, a text published by Élisée Reclus and his fellow anarchist communist Carlo Cafiero in the 1880s. Bakunin’s main theme was authority and the potential for theologised science. Although he talked loosely about ‘absolute science’ as ‘absolute authority’, he denied the possibility of its mastery, and accordingly rejected the false claims advanced by ‘men of science’ to ‘absolute, universal, and infallible authority’.Footnote ³⁶ Against the faulty idea of the absolute, Bakunin denied the possibility of universality: what was called law or morality yesterday was not recognised as such today; norms in China were not the same as those elsewhere. As a proud ‘atheist’, Bakunin argued that nothing could possibly encompass ‘the infinite totality of worlds and being’. The proposition was unintelligible, unimaginable except as a religious fiction that underpinned sovereignty and the state.

Science, then, was a project, a process, the object of ‘all the efforts of the human mind’ to grasp ‘the system of co-ordination’ of ‘all the natural laws manifested by the incessant development of the world’. This project would never be complete, because it followed the path of life. Moreover, the knowledge that scientific study imparted was always only ever partial. Adding another twist to the argument, Bakunin clarified the limits of science by distinguishing it from art. The role of science, he argued, was to formulate abstract generalisations about reality. Yet reality itself was art, created by ‘acting, living and passing individuals’. Preaching the ‘revolt of life’ against ‘the government of science’, he defended science as art’s handmaiden and refused to externalise its authority.Footnote ³⁷

Kropotkin’s construction of ‘modern science’ was explicable in Proudhon and Bakunin’s terms and similarly indebted to Auguste Comte. Science, he argued, was an expression of philosophy which, in turn, was ‘but a generalization, the result of intellectual movement in all the realms of life’.Footnote ³⁸ He aligned anarchism with science to reveal the speciousness of rival doctrines. Adopting Proudhon’s tripartite model, he plotted the movement from religion to metaphysics and science, emphasising the overlaps between these evolutionary steps, as much as the transitions. For example, Marxism was described by Marxists as science, but it was metaphysics in Kropotkin’s book. Indeed, the bulk of so-called modern knowledge was religion masquerading as science. Rephrasing Chernyshevsky’s question, ‘what is to be done?’ in his influential essay ‘Appeal to the Young’, he advised junking the existing libraries of repressive orthodoxy and pursuing genuine scientific methods in every field of intellectual endeavour.Footnote ³⁹

Kropotkin’s overriding interest was evolutionary biology, notably the work of Herbert Spencer, the liberal champion of Social Darwinism. Spencer’s science, Kropotkin argued, was skewed by unscientific, theological assumptions about human nature. While formally removing God from nature, Spencer had erroneously used the ‘treacherous method of resemblance’ or ‘analogies’ to justify law and vengeance – religiously-rooted morality – to protect the right of property.Footnote ⁴⁰

Explaining the shifts of modern science as a continuous revolt against orthodoxy, Kropotkin assessed knowledge claims by the standards of a naturalistic, inductive-deductive method of investigation.Footnote ⁴¹ This led him to describe anarchism as

His ambition was comparable to Proudhon and Bakunin’s. Naturalism, like Proudhon’s ‘philosophy of the people’,Footnote ⁴³ and Bakunin’s ‘art’, focused science on the ‘creative, constructive activity of the masses’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Rejecting anthropomorphism, ‘the habit of attributing human qualities and intentions to Nature and to physical forces’, Kropotkin endorsed Spencer’s attempt to construct a synthetic philosophy, ‘rising from the simple to the complex’, to ‘represent a reasoned, unified systematic summary of the whole of our knowledge’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This conception, like Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s, showed reality to be a constant, shape-shifting movement of forces. Indeed, reinforcing Bakunin’s view, he described natural law as ‘nothing but a certain relation among phenomena’, that takes a ‘temporary character of causality’.Footnote ⁴⁶ There was, Kropotkin argued, nothing ‘preconceived in what we call harmony in Nature’, only the ‘chance of collisions and encounters’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Taking up Bakunin’s theme of scientific authority, he remarked: Anarchists ‘shrug their shoulders’ when ‘metaphysicians wish to persuade a naturalist that the intellectual and emotional life of man is unrolled “according to the inherent laws of the Spirit,”’ or that ‘the aim of Law is to establish Justice, which represented the manifestation of the Supreme Idea’. Anarchists, he added, were equally at a loss when asked: ‘What is, then, according to you, the Aim of Life?’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Kropotkin, these questions were meaningless, for the object of science was life and its philosophy was anarchy. When anarchists are ‘addressed in this language’, he wrote, ‘they pass on without paying attention to it, and continue their study of social conceptions and illusions, past and present, always following the method of the naturalist’.Footnote ⁴⁹

For Kropotkin, the point of modern science was to find answers to plain questions ‘well put’ and to ‘help evolution in the direction that determines the social, scientific, and artistic activity of the Anarchist’. Like Proudhon, then, he promoted science as an enabler of anarchy or the pluralisation of life, its precondition, and normative ‘ought’. The theory of mutual aid was a ‘factor of evolution’ in both these senses: his study of natural phenomena stripped evolutionary theory of theologism to tip the scales of analysis against Spencer’s prevailing Social Darwinist view.

Science was a thread that knitted anarchists together as opponents of authority. Emma Goldman distinguished the ‘philosophy of theism’ from the ‘philosophy of atheism’ to describe the anarchist view. The former ‘is static and fixed’. She continued, the ‘mere attempt’ at discovery was ‘non-belief’, the ‘denial of wisdom’. The latter expressed ‘the expansion and growth of the human mind’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The human mind, she remarked, ‘never was, and can never be, bound by fixities’. Echoing Bakunin, she conceptualised the ‘restless march towards knowledge’ as a march in step with ‘life’.Footnote ⁵¹

Anarchist science exposed the falsity of the popular idea of anarchy as disordered and pointed to rival concepts of order and science. As Goldman put it (quoting the freethinker Joseph McCabe), the ‘universe is not the result of a creative fiat by some divine intelligence, out of nothing, producing a masterpiece chaotic in perfect operation’. Rather, it was the ‘product of chaotic forces operating through aeons of time, of clashes and cataclysms, of repulsion and attraction crystalizing through the principle of selection into what the theists call the universe guided into order and beauty’.Footnote ⁵² Order is anarchic, lacking a transcendent telos.

Using Proudhon to benchmark the historical tradition, we discuss concepts of divisibility, relatedness and irreducibility to flesh out this anarchist conception of order.

Anarchy and Divisibility

Following Comte, Proudhon argued that ontology begins not with ‘substances’ but with ‘relations’, and not with ‘ideas’ and absolutes, but with reality: ‘I use the word division to designate the first cosmogenic moment, much as Genesis uses the term Separation’. For Proudhon, ontology is ‘synthetic’. The ‘fact’ of a thing is always a composite of other things. The notion of being, and of cause, has been over-simplified and the ‘simple’ reduced to the ‘real’.Footnote ⁵³

If we start, as Proudhon does, with Leibnitz, then all things exist in virtue of their relations with other things – the ‘monad’ is not a reality, only the relation is real.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is the foundation of what Proudhon called his ‘revolutionary ontology’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Order is a balance of relations, a coalescence, a contingent irreducible, emergent (in)stability:

Force is a fundamental property of all relations, and contingent, complex and reciprocal relations of force and equilibrium, can, Proudhon argued, be identified in nature as in human social relations.

Proudhon’s ideas seeped into late nineteenth-century thought. In an essay on science and revolution written for a Russian audience in 1870, Bakunin used the concept of division to reject the state as the ‘fundamental and absolute’ principle of union. Examining themes explored in God and the State, he categorised himself as a partisan of everyday action: a non-doctrinaire revolutionary who recognised that entities were composed of individual parts. This idea of division, he added, applied to all relationships. Everything in the organic or inorganic world that lives, ‘or simply exists mechanically, physically or chemically’ behaved in the same way.Footnote ⁵⁷

In a series of articles written for the periodical The Nineteenth Century Kropotkin pursued similar themes, discussing topics including cell biology, quantum physics and cosmic gases. Arguing that the advanced ideas of the age in all fields confirmed the anarchist conception of anarchy, he congratulated modern psychologists and biologists for demonstrating that humans are composites of ‘faculties’, of ‘germs’, of ‘organs’. Modern science, he continued, had shown individuals to be ‘a cosmos of organs’, each organ to be ‘a cosmos of cells’, and each cell to be ‘a cosmos of infinitely small ones’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Élisée Reclus, Kropotkin’s friend and, like his brother Élie, a former Communard, found similar analogies in evolution. The first ‘life-forms’, he argued, ‘present rudimentary, uniform, and scarcely differentiated features’. Development was a process of differentiation or division.Footnote ⁵⁹ Looking at ‘humanity in its entirety’, he argued that ‘social groupings’ usually formed ‘small, distinct colonies’. The earliest were ‘microcosmic’ becoming ‘more and more extended and increasingly complex over time’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Like Kropotkin, Reclus argued that all social phenomena could be seen as composites. Engrained habits of thought, the tendency towards abstraction and the articulation of ‘sublime ideas’ that ‘merge with natural laws that govern the world’ explained why they were still typically theorised as singularities and wholes. The concept of the state was a prime example. Demythologising it, Reclus rejected idealist constructions of the state as ‘pure essence’ and the blunt Stirnerite critique of idealism as ‘philosophical abstraction’. The state, he argued, was a ‘collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to its influence’.Footnote ⁶¹ A society, similarly, was ‘a collection of individuals who come together and deliberate in pursuit of the common good’.Footnote ⁶²

Anarchy and Relatedness

In anarchism, divisibility did not spell atomisation. Rather, it bolstered a concept of relatedness. In an essay on meteorites and comets for The Nineteenth Century, Kropotkin remarked that the astronomers and physicists who studied the ‘tiny mines of the celestial space’, had improved our ‘general comprehension of the life of the universe […and] the unity of nature’.Footnote ⁶³ This conception of the whole runs through nineteenth-century literature. We consider four iterations: relatedness as harmony, interconnection, complementarity and community.

Harmony was a major motif in Kropotkin’s work. Advancing it as a scientific proposition, he argued that the ‘whole aspect of the universe’ had been transformed by modern scientific conceptions of cosmic interconnection.Footnote ⁶⁴ The political value of this conception was that it helped to dispel myths of anarchism’s repressive utopianism. Adopted as the name for one of Robert Owen’s utopian communities, ‘harmony’ was associated in the history of socialist thought with paternalism, the eradication of difference and the achievement of social happiness through the alignment of individual and communal interests.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pushing back against Marx and Engles’ critique of Charles Fourier’s apparently class-blind, consensual utopianism,Footnote ⁶⁶ and steering socialist history from Marxism to anarchist socialism, Kropotkin argued: ‘The idea of force governing the world, of preestablished law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of: the one which results from disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each other in equilibrium’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Proudhon, Reclus and Rocker all referred to the Riddle of the Sphinx to outline their conceptions of interconnection and complementarity.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rocker outlined his view in The Six, a story he devised to raise the morale of fellow inmates during his internment as an enemy alien in the First World War. It pairs Faust with Don Juan, Hamlet with Don Quixote and E. T. A. Hoffman’s fictitious monk Medardus with Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the singer immortalised by Novalis. They are ciphers for intellect and passion, knowledge and courage, egoism and love and their disagreements and separate wanderings illustrate the partiality and subjectivity of judgment. Each character in the pair reflects on their partner’s failings, but none fully grasps the partiality of their own perspectives. At the end of their journeys, they confront the Riddle. The realisation that their roads have converged sparks a collective ‘awakening’. While their enlightenment evokes the discovery of the laws of nature, it does not lead to unity or the formation of an artificial body or a common ego as Hobbes and Rousseau variously describe the sovereign. Rather, it brings them into an appreciative association which preserves individuality and idiosyncrasy. The Sphinx, who delivers the lesson, tells them:

The last aspect of relatedness, community, was brilliantly elaborated by Landauer. Sympathetic to the view that ‘the individual’ was what Stirner called a ‘spook’, an abstract fiction or ‘bloated nothingness’ that restricted our imagination, he nevertheless rejected Stirner’s conception of the individual, dubbing it theological. Stirner, he argued, had thrown the baby out with the bathwater and, in rejecting the atomised individual, he had created a ‘concrete’ being or ego in the ideal alone. The reality, as Landauer saw it, was described by ‘affinities and communities’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Coining the phase ‘from separation to community’, Landauer conceptualised relatedness as a spiritual force rooted in the discovery of heredity or ancestral community. This meant the unearthing of ‘the community’s desire in the individual’, not the investigation of family history.Footnote ⁷¹ With a nod to psychoanalysis, he admitted that individuals knew as much about this communal inheritance as they did about their ‘unconscious desires’.Footnote ⁷² But this inheritance was as real as the unconscious, and the refusal to accept it reduced individuals to ‘all matter, all perception, all spook’ and made the ‘meaning of life and the world’ forever ‘mysterious’.Footnote ⁷³

Community emerged through self-discovery; a disruptive awakening first ‘experienced within the recesses of the human interior’.Footnote ⁷⁴ He argued: ‘Once individuals have transformed themselves into communities, then they are ready to form wider communities with like-minded individuals. These will be new kinds of communities, established by individuals with the courage and the need to separate from the dullness of superficiality’.Footnote ⁷⁵

On this account, anarchy was a testing aspiration that disrupted social relations, unsettling the stability of the self as part of the process. In his short essay, ‘Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism’, Landauer described the productive chaos it caused in individuals:

The idea that individuals and collectives generate new constellations of forces – multiplicities – that shape the possibilities open to individuals in context, in an endless, complex feedback loop, was not controversial in nineteenth-century anarchism, though Landauer’s qualified endorsement of Stirner and fondness for Nietzsche was.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, the normative conception of anarchy emerged from the identification, study and abolition of ossified social relationships that routinely, and usually arbitrarily, shape our lives. For time immemorial, Élisée Reclus noted, men ‘haunted by their fear of the unknown’ and their ‘feeling of powerlessness to discover the real causes of things’, had created ‘divinities that represented both their formless ideal and the basis for an entire mysterious world of things’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Anarchy was ‘a new spirit’, yet also ‘as old as humanity’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Anarchy and Irreducibility

Irreducibility was the idea that order in anarchy could not be explained either by the decomposition of entities into their separate parts or by the action of any single underlying force. Anarchist ontology instead directed analysis towards notions of emergence.

Writing at the end of her life, with experience of Bolshevism, Stalinism and Nazism under her belt, Emma Goldman presented a crisp version of the thesis. The ‘individual’, she argued, is ‘the true reality in life’, a ‘cosmos in himself’ and the ‘sole source and motive power of evolution and progress’. Yet in this impassioned defence, she also recognised the ‘wonderful results’, namely, the ‘unique force of man’s individuality’, that came from ‘co-operation with other individuals’.Footnote ⁸⁰ This association, she argued elsewhere, created something beyond the individual.Footnote ⁸¹ Individuality was an emergent property of social forces, unique, the basis of the individual’s sovereignty and due reciprocal respect. It was real, material and tangible but also only ever in a process of becoming.

Proudhon laid the philosophical foundations for Goldman’s argument. According to Proudhon’s theory of groups, emergence is explicable as a function of grouping as becoming. Indeed, in ‘Le Petit Catéchisme Politique’, arguably the clearest statement of Proudhon’s social ontology anywhere in his works, he defined natural groups as ‘social embryos’.Footnote ⁸² To find order, he had argued in The Philosophy of Progress, we must build groups: ‘Just as in logic the idea of movement or progress translates into that other, the series, so, in ontology, it has as a synonym: the group. Everything that exists is grouped; everything that forms a group is one. Consequently, it is perceptible, and, consequently, it is’.Footnote ⁸³ But this state of being is not fixed, monadic, or hermetic. ‘I regard society, the human group, as a being sui generis, constituted by the fluid relations and economic solidarity of all the individuals, of the nation, of the locality or corporation, or of the entire species’.Footnote ⁸⁴ This process is unending. In Contradictions Politiques (1870), Proudhon argued:

This account of social order does not presuppose the empirical equality of all groups and individuals – quite the opposite. Balances emerge because of inequality, hierarchy, domination, and the fluid process of division and recombination. A calibrated society is one in which the balance is tolerable, enforced, implicit, habitual, or all of these things at once. But a balance is never permanent.

Just as society supervenes on the actions and activities of individuals, and social products are the emergent property of their labour, individuals are groups too, emergent balances of forces internal and biological, and in their relations with their environment. For Proudhon, and those that followed him, consciousness was understood as emergent from biological, intellectual and social relations in their material context. Unlike Comte, who argued that free will was a chimera dreamt up by the philosophes of the enlightenment, Proudhon argued that agency was free precisely because it was irreducible to any form of structure, biological or social, even if it was fundamentally shaped by them all.

In his posthumously published and unfinished book Ethics, a text examining the evolution of moral philosophy through the lens of mutual aid, Kropotkin applied Proudhon’s concept of emergence to investigate the source of moral sentiments. His main theme was the relationship between the ‘instinct’ to cohere and the development of ‘will’, a term he borrowed from Leibnitz to refer to the capacity to exercise judgments.Footnote ⁸⁶ Proudhon, he argued, had identified right, the ‘ability […] to demand from all others that they respect human dignity in their own person’, and duty, ‘the demand that everybody should recognize this dignity in others’, as the basis of this relationship.Footnote ⁸⁷ While he modified Proudhon’s theory, he used the analysis to deny explanations that relied on revelation or the calculation of self-interest. Nor was morality explained by passion or ‘feeling’. Proudhon’s insight, Kropotkin argued, was his contention that morality was a ‘product of the development of human societies’; what he called ‘sociality’ or ‘the sense of righteousness’ was equally an expression of the ‘the consciousness of the equal right of all men to mutual regard for personality’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Morality emerged out of, or perhaps supervenes on, individuals’ interconnections.

Kropotkin’s account of the construction of Gothic cathedrals illustrated the fortuitous contingency and productive ‘surplus’ that anarchists associated with emergence. While he reduced the grandeur of the cathedrals to the ‘grand idea’ of ‘brotherhoood and unity’ that inspired them, his narrative was anarchic: the cathedral had sprung from ‘an audacity which could only be won by audacious struggles and victories’. It had no single force. Rather, it expressed ‘vigour’ because, he said, ‘vigour permeated all the life of the city’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Similarly, for Rocker, the Gothic cathedral, ‘could only arise out of a society so rich and of such varied structure, in which every part, consciously or unconsciously strove toward a common goal’. It was a ‘collective creation in the production of which every […] member of society, joyously took part’. The cathedrals were produced by the labour of individuals working collectively. But they were more than the sum of these parts, or even of the surplus that their labour produced. Rocker described the cathedrals as the ‘majestic embodiment of that community which lent it a soul’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Medieval historians rightly question his romanticism.Footnote ⁹¹ But Rocker’s analysis, like Kropotkin’s, was not intended as an accurate account of the European Middle Ages. He was trying to establish the philosophical point that beauty emerged from the contingencies of anarchy.

Association, Force and Division

History, ethnography and science convinced nineteenth-century anarchists that association was a fact of life. As Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid, human and non-human species associated to rear progeny, for reasons of security and to enjoy material well-being. The complication was to grasp the social, political and ethical relationships it nurtured and the forces active within it.Footnote ⁹²

Proudhon’s short answer to the question ‘what is association?’ was ‘binding union’.Footnote ⁹³ His longer analysis involved an account of coordination. Coordination was what all groups do, using different expressions and configurations of force. Association was equally open to the revolutionary proposition that society needed to be ‘straightened’ out, just ‘as a young tree’ is made ‘to take a different direction’, and a ‘carriage is turned in a different direction after it has been pulled out of a rut’,Footnote ⁹⁴ as it was to the idea of ‘social liquidation’. But this latter proposition referred to the liquidation of government by the social, not the liquidation of the social.Footnote ⁹⁵

The idea that prevailed after the French Revolution, Proudhon argued, was the governmental idea popularised by the ‘scoundrel’ Rousseau,Footnote ⁹⁶ namely, that ‘the people’ as a collective had ‘no unitary existence’. Mistakenly, Rousseau had designated the people ‘an abstract personality, a moral individuality, incapable by itself of thinking, acting or moving’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Proudhon’s task was not only to show that association supported division, but also that social progression depended on tapping the non-governmental tendencies that had gained momentum in the years leading up to the Revolution.

Proudhon put in place the philosophical building blocks of the argument when he argued that history was shaped by individual and collective free will in opposition to necessity. He labelled his approach ‘ideo-realism’. The thought underpinning it was that all objects and phenomena exert force. Proudhon defined force in terms of two conceptions of powers: puissance, derived from the innate properties of the thing, and pouvoir, a fundamentally social activity ubiquitous in all social realms, though more complex in human societies.Footnote ⁹⁸ Inertia was an example of puissance – inactive resistance is an exercise of force. Pouvoir, however, described simple acts, like the putting one’s shoulder to a boulder, and more complex functions, like thought and co-operation, or building communities and constitutions. Thought and collective action are both struggles against necessity.

To illustrate, Proudhon opened War and Peace, his monumental analysis of war, with an account of its ‘moral phenomenology’, that is, war’s ideals, its rituals, symbols and instruments. These are often obscured by a focus on the materiality of war, but both are operative forces, and the character of the movement is emergent from the mix of the two.Footnote ⁹⁹ Just as the action of heaving a boulder involves the actor, and forces of gravity and friction, to create movement, the collective use of force in war, both moral and material, has revolutionised association, for better or worse.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

‘Ideo-realism’ represented an attempt to link ideas and material reality in ways which privileged neither and presupposed their interrelation.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It explained how ‘collective force’, an ontological, mechanical, industrial phenomenon, as well as a rational, artistic and moral force (what Proudhon called ‘collective reason’), gave rise to association and ‘social power’, or pouvoir, and how, in any complex society, association tended towards division and recombination. The more sophisticated the activity, function, or set of relations, the more carefully coordinated that division of forces must be.

Association, Proudhon argued, was driven by changes in production and the emergence of the complex division of labour. In society’s infancy, he contended, the coordination of the group was confused with the activities of the leader, or the ‘Godhead’ as Rocker termed it.Footnote ¹⁰² Over time, as ‘science develops, as labour is divided, as industry takes off’, the ‘number of capacities becomes proportionately greater; and this entirely empirical progress is manifested by the establishment of aristocracies’.Footnote ¹⁰³ These protean associations are nevertheless fated to division, dissolution and change.

Central to this process is the development of the complex division of labour in society. Leaning on the ideas of Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say, Proudhon used his ‘revolutionary social ontology’ to develop this argument.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He begins with the workshop. Here, individual initiative is constitutive of collective endeavour, and vice versa. This collective reciprocity is the basis of his philosophy of mutualism, both as an explanation of social power and as a principle of ethics.

Proudhon does not look to scale this account of social coordination. The coordination required to sustain advanced civilisations, with complex divisions of labour, is possibly beyond us.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But science, or ‘social science’ as he called it, is a key tool in helping us chart that path, and the constitutions of society must be deliberate. In The General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon argued that the social constitution was taking shape ‘slowly and silently’ in the ‘shadow of political institutions’ and ‘out of sight of the statemen and priests’. The new order was a denial of the ‘old politics’ and ‘old religion’ and expressed ‘vitality and autonomy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The new system, he continued, ‘based upon the spontaneous practice of industry’ was a ‘system of Human Right’, opposed to ‘arbitrary command, and was ‘complete in itself’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Shortly before his execution in 1911, the Zen Buddhist monk Uchiyama GudōFootnote ¹⁰⁸ outlined a remarkably similar concept of pluralisation. Like Proudhon, he believed that the ‘evolution of politics, law, religion, and ethics’, highlighted the movement ‘from heteronomy toward autonomy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Inversely relating statehood or nationhood to the maturation of consciousness, he contended:

However, perhaps leaning closer to Kropotkin’s conception of the integrative force of association, Gudō described the ‘final goal of the human race’ as ‘independence and mutual aid’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Force and Integration

Kropotkin developed Proudhon’s ‘social science’ into the science of ‘mutual aid’. Rejecting Bakunin’s claim that Proudhon was an idealist, a ‘metaphysician’ who used an abstract concept of right as a theoretical point of departure,Footnote ¹¹² Kropotkin adapted his own version of ‘ideo-realism’ to reexamine the ideational and material forces of association.

Proudhon, he argued, had attached ‘great importance’ to ‘idealization’ and to ‘the ideals that in certain periods acquire the ascendancy over the petty daily cares’.Footnote ¹¹³ Adopting this framing in his history, The Great French Revolution, Kropotkin opened with an account of ‘the idea’ that had ‘inspired the middle classes in 1789’: the ‘system of centralized authority […] passive obedience of citizens to the law; that worship of law, of Parliament, of judges and their assistants’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Later, thinking about social transformation, he invoked the philosopher Albert Fouillée: ‘ideas are forces […] they are ethical forces’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The weakness of Proudhon’s philosophy, he argued, was that it lacked robust scientific articulation. He found the remedy in evolutionary theory, the philosophy of the age, and identified Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) as its seminal statement.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Reworking Darwin’s theory of evolution to challenge Spencer’s Social Darwinism,Footnote ¹¹⁷ Kropotkin substituted mutual aid for the idea of justice, as the ‘pivot’ of association.Footnote ¹¹⁸ His general theory, applicable to human and non-human species, related co-operation to social division and showed how forces tending towards homogenisation confronted those tending towards heterogeneity. He took diversity as a starting point. This was ‘the distinctive feature’ of the physical environment. The ‘territory occupied by each nation’, he argued, was ‘a most varied texture of soils and climates, of hills and valleys, of slopes and races’. Accordingly, each ‘nation’ practiced a ‘variety of occupations’ and was ‘a compound aggregate of tastes and inclinations, of wants and resources, of capacities and inventive powers’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Kropotkin related the extension and refinement of mutual aid to the breakup of these established associations and the creation of new forms of co-operation between their separate parts. As a ‘natural growth’, the process of separation and reintegration made ‘absolute uniformity’ impossible.Footnote ¹²⁰ To illustrate, he plotted the double movement in the emergence of the family in the clan, the multiplication of households in village communities and the emergence of civic, mercantile, labour and cultural unions in European city-states.Footnote ¹²¹ Mutual aid was practiced in all these settings. But the ethical refinement of mutual aid and its extension from blood relatives to guests and strangers depended on the cultures nurtured through association and their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. Evoking Proudhon’s analysis of social force, Kropotkin referred to the European cities to make the point:

However, parting company with Proudhon, who preferred the Roman concepts trust or usufruct, Kropotkin discovered that cultures of co-operation were fostered by common ownership or communism. His description of the village community asserted the link between the material and ideational forces:

Kropotkin’s analysis was bolstered by an analysis of European social regression in the high Middle Ages, when the effervescence of the ‘current of the people’ had been flattened by the countervailing minoritarian forces that sought to bottle it. The social forces helpful to co-operation had survived: neither ‘the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle’, he argued, had been able to ‘weed out the feeling of human solidarity’ nurtured ‘by our preceding evolution’.Footnote ¹²⁴ But inequalities, exploited by self-aggrandising elites, had incentivised the better-off to press their economic advantages over their fellow citizens.Footnote ¹²⁵ Notions of right supplanted ideas of common good and competition displaced co-operation as the norm of association. Arbitrary social divisions, stifling ‘organic’ separation, and atomisation thereafter inhibited the practice of mutual aid. Looking at late Victorian London, Kropotkin remarked:

In this history of association, the division of labour heralded the destruction of the commons and the emergence of a new repressive orthodoxy. Kropotkin called it political economy and, aligning Proudhon with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Marx,Footnote ¹²⁷ characterised it as a perfect illustration of the kind of abstract thinking that anarchist science was designed to correct: a fanciful proposition cooked up by intellectuals bedazzled by the productive power of industrialisation and neglectful of its imperialist logics and exploitative functions.

Far from serving anarchy, the division of labour served laissez-faire liberalism by steering global trade towards production for profit. The plan, Kropotkin argued, was to turn ‘a few nations of West Europe’ into the ‘manufacturers of the world’ and use the rest to supply ‘food they cannot grow themselves’ and the ‘raw materials they need for their manufactures’.Footnote ¹²⁸ This division meant national specialisation for the sake of elite domination or, as Kropotkin argued, the transformation of production, locally, regionally and globally, to suit the trading preferences of the industrialised states. It was a recipe for the development of monocultures and aggressive resource extraction; the refusal of states to comply with the theory was entirely predictable, as was the resulting competition between states for markets and economic resources.Footnote ¹²⁹

Kropotkin presented his weighty critique in Fields, Factories and Workshops. The book recommended the integration of industry and agriculture to boost local production, reduce supply lines and transform global exchange by resetting association on need, or the right to well-being. With the Paris Commune firmly in mind, Kropotkin argued that mutual aid was integral to the prefigurative call to assert the ‘right to possess the wealth of the community’, the ‘right to live in comfort’ and the ‘right to decide […] what this comfort shall be, what must be produced to ensure it, and what discarded as no longer of value’.Footnote ¹³⁰ But the ‘rights’ he had in mind were not just material. Pointing to a dense web of networks already mushrooming across the globe, Kropotkin reimagined association as a vehicle for borderless organising and the complex integration of local, regional and transnational groups. Taking Proudhon’s idea, he thus substituted ‘free agreement’ for Proudhon’s neo-Roman ‘contract’ to steer the voluntarism of association away from the assertion of right and towards the satisfaction of spiritual, intellectual, recreational, cultural and scientific needs.Footnote ¹³¹

Nationalism and Culture

Rocker’s magnum opus, Nationalism and Culture was a comprehensive, historicised re-statement of Proudhon’s federalist thesis which Bakunin revived in 1871, when the IWMA split into anarchist and Marxist factions. Situating Bolshevism, Nazism and Fascism at the end of a long history of European statism, Rocker described these forms of totalitarianism as expressions of nationalism and linked their predominance to the suppression of the federalist alternative. Like Kropotkin and Landauer, he argued that the destruction of the Paris Commune marked the constitutional turning point. Following Bakunin, he characterised it as the universalisation of a repressive, regulative ideal.

Confusingly, this account of constitutionalisation used ‘culture’ in a general sense to describe ‘the conscious resistance of man against the course of nature’ and, in a narrow sense, the free expression of community, and of individuals in those communities.Footnote ¹⁵² In the first sense, it referred to the collective coordination and administration of public life, from community, to city, to state and was even consistent with ‘slavery and despotism’. In the second, it distinguished arrangements that promoted ‘the caste interests of the privileged minority’ from those that defended ‘the interests of the community’.Footnote ¹⁵³ The usage anticipated the complexity Buber found in the relationship between the social and the political principle.

Rocker’s history analysed the drift of European culture towards nationalism.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Enthused by an emancipating mission and armed with bogus race theory, Rocker argued that Europeans had played a key role in spreading nationalism across the globe and traced the spread through Christian theologism from the Crusades to the Renaissance and the Reformation, and from the Catholic reconquest of Spain to the colonisation of the Americas. He conceptualised this by showing how the ‘will to freedom’ had been overcome by the ‘will to power’. The terminology, adapted from Nietzsche and common to much German philosophy at this time,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ described the movement in history, theory and practice from the social towards the political principle.

Reworking Kropotkin’s historical sociology, Rocker argued that the will to power had fuelled the drive towards statism in Europe from the high Middle Ages; the domination of man by man was complete by the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Like Kropotkin, he argued that economic inequality had undercut mutual aid in the medieval city states, and that the dismemberment of the medieval social system between the twelfth and fifteenth had been driven by the development of ‘mercantilism and economic monopoly’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The shift from absolutism had given rise to an ‘abstract concept of freedom’ or ‘ego-cult’ that promoted the ‘the oppression of the weak by the strong’ in the name of self-advancement and creative expression.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Its great success was to have inaugurated the age of the ‘Master Man’, modelled by Cesare Borgia, championed by Machiavelli and embodied by a litany of absolutists as ‘handy with poison and dagger’ as the ‘rosary and sceptre’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ These individuals, eager to proclaim their genius and project their power at every turn, had diluted the ‘spirit of responsibility’, that ‘ethical feeling arising from human association’ and essential to solidarity and ‘real community’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

The culture of nationalism that had taken shape was structured by domination and a hierarchy of peoples. Linguistic, religious, historic, mythical and racialised ethnic norms designated insiders and outsiders, citizens and immigrants, natives and foreigners, and settler-pioneers from the indigenous. The crude nationalist opposition between primitive ‘nature’ peoples and purportedly civilised, ‘culture’ peoples showed how oppressively these boundaries had been drawn in European states.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Like Landauer, Rocker used Étienne la Boétie’s concept of voluntary servitude to describe the ‘deep rooted dependency’ that a monolithic, statist culture signified.Footnote ¹⁶² The compensation for slavishness, he argued, was the promise of meting out punishments to those ranked lower in the hierarchy. But symbolising it, he followed Kropotkin in describing the new forms of association manifestations of ‘inhuman, cruel and egoistic’Footnote ¹⁶³ Roman legalism, and the now stunted culture as expressions of Hellenic autonomy.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Identifying Hegel as a key figure in the Roman revival and a champion of the Prussian state, Rocker also reinforced the bridge between patriotic German statism and Marxist state socialism. His analysis was more nuanced than Bakunin’s characterisation of Teutonic socialism (and free of its anti-Semitic slurs).Footnote ¹⁶⁵ But the thrust of the argument was the same: Rocker rejected Hegel’s ‘harsh insistence on the unity of the individual with the state’,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ and opposed state socialism because it demanded proletarian unity.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Following these different currents of thought, Rocker contended that Europe’s cultural inheritance was the loss of plurality, the entrenchment of a totalising ideology of dependence and the consolidation of all legitimate pouvoir in the constitution and the monopolisation of violence. Organisation had been transformed into techne, ‘the art of ruling men’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Education had become the ‘drill of the national state’, leaving the ‘sources of creative urge […] quenched’ by junk food prepared by ‘the all-devouring machine’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ As the ‘intellectual precipitate of this endless struggle’,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ nationalism had ordered social relationships to advantage elites over masses, creating conflicts that required the perpetual increase of repressive force. What was now called the constitution, Rocker noted, was the protection of caste interest: the rule of law, the centralisation of the state, the repressive control of society and the concentration of economic and political power.

This struggle against what we might call the entropy of politics was epitomised by Jacobin, fascist, and ‘Bolshevist’ ideologies.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Liberalism opposed fascism as it did Bolshevism, but Rocker’s charge was that liberal constitutionalism could only preserve itself by aping totalitarianism. The attempt to legislate against the extremes in Germany had backfired disastrously, dramatically revealing the fragility of constitutionalism in the process. As he put it: ‘Bourgeois democracy has grown senile and has lost all sympathy for the rights it once used to defend’. This ‘blunting of its morals’, he continued, had clipped its wings, forcing democrats ‘to borrow the methods of the enemy that is threatening to devour it’.Footnote ¹⁷²

Rocker made three interrelated points. First, constitutionalism was an expression of the will to power and nationalism and could only ever act as a soft brake on arbitrary power. Constitutionalism attacked dynastic absolutism while leaving in place the systems of domination from which it issued: private property. Examining the ‘deficiencies’ of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, he pinpointed the weakness of ‘liberalism itself and all later constitutional schemes’ in the ‘economic inequalities’ created by the right to property. These inequalities ‘could not be removed by the separation of powers’.Footnote ¹⁷³

Second, constitutionalism conflated self-government and national independence, corrupting the civic virtues that constitutionalists sought to engender in the state. History, he argued, had vindicated Proudhon’s view that the replication of the French model would result in the curtailment of liberty. Ignoring Proudhon’s warnings, Mazzini, Garibaldi and the masses they had inspired had inadvertently planted the ‘germ of a new form of human slavery’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Neither their impassioned love for the people nor the sincerity of their republican aspirations could insulate republicanism from fascist remodelling, the centralisation and production of so-called high culture via the doctrine of nationalism. The slide from cultural to political nationalism was not inevitable. As Rocker remarked, Proudhon had warned of the dangers of national unification to try ‘to persuade his contemporaries to fight it’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ But the trajectory was always discernible, and ‘the people’ had followed it, willingly or otherwise.

Third, remodelling the constitution to recognise previously marginalised or despised groups may soften those repressive norms and address some of the most egregious discriminations. But it would not dismantle them. The development of a single political culture, the expression of the collective freedom and the will to power, becomes more and more bland: culture experiences a general ‘degradation’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The deeper the state penetrates into the society, the more people become ‘mindless automatons’ of the will to power.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ He added: ‘The delusive belief in a dictatorship which is today spreading over Europe like a pestilence is only the ripe fruit of an unthinking belief in the state, which has for decades been implanted in men’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

Rocker’s proposals for the reconstitution of post-war Europe did not, then, invoke the ancient against the modern constitution, but were instead inspired by Proudhon, ‘the most eminent of all the moderns who have inscribed the principles of federalism on their banners’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Borrowing Proudhon’s language, he proposed a ‘law of association’ to empower ‘countless alliances arising from free agreement’ against ‘types of organization and centralizing tendences arising with the development of the modern state’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This, he argued, would avoid arbitrary legal regulation and allow fluid social, political, intellectual and economic forces to find their own level. The only hope, Rocker argued, was a ‘federated Europe with a unified economy’ and then a ‘world federation’ which respected the freedoms of all colonised peoples too.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Culture and the Constitution: Towards Anarchy

In the epilogue to the second edition of Nationalism and Culture, Rocker reflected on his pre-war predictions, and the likely trajectory of world politics as countries climbed out of the rubble. He juxtaposed two options: the imperialist state capitalism of ‘the Kremlin dictatorship’, and the liberal nationalist capitalism. Both were underpinned by the principle of state sovereignty, now embedded in the United Nations. Considering how to rescue constitutional values from constitutionalism, he discounted strategies for cultural inclusion and looked instead towards new forms of ‘co-operative collaboration’ and federalist internationalism; forms of association that would enable the marginalised to outline their own terms of association. This was not ‘a plea for particularism, or the small state’, but for ‘a higher social culture founded on the freedom of man and his free union with his fellow men’.Footnote ¹⁸² To unshackle culture is to realise anarchy: ‘Culture as such is never national, because it always extends beyond the political frame of the state structure and is confined by no national frontier’.Footnote ¹⁸³ Rocker found the normative framework in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. For Montesquieu, he argued, laws were ‘adjustments of things to one another and to man’. Law’s force derived from ‘man’s belief in its usefulness’ not in ‘external compulsory power’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Incorporated into the architecture of nationalism, Montesquieu’s concept had morphed into a ‘blind faith in law’. Rousseau’s Social Contract had signalled its demise. Citizens no longer obeyed the law because they considered it useful but because resistance was regarded as ‘political blasphemy’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Anarchy was Montesquieu’s real home.

Rocker’s comprehensive account of the history of state formation and the contradictions of a culture of constitutionalism was a little verbose, but his conception of culture as orders emergent from individuals in communal self-expression, sprang from a conception of anarchy that was widely shared.