War and Resistance

Kropotkin described War and Peace as ‘a source of indescribable aesthetic pleasure’. He also recognised that the novel advanced a ‘philosophy of war’. He considered this as compelling as the historical narrative.Footnote ¹³ Aside from plotting the trajectories of his characters, one of the persistent questions it asks is: why do men fight? As Inessa Medzhibovskaya shows, the answer is not straightforward. Tolstoy distinguished ‘political’ and ‘zoological’ violence from ‘primordial force’ and ‘the simulation of this force by the state’.Footnote ¹⁴ The first pairing set conscious, deliberate decision against unreflective ‘force of habit’,Footnote ¹⁵ and the second pitted spiritedness and readiness to fight against orchestration.Footnote ¹⁶ However, the general conclusion he drew was that men fight because it appears rational to do so, because refusal does not cross men’s minds or because they are impassioned or incentivised to kill their fellow beings. These motives are not mutually exclusive or always well-understood.Footnote ¹⁷

The philosophical underpinning of Tolstoy’s analysis can be traced to Kant’s idea of necessity. Designating free will as a cognitive device to conceal or compensate for human incapacity,Footnote ¹⁸ Tolstoy argued that individuals acted as if they were free and that, on a conscious level, man ‘feels beyond doubt that he is free to do whatever he wants’.Footnote ¹⁹ But this freedom was misleading, and it wrongly directed attention from the ordinary to the exceptional, emphasising the role of will over the relationship between will and necessity.Footnote ²⁰ Free will, Tolstoy remarked, ‘is what is examined; necessity does the examining’.Footnote ²¹

In an abstract sense, the ‘ordinary’ was the ‘infinitesimal minimum’.Footnote ²² Adding more substance to the concept, he described war as an ‘irrevocable action’ explained by ‘millions of actions performed by other people to create historical significance’.Footnote ²³ Tolstoy described the technique he used to comprehend these actions as ‘the art of integration’.Footnote ²⁴ It meant examining individual circumstances and the social phenomena motivating action. This was the relationship between will and necessity. War and Peace achieves this feat by following the fortunes of over 100 characters who wrestle with the same dilemmas in different ways. Each of his characters’ actions is undertaken freely, but in Tolstoy’s terminology, they are all driven by necessity.Footnote ²⁵

Kropotkin suggested that Tolstoy used the character Platon Karatayev, a gentle sage who enchants the hero Pierre after his capture by French forces, to present the thesis. Contesting the view that ‘Tolstóy was preaching in Karatáeff a sort of Oriental fatalism’, Kropotkin argued:

While Kropotkin steered necessity from the cognisance of reality towards the determination to change, he captured Tolstoy’s scepticism about choice. Necessity referred to the tangible and unknown forces that conditioned action. In society, necessity was shaped by the intricate social webs that gave life meaning while also clouding deeper, universal moral imperatives. As Barnhart argues, the ‘deep texture’ of necessity was inversely related to the ‘depth and richness’ of social relationships:Footnote ²⁷ the richer our interdependence, the less able we are to comprehend our reliance on the unseen forces that govern our existence. To further complicate the picture, Tolstoy argued that social relationships were always mediated by power and hierarchy: our judgments about our obligations were thus fatally distorted by our sense of social obligation and subject to the deceptions of the elites who, detached from ordinary folk, behaved as gods.

The trajectory of Prince Andrei’s life captures the nature of the human predicament. The epitome of the Homeric hero, Andrei enlists in 1805 in a quest for ‘glory’, equating ‘glory’ with the ‘love for other people’ a desire to ‘do something for them’, and to garner praise.Footnote ²⁸ To his horror, he finds out that war is a ‘nice hobby for idle people and butterfly minds’ and ‘the vilest thing in human life’. Its aim ‘is murder’ and its weapons ‘are spying, treachery and the fostering of further treachery, the destruction of people, looting their property and stealing from them to keep the army on the road’.Footnote ²⁹ Andrei’s tragedy, not untypical in Tolstoy’s fiction, is that he discovers life’s greater purpose only at the point of his own death. A near-fatal injury triggers his first epiphany. The revelation of fundamental necessity comes only at his passing. As his life ebbs away, he feels a sense of ‘becoming’ and a strange ‘lightness of being’.Footnote ³⁰

Tolstoy identified the state as the most perverse and destructive manipulator of necessity. In an open letter decrying Tsarist repression of the Dukhobors, a non-conformist pacifist Christian sect,Footnote ³¹ he set out his thesis by exposing the logics of militarism:

The idea of peace in the world of militarised states was, he argued, a fantasy. In 1899, responding to the first meeting of the Hague International Peace Conference, he contemplated three questions: (i) Is war among civilised nations still required by history, law and progress? (ii) What are the intellectual, moral, physical, economical and political effects of militarism? And (iii) In the interests of the world’s future civilisation, what are the solutions which should be given to the grave problems of the war and militarism? (Tolstoy 1900a).Footnote ³³ In answering the first two, he summarised the thesis outlined in War and Peace, namely, war was required by those occupying the seats of power to advance their interests, and carelessness and irresponsibility were the deadening effects of hierarchy: elites, insulated from the suffering of ordinary folk, denied their responsibility for the actions of the populations they mobilised in war.

Tolstoy acknowledged that states were unable to stem entirely resistance to war and militarism.Footnote ³⁵ Judgment, sharpened by faith, enabled groups like the Dukhobors, still immersed in what he called primitive religion, to reject the state’s appeal to necessity and bring their connection to God to bear on militarism. Yet for Tolstoy, these instances of non-resistance to violence did not point to a constitutional politics: the appeal to the idea of free will and the misconception of necessity ruled this out. Indeed, his ordering of faith over politics indicated that war and militarism could only ultimately be defeated by love, God, conscience and reason. Even if anarchists were able to undo the institutions of state, they could not – and would not – unpick the strong social ties that impelled all calls to arms. Non-resistance to violence was at best a holding position against inevitable cultural corruption. As Michael Denner argues, Tolstoy adopted a ‘strategic position’ against autocracy and the ‘dominant value systems’ of ‘specifically Western institutions’. By universalising faith and bringing Christianity into relation with Daoism, Hinduism and Islam, he threw his weight behind peoples willing to defy government, especially to defend ‘the superiority of rural life’ and tradition, against westernisation.Footnote ³⁶ This was a profoundly anarchic antipolitics.Footnote ³⁷ But it did not point to the eradication of war. Kropotkin, an ardent admirer, pursued these themes to bring anticolonial, antiwar resistance into Proudhon’s federalist model.

War and Treaty

Whereas Tolstoy linked war to social entanglements, Proudhon conceptualised war as an expression of the right of force. War, he argued, was an inescapable feature of politics: ‘in fact or in right, the social state is always a state of war’.Footnote ³⁸ Their descriptions of the informal truces that punctuated the Crimean War capture their differences.

In his memoir of the Siege of Sebastopol, Tolstoy recalls the camaraderie between the French and Russian troops and emphasises their common subjection to military hierarchy. Left to their own devices, they shared tobacco and teased each other about their language capabilities. On hearing them ‘shake with laughter’, Tolstoy writes, the commanding officer yells: ‘Don’t leave your lines; back to your places, sacré nom! […] and the soldiers disperse with evident reluctance’.Footnote ³⁹ Proudhon, in contrast, used the exchange to personify the right of war between nations. ‘[T]he most beautiful commentary I could offer on my thinking and on […] the right of force’, he remarked, is the informal truce ‘[d]uring lulls in the bitterest of fighting of the Crimean war’. Here, ‘the French and Russians mingled as friends, as hosts, swapping a pipeful of tobacco, a swig of brandy’.Footnote ⁴⁰ They were not ‘enemies’,Footnote ⁴¹ but morally equal combatants struggling for their right to exist, and when the war was over, this struggle would continue.

Like Tolstoy, Proudhon thought the study of war should combine the analysis of the movements of armies, battles, tactics and strategy, with the study of war’s ‘moral phenomenology’.Footnote ⁴² But in Proudhon’s work, the moral aspect of the exercise of collective force and reason makes war right-making. Tolstoy argued that the centrality of war to the conduct of the state corrupted all secular institutions. Proudhon argued that the social element makes war fundamentally and inescapably normative. Soldiers fight for ideals as well as for each other. Societies justify mass murder using the same and similarly vaunted values, and ground post-conflict political orders on the heroic sacrifices of dead warriors.

Proudhon’s reading of the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War illustrates his conception of morality and the use of force. At the height of the wars, in 416 BC, Athens ‘laid siege to the island of Mela’ and presented the Melians with a choice: surrender or die. Realising that they were weaker and outnumbered, the Melians appealed to the gods to ‘watch over them’ as they faced the ‘unjust’. Might was not on their side, but right was: no peoples should submit to the will of another simply because they are the stronger. The Athenians advanced a contrary interpretation of the will of the gods. The gods were preponderant over men, they argued, because of their might. The same rule applied to peoples: ‘wherever force lies, there too command resides’.Footnote ⁴³ Proudhon concluded: ‘It is this invincible sense of a righteousness implicit in war that at first swathed it in robes of formality, which conditioned it and governed its consequences, as if it were a sort of court proceedings’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Proudhon compared his reading of the dialogue to Hobbes’ interpretation to cement the argument about war and right. Hobbes’s reading was metaphysical rather than theological, but no less contingent. In his account, ‘right reason’ ought to have prevailed, and the Melians should have surrendered. Proudhon concludes War and Peace with reference to Hobbes: ‘Hobbes’s theory is wrong: our over-riding motive is not selfishness; it is not the preservation of our body and limbs, it is not our interest, be it well or wrongly construed’; it is not ‘interest’ but ‘justice’, conceived of in concert with others, that drives us.Footnote ⁴⁵ To attempt to settle matters of right with ‘right reason’, and deny the salience of violence and morality, is to deny both the right of force and the ‘collective conscience’ that sovereignty is built upon. But crucially, if might is a legitimate exercise of right, it is so for all.

Using war as a salient metaphor for the empirical reality of politics, Proudhon turned his attention to the latent violence of social ‘pacification’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Distinguishing direct violence or physical force from indirect or structural violence – for example, the effects of inequality on the lifespans of the poorest – he defined pacification as an implicit truce between and within the groups that make up a given society. Its character depended on the balance of military, ideational and productive powers. But the implied threat of violence, or of the exercise of force deleterious to one group by another, was central to the system of right in any society.

To illustrate, the pacification of post-Revolutionary France was characterised by ‘gouvernementalisme’. Proudhon tracked the evolution of the idea to the encyclopaedists and followed it through Saint-Simonian technocracy to the mollification of revolutionary values and the adoption of governmental norms in 1848. In War and Peace, he adopted the term ‘militarisme’ to examine governmentalism and show how war both structures society and pacifies it:

For Edward Castleton, one of Proudhon’s most diligent readers, this is evidence of Proudhon’s anthropology of the state. The consolidation of the state through social pacification is a sign of its maturity. By illustrating the marital underpinnings of society and order, Castleton argues, Proudhon attempted to use positive social science to liberate us from the grip of history, or its seeming necessity.Footnote ⁴⁸ The analysis of war, then, revealed how society could constitutionalise and dispense with militarism and governmentalism in turn.

Following Kant, Proudhon argued that perpetual peace was the means, not the end, of constitutional change.Footnote ⁴⁹ The abolition of war, he argued, ‘is a utopia that every civilization, and every period in history has passed down to the next, in the same way as they pass down dreams of brotherhood and equality’.Footnote ⁵⁰ International treaty law was the crucible, ontologically prior to ‘domestic’ law.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, he recommended extending the proto-federal constitutional moment of the Congress of Vienna into the mutual recognition of the dignity of all peoples.Footnote ⁵² This conception of politics made the difference between a constitution and treaty law wafer thin: both used treaties, pacts and agreements to pacify social relations, codify the terms of the truce between society’s competing forces, and commit to non-violent means to achieve future goals, as long as the terms of the truce are respected by all. However, Proudhon also argued that peace had to have its own positive connotations.

Rather than try to hold all forces in transcendent balance and make conflict a thing of the past, the peace must be dynamic, harness all the powers of society and justify their division such that the conflict between them drives the process forward, holds them together, while none dominates arbitrarily. In other words, society must come to collective agreements about how it justifies its own pacification and must resist the monopoly of force for the sake of its own material and intellectual force, and the possibility of change.

Proudhon turned to political economy to find a focus for the constitution. As William George remarks, his view was that the laws of political economy did ‘not depend upon the arbitrary will of man […] labor could then be organised for the wellbeing of all’.Footnote ⁵³ In War and Peace, Proudhon developed the argument. By the 1860s, the emerging power of the French and European industrial proletariat was coming into view. This new collective force, he contended, could accommodate and transform the destructive martial spirit that lingered in the post-Napoleonic era. Understanding the economic causes of war through history and social science made it possible to neutralise them through the exercise of collective reason and collective force. However, the industrial proletariat had to flex its collective muscle.Footnote ⁵⁴ Only ‘agricultural-industrial federalism’, he argued in The Principle of Federation, could counter the ‘financial feudalism’ that was emerging.Footnote ⁵⁵

Proudhon’s divergence from Tolstoy was marked but not absolute. Whereas Proudhon referred to Comte’s law of stages to rank positive science over theology, Tolstoy outlined a sociology of religion to chart shifts from animal to the social to the divine, and so raised the possibility of peace as an end, however remote.Footnote ⁵⁶ Proudhon argued that no such transcendence was possible. But the ethics of Tolstoy’s strategic resistance were compatible with Proudhon’s proposal to promote peace as the means of constitutional politics.

War and Mutual Aid

After Proudhon’s death in 1865, anarchist theory developed in the shadow of the accelerating development of industrial capitalism and the fracturing of the socialist movement. When the IWMA split, the antiauthoritarians who followed Bakunin and opposed Marx investigated concepts of class conflict and social war in the light of the development of scientific socialism. In the late nineteenth century, Kropotkin redeveloped Proudhon’s constitutional project to elaborate anti-Marxist anarchist communism and in criticism of laissez-faire liberalism.

Kropotkin’s analysis of war and politics is overshadowed by his controversial decision in 1914 to support the Entente against the Central powers.Footnote ⁵⁷ For Emma Goldman and others, his stance was explicable only as an infatuation with the ‘glamor of political liberalism as represented by Republican France, Constitutional England and Democratic America’ and his inability to ‘realize that the line of demarcation between liberalism and autocracy is purely imaginary’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Kropotkin’s defence is indeed baffling. Only one year earlier, warning of the likelihood of global conflict, he had argued that war was the result of competition structured into the modern state by capitalism.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet contrary to Goldman’s assertion, Kropotkin’s endorsement of the Entente’s fight was an expression of a consistent antiwar stance.

Kropotkin’s account of war was rooted in his critique of Social Darwinism and centred on the idea of the warrior spirit. His starting point, outlined in Mutual Aid, was that the Social Darwinist account of nature as an individual fight for survival in which only the fittest prevailed was deeply flawed.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Ethics, his posthumously published book, he applied the theory to attack the competitive logics of Herbert Spencer’s laissez-faire liberalism and the theory of social progression, arguably among the most influential accounts of his age.Footnote ⁶¹

Kropotkin’s assessment of Spencer was not entirely negative. He celebrated Spencer’s evolutionary approach, his embrace of the principle of equality, and his acknowledgement that moral judgements were context dependent.Footnote ⁶² He agreed with Spencer that war created the state and shared Spencer’s view that progress could be measured by war’s containment.Footnote ⁶³ Like Spencer, he also characterised social progress as a shift from homogeneity to heterogeneity, mirroring Proudhon’s development of Smith’s theory of the development of the complex division of labour.

The problem was that Spencer was a socially conservative, sometimes ‘reactionary’, natural rights utilitarian, who collapsed equality into equal happiness and defined this as equal liberty.Footnote ⁶⁴ Wrongly describing social evolution as a move from the ‘warlike, militant state’ to the pluralist ‘peaceful, industrial community’,Footnote ⁶⁵ he also mistakenly linked heterogeneity to the state’s creation and the expansion of free trade. To compound the error, Spencer described this movement as one from the ‘savagery’ of ‘primitive’ peoples to the refinement of European manners.Footnote ⁶⁶ This account of ‘primitive’ society was ‘wrong […] even fantastic’,Footnote ⁶⁷ as unreliable as Rousseau’s earlier idealisation of the state of nature, and based on vulgar assumptions about man’s ‘animal’ origins.Footnote ⁶⁸

Kropotkin presented a parallel historical sociology to correct Spencer’s account. Liberalism, he admitted, had expanded individual rights. But it had relied on state regulation and thus tended towards homogeneity and compliance. Indeed, industrialism, the term Spencer used to describe liberal ‘civilisation’, had only boosted militarism. According to Kropotkin’s history, the consolidation of state power in Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries had launched a war for domination that elites had been waging both within and without their jurisdictions with varying ferocity ever since.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rejecting Spencer’s claim that the formation of the modern state represented a move from war to peace, he argued that the ‘rapacious instincts’ that Spencer erroneously tied to ‘primitive’ society were ‘not only preserved’ but ‘strongly developed’ by the ‘new methods of acquiring wealth’ sponsored by industrial capitalism.Footnote ⁷⁰

Like Tolstoy and Proudhon, Kropotkin acknowledged that violence and conflict were not the state’s preserve. For example, he noted the ‘weird rites’ practiced by ‘sorcerers, shamans, and soothsayers’, later institutionalised in religion for ‘intimidation, especially of women and children’.Footnote ⁷¹ The twin charges he laid at Spencer’s door were first, that he had ignored the ritualised practices, systems of justice and compensation that warrior states perfected to resolve conflicts and build trust and solidarity within and between communities,Footnote ⁷² and second, that he had glossed the institutionalised violence endemic in the so-called peaceful industrial community. The civilising force of law was the beam in Spencer’s eye. As if to show how badly it had distorted his vision, Kropotkin cited the findings of the Whig historian Henry Maine, who traced origins of international law to supposed tribal practices.Footnote ⁷³

Kropotkin highlighted the rank stupidity of industrial peace by again quoting Maine: ‘Man has never been so ferocious or so stupid as to submit to such an evil as war without some kind of effort to prevent it’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Industrial peace had done just that. Kropotkin pointed to the violence arising from ‘greed, vanity, and the thirst for power’Footnote ⁷⁵ and made manifest in labour relations.Footnote ⁷⁶ Free trade drove conquest or ‘plunder’ fought at the cost of those designated ‘backward tribes and peoples’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Speculative investments in technology produced ‘poisonous gases, submarines’ and Zeppelins to attack ‘sleeping cities’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Describing the horrors of the 1904–05 siege of Port Arthur, Kropotkin argued that the peaceful industrial community operated on a permanent war footing.Footnote ⁷⁹ The First World War, he later remarked, was only ‘the latest act’ of this industrial ‘process’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The irony was that ‘military predatoriness’ had ‘never ceased to be extolled as the highest virtue’.Footnote ⁸¹

Kropotkin argued that the abolition of inequality, what Proudhon called the ‘extinction of pauperism’, would remove the most immediate, primary causes of war without eradicating the phenomenon. However, abandoning Proudhon’s political economy, he also modified the idea of pacification. The solution to war, he argued, was the eradication of competition and the channelling of the warrior spirit to the preservation of mutual aid.

Kropotkin’s history of ethics provided the scaffolding. Turning once more to Spencer, he rejected his theorisation of moral progress and used naturalism to posit a ‘universal law of organic evolution’. This related the changes in social norms and practices to the release of a latent ‘vital force’ for self-sacrificing action,Footnote ⁸² where vital force corresponded to the third component of a progressive series leading from mutual aid, to justice and morality.Footnote ⁸³ Borrowing Spencer’s terminology, he presented the first two as ‘unconscious tendencies, instincts and habits’ which sparked reflections or ‘thoughts that are not quite clear’ about the best ways of preserving social life.Footnote ⁸⁴ In contrast, morality, an ‘unstable feeling’ and the least ‘imperative’ ethical drive, was consciously disruptive. It animated challenges to accepted norms and standards, forcing breaks with convention.

Evoking Henri Bergson’s philosophy of life, vital force chimed with what Patricia Leighten calls the ‘political refusal of the status quo’ circulating in early twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde art movements.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, Kropotkin used Jean-Marie Guyau’s A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or SanctionFootnote ⁸⁶ to theorise morality as a ‘striving toward a more intensive, and varied life’ or a ‘spiritual activity rich in impressions, feelings, and manifestations of will’.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was ‘acquired through struggle’, prompted by danger and inclined towards risk.Footnote ⁸⁸ It included the creativity that animated all ‘great discoveries and explorations’, ‘all the attempts to rebuild society on new bases, made at the risk of life, all the new departures in the realm of art’.Footnote ⁸⁹ As the driver for a multitude of disruptive, challenging micropolitical actions, morality underpinned what Kropotkin called the ‘heroic act’ in battle or struggle, ‘flights of daring thought’, the willingness to confront ‘hazards […] even serious ones’.Footnote ⁹⁰

The judgments that motivated morality, Kropotkin argued, were environmentally conditioned. A critique of Nietzsche revealed the mutability. Perhaps in some sympathy with Nietzsche, he argued that the ‘want of development of the personality (leading to herd-psychology) and the lack of individual creative power and initiative’ were the ‘the chief defects of our time’.Footnote ⁹¹ However, in critique of Nietzsche, he argued that Nietzscheanism warped morality: it was an aggressive response to herd-psychology that indulged the aristocratic conceits of egoists and advanced the will to power ‘against the interests of society’. The anarchist response, rooted in mutual aid, expressed morality’s creative force, namely, the ‘striving for sociality’.Footnote ⁹²

Kropotkin’s appeal to the vital force of morality was, then, tied to the institutionalisation of mutual aid. As a creative transgressive force, morality tended towards equality but disrupted social conventions for the sake of the group’s long-term well-being. It acted as a brake on established practice, custom and habit and motivated solidarity against domination. Kropotkin’s favourite exemplars of morality were Sofia Perovskaya, executed for her part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and Louise Michel, the veteran of the Paris Commune.

Confusingly, Kropotkin’s support for the Entente in 1914 sprang from his conception of a martial morality. Ignoring the social pressures exerted on volunteers to enlist, and receptive to the atrocity stories coming out of Belgium, he argued that it was legitimate to repel the aggression of the Prussianised German state. Referring to the pact of friendship agreed in 1872 at the St. Imier Conference, he told one of his angry, bewildered comrades that it was clear ‘who the aggressor’ was: ‘Popular sentiment is never mistaken on this point’.Footnote ⁹³ The war was a struggle between life-affirming and life-sapping regimes, comparable to the Napoleonic Wars, which tapped the spirit of mutual aid:

Kropotkin’s account of war and morality seemed to open a gulf with Tolstoy as wide as the rift that his defence of the war opened in anarchism. Attempting to minimise the difference, he observed that Tolstoy refused to condemn transgressors who acted in conscience and good faith against injustice.Footnote ⁹⁵ If this purported alignment on ethics was unlikely to convince Tolstoyans and papered over the significance of the political scission, it was not a complete break with anarchist tradition. Tolstoy’s analysis of war suggested that resistance was the last line of defence against the political degradation of morality. For Proudhon, war was a social force that ‘animates society’,Footnote ⁹⁶ moralised by those who waged it and amenable to pacification. Kropotkin’s argument was that war was a transmutable social force, aggravated by competition and moralised by mutual aid. All three linked the incidence of war to government, exploitation and hierarchy, and each articulated an antiwar strategy. Proudhon and Kropotkin also proposed constitutional solutions.

Decentralised Federation: Proudhon’s Template

Proudhon was the outstanding theorist of federalism in the anarchist tradition. Although his vision of anarchist federation is idiosyncratic, his concept quickly became a staple of anarchist thought. We start, then, with Proudhon and show how the ideas evolved after his death in 1865.

For Proudhon, federalism was the natural corollary of his theory of association. As he put it: ‘If I began with anarchy, the conclusion of my critique of the governmental idea, I had to finish with federation, the necessary base of the rights of European peoples, and, later, the organisation of all states’.Footnote ⁹⁷ He fleshed out this ambitious constitutional agenda in his writings on the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, Italian and Polish unification, and his unfinished work on constitutional history. However, his 1863 book, The Principle of Federation, was his most important statement.Footnote ⁹⁸

Proudhon’s ideas were influenced by Louis-Henri Delarageaz, a liberal Swiss nobleman, and passionate defender of the autonomy of the canton of Vaud, and Giuseppe Ferrari, an Italian liberal republican and federalist.Footnote ⁹⁹ When he looked for a model, he proposed that individuals and collectives arrange their affairs as the Swiss had done. However, the Swiss republic was an imperfect example of what he called a ‘progressive constitution’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Habsburg imperialism prompted the federation of twenty-five sovereign Swiss cantons in the Confederation of 1831. When Catholic and monarchist cantons threatened to leave in 1848, preferring an alliance with the Habsburgs, a civil war was fought to preserve the confederation (Sonderbund). This replicated the effect of the American Civil War in the United States: the 1848 constitution set Switzerland on a path from confederation to a federal state. The right to secession was rescinded, and the federation became a state.

Proudhon was not uncritical of the Swiss model. He was keen for the Swiss to establish a federal university, to advance common understanding and critical thinking, and, against a ‘federal court’, he argued in favour of a court of arbitration and a central authority that could fix ‘weights and measures’. But likewise, he argued that a federal standing army would be antithetical to the freedom of the parts. Proudhon cites his friend Gustave Chaudey, who, writing in La Républicain Neuchâtelois in 1852, argued that Swiss cantonal military independence is crucial to the freedom of the whole, since it would then be impossible for the parts to become ‘weapons of a conspiracy of the centre’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

He found a more inspiring model in the associations of Swiss watchmakers in the Jura, to east of Besançon, his birthplace.Footnote ¹⁰² The defence of specialism, of artisan production and the location of the workshop in the community, were central to this. The correspondence and mutualisation of the interests of the workers with those of the commune was born of necessity, but also worked to sustain their communal and cantonal independence. The defence of the artisan also contrasted starkly with the new authoritarian manufactories of Manchester, and what Proudhon called the ‘industrial and financial feudalism’ of France, and its emerging Saint-Simonian ‘bankocracy’.Footnote ¹⁰³

The concept Proudhon articulated demonstrated the possibility of developing a form of radically pluralist association in which the contracting parties surrender only what is strictly necessary to make the agreement mutually worthwhile, and never so much as to make them subservient. To clarify, Proudhon argued: ‘Any obligation, even a bilateral and commutative one, which requires those whom it binds to contribute all their efforts, to give up their independence, and to devote themselves totally to an association is an excessive obligation unworthy of man or citizen’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The resulting compact would be prone to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Proudhon’s federation was a ‘combination of shared and self-rule’ which detached conflict regulation from top-down ‘étatiste’ systems designed to maintain the integrity of the sovereign state by commanding loyalty to it.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Using Rousseau’s social contract as a foil, Proudhon defined federation as a ‘pact’, a real contract, a treaty or an alliance, that is commutative, synallagmatic, mutualist, or reciprocal.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His view was that contract and treaty equalise parties in principle, or in status, and federation becomes an attempt to mutualise those relations in practice. Unlike the sovereign state, which invokes law to regulate distributive systems of justice, the federal constitution presupposes the real social and material inequality of the participants, their complex grouping and economic division, but also their mutual sovereignty and dignity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The mutual dignity of the contracting parties is presupposed by the construction of the federal pact as a treaty, and it remodels law from ‘a statute of arbitration willed by man’, into a rule or agreement produced by contractual relations. And finally, it is through the conclusion of mutual agreements, Proudhon argued, that we come to understand the nature of right for ourselves.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Federation, Proudhon argued, demands and furthers education by enabling contracting parties to assess the terms of their agreements critically and review them as society changed. His expectation was that it would extend learning beyond the confines of the federation, once the process started to gain traction.

Proudhon’s federative process had three clear phases. In the first, groups realise collective and individual goals and visions of the good. Bringing all the prejudices and commitments they have to groups, individuals unite for mutual security, benefit or growth. As they grow, and their internal division of labour becomes more complex, they enter the second phase: they separate, either ideologically, conceptually or materially. Proudhon’s contention was that the process should be pressed to its logical and material conclusion. His call to ‘leave nothing undivided’,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ which, as well as mimicking anarchy, was an appeal to dissolve social entities into their smallest administrative and collective units. The law of progress, as he put it elsewhere, was defined by ‘complexification and differentiation’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Similarly, anticipating Kropotkin, he argued progress is impeded when this diversity is curtailed.

The third phase starts when this process of division establishes the sociological basis for the federal constitution, an ‘ought’ that is simultaneously, or already, an empirical ‘is’: anarchy. In this anarchist constitution, the centre becomes nothing but an administrative hub. The principle of subsidiarity decentralises administration and the right to secession is guaranteed.Footnote ¹¹¹ Proudhon argued ‘The authority responsible for its execution can never overwhelm the constituent members; that is, the federal powers can never exceed in number and significance those of local or provincial authorities, just as the latter can never outweigh the rights and prerogatives of man and citizen’.Footnote ¹¹²

Because the central authority of the federation is bound by a commutative contract, it cannot exceed the powers of the parts without violating the sovereignty of those parts. Proudhon notes:

Modern scholars sometimes describe Proudhon’s federalism as a variant on liberalism, and use the priority of liberty to define both.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, as Føllesdal notes, while Proudhon defended federalism ‘as the best way to retain individual liberty within “natural” communities such as families and guilds who enter pacts among themselves for necessary and specific purposes’, his federative idea turned the state into ‘one of several non-sovereign agents in charge of coordinating, without final authority’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The distinctive aspect of anarchist federalism was not just that it tended towards ‘association’, ‘co-sociation’, ‘reciprocity’, ‘mutuality’, as opposed to ‘rule’, ‘empire’, ‘dominance’ and ‘monarchy’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Proudhon’s concept was distinctive because it enshrined individual sovereignty and thus demanded decentralisation ‘from the top down’ to reconstitute society ‘from the bottom up’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As the Proudhonist Siegmund Engländer put it: ‘As separate individuals, we shall centralise our interests and form larger combination […] We will all be sovereigns’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Individual sovereignty was prefigured in the collective force of the groups that constituted the federation and was foundational to it.Footnote ¹¹⁹ An a-legal principle, it divided power to stop the tendency towards concentration, and it was realised through the right of exit or secession.

Following republican traditions, anarchists often expressed the right of secession as a right of resistance. For example, in 1912, anarchists grouped around Ricardo Flores Magón endorsed the constitutional stance taken by the historian and leader of the Liberal Party, Fernando Iglesias Calderón against the Porfirio Díaz government. To affect the defence of the rights accorded in the 1857 constitution, Calderón reminded Mexicans that the ‘prerogatives of the citizens’ included the right ‘take up arms, in the army or the national guard, for the defense of the republic, or of its institutions in the terms prescribed by the law’.Footnote ¹²⁰

Yet anarchists added two twists to this long-established republican right. First, whereas republicans tied the right of resistance to the defence of republican institutions and the will of the sovereign, anarchists devolved that to the real individuals and associations who retained their sovereignty. Second, anarchists relaxed the link between secession or exit and resistance. Secession was not a declaration of war. Rather, it was a mechanism for constitutional adjustment and a continual reminder of the work needed to maintain the federation. Secession was a last resort, the assertion of which need not even result in exit. Assuming the mutual pacts between the federated groups were worth maintaining, Proudhon argued that the guarantee incentivised constitutional reform. Secession was a principle of justice which protected the federation from becoming a state, or a form of structural domination masquerading as freedom.

On his deathbed in 1865, he commented on the ‘Manifesto of the 60’, a call issued by a group of workers for functional and corporatist representation of industry in the French Assembly. In the response he composed, which became De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières, he argued that the emergence of the working class from bourgeois ‘tutelage’ signalled the emergence of a class that ‘now acts exclusively by itself and for itself’. Crucially, this was an example of the sort of secession, or ‘scission’, that he had been defending in writings on federalism: ‘to secede, legitimately, is the only means to assert our right, and, as a political party, to have ourselves recognised’.Footnote ¹²¹ The means to this end was mass abstention in national elections.

In supporting division and sub-division, exit acts as a non-ideal constitutional bulwark against domination. As Whitaker puts it, the ideal was to limit the ‘self-destructive’ effects of democracy by protecting property ‘decentralized into hands of the people as producers’ against ‘the democratic despot’ that would put it in the hands of the owners against the majority.Footnote ¹²² The imperfection was the producers’ readiness to resist democracy for the federation.Footnote ¹²³

To sum up: in Elazar’s terms, Proudhon’s template can be described as a ‘grand design’, an arrangement ‘created out of a series of building blocks or self-governing cells from the smallest, most intimate connections to the universal commonwealth’. Each of these is ‘internally organized and linked to others by some form of consensual relationship’ and ‘oriented toward some form of consensual relationship […] some higher end of human harmony’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Critics charge that his ‘central idea’ is ‘vague and problematic in its institutional form’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet the fuzziness was a function of Proudhon’s commitment to anarchy. Decentralised federation broke ‘categorically’ with unitary constitutionalism and resisted what Tierney calls the ‘legal-normative conception of modern politics to one state, one constitution, one people’. He aspired to set the ‘collective, territorially located sites of constitutional personhood’ against ‘the plurality of government’ and the ‘constitution of the state’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Proudhon blurred the distinction between treaty and pact but admitted of no ‘singular legal act’ structuring the federation.Footnote ¹²⁷ His aim was to meet the task that Rousseau had set himself and, in Proudhon’s view, had miserably failed to achieve. This was to devise a political association that would defend the ‘whole common force, the person and goods of each associate’ and ‘while uniting himself with all’ ensure that each obeyed themselves alone ‘remain as free as before’.Footnote ¹²⁸ The trick, Proudhon argued, was to accept anarchy. Divisibility, symbolised by the commitment to individual sovereignty, was the key. In distinction to the social contract, decentralised federation achieved unity or social cohesion by means of the establishment of mutually agreeable contracts, agreements, exit penalties and the pursuit of redress. Whether these took the form of bilateral agreements between individuals or groups, or between cities, states and regions, association is agreed consciously, consensually, and is always open to change. At the same time, federation is not reducible to the constituent groups or individuals because individuals define community loyalties through their association. As Patrice Rolland puts it: ‘The federation becomes the salvation of the people; it also saves man by dividing him from the tyranny of his morals and from his own madness’.Footnote ¹²⁹

As we discuss below, Proudhon’s template was modified and adapted following his death. Yet as Colin Ward argued, decentralised federalism, what they both called the ‘confederation of confederations’, has remained a mainstay of anarchist sociology for over 150 years.Footnote ¹³⁰

Variations in Decentralised Federation

The Paris Commune of 1871 and the break-up of the IWMA cemented the most significant modification to Proudhon’s model.Footnote ¹³¹ At the point when anarchists began to refine their organisational practices, now in opposition to Marxist social democracy, decentralised federation was communalised. As Engländer wrote, the Commune became a test of the federal principle, and a ‘germ of an organisation of society’, the ‘egg of society’, which stripped ‘national representation of its sovereign power’.Footnote ¹³² The modification of Proudhon’s template, which we track in Bakunin’s thought, prompted a debate about the status of workers’ associations and what became known as the prefigurative politics of decentralised federation.

Inheriting Proudhon’s mantel, Bakunin promoted decentralised federation as a communal process. In 1866, a year after Proudhon’s death, he set out an elaborate, labyrinthine conception of decentralised federation in the ‘Revolutionary Catechism’. It called for the internal reorganisation of each country based on the ‘absolute freedom of individuals’, productive associations and communes and the right of self-determination for each nation, people, region, province and commune, however small or weak. Union, as Proudhon had argued, would result from the ‘mutual attraction of the parts’ and ‘internal local necessities’ judged only by those units. Each entity would conclude its own alliances and unite or separate according to its own ‘will and needs’ and without regard for any ‘so-called historical rights of the political, commercial or strategic needs of states’.Footnote ¹³³

An interesting reminder of Proudhon’s ‘Political Catechism’ (1858),Footnote ¹³⁴ Bakunin’s ‘Revolutionary Catechism’ described the ‘autonomous commune’ as the ‘basic unit of all political organisation’. It would elect its own ‘functionaries, lawmakers and judge’ and administer ‘communal property and finance’. It would have the power to create its own constitution and laws but could only be part of the ‘provincial federation’ if these were consistent with the ‘fundamental principles of the provincial constitution’ and ‘accepted by the parliament of the province’. Further, communes were obliged to ‘accept the judgments of the provincial tribunal and any measures ordered by the government of the province’. Communes refusing to accept the provincial laws would not be entitled to its benefits.Footnote ¹³⁵

Bakunin’s post-1871 conception, though largely consistent with this early outline, had a looser feel. Instead of constitutional alignment, he spoke instead about ‘spontaneous organisation of work and collective property’ by the ‘freely organised and federated productive associations’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Emphasising the differences between his conception of federation and Marx’s idea of the centralised ‘worker’s state’, he argued that ‘the masses’, groups, communes and associations, would destroy the state by putting an end to the ‘iniquities enshrined in legal law’ and what he called its associated cults.Footnote ¹³⁷ The ‘future social organisation’ of society could only be realised ‘from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal’.Footnote ¹³⁸

The next generation of post-Commune writers, including Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus and Landauer, further relaxed the structures of decentralised federation and simultaneously thickened the social relationships. Kropotkin took his cue from the Swiss watchmakers he met on his first visit to western Europe in 1872. Writing in his memoirs, he described decentralised federation as the idea that: ‘Each nation, each separate region, and even each local section had to be left free to develop on its own lines’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Turning to the social relationships, he described the trust that the Swiss workers vested in their association, ‘the love with which they spoke of it, the sacrifices they made for it’. Federalism, he noted, had an ‘elevating influence’ exercising a profound ‘effect’ on ‘their minds’:

In another iteration of the idea, Kropotkin globalised and pluralised the commune to transform the federation into an association without frontiers or borders. Commune organisation forged egalitarian connections between territorially located groups, as well as within them, building an infinite number of cross-cutting communities of interest. Individuals would group together with other like-minded individuals scattered ‘over a thousand towns and villages’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Later on, he described the commune as ‘an oath of mutual aid’.Footnote ¹⁴²

This communal sharpening of federalism accentuated bottom-up federal processes and produced two distinctive modes of organising, variously tuning federalism to workplace or municipal organising.Footnote ¹⁴³

The 1907 International Anarchist Conference exposed the broad lines of fracture within the anarchist movement. In resolving that syndicates were the ‘living germ of the society of to-morrow’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ the Conference sparked a debate between Errico Malatesta, a syndicalist sceptic, and Pierre Monatte, the champion of the anarchist syndicalism.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Malatesta charged syndicalists with privileging workers over non-workers, ducking fears about workers’ nationalist and patriotic proclivities and subordinating mutual aid to worker solidarity, thus overplaying the workers’ anarchist sympathies and narrowing anarchism’s moral vision.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

For the syndicalists, Monatte conceded the risks of ‘centralisation’ and ‘officialdom’ in workers’ organisations and the need to inject into syndicalism ‘a clear understanding’ of what the aspiration for social revolution entailed.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Syndicalism, he argued, offered anarchists a natural home: syndicates were workers’ organisations, mistrustful of politicians and suspicious of parliamentarism; they offered a clear path to social transformation. To address Malatesta’s qualms about workers’ education, he argued: ‘Every strike is a lesson in revolutionary action’. The revolution would not come ‘before the workers know their power’, but through its exercise, driven by the educative force of social solidarity.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Monatte’s position, later echoed by Rudolf Rocker, was that syndicalism engendered solidaristic collective actions capable of transforming workers’ ambitions.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

In the 1940s, when European anarchists considered how to rebuild their movements after the crushing of the Spanish Revolution, Tom Brown and George Woodcock fleshed out two contrasting organisational plans.

Writing under the byline ‘The Commune’, the antifascist labour organiser Tom Brown produced a matrix to describe anarchist syndicalist federation. The vertical axis united workers by trade, from local factory or job committee to district and national Councils of Labour. The horizontal axis united them by locality. Job committees were part of local federations of syndicates. Workers in each ‘factory, mine, shop, garage, or other place of work in any one town or locality’ would be ‘affiliated to the local federation’ such that ‘any city, town, or group of villages may have an organisation representative of engineering works, railmen, busmen, teachers, shop assistants, tailors, municipal workers, builders, clerks, musicians and other workers’. The composition varied according to the geographic location of industries, and it included unemployed, housewives and small groups of ‘odd trades’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But the syndicalist constitution was designed to align labour organising and local community action.

Responding to what he described as the ‘continued moribundity of syndicalism’,Footnote ¹⁵¹ George Woodcock, the future historian of anarchism, rebooted the commune as a federative idea based on co-operation and designed to ‘co-ordinate and secure the efficient running of public services and to give expression to the wishes and needs of the people’.Footnote ¹⁵² Anarchism, he argued, could not ‘succeed as a negative doctrine of industrial struggle’ or with ‘a syndicalist idea of organisation […] influenced by capitalist ideas of monolithic centralism’.Footnote ¹⁵³ While the commune included the organisation of producers in factories and workshops, the richness of ‘communal life’, he argued, sprang from the connections individuals established as consumers and through shared interests in, for example, ‘sport, art and sciences’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Making local associations organised for the ‘satisfaction of the social necessities of life’, the ‘pivotal’ units of organisation, Woodcock recast the federation as the commune of communes: ‘local community association’, leading to ‘regional and international federations of communes’, providing the only ‘sound foundation for international solidarity’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The historical lineages of these two concepts of decentralised federation are sometimes drawn to expose the looseness of municipal organising and promote organisationally robust workplace organising.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Anarchist practice suggests that the correspondence between modes of organising and formal structure is weak. As we show in Chapter 5, the Industrial Workers of the World was a federation on paper, but its organisational practices were slack. From our perspective, the dispute about communalisation reveals the depth of the practical challenges that decentralised federation poses. Proudhon’s ambition was to constitutionalise anarchy, not to organise anarchists. The challenge of the anarchist vision is to augment the federation and multiply the associates without scaling up.

Evolution, Revolution and Decentralised Federation

In 1992, Colin Ward remarked that the ‘evolution of the political left in the twentieth century’ tended towards statism. The legacy of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin was dismissed as ‘irrelevant’ and the ‘agenda for both federalism and regionalism’ was set by the political right.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Ward’s gloomy assessment accentuates the cognitive stretch required to imagine how anarchist constitutional practices shape and reshape global politics as Proudhon and others intended. In this final section, we consider evolutionary and revolutionary answers to this problem.

The first, outlined by Proudhon, used the international order to frame the process of federation. The second, expounded by Bakunin, proposed internationalism to transform the world order. The dissolution of the state and militarism and the kindling of a new spirit of independence, he argued, were the routes to the creation of a United States of Europe.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

As Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus and others argued, evolution and revolution can be conceptualised as facets of the same process, rather than alternative strategies or moralised positions. To show the applications of this conception, we explore Colin Ward and Ioan Bowen Rees’s analyses of the European Union, subsidiarity and regionalism. For both, the European Union delimits constitutional possibilities, thus also revealing the scope for transformative action. This set of contemporary reflections not only contrasts with proposals for a United States of Europe in the nineteenth century but also draws attention to a concomitant lack in contemporary anarchist thinking.