Abstract
In this chapter I survey the ways in which anarchists have understood the concept of freedom. I argue that anarchists have understood freedom in three ways, which often overlap and combine. Anarchists understand freedom negatively, as freedom from domination, positively, in terms of the enabling conditions of freedom, and freedom with or freedom in, or the necessary institutional parameters for freedom. This latter conception of freedom is arguably more central to the lived anarchist movement than many have recognised, pervading the major anarcho-syndicalist unions and most anarchist groups. I link it to negative and positive accounts of freedom in order to defend a wide and plural account of anarchist accounts of freedom. The institutional focus of the chapter also enables an approach to freedom that takes inter-group freedoms seriously and allows us to link anarchism more coherently to the dynamics of international relations. Each of these aspects of the problem of freedom in anarchist politics demands a reappraisal of the constitutionalising practices of anarchist groups, and I conclude by pointing to some of the most recent research on this topic.
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Notes
- 1.
P.-J. Proudhon, ‘Solution of the Social Problem’, in I. McKay (Ed), Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh: AK Press, [1848] 2009), 280.
- 2.
See, for example, S. Hirsch and L. Van der Walt (Eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2010); L. Van der Walt and M. Schmidt, Black Fame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009); C. Ward, ‘The anarchist sociology of federalism’, Freedom, June/July, 1992; C. Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); M. A. Bakunin and S. Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy. Selected Works by the Activist Founder of World Anarchism. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Sam Dolgoff (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973).
- 3.
Liberty is a concept more central to the Anglo-analytical tradition of moral philosophy, while freedom and emancipation are concepts used more in the history of political thought and critical theory. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use liberty, freedom and emancipation interchangeably. Freedom translates as liberty in most Romance languages (e.g., liberté, liberdad, libertà), and these remain the conceptual vocabularies for non-Anglo anarchists. The association of liberty with the liberal rights tradition may explain some of the preference for thinking and speaking in terms of freedom. In this chapter, I use the concepts interchangeably. For good general discussions of liberty and freedom in the Anglo-American traditions of political philosophy, see J. Filling, ‘Liberty’, in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2014) and N. J. Hirschmann, ‘Freedom’, in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2014).
- 4.
On this, republicans and libertarians are remarkably close. C. List and P. Pettit, Group agency: The possibility, design, and status ofcorporate agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 180–185. C. Kukathas, ‘Liberalism and multiculturalism: The politics of indifference’, Political Theory, 26 (1998), 686–699.
- 5.
A. Prichard, ‘Collective Intentionality, Complex Pluralism and the Problem of Anarchy’, Journal of International Political Theory, 13 (2017), 360–377.
- 6.
For more on this, see R. Kinna and A. Prichard, ‘Anarchism and Non-Domination’, Journal of Political Ideologies, (forthcoming), and www.anarchyrules.info.
- 7.
U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 32.
- 8.
Gordon, ibid., 33.
- 9.
For an excellent discussion of this, see A. Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- 10.
For fuller discussions of each, see K. S. Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); J. P. Clark, The Philosophical Anarchism ofWilliam Godwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Van der Walt and Schmidt, Black Flame.
- 11.
J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Of the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right’, in V. Gourevitch (Ed), Rousseau: The Social Contract and other later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–152.
- 12.
For an excellent discussion of the uptake of Hegel in anarchist thought, see N. Jun, ‘Hegel and Anarchist Communism’, Anarchist Studies, 22 (2014), 28–54.
- 13.
For more on this, see A. Prichard, Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).
- 14.
L. Tolstoy, The Slavery of Our Times (Maldon: The Free Age Press, 1900).
- 15.
A. Prichard, ‘Deepening Anarchism: International Relations and the Anarchist Ideal’, Anarchist Studies, 18 (2010), 29–57.
- 16.
J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1998).
- 17.
P.-J. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation and the Need to Reconstitute the Party of the Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).
- 18.
Bakunin cited in M. Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995), 6.
- 19.
M. A. Bakunin, ‘The Capitalist System’, Anarchy Archives, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/capstate.html [Accessed 27.11.217].
- 20.
For more on this, see P. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge, 1980).
- 21.
S. Newman (Ed), Max Stirner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), S. Newman, ‘“Ownness created a new freedom”: Max Stirner’s alternative concept of liberty’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, ONLINE FIRST (2017), 1–21.
- 22.
I. Berlin ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in I. Berlin (Ed), Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 121–154.
- 23.
A. Copley, ‘Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Reassessment of his role as a moralist’, French History, 3 (1989), 194–221.
- 24.
For a working translation of this, and other feminist critiques of Proudhon’s anti-feminism, see Shawn Wilbur, https://libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/henriette-artiste-letter-to-proudhon-1849/ [Accessed 27.11.17].
- 25.
M. J.d’Héricourt, A Woman’s Philosophy of Woman or, Woman Affranchised: An Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1981), 58.
- 26.
V. de Cleyre, ‘The Gates of Freedom’, in E. C. DeLamotte (Ed), Gates of Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, [1891] 2004), 238.
- 27.
S. Newman, Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 26.
- 28.
J. Zerzan, Future Primitive and Other Essays (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994).
- 29.
For more on this, see P. Abufom Silva and A. Prichard, ‘Anarchism and Nineteenth Century European Philosophy’, in N. Jun (ed), Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 434–453.
- 30.
J. P. Clark, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 63–78.
- 31.
M. Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), M. Bookchin, The ecology of freedom: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991).
- 32.
M. Bookchin, Urbanization without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992).
- 33.
B. Franks, ‘Anarchism and the Virtues’, in B. Franks and M. Wilson (Eds), Anarchism and Moral Philosophy (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010), 135–160.
- 34.
A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).
- 35.
P.-J. Proudhon, ‘Little Political Catechism’, in I. McKay (ed), Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010), 654–684. See also, Ward, ‘The anarchist sociology’.
- 36.
J. Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17 (1972), 151–164.
- 37.
S. Lechner, ‘Why anarchy still matters: On theories and things’, Journal of International Political Theory, 13 (2017).
- 38.
S. Gill and A. C. Cutler (Eds), New Constitutionalism and World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), G. W. Brown, ‘The Constitutionalisation of What?’, Global Constitutionalism, 1 (2012), 201–228.
- 39.
Gordon, Anarchy Alive, chapter 3.
- 40.
L. Van der Walt and S. Hirsch (Eds), ‘Rethinking Anarchism and Syndicalism: The colonial and post-colonial experience, 1870–1940’, in Hirsch and Van der Walt, Black Flame, xxi–lxxiii. See also, D. Berry and C. Bantman (Eds), New perspectives on anarchism, labour and syndicalism: The individual, the national and the transnational (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010).
- 41.
T. A. Wachhaus, ‘Anarchy as a Model for Network Governance’, Public Administration Review, 72 (2012), 33–42.
- 42.
Y. Simon, ‘A Note on Proudhon’s Federalism’, in D. J. Elazar (ed), Federalism as Grand Design: Political Philosophers and the Federal Principle (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987), 223–234. See also T. O. Hueglin, ‘Yet the Age of Anarchism?’, Publius, 15 (1985), 101–112.
- 43.
Proudhon, ‘Solution’, 136.
- 44.
S. Newman, ‘“Ownness created a new freedom”: Max Stirner’s alternative concept of liberty’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, ONLINE FIRST (2017), 6.
- 45.
Gordon, Anarchy Alive, 56.
- 46.
Gordon, ibid., 61.
- 47.
See U. Gordon, ‘Anarchism and Nationalism’, in N. Jun (Ed), Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 196–215.
- 48.
Gordon, Anarchy Alive, 69.
- 49.
For more on this, see M. Egoumenides, Philosophical anarchism and political obligation (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
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Prichard, A. (2019). Freedom. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_4
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