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David Held is an Anarchist. Discuss Alex Prichard Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2010 39: 439 originally published online 8 November 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0305829810383607 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mil.sagepub.com/content/39/2/439

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David Held is an  Anarchist. Discuss

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2) 439–459 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co. uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0305829810383607 mil.sagepub.com

Alex Prichard

London School of Economics

Abstract David Held’s international political theory is an echo of many of the core ideas at the heart of the anarchist tradition. These include an attempt to mediate a course between liberalism and Marxism, the centrality of the principle of autonomy to his political theory, a similar critique of the state and the economy based on this principle, and a vision for politics that is decentralised, multi-level and federal. The core differences revolve around a different reading of the history of state formation, the centrality of the democratic legal state to Held’s work and the rejection of the same by the anarchists. From an anarchist perspective, it is internally contradictory for Held to call for the continued existence of the institution which has historically been the antithesis of autonomy – the state. I will argue that because he has not taken the anarchist literature seriously, his defence of the state is left open to an anarchist critique. My argument will be that anarchy, rather than the state, is the precondition of autonomy. My dual aim with this article is to help bring anarchism in from the cold and to show where anarchist theory and contemporary cosmopolitanism might fruitfully learn from one another. My conclusion is that David Held is not an anarchist, but a more consistent Heldian political philosophy would be.

Keywords anarchism, anarchy, autonomy, cosmopolitanism, international political theory

Introduction David Held is currently the Graham Wallas Professor of Government and co-director of LSE Global Governance, a centre devoted to the theory and practice of global governance. He founded Polity Press in 1984 and his prolific output and high-profile status, not to mention the timely intellectual contributions of his work, have lent him the ear of progressive policy makers in the UK and Europe. Held’s name has become almost synonymous with the study and advocacy of radical democratic projects, progressive

Corresponding author: Alex Prichard, London School of Economics Email: [email protected]

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left-globalisation and ethical and political cosmopolitanism.1 His works, which stretch to many yards on most university library bookshelves, present a singular and hugely influential challenge to traditional statist, liberal and neo-liberal approaches to ethics, politics and power and advocate a coherent and philosophically grounded defence of what he calls ‘global social democracy’. Held is categorical that anarchism has nothing to offer to this project. In Models of Democracy, Held quite explicitly and deliberately ignores the anarchists.2 When he does engage with anarchism or the anarchists, he reverts to stereotypes. Anarchists, he argues, ‘those notorious for attacking Starbucks at the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting’, ‘do not seek common ground or a new reconciliation of views … [and] in this respect they are no different from the extreme neo-liberalisers who put their faith first and foremost in deregulated markets’.3 Elsewhere he argues that ‘the radical anti-globalist position’, which he implies is synonymous with anarchism, ‘appears deeply naïve about the potential for locally based action to resolve, or engage with, the governance agenda generated by the forces of globalization. How can such a politics cope with the challenges posed by overlapping communities of fate?’4 Held’s anti-anarchism and his residual statism are tied to his Marxism. As he puts it: ‘Marx, it should be emphasised, was not an anarchist’ and he envisaged a long period of state-controlled society before the state should, could or would eventually ‘wither away’.5 As far as it has been possible to determine, these short quotations constitute the full extent of Held’s engagement with anarchism and suggest why Held has never seen fit to engage with the arguments of the anarchists. But they are simply not a fair assessment of anarchism. More importantly, as I will show, Held’s ignorance on these matters undermines the originality of his own position and ironically lends intellectual support to the anarchist position. As Andrew Linklater, another proponent of cosmopolitan democracy and one of the foremost International Relations theorists, has argued, ‘[t]he anarchist tradition has long-argued for despatching state monopoly powers to local communities and transnational agencies in order to recover the potentials for universality and difference which were stifled by the rise of the modern territorial state’, and he calls for more research into anarchist conceptions of citizenship and community in a post-Westphalian

1. The works referred to here will be David Held, ‘Beyond Liberalism and Marxism?’, in The Idea of the Modern State, eds G. McLennan, D. Held and Stuart Hall (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984); David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity in association with Blackwell, 1987); David Held, ‘Cosmopolitanism: Globalisation Tamed?’, Review of International Studies 29, no. 4 (2003): 465–80; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); David Held, ‘Restructuring Global Governance: Cosmopolitanism, Democracy and the Global Order’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2009): 535–47; David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization and Anti-globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); David Held and Heikki Patomäki, ‘Problems of Global Democracy: A Dialogue’, Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 5 (2006): 115–33. 2. Held, Models of Democracy, 6. 3. Held and McGrew, Globalization and Anti-globalization, 115. 4. Held, Global Covenant, 162; Held and McGrew, Globalization and Anti-globalization, 130. 5. Held, ‘Beyond Liberalism and Marxism?’, 227.

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era.6 This position is taken seriously here and while my aim is not to set up a points tally, I do want to show how theorists of cosmopolitanism like Held might benefit from an engagement with the anarchist literature and vice versa. The crux of the matter is that by not paying closer attention to the anarchist critique of the state Held is left wide open to it. The article is structured in the following way. I begin by outlining Held’s international political theory in brief. I will show how Held presents a reading of the historical sociology of the modern state which suggests the possibility of a move beyond it. Held argues that any shift from a statist world order to something more federal and cosmopolitan demands a moral philosophy that can orient our normative and political theory because the principles which animated the statist order are redundant. The core principle Held isolates to help achieve this is that of ‘autonomy’. This concept, he argues, takes the best from the Marxist and liberal traditions and in so doing moves beyond both. I will show how Held uses this principle to illuminate the ethical and political processes that undermine autonomy in two ‘sites of power’. While there are five more concepts central to Held’s theory, considerations of space mean I can focus on only two: the state and economy. Held argues that the possibility of autonomy is closed down by a neo-liberal market order and the limitations of the liberal state in a globalised political order. His aim is to reinvigorate a global social democratic project, or a new compromise between state, labour and capital, structured in accordance with the requirements of autonomy, to help us respond to the challenges of our times. Central to his project is the retention and promotion, at least in the short to medium term, of the ‘democratic legal state’. The statist trap at the heart of Held’s thinking is illuminated more than adequately when we approach it from the perspective of anarchist political philosophy. In the second, more substantive, part of the article I will show how an anarchist international political theory drawn from a range of contemporary sources, but mostly fleshed out with the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), is remarkably similar to Held’s position but challenges it in important ways.7 What I will first argue is that we are where 6. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of a Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 196. See also Richard Falk, ‘Anarchism and World Order’, in Nomos XIX: Anarchism, eds J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1979); Thomas G. Weiss, ‘The Tradition of Philosophical Anarchism and Future Directions in World Policy’, Journal of Peace Research 12 (1975): 1–17. 7. I pay closer attention to Proudhon’s thought in this article for three principal reasons. Firstly, Proudhon’s thinking is arguably most strikingly echoed in Held’s writings and thus deserves foregrounding. Secondly, even if we find similar ideas in later anarchist thought, Proudhon’s writings were arguably the genesis of anarchism and thus a focus on the intellectual source of these arguments seems logical. Finally, since Proudhon’s writings have been long forgotten, this exegesis ought also to help flesh out the historiography and conceptual content of anarchism. See, for example, P. J. Proudhon, Si les Traités de 1815 Ont Cessé d’Exister (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863); P. J. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, trans. Richard Vernon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix: Recherches sur la Principe et la Constitution du Droit des Gens, nouvelle edn. (Paris: Editions Tops, 1998). See also Alex Prichard, ‘Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007): 623–46; Alex Prichard, ‘Deepening Anarchism: International Relations and the Anarchist Ideal’, Anarchist Studies 18, no. 2 (forthcoming); ‘The Ethical Foundations of Proudhon’s Republican Anarchism’, in Anarchism and Moral Philosophy, eds Benjamin Franks and Matt Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Alex Prichard, ‘What

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we are today – licking our 20th-century wounds – precisely because so few listened to the anarchists’ warnings regarding the combination of populism, the emerging nation state and economic expropriation in the 19th century.8 I will also show that anarchism always defended the best of socialism and liberalism without subscribing to either and that autonomy is at the heart of any anarchist political philosophy. Indeed, when we look at the concept from this perspective, we gain a quite different understanding of the role of the state in modern society and the means through which we ought to realise a more emancipatory political agency. It is only without the state that we can be autonomous – anarchy, anarkhia, without leader, or the absence of a sovereign, is, I will argue, the precondition of autonomy.9 What I will argue is that anarchy is the logical culmination of Held’s theory. However, what this necessitates is the abandonment of any political and normative commitment to the state because the traditional compromise between organised labour, capital and the state has simply entrenched the power of the latter two and the impotency of the former. The anarchist alternative I will outline here mirrors Held’s in its defence of subsidiarity, multi-level governance, federalism and stateless citizenship. This is not the place to outline a programme of action, but a range of questions and suggestions for further reflection, for mainstream cosmopolitans and anarchists alike, will close the analysis.

Part 1: David Held’s Cosmopolitan Project The Historical Sociology of State Formation At the close of the 20th century, after two World Wars, the collapse of Cold War antipathies and the grand narratives of Left and Right that had set the terms of political debate for most of the century, political and social theorists began queuing up to tell us that there had been a profound and irrevocable transformation of political community.10 While the trajectory of this transformative process, usually understood as neo-liberal globalisation, is still debated,11 what is now taken for granted is that the old 19th-century order, characterised by nation states at each other’s throats for territory and prestige, governed by nothing more than the whim of royal prerogative or the ugly whim of democratic populism, has passed us by. The European Union is usually held up as the embodiment of this transformation, where pooled sovereignty and cooperation, the defence of universal values such as human rights, open markets and social democracy, are said to be the culmination of the harsh learning process that characterised Hobsbawm’s ‘age of extremes’.12

  8.   9. 10.

11. 12.

Can the Absence of Anarchism Tell Us about the History and Purpose of IR?’, Review of International Studies (forthcoming 2011). Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1978). Uri Gordon, ‘Αναρχία – What Did the Greeks Actually Say?’, Anarchist Studies 14, no. 1 (2006): 84–91. See, for example, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamilton, 1992); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Linklater, Transformation. Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory: Polemical Essays (London: Verso, 2000); R. B. J. Walker, After the Globe, before the World (London: Routledge, 2010). Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1994).

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The 21st-century promise is that we can make the most of this interregnum by rethinking the political philosophy of order that gave us the nation states that global changes are now allowing us to move beyond. Indeed, the argument from necessity is that if we do not do this, we risk short-changing our global futures. As Held puts it: The transformation of politics which has followed in the wake of the growing interconnectedness of states and societies and the increasing intensity of international networks requires a re-examination of political theory as fundamental in form and scope as the shift which brought about the conceptual and institutional innovations of the modern state itself.13

Held’s solution is a radical ‘global social democracy’. In crafting the political philosophy to underpin it, Held is trying to square two distinct processes. The first is a historical emergence of a thinly institutionalised global political community, the second Europe’s recent localised and varied experiences of social democracy, which, he argues, is a social advancement of historic proportions. For Held, social democracy is a compromise between labour, capital and the state. What it represents, however, is also the most stable and equitable compromise yet struck, and the pacific and equitable qualities of this compromise, both within and between like-minded social democracies, suggest their replication elsewhere might produce the fabled Kantian paradise – a position echoed throughout large parts of the International Relations literature.14 The challenge these writers face in their attempt to universalise a localised experience is that contemporary political community, not to mention social democracy itself, is being reshaped by neo-liberal forces of globalisation faster than social democracy can become entrenched. Moreover, the undermining of social democracy is taking place with the collaboration of social democratic national states.15 In response Held argues that this crisis of social democracy can only be adequately responded to with global solutions. The practical and political purpose of the historical sociology of state formation above is to show the potentialities immanent in the times we live in. As Held and McGrew put it, looking at the EU as a prime example we can see that ‘[p]olitical space for the development and pursuit of effective government and the accountability of power is no longer coterminous with a delimited political territory. Forms of political organisation now involve a complex deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of political authority.’16 If we are to retain the progressive ‘compromise’ at the heart of the 13. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 143. 14. See, for example, Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (1983): 205–35; Erik Oddvar Eriksen, ‘The EU – a Cosmopolitan Polity?’, Journal of European Public Policy 13, no. 2 (2006): 252–69; Andrew Linklater, ‘Citizenship and Sovereignty in the Post-Westphalian European State’, in Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, eds D. Archibugi, D. Held and M. Köhler (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 15. David Bailey, ‘Governance or the Crisis of Governmentality? Applying Critical State Theory at the European Level’, Journal of European Public Policy 13, no. 1 (2006): 16–33; David J. Bailey, ‘The Transition to “New” Social Democracy: The Role of Capitalism, Representation and (Hampered) Contestation’, British Journal of Politics & International Relations 11, no. 4 (2009): 593–612; Sara Motta and David Bailey, ‘Neither Pragmatic Adaptation nor Misguided Accommodation: Modernisation as Domination in the Chilean and British Left’, Capital & Class 31, no. 2 (2007): 107–36. 16. Held and McGrew, Globalization and Anti-globalization, 124.

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social democratic project, between labour, capital and the state, which was cemented in Western Europe in the early 20th century, we are now forced to do so in a radically different political context but also with institutional and technological opportunities previously unknown or unimagined. This reading of history certainly suggests that none foresaw the travesty European national statism was to bequeath to history and that no one suggested a radically decentralised alternative before it was too late. By ignoring anarchism, historical alternatives to the nation state can also be ignored and, in the absence of recognised alternatives, social democracy becomes the only progressive game in town.

Towards Autonomy The bulk of Held’s own work is directed at providing the philosophical justification for ‘global social democracy’. Central to this is establishing the normative centrality of a ‘principle of autonomy’, a principle which he believed was quite original. In a 1985 piece that prefigured much of his future political theory, he argued that the unsatisfactory political choice of the 20th century was between liberal reformism and revolutionary Marxism.17 Ignoring anarchism, Held was able to argue that political philosophy as such (constituted around these two poles) lacked the intellectual tools to respond to the transformation of political community at the end of the 20th century. Held argued that it was, however, possible to take much of value from these two traditions that could be developed into a sophisticated political theory of ‘autonomy’. Held juxtaposed the liberal focus on positive and negative freedoms with the Marxist appreciation for the structural inhibitors to the possibility for their fullest realisation. Liberalism, it was argued, was overly wedded to a narrow understanding of human rationality and responsibility and to the idea of the state as a neutral arbiter between private interests when in fact, as Marxists argue, the free market, structured around private control of the means of production, structures social relations along a division between the haves and have-nots. While this analysis was significant in its own right, its value was also in its ability to illustrate how wider or other structures of social power also limit the potentialities of and for human flourishing elsewhere. Economic marginalisation finds its equivalent in culture, race and gender relations to mention but three domains. The myopic focus on the individual, a narrow understanding of rationality and an idealised notion of the arbitrator-state on the right was clearly problematic, but the core impulse for individual freedom and autonomy at the heart of liberalism was an advance often overlooked by defenders of revolutionary Marxism – particularly when in cahoots with the Soviet state. These debates are now well worn, but Held’s contribution was to take the liberal defence of freedom and responsibility and use Marxism to widen and deepen it. To do this he elaborated a deontological ‘principle of autonomy’. Held made the bold (and, as I will show, unfounded) claim that the principle of autonomy is not ‘at the heart of any of the models of participatory democracy which place the active citizen exclusively at their centre’,18 and, building on the work of Immanuel Kant and neo-Kantians such as John Rawls, Brian Barry and Jürgen Habermas, Held defined the principle of autonomy thus: 17. Held, ‘Beyond Liberalism and Marxism?’. 18. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 149.

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persons should enjoy equal rights and, accordingly, equal obligation in the specification of the political framework which generates and limits the opportunities available to them; that is they should be free and equal in the determination of the conditions of their own lives, so long as they do not deploy this framework to negate the rights of others.19

This principle, he argued, could help us frame and specify the appropriate institutions for the realisation of autonomy and also provide a yardstick against which to identify full and active citizenship in this (post)modern era. Contemporary society fails the test of the principle of autonomy because in seven key ‘sites of power’ (the body, welfare, culture and cultural life, civic associations, the economy, the organisation of violence and the state) people have little if any control over the ‘specification of the political framework which generates and limits the opportunities available to them’. The language through which this process is best articulated is that of citizenship; the appropriate institutional framework must, however, be global.

The Evolution of Social Citizenship: Autonomy, the State and the (Global) Economy Held links the state to the economy and both to law and democracy. This move allows him to articulate alternatives to the status quo in the language of citizenship, and he illustrates his argument with the story of the emergence of social citizenship. The story goes like this: the first articulation of political autonomy was that of the Barons and their defence of their fiefdoms from the King. This set of formal legal rights was set down in law and guaranteed constitutionally. When it was shown that without access to law-making the legal equality suggested by legal rights would only be partial and ultimately at the discretion of the sovereign, political rights to participate in that process of law-making were extended and the sphere of autonomy developed once more. When it was then shown that without the economic wherewithal to fully engage in a political process in the first place the legal and political right to do so is meaningless, social rights to welfare support, health provision and so on were instituted.20 This is a radical simplification of an extremely complex historical process, but one in which the general widening of political participation is taken to be symptomatic of the progressive nature of the modern state. While anarchists would argue that this process is symptomatic of the co-option of human autonomy by the state, Held believes this process has at least one further step to make: the extension of the principle of autonomy suggested by the emergence of social citizenship to every domain of political life – in particular the economy. As Held put it: ‘[o]nce citizens entered the factory gates, their lives were largely determined by the directives of capital … politics was not extended to industry .… To the extent that modern capitalist relations produce systematic inequalities in economic and social resource, the structure of autonomy is profoundly affected.’21 Therefore, ‘[i]f democratic legal 19. Ibid., 147, emphasis in the original. 20. The key reference for this narrative is T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto, 1992). 21. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 182–3.

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relations are to be sustained, corporations will have to uphold, de jure and de facto, a commitment to the requirements of autonomy’,22 which is to say that economic relations would need to be democratised, with those likely to suffer from the effects of private actions given control over the processes that have hitherto been denied them. Held continues that ‘[t]he question of particular forms of property right is not in itself the primary consideration’,23 but reasonable access to the decision-making procedures that govern any given property regime is. If we cannot collectively decide whether we desire a given property regime, then to what degree can it be said to be morally acceptable? Moreover, if we can show that a particular ownership regime systematically disempowers, are we not entitled to demand more autonomy from it? Held, like most anarchists, answers both questions in the affirmative. It is on the terms of the solution that they differ since, for Held, the answer to this question of how we might so decide is answered in terms of the ‘democratic legal state’. For Held the state is ‘an independent corporation, made up of an ensemble of organisations coordinated by a determinate political authority’,24 all of which is bound by legal rules which are increasingly internationalised. States also have a de jure monopoly on violence and are historical products peopled by historical and politicised subjects, rather than an abstract entity populated by equally abstract rational egoists. The state has a real and formative role to play in the shaping of the life chances and opportunities of the groups over which it has jurisdiction. It is not an impartial arbiter, but nor does that mean that it is automatically beholden to any one set of particular interests in all given societies. The state itself is also shaped and constrained by law and wider social struggles which themselves emerged out of historical processes of war, civil contestation and economic bargaining. The purpose of the ‘principle of autonomy’ and the historical sociology of state formation is to show that this process has become ever more inclusive and that to develop this neo-Kantian process demands further entrenching the principle of autonomy within a framework of democratic public law. For Held: democratic public law sets out the basis of the rights and corresponding obligations which follow from a commitment to the principle of autonomy. It sets the form and limits of public power – the framework in which debate, deliberation and policy-making can be pursued and judged. Rules, laws, policies and decisions can be considered legitimate when made within this framework; that is, when made bearing ‘the democratic good’ in mind.25

This ‘democratic good’ is contrasted with ‘an unbridled licence for the pursuit of individual interests in public affairs’.26 However, it is somewhat curious for Held to argue that ‘political empowerment’ demands ‘de jure status’ and, furthermore, that empowerment should demand the state is no less curious.27 The suggestion here is that the state is the only body that can guarantee autonomy and political empowerment, and the only 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Ibid., 252. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 101.

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way this can be done equitably is within the parameters of public law. The history of political change, from the suffragette movement to the struggle for labour rights, from anti-colonialism to racial equality, even the unbridled struggle for the rights of key individuals, suggests that legality and official sanction are rarely the hallmark of the tools for political empowerment and are more often inhibitors to it. Moreover these struggles often took place without a demand for formal political empowerment and were also often anarchist in tenor.28 The point here is that law has traditionally curtailed autonomy and the key instrument for the defence of inequality has been the state. As has been pointed out by a number of authors, Held’s Kantian position on the relationship between law and human potentiality is somewhat naïve and suggests that law has causal properties over and above the agency of the actors who write and enforce it.29 We are left to hope and pray that those empowered by law to make decisions on our behalf do indeed have the ‘democratic good’ in mind, even that their conception of this ‘good’ echoes our own or that of the communities or trades we spend most time in. We must also hope that the pre-existing democratic public law does not constrain the range of future possibilities open to us as citizens (be that protest or freedom of speech) and finally we must also hope that the state makes good its promise to defend autonomy. The state’s record on this is poor. Invariably, autonomy, whether premised on gender equality or environmental responsibility or anything else, has to be fought for – often fatally – and ripped from the clutches of the state. Of course, democratic public law demands welfare support to enable access. But the social democratic compromise that is supposed to underpin the new democratic legal state is also crumbling. Left-wing parties in Europe and elsewhere have arguably become complicit in the reproduction of the neo-liberal order to which they were traditionally opposed. Moreover, that the sovereignty of European states in particular cannot be trusted to defend the rights of its citizens is typified by the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Held recognises this and calls for further deepening or entrenching of these multiple levels of political and legal oversight. What he also calls for is stronger democratic oversight of them in turn.30 While bodies such as the UN, the EU and so on provide historically significant redress and security, they lack the legitimacy of established democracies precisely because so few are entitled to participate in the decision-making process and their law-writing rituals. Following the principle of autonomy in these situations means an obligation to democratise these bodies. Within the political framework advocated by Held this seems decidedly utopian. 28. This history is not well known and only cursory reference can be made to the relevant literatures here. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Extensive reading lists on various aspects of anarchist theory and history can be found at the Anarchist Studies Network website. See http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/ReadingLists (accessed 12 August 2010). 29. William E. Scheuerman, ‘Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Rule of Law’, Ratio Juris 15, no. 4 (2002): 439–57. 30. See, for example, Held, ‘Restructuring Global Governance’, 541–2.

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Held, like so many anarchists, also draws our attention to the multilateral economic institutions of the global economy, such as the WTO and World Bank, and their significant legitimacy deficits, and also the relatively unregulated global economic system and its mitigating effects on the autonomy of the poor both in the core and periphery of the world economy. Held notes, for example, how the legal rules which govern the global economy routinely favour those who first wrote them, which is to say that average life chances are structurally skewed in favour of the affluent North-west. Held’s vision for ‘global social democracy’ is that active participation in the rule-making that structures the global architecture can rebalance the demands of capital, labour and states towards meeting the requirements of autonomy. The remaining question regards the appropriate institutional framework through which to realise this compromise and how it can be shown to defend autonomy.

Autonomy, Subsidiarity and Multi-level Cosmopolitan Governance The feature of Held’s work that contemporary anarchist theorists would gain most from is his approach to international affairs.31 There are three concepts Held deploys here. Firstly, Held argues that the principle of subsidiarity implies that ‘those whose life expectancy and life chances are significantly affected by social forces and processes ought to have a stake in the determination of the conditions and regulation of these, either directly or indirectly through representatives’.32 This principle is enshrined in the Treaty of the European Union and while there is debate around where this principle stops (it was famously advanced by Margaret Thatcher to protect the interests of national states), ideas are catching. What the evolution of citizenship and the widening of the franchise have shown is that participation is central to the development of our autonomy. Subsidiarity ought therefore to imply the democratisation of our workplaces as Held argues (above) and this ought also to imply that macroeconomic decisions that are likely to affect microenterprises ought to be decided by those micro-enterprises. The problem, as Held sees it, is that ‘[p]olitical space for the development and pursuit of effective government and the accountability of power is no longer coterminous with a delimited political territory. Forms of political organisation now involve a complex deterritorialization and reterritorialization’,33 which, again, ‘points to the necessity of both the decentralisation and the centralisation of political power’.34 Held also argues that ‘decision-making should be decentralised as much as possible … centralisation is favoured if, and only if, it is the necessary basis for avoiding the exclusion of persons 31. Clearly there are others that work in this area. See, for example, Nigel Dower, ‘The Idea of Global Citizenship – A Sympathetic Assessment’, Global Society 14, no. 4 (2000): 553–67; Onora O’Neill, ‘Bounded and Cosmopolitan Justice’, Review of International Studies 26 (2000): 45–60; April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2001); Andrew Linklater, ‘Cosmopolitan Citizenship’, in Cosmopolitan Citizenship, eds K. Hutchings and R. Dannreuther (London: Macmillan, 1999); Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992). 32. Held, Global Covenant, 100. 33. Held and McGrew, Globalization and Anti-globalization, 124. 34. Held, Global Covenant, 100.

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who are significantly affected by a political decision or outcome’.35 Autonomy can only be protected by giving people an active role in the decisions that affect their life chances. This is where the democratic legal state has a role: to redress any egregious imbalance of forces in society in defence of the principle of autonomy rather than in the interests of any one political cleavage. But the state is ‘both too small and too big’ for this task – too small to cope with global pressures and too big to respond to micro ones. For Held, this suggests a new approach that ‘yields the possibility of multilevel democratic governance. The ideal number of appropriate democratic jurisdictions cannot be assumed to be embraced by just one level – as it is in the theory of the liberal democratic nation-state’.36 This is quintessentially an anarchist position but one that completely underestimates the relatively autonomous power of the state and our ever-diminishing ability to direct it.37 Finally, in this complex mélange of political orders, sovereignty becomes something of a misnomer. The politics Held describes lacks a determinate political centre – a real sovereign. What Held argues is that while state sovereignty can now be replaced by the sovereignty of the people consistent with the principle of autonomy, this autonomy is in turn regulated by complex institutional arrangements that are ‘both constraining and enabling’.38 As Held puts it: In this conception, the nation-state ‘withers away’. But this is not to suggest that states and national democratic polities become redundant. Rather, states would no longer be regarded as the sole centres of legitimate power within their borders, as is already the case in many places. Rightful authority or sovereignty can be stripped away from the idea of fixed borders and territories and thought of as, in principle, an attribute of basic cosmopolitan democratic law which can be drawn upon and enacted in diverse realms, from local associations and cities to states and wider global networks.39

What this formulation suggests of course is that anarchy, characterised as the absence of a formal hierarchy and the absence of a sovereign centre, becomes the norm not the exception found only at the international level. It also begs the question of why still more radical disaggregation of the state at the micro-level should not continue apace. Is the ‘democratic legal state’ really vital to human autonomy? What does the state provide that a more complex institutional arrangement, clearly suggested by Held’s own writings and ideas but not arguably taken far enough, could not also guarantee? The following section is principally structured to drive this question home and suggest areas for further debate.

35. Ibid., 101, emphasis added. 36. Ibid., 102. 37. For more on the concept of multi-level governance, subsidiarity and neo-medievalism, see Andreas Föllesdal, ‘Survey Article: Subsidiarity’, Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1998): 190–218; Jörg Friedrichs, ‘The Meaning of New Medievalism’, European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 4 (2001): 475–502; Gary Marks, Lisebet Hooghe and Kermit Blank, ‘European Integration from the 1980s: State-Centric v. Multi-level Governance’, Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 3 (1996): 341–74. 38. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 147. 39. Held, ‘Restructuring Global Governance’, 541.

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Part 2: Anarchy and Autonomy The Evident Threat of the Nation State in the 19th Century Recall that Held argues that we have much to learn from the history of state formation. Recall also that ‘we’ are supposed to learn from our mistakes. What if, however, there was a group of people who warned vociferously that the rise of the nation state portended only disaster? Singularly amongst 19th-century social philosophies, anarchism was socialist and anti-statist. Marxists, social democrats, liberals, monarchists, imperialists, revolutionary nationalists and so forth, were all driven by the desire to capture the state or wield the instruments of state power in their favour against other prevailing interests. This struggle for control of the state by non-state forces, be they the bourgeoisie or the working class, contributed to the increasing monopolisation of power by the state in its attempts to control recalcitrant domestic populations. With each success the state was seen as an ever greater institutional prize for the next set of would-be ‘leaders’. The doctrine was one of centralisation and the totalisation of the state, in the interests of this or that group but couched in universalist terms, and this continued unabated until the end of the Second World War. The anarchists were protesting against precisely this process. Proudhon warned against the unification of Italy, foreseeing that such a unity would require overwhelming force and would be singularly detrimental to the varied character of the peninsula, the economic autonomy of the regions and the interests of neighbouring states. Throughout his work Proudhon also lamented the centralisation of France and the extinguishing of local autonomy by the centralised Jacobin state. In De la Justice (1858), Proudhon also warned against the centralisation of the German state, but five years later, in Si les Traités de 1815 ont Cessé d’Exister, he seemed to have changed his mind and was convinced that a German confederation was more likely and therefore less to worry about. Proudhon here also rejected the unification of Poland in favour of a mix of confederalism and protectorates. He further rejected the claims of most national liberation movements that were cast within centralising and statist terms, while he defended the autonomy of Europe’s regional groups. His simple argument was that such moves would not lead to the emancipation of the peoples but to their co-option by the state and their exploitation by capital.40 Similarly, writing in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the execution of 20,000 working-class men and women by the French republican state in Paris in 1871 (and the expulsion of tens of thousands more), Mikhail Bakunin was under no illusions as to the nature of the modern nation state. Looking across the Rhine, he was also awake to the future nature of the militarised Prussian state and warned cogently against a German-led social democratic party and its co-option of the International Workingmen’s Association. He argued that under Marx’s iron rule the autonomy of the working class would be irretrievably compromised.41 Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman watched in shock as the Russian Revolution unfolded and warned against the centralisation of state 40. For a full discussion of this and extensive references to the relevant literature, see Prichard, ‘Deepening Anarchism’. 41. Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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power in the hands of the few; both called on Lenin to change the course of the Revolution or see its core principles irrevocably betrayed.42 Rudolf Rocker warned about the rise of the Nazi party,43 while Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was explicitly aimed at countering the social Darwinist tendency in European thought and its role in bolstering the German Reich.44 Consider finally British and American abstention during the Spanish Civil War, when the anarchists fought the combined might of Franco’s Falangists, Mussolini’s Fascists, Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s henchmen in the name of democracy and freedom.45 What Hobsbawm characterised as an ‘Age of Extremes’ ought to be seen as a moral stain on the historical conscience of so-called democracies and, when read together, the works and observations referred to above constitute an ‘I told you so!’ of historic proportions. The anarchists have always been hostile to the nation state and in large measure they have been right to be so. It is disingenuous for the contemporary Left to claim to be able to take lessons from history, when their comrades have been making these arguments with foresight for centuries and have been killed by the Left and Right for their troubles. And yet, despite the millions that were sent to their deaths either in war or through the highly mechanised and centralised killing of civilians by the state (a process that would have been practically impossible on that scale without one),46 the anarchists were seen to be the crazy lunatics. And now, today, when the Left warns of the dangers of centralisation and the lessons we are supposed to have learnt from the past, it is conveniently forgotten that the most prophetic were the ones most states silenced through lethal force.

Anarchism,  Autonomy and Liberal Socialism The standard trope is that the anarchist response to the rise of the nation state was the advocacy of chaos and disorder, and any violent means would do to bring this about. Such a view of anarchism is deeply ingrained in the popular imagination and bears little if any relation to the historical record.47 In fact, anarchism ought to be understood as a robust political philosophy in its own right and one that is surprisingly being echoed today. For example, consider David Apter’s argument that ‘the virtue of anarchism as a doctrine is that it employs a socialist critique of capitalism with a liberal critique of 42. These letters are available online at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/kropotkin/KropotkinCW. html (accessed 21 July 2010). 43. Rocker, Nationalism and Culture. 44. See the introduction to the 1914 edition of Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989). 45. For a good treatment of the international dimensions of the Spanish Civil War that is relatively sympathetic to the near-impossible position of the anarchists in Spain and recognises their many social and political achievements, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 4th edn (London: Penguin, 2003). 46. See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 47. For good discussions regarding anarchism and violence, see, for example, Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 78–108; Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006), 139–53; Ruth Kinna, Anarchism (Oxford: One World Press, 2005), 158–62; David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009), 222–8.

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socialism’.48 The socialist critique of capitalism revolved around the structuring effect of a capitalist economy against the interests of the many, while the liberal critique of socialism centred on the negative effects of state centralisation and centralised direction of economic forces articulated in the interests of the many but in practice serving those of the few. As Richard Falk has argued, anarchism is ‘alive to the twin dangers of socialism and capitalism if pursued within the structure of statism’,49 and this made it very unpopular on the Left. It seems anarchism has been characterised in terms Held has arrogated to himself. It is also worth pointing out that Monique Canto-Sperber, Professor of Moral Philosophy and previously director of the École Normale Supérieure, has argued that Proudhon was ‘the first liberal socialist’.50 He rejected the collectivism of the Left and the individualism of the Right and sought a via media between the two.51 Anarchists attempted to balance the demands of individuality and community, the relationships of communities with one another, and the necessity of political freedom through participatory social control. The key to understanding the importance of each of these is the anarchist critique of the structuring effects of the state and a capitalist economy on our life chances and how little democratic control the vast majority of people have over their lives. The second claim to originality that Held makes is that he is quite unique in putting a principle of autonomy alongside active citizenship at the heart of his political philosophy. However, as David Graeber has recently shown through extensive ethnographic analysis within the newest direct-action social movements, ‘“autonomy” [is] simultaneously the greatest anarchist value, and the greatest dilemma’.52 The dilemma revolves around reconciling the interests of individuals and groups while also retaining the maximum autonomy for each. As Ruth Kinna has shown, throughout the anarchist tradition there is a liberal defence of the autonomy of the individual against the encroachments of the state and capital, the Church and other powerful individuals.53 For Kropotkin, Proudhon and right through to Murray Bookchin, David Graeber and beyond, the defence of the negative freedoms of the individual, that is defence from the encroachments of the state or the expropriations of capitalism, has to be balanced with the positive rights of the individual to create those structures necessary to human flourishing. This is the dilemma of realising autonomy through horizontal modes of organisation in our daily practices when the norm is towards hierarchy and representation rather than direct action and anarchy. The claim is that the state is the core instrument through which the unjust and exploitative contemporary global order is maintained (and Held recognises as much through his advocacy of a radical brand of cosmopolitan democracy), and so anarchists, in order to be internally consistent, have to remain autonomous of it. Held believes there is hope yet. 48. David E. Apter, ‘The Old Anarchism and the New – Some Comments’, Government and Opposition 5, no. 4 (1970): 397–8. 49. Falk, ‘Anarchism and World Order’, 82. 50. Monique Canto-Sperber, ‘Proudhon, the First Liberal Socialist’, paper presented at the Gimeon Conference on French Political Economy 1650–1848, Stanford University, CA, 2004. 51. For more on this, see Aaron Noland, ‘History and Humanity: The Proudhonian Vision’, in The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History, ed. Hayden White (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1968), 59–105. 52. Graeber, Direct Action, 266; David Graeber, ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review 13 (2002): 61–73. 53. Kinna, Anarchism, 76–81.

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It may surprise many to find that there is a rich anarchist tradition of debate on these issues, one which cannot be adequately covered here.54 However, again, the message is that the instruments of state power have manifestly failed to deliver on their bold 19thcentury promises for popular sovereignty, and this has led to very real hostility to the established forms of representation and political agency. Indeed, with anarchists at the forefront of many a movement for radical social change, the historiography of the tradition is littered with examples of extreme state repression, summary executions, agents provocateurs and widespread smearing in the popular media. The resulting anti-representational politics, direct action and commitment to anti-authoritarianism are central to anarchist praxis precisely because all other avenues for radical social change have been closed off to their demands or have been shown to fail to realise them.55 Proudhon is again interesting here in relation to a wider macro-level understanding of the ethics of anarchic autonomy. As I have shown elsewhere,56 Proudhon was resolutely against the doctrine of unity that characterised the process of nation state and empire building in the 18th and 19th centuries. The political philosophy of unity tended to exhibit three clear tendencies: that order rested on overwhelming power, that the terms of consensus were to be defined by the sovereign power and that all challengers were to be put down by force since force was the defining characteristic of the struggle for power. From England’s relationship with Scotland, Ireland and Wales through to innumerable other examples of what we might call internal imperialism, the discourse was the same – ‘Unity or Death’, as Mazzini once said of his vision for the Risorgimento. Nationalist struggles and the wish-dreams of the state-socialists were the same – the capture of state power would usher in the Promised Land: the proletariat ‘must … conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which immediately it is forced to do’.57 The anarchist alternative was to defend the autonomy of the plural social and political cleavages of society and show up the doctrine of political unity for what it really seemed to be: in the case of Italy at least, ‘simply a form of bourgeoisie exploitation under the protection of bayonets’.58 This pitched anarchists against many of the countervailing political tendencies of the time. Paradoxically, Proudhon looked to the autonomy of states in the international system as a model for the autonomy of all social groups.59 On 54. For an excellent collectively authored online overview and general introduction to anarchist praxis, see ‘An Anarchist FAQ’, particularly ‘Section J: What Do Anarchists Do?’, available at http://anarchism. pageabode.com/afaq/index.html (accessed 13 August 2010). 55. Anarchists argue not only that the state will be diametrically opposed to initiatives that seek to obviate the need for a state and therefore seek direct control of politics and the economy from below, but also that to seek change through the state would be to entrench the very systems of power and exclusion that anarchists wish to overturn. For a good non-anarchist analysis of structural exclusion from politics, see Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). On the refusal to participate in formal politics, see, for example, John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Graeber, Direct Action. 56. Prichard, ‘Deepening Anarchism’. 57. Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 169–70. 58. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Fédération et l’Unité en Italie (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862), 25. 59. For an interesting contemporary articulation of this relationship between anarchy and freedom that is not

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what legitimate basis could one state or group of people, in the case of Italy the Sardinians, legitimately override the autonomy of the plural regions that went to make up the Italian peninsula? Proudhon pointed out that ‘the idea of universal sovereignty, the dream of the Middle Ages and formulated in Charlemagne’s pact, is the negation of the independence and the autonomy of states, the negation of all human liberty, something which states and nations are eternally unified in refusing’.60 He also argued that the tendencies afoot in Europe would bring history to an end by stifling the political and cultural diversity that made up the rich tapestry of the continent. Contra Mazzini, from Proudhon’s perspective unity would be the death of diversity. Proudhon’s ideas are also deeply neo-Kantian in relation to the moral and political autonomy of the individual.61 Robert Paul Wolff’s contemporary rearticulation of this restates the anarchist position on autonomy succinctly.62 In brief, Wolff argues that anarchism is the most consistent form of neo-Kantianism. The argument here is that laws not freely acceded to (no matter whether moral or legal) are arbitrary impositions on the will of naturally free individuals. Taking Kant far further than he himself would have allowed, Wolff has argued that a rational individual is one wholly responsible for his or her actions. But this can only be the case if said individual has complete control over the conditions which structure their life chances. How can we be responsible for outcomes we have no control over? The modern nation state, a symptom of ‘power over’ in general and the single most significant zone of exclusion in history, therefore curtails rather than enhances autonomy insofar as representation mediates our agency and insofar as the defence of a capitalist economic system systematically expropriates the fruits of our labour. In sum, Wolff argued that ‘[t]he primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled’.63 Anarchy or the absence of a sovereign, be that the proprietor or the state, by this analysis at least, is the precondition of autonomy. The hope that law will constitute a sufficient barrier to the traditional excesses of the state is insufficient unless supported by the idea that law itself can be democratically decided. While Proudhon is untypical of anarchists in general on this point, he argued for law and a democratically elected and locally accountable judiciary.64 Citizenship for Proudhon involved the active participation in deciding on the rules that ought to structure our lives, and this is only possible within the sorts of structures and institutions Held outlines and Proudhon anticipated. Proudhon argued that law and democracy ought to be the expression of the will of society’s ‘natural groups’, of which we are all already members, in order to embed our political agency and thereby be able to turn our backs on the state.65

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

from the extreme right, see Mervyn Frost, Global Ethics: Anarchy, Freedom and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2009). Unfortunately, Frost is just as unaware of the anarchist tradition as Held. Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix, 293. Prichard, ‘The Ethical Foundations of Proudhon’s Republican Anarchism’. Robert Paul Wolff, In Defence of Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). Ibid., 18. See also Richard Vernon, ‘Obligation by Association? A Reply to John Horton’, Political Studies 55, no. 4 (2007): 865–79. Sophie Chambost, Proudhon et la Norm: Pensé Juridique d’un Anarchiste (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004). A restatement of these views can be found in Harold Laski’s sociological approach to law and politics. See, for example, Harold J. Laski, ‘The Pluralistic State’, Philosophical Review 28, no. 6 (1919): 562–75.

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Held asks that we turn towards the state in the hope that it will support our efforts in the regard. Anarchists, arguing from experience, suggest anti-statist alternatives. By democratising all natural groups, from the workshop to the factory, the town to the region, we politicise all our social relations – our economic relations foremost. For Proudhon, the economy, our place of work, conceived in its classical Greek sense of oikos, was the domain in which our rights and duties were most keenly felt and most routinely denied by an overarching authority – capitalist or state capitalist. As he argued: It is not in the fraternity of revolutionary citizens but in the reciprocity among producers that unity is to be sought. Nor is it in the sharing of uniformity of status as citizens that unity is found but, precisely to the contrary, in the diversity of skill and situation that, in making individuals complementary to one another, also makes them cooperative.66

Elsewhere he continues: Thus we need not hesitate, for we have no choice. In cases in which production requires great division of labour, and considerable collective force, it is necessary to form an ASSOCIATION among the workers in this industry; because without that, they would remain related as subordinates and superiors, and there would issue two industrial castes of masters and wage workers, which is repugnant to a free and democratic society.67

This call for association is mirrored throughout Proudhon’s works by a concern that all natural groups become aware of their political capacity, formalise it through a regularised decision-making procedure and act. It is the specific form that the direction of this group action takes which determines whether it is anarchist or not, and only participatory, direct and consensual decision-making procedures can realise an anarchist community. As Richard Vernon has pointed out, citizenship, ‘as a political value, was merely an arrest of the spirit of liberation, whose ends were not political at all’.68

Anarchism,  Autonomy, Federalism and Governance Proudhon argued that society’s natural groups should be directly democratic if they were to reflect the political capacity of those who populated them, and this capacity, once formalised in this way, ought not to be alienated as was demanded by modern liberal politics from Rousseau onwards.69 It is the alienation of this political capacity to the state or capital, or indeed to hierarchical labour unions, which constituted the first move in our structural expropriation. Cooperation amongst groups emerges naturally from the asymmetrical demands of any given group relative to its structural location and the character of the individuals of which it is composed. Outside formal politics, these natural groups 66. Cited in Richard Vernon, Citizenship and Order: Studies in French Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 74. 67. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la Capacité Politique des Classes Oeuvrières (Paris: Slatkine, 1982), 216; Aaron Noland, ‘Proudhon and Rousseau’, Journal of the History of Ideas 28, no. 1 (1967): 33–54. 68. Vernon, Citizenship and Order, 66. 69. Noland, ‘Proudhon and Rousseau’.

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come together at will. Proudhon argued that the most emancipatory form of large-scale political association that could defend this movement and autonomy was federalism.70 This is potentially a global project if we agree that politics and our interests are never coterminous with states or given territory. In order to formalise the relative autonomy of towns, regions, cities, trades unions and all other natural social groups and, he argued, federate them along the lines of the Swiss constitution of 1848, we would have to recognise their relative autonomy. Having recognised this autonomy it would be contradictory to deny the will of these groups and so politics would be naturally subsidiary. Politics would be bottom up rather than top down. The international order is now conceived in statist and ‘supranational’ terms because we have conflated all social groups in an arbitrarily given territory with the state. In fact, the state is one more relatively autonomous group and there are no boundaries to politics except those we choose to enforce. In reality the jurisdictions of states and the reach of political groups overlap one another in complex international, inter-regional and inter-communal relations. Cosmopolitan, multi-level governance is something that takes place in the way in which communities interrelate on a daily basis. We simply expect the state to formalise those relations. As campaigns for fair trade, charity, town twinning and so on indicate, there are complex communal and collective links that are forged globally on a daily basis without state control. As Held argues, and as anarchists also suggest, the institutionalisation of our interconnectedness demands a reconfiguration of the locus of collective agency from formal politics (which provides only minimal opportunities for the vast majority due to access costs) to social relations in general, through which we interact with one another in complex exchange processes both individually and collectively every day. The emergent neo-medieval world order is the quintessential anarchist community and is one that is currently being analysed under different names in a wide variety of postMarxist writings.71 As Held has recognised, the freedom or autonomy of groups is the precondition of social dynamism and change and the defence of the autonomy of groups is a moral imperative in an age of genocide. This would also, in many senses, constitute recognition of the realities of social organisation and these groups would prefigure and provide the ontology of social order to replace those institutions that have historically undermined the very autonomy they claim to defend. Anarchist schemas for organising order in anarchy are legion and so a list will have to suffice here. We might well start with Proudhon’s Principle of Federation (1863) and Bakunin’s defence of a United States of Europe in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War.72 We can look at the way in which anarchist society was organised in Spain in the 70. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation. 71. See, for example, Michael Walzer, ‘The Civil Society Argument’, in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 89–107; Chantal Mouffe ‘Democracy in a Multipolar World’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2009): 549– 61. For a collection of essays on the historical borrowings across Marxist and anarchist politics, see the forthcoming collection by Dave Berry, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta and Alex Prichard, eds, Politics in Red and Black: Libertarian Communism in the 20th Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave). 72. Thomas O. Hueglin, ‘Yet the Age of Anarchism?’, Publius 15, no. 2 (1985): 101–12; Dimitrios Karmis, ‘Pourqoi lire Proudhon aujourd’hui? Le fédéralisme et le défi de la solidarité dans les sociétés divisées’, Politique et Sociétés 21, no. 1 (2002): 43–65; Yves Simon, ‘A Note on Proudhon’s Federalism’, in

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1930s,73 or more contemporary dilemmas of organisation and its relation to anarchic ends today.74 We can find evidence of non-hierarchical organisation in infoshops and autonomous spaces,75 in wider debates about union/social/trade federations, in the history of labour movements,76 women’s movements,77 in debates about sexuality and identity,78 nature and environmentalism,79 and so on. What is consistently argued is that the state cannot defend autonomy because its very raison d’être is predicated on denying that autonomy. To relocate power to the constituent groups of society would be to undermine the power of the state. Why do we need the state if we can organise our inter-social relations without one, as we do almost daily? Indeed, the evidence for social democracy seems rather negative to say the least. David Bailey has argued that European social democracies are failing to achieve social democratic gains within their states and are increasingly looking to the EU as an institution that might fill that gap.80 The problem is of course that there is often less democratic oversight in the EU than in national states. Sara Motta and David Bailey have also shown that efforts to ‘modernise’ traditional leftwing parties, along the lines of New Labour for example, have been done by removing oversight of the broad membership and skewing party choices in economic directions that are antithetical to that core support.81 Again, social democratic parties are, in practice, not realising social democratic goals. Both processes are undermining rather than aiding the participation of national citizenships, whether party-based or not. That these processes are pitched as inevitable or without alternative is simply a symptom of the abuse of power. Global social democracy, from the perspective outlined here, will fail to deliver if the state is at its heart.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

Federalism as Grand Design: Political Philosophers and the Federal Principle, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987); C. Berneri, ‘Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas’ (1942), available at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/coldoffthepresses/bernerikropotkin. html (accessed 15 May 2010); Colin Ward, ‘The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism’, Freedom (June/ July 1992), available at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/anar/en/display/334 (accessed 15 May 2010); Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism’, available at http://www.marxists. org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm (accessed 15 May 2010). Cf. V. I. Lenin, ‘On the Slogan for a United States of Europe’, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1915/aug/23.htm (accessed 15 May 2010). Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self Management in the Spanish Revolution 1936– 1939 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1974). Gordon, Anarchy Alive!; Graeber, Direct Action. Tom Goyens, ‘Social Space and the Practice of Anarchist History’, Rethinking History 13, no. 4 (2009): 439–57. David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (London: Greenwood Press, 2002). Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005). Jamie Heckert, ‘Sexual/Identity/Politics’, in Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age, eds Jon Purkis and James Bowen (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004), 101–16. The touchstone in this area is likely to remain Elise Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre: Histoire Contemporaine (Paris: Fayard, 1990). David J. Bailey, ‘Obfuscation through Integration: Legitimating “New” Social Democracy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 43, no. 1 (2005): 13–35. Motta and Bailey, ‘Neither Pragmatic Adaptation nor Misguided Accommodation’.

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Conclusion In this article I have argued that there are striking similarities between David Held’s brand of cosmopolitan democracy and anarchist political theory. There are also important distinctions to be made. On the one hand, like anarchists, Held sought a path between liberalism and state socialism and later Marxism. Like the anarchists, Held also places autonomy at the centre of his political theory, and, like the anarchists, foregrounds subsidiarity, federalism and multi-level governance. The key differences lie in Held’s reading of the rise of the modern state and the related assumption that the state can be an instrument for the realisation of a fuller autonomy. It is clear that Held is not an anarchist and I do not wish to claim that he should be or that anarchists ought to welcome uncritically a Heldian political philosophy. However, I do claim that a more consistent Heldian political philosophy would be distinctly more anarchistic than Held would perhaps be happy with. Why? Well, if we take autonomy seriously, then we need to engage with the anarchist argument that the modern state is essentially antithetical to it and we need to find socialist strategies beyond the state in the here and now. Held’s work can spur us on here, but I have argued that in order to realise a fuller autonomy we need to recognise that anarchy rather than a reformed statism is the key to autonomy. There are clearly key issues that have not been dealt with at all here, such as the five other ‘sites of power’ that Held discusses, and with more space a deeper discussion of the role of capital in mitigating human autonomy would have been desirable. But I hope that this analysis provides enough food for thought to open up further debates in the future. The aim here has been to point out key similarities and differences and to give a sense that a return to the anarchist tradition is not as daunting or as seditious as might otherwise be believed. In this sense I hope my exegesis and argument prove enlightening both for scholars of cosmopolitanism and for those interested in anarchist praxis. While anarchism can provide a spur to more critical thinking about autonomy and the state, the cosmopolitan literature might also provide a useful framework on which anarchists can hang their own ideas about world politics. Finally, I have tried to show that, contrary to Held’s view, an anarchist politics can indeed ‘cope with the challenges posed by overlapping communities of fate’ that globalisation has thrown our way, and that anarchists were dealing with these issues at precisely the time that modern states were attempting to totalise political community – to erase any possible overlap of community. In light of this, David Held may find a turn to anarchist political philosophy to be a worthwhile experience, and there is reason to believe that this would be in keeping with his own comradely spirit. In response to Heiki Patomäki’s probing critique of his work, Held responded that, ‘[d]espite these many differences between us, I think we’ll be marching together all the way to the “barricades” and we’ll probably find ourselves on the same side! We’ll be arguing as usual, but also recognising that we have a huge common project – global democratisation. See you there!’82 See you there indeed. 82. Held and Patomäki, ‘Problems of Global Democracy’, 130.

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Acknowledgements This paper was presented at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice research seminar at the University of Nottingham and at the ‘Anarchism and World Politics’ colloquium at the University of Bristol. I would like to thank participants at both events, as well as the editors at Millennium and two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own. This paper was prepared while the author was an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics, University of Bristol. Grant code: PTA-026-27-2404.

Author Biography Alex Prichard is LSE Fellow in International Relations at the London School of Economics.