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The Book
Written by the Russian thinker Bakunin, the book traces the foundations of the author's anarchic suggestions, according to the classic topoi of this school of thought. The full realization of the individual is possible only outside the State and any collectivity organized in an institutional form, in a context where every man relates to another on a plane of absolute equality.
PDL's Comment: What Society Without Institutions?
In the vast philosophical and political overview, anarchic thought occupies a place of absolute prominence, posing very profound questions with which we must necessarily confront every time the idea of the State as a pre-established organization aimed at the well-being of men, or at least their majority, through a monopoly of Force in a given territory, and the application of certain rules and sanctions on those who transgress, is challenged.
Anarchic thought stands, as is known, in antithesis to this assumption - characterizing in both positive and negative ways the history of modern political thought - and poses the fundamental idea that maximum happiness and fulfillment could be achieved by individuals completely disregarding the existence of a society organized in the form of a State, to be replaced by an atomized society where each individual independently provides for their own welfare, eventually relating to others on a basis of absolute equality. In this perspective, anarchy therefore designates the absence of a Force monopoly external to the individual, restoring to the individual the original freedom and individuality that they would have enjoyed before the organization of society according to state forms, and, therefore, before the organization of society itself according to forms of power centralization in the hands of a few or one.
Extremely fascinating on a speculative level, anarchic thought, never organic and never defined by a specific doctrine, not even by the Bakunin we review here, appears in truth based on mere undemonstrated and probably fallacious petitions of principle, on a radical lack of historical perspective, both as regards the study of the past, and the ability to prophesize a possible and desirable future outside of a society organized according to forms of power centralization, not only on a state basis but also on an institutional one.
Let's go step by step, guiding the average user, perhaps not used to following a geometric pattern in the exposition of the problem, to follow my strict critique of anarchy. A critique that, I want to underline, does not concern so much the dream of a better world underlying anarchic speculation, as the fact that it is the demolition of public power that determines it and, in essence, that resorting to anarchy is the method to improve things.
From a historical point of view, anarchic thought seems ineffective to me because, since organized society has existed, that is, since the first hominids began to divide tasks and functions in hunting and defending their territory, the same idea of command centralization, and of the force to implement this command, exists in a few individuals (oligarchy) or in one individual (monarchy), then reaching various forms of representative democracy, that is, the power of the majority. This is a historical and at the same time functional fact, since, without resorting to force and its monopoly within a hierarchical and stabilized state structure, the existence of an organized societas would not even be possible, and therefore the survival of the human species itself as we understand it, that is, as an animal species created by God (for those who follow evolutionary theories: evolved) with distinctly social characteristics, where it is the group organized according to stable and state forms to find resources, ensure the conservation of the species itself, defend the species from predators and competitors, and so on.
In short, there is no need to invoke Aristotle to fundamentally deny the very logic of anarchy, which, by removing from the State or the society organized on an institutional basis the monopoly of force, would determine: a) a fragmentation of force with exposure of the human race to ruin; b) a recomposition of force on an individual basis, determining, in the medium to long term, the return to a society where - to quote Hobbes - homo homini lupus (or: every man would become a predator of the other), which would be followed by the obvious and inevitable recomposition of power on bases very similar to those that were intended to be demolished, if not even worse. It is then evident the utopian and unrealistic basis of anarchism, in all its forms: admitting that the relative thinkers were in good faith in predicting a return to freedom, rather than a war of all against all, through the demolition of the State, it can only be concluded that the same had an excessive trust in the individual as a subject who is tendentially peaceful and capable of surviving by providing solely for themselves, or through transient and associative ties with other peers, devaluing those egoistic and overpowering instincts that instead seem to be intrinsic to human nature in its intimacy, and, unfortunately, in its essence.
Certainly, the trust in man placed by anarchists is not too dissimilar from that of other philosophical and political currents characterized by a sort of irrational trust and idealization of human nature and culture: I am referring especially to that Rousseau who, predicting a State of Nature in which each man lived free and in harmony with the Whole and with other individuals, omitted to consider how, in nature, the prospects are radically different and how, without the necessary concentration of power and violence in an institution that exercises them according to reason, there is no space but for chaos, drift, and even death. This was well understood by the ancient Greeks: who instead of putting someone to death limited themselves to exiling them outside the "walls" of the city. Well aware that outside institutions, organized society, there was a wild nature ready to deprive the individual of every dimension that we would call human, before leading them to almost certain death.
Institution-based social organization thus appears ineliminable: another problem is exercising the State's public Force according to reason and clear rules, placed primarily to guarantee the individual, who has given the State the task of protecting them.
I am often accused of being impersonal, so I close, to overcome such criticisms, with a personal postscript and of lived life: some time ago in the neighborhood of Rome where I live, anarchists held a demonstration and a protest against the State, splashing everything with red paint, from the park benches to the ATM where I went to withdraw money. I would like to ask these gentlemen if, in an anarchic and egalitarian society, they would allow themselves to act in this way, if in the hypothetical and fortunately unrealizable life they predict they would be at least more polite, if not more intelligent.
Sad are the ideas that need certain means to be propagated.
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