Justice, Order and Anarchy

The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Alex Prichard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415596886
• eBook ISBN: 9781136732737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a contextual account of the first anarchist theory of war and peace, and sheds new light on our contemporary understandings of anarchy in International Relations. Although anarchy is arguably the core concept of the discipline of international relations, scholarship has largely ignored the insights of the first anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon's anarchism was a critique of the projects of national unification, universal dominion, republican statism and the providentialism at the heart of enlightenment social theory. While his break with the key tropes of modernity pushed him to the margins of political theory, Prichard links Proudhon back into the republican tradition of political thought from which his ideas emerged, and shows how his defence of anarchy was a critique of the totalising modernist projects of his contemporaries. Given that we are today moving beyond the very statist processes Proudhon objected to, his writings present an original take on how to institutionalise justice and order in our radically pluralised, anarchic international order.

Rethinking the concept and understanding of anarchy, Justice, Order and Anarchy will be of interest to students and scholars of political philosophy, anarchism and international relations theory.

1 Retrieving Proudhon

History has not been kind to the harbingers of modernity. Nuclear and environmental catastrophe threatens a sixth planetary extinction, and the hubris of the modern ideology of incessant progress is tempered by the memory of the holocaust. Capitalism has yet to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and the hyper-technocratic and exclusionary orders we once craved as the pinnacle of social order are now the bane of our blemished past. Statism no longer commands the moral high-ground, obedience and deference still less, while the promises of industrialisation have been broken by the costs of environmental degradation. Modern global politics remains the preserve of a largely unaccountable and class-homogenous elite, modern life feels all the more dominated, and the institutions of the global order seem ever more distant from the concerns and control of the vast majority. Neither the promises of statism nor the rhetoric of the end of the nation state provide much comfort. As a result, disillusionment with the established order often turns into boisterous rebellion and yet what change emerges is consolidated within the established parameters of business as usual. More challengingly still, while most on the radical left now accept that the state is no longer the means to revolutionary social change, the alternatives have been all but lost to historical memory.

It is in this atmosphere that anarchism has re-emerged as perhaps the most vibrant and exciting political movement of our time. Everywhere, horizontal modes of social organisation, consensus decision-making, low footprint lifestyles and a rejection of capitalism and the state go hand-in-hand with the affirmation of equality and the widening of the zones of social inclusion; rejecting sexism, racism and hetronormativity and the plural ‘regimes of domination’¹ that structure (post)modern life. Anarchism is in the air, and yet, if we were to believe the soothsayers of modernity, it was doomed to extinction with the emergence of industrial society. Perhaps then, with the passing of industrial society in the crippled centres of twentieth-century power, this may yet be ‘the age of anarchism’.²

In the aftermath of the Battle for Seattle, the killing of anti-capitalist protesters in Genoa and Athens, and the revolts and uprisings that have punctuated the years since the turn of the millennium, anarchism, that complex of ideas and practices long-consigned to the dustbin of history, is being fished back out again, dusted off and reassessed. Absent on the curricula of most relevant university courses, these new histories are mostly being written from scratch, while the mainstream looks on warily. Given the proximity of that mainstream to the traditional concerns of state and capital, it is perhaps little surprise that there is a more complete memory of anarchism on the streets than in the standard textbooks of the academy. But in the last few years alone, there has been an explosion of new works on anarchist movements in various geographical locales, books on anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. There are new anarchist vegan recipe books and new and empowering anarchist histories. There are new books on the complex philosophy of anarchism, its relation to art and the environment, social organisation and equality.³ Throughout all of these, as Uri Gordon has noted, there runs a common concern to identify, unravel and liberate from the ‘regimes of domination’ that characterise our modern condition, to seek out new ways of living together and new means through which to realise the good life.⁴

The discipline of International Relations (IR) is perhaps the last stronghold in the social sciences to have withstood the anarchist advance. And yet, it is perhaps the place where anarchism can have most impact and where anarchists can also learn a great deal. Ironically, anarchy is the central concept of the discipline: that anarchy between states that is constituted by their egoism and their de jure (rather than de facto) sovereignty. Such has been the centrality of the concept of anarchy to the everyday concerns of IR theorists that in a recent history of the evolution of the discipline, Brian Schmidt was moved to dub IR ‘the political discourse of anarchy’.⁵ For nearly 150 years now, IR scholars have been anarchy, if not anarchist, theorists. What distinguishes IR theory from anarchist theory is that on the whole, but especially amongst the more progressive theorists in the field, anarchy is widely seen to be the pathogen of politics, that feature of political life that international organisations like the UN, the spread of democracy and the institutions of global capitalism were supposed to release us from once and for all. This project has proven to be something of a chimera. As I will argue in the pages that follow, the desire for ever stronger states – the assumed lynchpin of global order – has resulted in ever more conflict. Moreover, as states have strengthened, so too have they been prone to dissolution. Principally, the forces of neoliberal globalisation and regional integration have seen modern states undercut and overruled by wider and more parochial political, economic and social interests. The collapse in the certainties of the enlightenment and the decline of the modernist credos of inevitable progress has also seen a wider existential collapse in confidence, buttressed only by finding new enemies of peace and freedom against which to fight unending wars. Anarchy is more, not less acute in the contemporary era and yet, on the whole, order prevails.

The fact of order in anarchy is perhaps the central conundrum of the discipline of IR. As Kenneth Waltz put it in his discipline-shaping work: ‘[t]he problem is this: how to conceive of an order without an orderer and of organizational effects where formal organization is lacking.’⁶ Anarchy (the absence of an ‘archos’, or formal leader and final point of authority⁷) is considered to be the structural feature which most clearly distinguishes international life from domestic politics. How, it is asked, given what we think we know about anarchy, is it possible that despite its prevalence, order persists? As I will show later on, answers to this question are what have shaped theorising in IR.

But this framing relies on a number of highly problematic assumptions with quite well-established consequences. First of all, Waltz assumes, and most others follow, that the domestic order, such as it is structured institutionally by states, is characterised by formal hierarchy, in contrast to the anarchy of international relations. The implications of this framing have become almost intuitive for scholars of IR ever since. In an influential piece published in 1966, Martin Wight, one of the key architects of post-war British International Relations scholarship penned an article entitled ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’⁸ Wight argued that there was no established canon of thinking about how to achieve the good life in world politics for the seemingly obvious reason that it was simply impossible to write. Since no overarching authority exists in the international sphere, to theorise the good life with reference to anarchy was a non-starter – anarchy cannot be a framework for thinking about the values of justice, or peace, order and progress. Reinforcing the academic division of labour between political theory and IR, Wight argued that speculation about the good life is only possible within states and within the intellectual parameters set by methodological nationalism.

Wight recognised that where snippets of international theory were penned it invariably came under the title of ‘the philosophy of history’ and, he rightly concluded, that it was usually but a small step from there to ‘theodicy’⁹ – a claim I will support at length in the chapters to follow, but one that is rarely recognised by the contemporary field. But, he also argued that, ‘[t]he only political philosopher who has turned wholly from political theory to international theory is Burke’, and ‘[t]he only political philosopher of whom it is possible to argue whether his principal interest was in the relations between states rather than – or even more than – the state itself, is Machiavelli’.¹⁰ Innumerable scholars have since questioned this claim and have brought back to our attention a long lost tradition of international political theory.¹¹ Even more scholars have sought to show that even in anarchy justice and the good life is possible.¹² Very few, however, have thought to recover the anarchist tradition of theorising about international relations and to see what the anarchists think about the possibilities of justice and order in anarchy.¹³ None have investigated whether Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's voluminous writings on the subject have any value for understanding its central concept.

What I will show is that the international political theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), the first self-professed anarchist, presents a distinct challenge, not only to the historiography of the discipline but also to its central claims around the concept and potentials of anarchy. Recovering Proudhon's thought in its context, I will show, requires us to question a number of assumptions about the inevitability of the present and helps us rethink the potential of anarchy for the future. In a move that will at first seem counter-intuitive, Proudhon believed that international anarchy was something of a template for all social relations. Rather than see it as the thing to be overcome, Proudhon argued that anarchy was the natural condition of social life, that statism and transcendent orders proposed by the modernists were illusory, and that domination was a break on history as well as a bullet to the knee of every man or woman who sought self-realisation. Like Martin Wight, Proudhon recognised clearly the wider tendency in nineteenth-century political discourse towards theodicy in the understanding of war and history, and the concomitant tendency to see progress to ever higher liberal and republican orders as being preordained in history. For him, as I will show, overcoming domination was as much a project of cosmology and history as it was of politics and economics.

While contemporary IR theorists are perplexed by order in anarchy, for Proudhon and the anarchists that followed him, anarchy was the primary goal for all domains of social life. Proudhon saw in the international anarchy a tendency of states towards mutually recognised pacts, constituted in anarchy. He saw federalism as a constitutional project apposite for the institutionalisation of all social groups, ensuring liberty in anarchy. Just as states mutually constrain one another, as states became more republican he saw further opportunities for order and justice to be constituted by all social groups mutually constraining one another. For him, the international anarchy provided an imperfect template for a system without any final points of authority, a system in which, as he put it: ‘the political centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. This is unity.’¹⁴

This vision was argued consistently throughout his 25 years of writing. In his first book, What is Property? (1840), he argued: ‘As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.’¹⁵ On his deathbed, 25 years later, Proudhon dictated his final book to his friend Gustave Chaudey. Here he suggested, ‘[t]hat which is known in particular as le pacte de garantie between states is nothing else than one of the most brilliant applications of the idea of mutuality, which, in politics, becomes the idea of federation’.¹⁶ Whereas at the outset he attempted to prove the possibility of anarchism by reference to a critique of bourgeois property relations and extended treaties on epistemology and politics, during the final five years of his life he argued that there was much that we could learn about the possibility of anarchism from international relations.

The broad, theoretical aim of this book is to set out this vision of anarchy and in so doing to invert the classical conception of the division of labour between IR and political theory. My aim is to show that IR, updated and fleshed out with the benefit of anarchist theory, is uniquely positioned to help us understand the processes and means through which order and justice are possible in anarchy. As processes of globalisation radically pluralise the global order and methodological nationalism retreats ever further, this is not the end of ‘the international’ as a discreet or sui generis domain of social life. In fact, it has never been either. But this does not mean that new and radical theories of anarchy are not required to help us conceptualise the deepening pluralisation and ordered anarchy of the international system. We need both a sense of how this condition emerged and the immanent processes within it that can help us get a handle on the future. Contextualising Proudhon's theory of anarchy in terms of his own intellectual and historical context, I propose, can help us to that end.

This book provides a defence of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's understanding of and vision for global politics, derived from an original re-reading of his un-translated, final works.¹⁷ My aim is to use this historical recovery to speak to our modern predicament once more. I set out this vision by reconstructing Proudhon's social theory from the bottom up, from his theory of justice in general, to his sociological theory of group agency; from his thinking about the place of war in human history to his theory of the foundational right of force; all crowned by his vision of a radically decentralised federalism guided by a commutative principle of mutualism, both of which institutionalise his anti-statism and anti-capitalism respectively. The pages that follow contextualise Proudhon's international political theory within the intellectual debates of his time, specifically within the plural currents of French republican political thought, the collapse of empires and the industrialisation of warfare in the nineteenth century. I show how Proudhon engaged debates around positivism, social engineering, the cosmological providentialism of his contemporaries and their promises that the future would always be better than the past. But within this broad context, it is the primary aim of this book to make a substantive contribution to debates around the theorisation of the relationship between justice, order and anarchy in International Relations and political theory.

The contrasting vision of anarchism and anarchy in IR and political theory, the one positive the other negative, have a common historical heritage.¹⁸ The modern state and the modern individual emerged out of the same primordial intellectual and political soup, at around the middle of the seventeenth century. The model of the rational, sovereign, autonomous individual became the template for conceptualising the moral and political agency of the emerging polities of Western Europe, and vice versa.¹⁹ The pressures facing individuals in a pre-social state of nature were said to be amplified thousand-fold in the international anarchy and were it not for sovereign states, chaos would ensue. The state of nature theory was offered as an indication in this regard. As Hobbes argued,

though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against the another; yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators [ … ] which is a posture of War.²⁰

‘But’, he continues, ‘because they [Kings and Persons of Soveraigne authority] uphold thereby the Industry of their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the Liberty of particular men.’²¹ According to Hobbes, then, the state exists as the lynchpin of domestic peace and the resulting anarchy is the tragic catalyst for inter-state war. Many disagreed with Hobbes, rejecting his materialist dystopia and the vision of an overbearing state, but the evolution of political theory was marked by the continuation of this conception of ever more autonomous and/or sovereign individuals and the problem of anarchy that emerges from their consequent inter-relationship It is this basic problem that the European republicans of the nineteenth century applied themselves: how do you get rid of anarchy without undermining autonomy? How can you have order without an orderer? For Proudhon, the answer was anarchism. For the rest, the republican state would lead us to the Kantian ‘Kingdom of Ends’, and this eschatology was given in history itself.

Contemporary international political theorists tend to reject the proposition that the international and domestic are fundamentally distinct,²² many suggesting that if international relations are no longer distinct social domains, the inter-state anarchy no longer the most pressing issue in world politics, then perhaps our globalised world order is ushering in the end of IR theory?²³ With the help of anarchism IR theorists, that is to say those who preoccupy themselves with order in anarchy, are uniquely positioned to understand the emerging, complex and hyper-pluralised world order.

Never, to my knowledge, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor's foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Retrieving Proudhon
• 2 Anarchy and contemporary IR theory
• 3 National unity and the nineteenth-century European equilibrium
• 4 War, providence and The international order in the thought of Rousseau, Kant and Comte
• 5 From providence to immanence: force and justice in Proudhon's social ontology
• 6 The historical sociology of war: order and justice in Proudhon's La Guerre et la Paix
• 7 Anarchy, mutualism and the federative principle
• 8 Anarchy is what we make of it: rethinking justice, order and anarchy today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index