This is the transcript for the original broadcast of this program (3 May 2008).

Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. I'm Alan Saunders.

This week, what is at the moment probably one of the least fashionable of 'isms', anarchism. The word derives from the Greek, it means 'without a ruler', and the idea is that all forms of government are oppressive and undesirable and should be abolished.

Now it hasn't exactly swept the world, this idea, it's only ever taken off a few times and in a few places, 19th century Russia for example, and early 20th century Spain. So why has anarchism always played a minor role in political life and philosophy? Simply because it's a bad idea? Or because the idea of life with no government to arrange things for us, sounds like a hot of hard work. I mean who'd look after the drains? Or because anarchism conjures up images of crazed protesters with bombs or attacking police horses? Or is the State just too powerful and entrenched to disassemble?

Today on The Philosopher's Zone we ask, does anarchism still have something to offer? And to talk about this, we're joined by Robert Paul Wolff, Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of more than 20 books, including The Poverty of Liberalism and In Defence of Anarchism.

Now In Defence of Anarchism was written in the heady days of 1965, published in 1970, later translated into more than ten languages and republished in 1998. It's become a minor classic. So, Robert Wolff, thank you very much for joining us.

Robert Wolff: I'm delighted to be with you.

Alan Saunders: Let's straight to it. Can you lay out your basic arguments about why the State structure is inherently bad for individuals?

Robert Wolff: Well it's really quite simple. There is a fundamental obligation that each of us has to make his or her own moral decisions. It goes by the name of autonomy, and the great 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant was the philosopher who more than any other, emphasised the autonomy of the individual.

Over against that is the characteristic claim of virtually every State that has ever existed, namely, the claim that it has the right to rule, that it has a monopoly on the authoritative use of power, that it has the right to tax, that it has the right to require its subjects or citizens to obey the law, and so forth. And what I did in this little book was to ask the question 'Is there any way in which the autonomy of the individual, it can be made compatible with the authority claims of the State?' Now the most plausible and these days the most popular answer to that question is 'Yes, in a democracy, because in a democracy the State speaks with the voice of the people.' But of course it only speaks with a voice of the majority of the people, and therefore it is always in the position of compelling the minority to do what the minority thinks it is wrong to do. And I explored that subject for some 80 pages or so, and came to the very simple conclusion that there is no way that the autonomy of the individual can be made compatible with the authority of the State, from which it follows that there is no such thing as a legitimate State. It's quite that simple.

Alan Saunders: Well let's approach the question from another direction and look at whether it might actually be right for individuals to surrender some of their autonomy, and we could do that by comparing anarchism with liberalism, a much more dominant trend in Western political thought. Now liberalism often takes off from what's called the state of nature argument. We are living in a state of nature, that means that we have communities perhaps, if only because we have affections for others and we have family times, but we don't yet have government. However, we discover that there are things that we can't get done without a government to organise them for us. The question then is how much of our natural liberty, if you like, our natural autonomy, we're willing to exchange in return for the advantages of having a government. It's a trade-off. So is the anarchist somebody who's just not willing to engage in that trade-off?

Robert Wolff: No, not at all. But I think your characterisation of it is in a certain fundamental way, wrong. There are lots of situations in which we find it necessary to go along with something we think is a bad idea, just because not going wrong would be worse still. That's not the question. The State doesn't say to us, Look, we want you to think about this, and I think we would be able to persuade you that this is one of those cases where you ought to do something you don't think is the best thing to do just because it's going to accomplish something that's better than the alternative. The State says We, the State, have the right to command you, even if you think that we are fundamentally wrong and you have no right to challenge that, because we have the authority.

Suppose just to take a sort of a silly-sounding example: suppose you're on a ship that has hit an iceberg and it's necessary to organise people to get off the ship very quickly, and everybody understands that the ship's Captain is the person with the authority but unfortunately he's been killed. One of the passengers who sees this, puts the Captain's cap on, and pretends to be the Captain in order to organise people and get them off the boat. And suppose you know that that isn't really the Captain. You might go along, even though you know that he doesn't have any authority since he isn't the Captain, because you think that anybody who can get people organised and off the boat, will be doing a good thing. And in the same way, I might find myself going along with the commands of a benevolent dictator, or a wise king or a not-so-bad President.

You can compare that with the claim that is made by the Roman Catholic church. The Roman Catholic church in its wisdom, understands that it cannot command people to believe what they do not believe, it only commands them to submit to the authority of the church in the hope that they will come to believe what the church quite confidently thinks is the divine truth. So the church doesn't demand belief, which it cannot command, it only demands obedience, and that's exactly what the State commands.

Alan Saunders: Now let's be clear: there are different types of anarchism, aren't there?

Robert Wolff: Yes. there are really four kinds of anarchism. There is first of all your good old-fashioned, bushy beard, thick glasses, seedy clothes, bomb-throwing anarchist, the sort that you mentioned at the beginning of our discussion.

Then there is the second kind which is the libertarian anarchist, the sort of Ayn Rand, or as we say in the United States, Ron Paul anarchist. This is the person who thinks that the only relationships between people in a society should be contractual relationships of a market-oriented sort. So there ought to be no State. If you need garbage collection, a private company does it; if you need police protection, a private company offers it, or several do and compete with one another.

The third kind of anarchism is utopian or communitarian anarchism, the sort of anarchism of people who believe that the social relationships between people should be based on consensus, and so you get people going off and setting up little communities, typically farming communities, where there's a good deal of sandals and candles and organic food, and everything's decided by endless discussions, a little bit like a Quaker Meeting.

And then there are philosophical anarchists, who analyse the relationship between the authority claims of the State and the moral autonomy of the individual. And I'm a philosophical anarchist. And the conclusions that I come to are in a sense the foundation for all of the other anarchisms.

Alan Saunders: There's a book called The Anarchists' Cook Book. It's infamous and illegal collection of recipes for trouble, bomb-making, tips for making poisons etc. It was written in 1970, it was denounced by many anarchists. But the association between anarchy and violence is still a pretty strong one in the public mind, and it's not as though anarchists haven't set off an explosive or two over the centuries, is it?

Robert Wolff: By and large the explosions that have been set off have not been set off by anarchists. They have been set off in the first instance of course, by States. I mean if you look at all of the violence that has been perpetrated on human beings over the centuries, or over the millennia, almost all of it has been perpetrated by States. A small amount of it has been perpetrated by people committed to some ideology or other who are in effect, seeking to become the State, and then there is this tiny, tiny, tiny handful of people who show up say in Conrad's The Secret Agent, or places like that, who can be thought of as bomb-throwing anarchists.

Alan Saunders: Now I imagine you might have a number of fans out there who read your book and would very much refuse to define themselves as anarchists. I mean you've already mentioned the sort of Ayn Rand people, and you only have to take some interest in the Republican primaries in the United States to see religious conservative republicans and libertarian republicans, who for sometimes different reasons abhor the State and all it does to impinge on their freedom. So if we just stick with the politics and perhaps leave economics aside for the moment, but do left and right cease to have much meaning in this context?

Robert Wolff: Let me start to answer the question by saying that when I first published the book, I was abashed and made somewhat uncomfortable to receive several very praising letters from well-known right-wingers. And a number of people have pointed out that at various points in American political history, the political spectrum has had something like the shape of a horseshoe with the extreme left and the extreme right closer to one another than they are to the middle.

But I am in fact an extreme left-winger, and the reason for that is that I can't leave economics aside. That is, once I am finished confronting the question of the authority of the State, I am forced to go on to ask, 'And now what should we do?' and that that point my guide is not Bakunin, and it is not William Godwin, it is Karl Marx, I must confess. When I say that I am an anarchist, I don't mean that that is the principle on which my political activity is founded because my political activity is founded on economic concerns and moral concerns and foreign policy concerns, which anarchism simply doesn't address. And so I think of my anarchism as the starting point, not as the concluding point of my political journey.

Alan Saunders: Now Bob, you say that the great philosopher who attracted you to anarchism was the 18th century German thinker, Immanuel Kant. Now I'm sure he'd be turning in his grave, wouldn't he, if he heard that he was responsible for your anarchism?

Robert Wolff: I'm sure he's spinning. He would be appalled. He was the very antithesis of any kind of anarchist you would want to mention. However, he was a rigorous thinker, and he was absolutely committed to the primacy of the autonomy of the individual moral agent. And by autonomy he meant what the Greeks meant, that is to say 'giving law to oneself'. By autonomy, he didn't mean lack of law, he meant law given by the individual to himself or herself, and that moral autonomy he thought was the foundation of ethical theory and the foundation of the State.

Now Kant happened in fact, to be a defender of democratic theory and thought that there were forms of democratic theory that could resolve this conflict, and I think he was wrong about that. Indeed at one point, when I was lecturing on Kant's ethical theory, I thought that I could follow his arguments through to the end and solve my problem, and I finally came to the conclusion that I couldn't. But I think of myself as grounding myself on Kant's philosophy, because I begin with his conception of the rational, moral autonomy of the individual. I might add, by the way, that in Massachusetts if you pay an extra fee, you can get licence points that have words or messages on them, and my licence plate actually reads 'I Kant'.

Alan Saunders: Do people think it just means, 'I can't, I'm unable to'?

Robert Wolff: Well about maybe 95% of the people see it, think it means I can't, and think it's some kind of ribald remark. But every so often, somebody in a battered Volvo draws up behind me at a traffic light and waves, gives me a wave of the hand, and then I know I've been understood.

Alan Saunders: You've also been known to compare Kant with the blues singer, Leadbelly.

Robert Wolff: Yes. Well I should explain that when I studied Kant, I very quickly came to understand that he was the greatest philosopher who ever lived, and that his book, The Critique of Pure Reason was the greatest work he had ever written, and that the passage called 'The transcendental analytic' was the hardest and most central passage of all of his philosophy. Well when I was a kid, I was much enamoured of folk music and there was a great American folksinger named Huddie Leadbetter who went by the name, Leadbelly, who got himself in a good deal of trouble and was trice convicted of murder and sent off to chain gangs in Texas. And Leadbelly used to sing for the other convicts when they were working on the chain gang.

Well when Alan Lomax, the great folklorist went around collecting folk songs and found Huddie Leadbetter, he put together an album of Leadbelly songs and on the liner notes, he described Leadbelly as 'the toughest men on the toughest chain gang in the toughest prison in Texas'. And I always thought of the transcendental analytic as 'the toughest passage in the toughest book by the greatest philosopher in the world', and I thought that's what I need to tackle. So my first book was a book on the transcendental analytic.

Alan Saunders: Your book on anarchism has been on philosophy courses for decades now, and you've modestly suggested that that's because it's short and it gives instructors something to refute. But do you think that anarchist ideas have, over that period, changed the world at all?

Robert Wolff: The ideas haven't changed the world a bit. But I'll tell you what is changing the world, not books and not my anarchism, but the internet. I am staggered by the way in which in this political season, the internet has transformed American politics, and I think will go on to transform politics around the world. It has transformed a top-down political structure into a horizontal side-by-side political structure, in which the authority of those at the top, the authority of people in the mainstream media, the authority of the official commentators, is perpetually undermined by the flood of voices that appear on the internet. And one of the things one discovers is that the comments made by unknown people out there in cyberspace, are very often as intelligent, as perceptive, as knowledgeable, and as thoughtful as the comments made by the official commentators one sees on the networks. And I think that what is happening now is a transformation that will permanently change the way in which politics is organised, and in what is, if I may be somewhat optimistic, an anarchist direction.

Alan Saunders: Aside from the internet, we also have movies, and you've argued that we have anarchism to thank, or perhaps to blame, for the Rambo movies.

Robert Wolff: Well in a funny way. That is to say, I'm old enough - God help me, I'm 74 - I can remember when I used to go to the movies always when I was a kid, and when you went to the movies back in the '40s and early '50s, if a man appeared in a movie in a suit and introduced himself as an FBI agent, you knew he was a good guy and you could trust him. And one of the things that the Vietnam War did in the United States was to completely subvert and reverse that set of attitudes. Now when you go to the movies, and somebody introduces himself as an FBI agent, immediately you know that this person can't be trusted and will probably turn out to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Now the first Rambo movie which is a marvellous movie, First Blood, with Sylvester Stallone, is an example of just that. Here is this Medal of Honour war hero who comes home from the Vietnam war and is walking along a road, doing absolutely no harm to anyone, and comes into a little town where he is rousted by the local police chief, played by Brian Denehey, who immediately starts giving him a good time and roughing him up and so forth. Now in a wonderfully ironic way Denehey takes one look at him and says, 'This guy's trouble', and of course Rambo ends up blowing the town up. But only because he has been unfairly treated and in this situation, it is the police chief who is immediately recognised as the bad guy, and the loner, the outsider, who is immediately recognised as the hero. That is such a transformation.

Now I have to say if you go far enough back in movies, all the way to the '30s to the great Frank Capra movies, you see something like that, A Man Names Smith, The Man who Went to Washington and so forth, where you see the powers-that-be being the bad guys. The American Depression had the same impact that the Vietnam war had on people's belief in authority.

Alan Saunders: But is this an expression of a sort of underlying, perhaps unconscious, anarchism, or is it just cynicism?

Robert Wolff: It's not cynicism. I think that's the wrong description of it. It's certainly not organised, thoughtful, systematic philosophical anarchism. Nothing like that. What it is, is a deep suspicion of authority claims, and a deep suspicion of authority claims is the starting point for a recognition of the truth of anarchism. Until you are prepared to recognise that those who are in positions of purported authority have no greater claim on our loyalty or our obedience than anyone else, it's very hard to think through these issues of authority and autonomy.

Alan Saunders: Critics of your books suggest though that it's not the State that's the real threat to the autonomy of individuals these days, it's companies, and even other individuals - think of those Russian oligarchs who simply took over whole sections of the Russian economy after communism collapsed. The State is sidestepped, and it's arguably overpowered by forces more powerful than itself.

Robert Wolff: That's true. That's absolutely true. I don't view anarchism as an alternative to a critique of the corporate powers. I view it as simply a part of a full-scale critique of authority claims and the exercise of authority, frequently the exercise of concealed authority. One of the ways in which corporations are more menacing than the State is that it's less obvious to us that our lives are controlled by those corporations than it is that our lives are controlled by the States, and it's the State after all puts people in police uniforms and sends us tax bills and puts us in jail and does all sorts of other obvious controlling things. And I haven't I must confess, encountered that criticism of my book, but if somebody were to make it, I would agree with it completely.

Alan Saunders: Let me end by asking you, as a philosopher and anarchist who's actually retiring from his post this year, do you think philosophers contribute enough to making the world better, or isn't that their job? I mean you run a scholarship program for students to go to university in South Africa. Is that on a continuum with your philosophical and anarchistic ideas or is it simply what you do with another hand?

Robert Wolff: No, it's part of what I think is important. It took me a while to come to realisation that I needed somehow to combine the theoretical work that I do with an attempt to make the world different. But I discovered something painful, but important, which is when you're a philosopher, thinking about everything is just as easy as thinking about something. So philosophers tend to think about everything, like the entire universe, or maybe all possible worlds, because that's no harder than thinking about just the corner of the world that I live in. But when you try to change the world, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to make a tiny change and ten times as much effort to make a slightly bigger change.

Are philosophers doing enough? No, philosophers by and large, I'm embarrassed to say, are a very apolitical lot, as compared with other branches of the academy. And philosophy in the United States at any rate, it's not true perhaps in France and other places, but in the United States, philosophers have played very little role in the public life of the society, whereas economists and political scientists and sociologists, have played a major role. And that I think is a failing of philosophers, it's not a failing of the field or of the subject, it's a failing of the people. And I think it should change.

Alan Saunders: Well Robert Paul Wolff, enjoy your retirement, and thank you very much for joining us.

Robert Wolff: It was lovely talking to you.

Alan Saunders: The show, which is of course an autonomous collective, is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production this week by Michelle Goldsworthy.

I'm Alan Saunders, and I'm organising for another Philosopher's Zone next week.

LEADBELLY SINGS Take this hammer