Aristotle took a pragmatic, empirical approach to political science. For example, he (and his research assistants) collected over 150 constitutions of political communities so that he could analyze them.

His concern, in his Politics, was to teach how political constitutions succeed and fail, in the hopes of helping his students contribute to healthy, stable, lasting constitutional orders. He was not concerned with justifying political organizations or the power differentials in them.

In contrast, much anarchist political philosophy concerns what is just, and why a coercive state and other such institutions are not. It argues why anarchism is correct, and why various justifications for a coercive state are flawed.

What would an Aristotelian approach to anarchist political philosophy look like?

An Aristotelian Anarchism?

Such an approach would leave arguments justifying anarchism to one side and take it as given that you hope to live in a healthy anarchist polis and you are more interested in how to make that happen.

Why did Aristotle neglect anarchism in his Politics in the first place? For one thing, Politics derives from notes from lectures he gave to students of political science, who would have been members of the ruling class preparing to take their place ruling or advising the rulers of existing Hellenic states. Advice on how to found and maintain anarchist constitutions wasn’t what his students were after.

Aristotle’s Esoteric Anarchism?

It is also possible that Aristotle did express an opinion about anarchy in the Politics, but you have to look carefully to find it. Some readers pursue “esoteric” readings of the ancient philosophers. The idea is that for various reasons, these philosophers could not explicitly record the full extent of their teachings — for example they feared reprisals (look what happened to Socrates), or they feared the effect their teachings would have on untutored people. Only students who engage with the works of these philosophers in a substantial, non-superficial way will be able to discern the nod-and-wink message under the surface.

To find an esoteric anarchism in Aristotle’s politics, I would start with two sections in particular. In chapter ⅹⅲ of book Ⅲ, he considers the person of extraordinarily superior virtues. What should the polis do with such a person? Should we perhaps put them in charge? Aristotle says no, instead: “such men we must take not to be part of the state… [T]here is no law that embraces men of that caliber: they are themselves law.” Then, towards the end of the same book, he explains that “in the best state… the virtue of a man and of a citizen are identical.”

Explicitly Aristotle says that men of extraordinary virtues are dangerous to the state and ought perhaps to be exiled. But this is a difficult thing to reconcile with his other teachings — particularly his view that the whole purpose of the state is to create a context for developing the virtues to the utmost— and seems to invite a search for an esoteric reading, perhaps along these lines:

the best man is the most virtuous man such a man is outside of the state and is a law unto himself in the best state, the virtue of a man and of a citizen are identical ∴ in the best state, the best citizens will be outside of the state and a law unto themselves ∴ the best state would be an anarchic one

Aristotle’s definition of the best citizen reminds me of Ammon Hennacy’s definition of an anarchist: “someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.”

How Would Aristotle Approach Anarchism?

Speculative esoteric readings aside, another possibility is that Aristotle did not consider the workings of anarchy to be a problem that needed solving, or to be a problem for which his framework for solving the problems of monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies would work as well.

That said, Aristotle’s concentration on small, polis-sized units (as opposed to nation-, empire-, or confederation-sized ones) makes it potentially more useful to students of anarchism than a lot of what gets taught as political philosophy today. Aristotle thought that the polis was the final stage of human organization, and he likely would have frowned upon those more ginormous organizations (he is pointedly silent about empires at a time when his former student Alexander was busy conquering his). It may be easier to stretch his philosophy to cover an anarchic polis than it would be to cover an oligarchic empire.

The name Aristotle gave to the goal accomplished by a successful polis was autarkeia — self-rule, or self-sufficiency. How can this best be accomplished and maintained in an anarchic polis?

The Anarchist Constitution

Anarchy has of course the popular meaning of disorder and chaos, and of course that isn’t what we mean by it in the realm of politics. Etymologically, it means without-rule, which makes it a sort of void which alternatives like mon-archy or olig-archy fill. For our purposes this won’t do either.

Even anarchists tend to describe anarchism in terms of absences or lacks: No ruler, no states, no classes, no hierarchy… But this is rarely helpful and sometimes misleading. It might be best to start by defining anarchy positively, by what it is.

Anarchy is a variety of political constitution (not to be confused with a written document like “The Constitution”) with a collective purpose. In this, it is like most of the other forms of government that Aristotle discussed (kingship, aristocracy, oligarchy, polity, and democracy), and so it can be analyzed in a similar way.

It might be objected right away that anarchy either does not have a collective purpose (that it is merely haphazard, or that it is at most a collection of individuals with individual purposes) or that it is not a variety of political constitution. I think Aristotle would say that these objections are mistaken: a healthy and stable anarchy requires both things.

When Aristotle described his varieties of constitution, he said that for each there is a good form and a bad form. In the good form, the rulers rule for the benefit of everybody and for the good of the polis; in the bad form, the rulers rule for themselves only. The same can be said for anarchy, though in an anarchy the rulers are everybody (not just many, few, or one).

So let’s update Aristotle’s nomenclature:

When one person rules, the good form is called monarchy; the bad form tyranny.

When a small group rules, the good form is called aristocracy; the bad, oligarchy.

When the many rule, the good form is called polity; the bad, democracy.

When everybody rules themselves and nobody rules anyone else, the good form is called anarchy; the bad might be called a “free-for-all”.

“Anarchy” is the variety of constitution in which everyone “rules” on an equal basis, and these rulers rule for the benefit of the polis, something which also redounds to the general benefit of the people who constitute it.

But this talk of “rule” and “constitution” does not at first sound very anarchic. Let me clarify:

“Constitution” just means “how things are constituted.” It’s a shorthand way of referring to the forms, customs, understandings, and practices that govern (another dirty word we must reclaim) how people behave in the political environment (the environment of the polis — the community). A constitution may be codified formally but it doesn’t have to be (a written constitution isn’t necessarily reliable anyway).

“Rule” in this case means “govern themselves,” as it’s the usual principle of anarchy that everyone is expected to govern themselves rather than be governed by others. If people in anarchy govern themselves in a manner that is shortsightedly selfish and damaging to the polis, they will not long govern themselves. If they govern themselves in a way that contributes to a thriving anarchy, they may be able to keep at it.

Enlightened Self-Interest

This is more a matter of enlightened self interest than of noble sacrifice for the collective. Once you realize the importance of the health of the community to your own thriving, you will leave vulgar individualism behind and see that your place as a pillar of such a community is better for you individually than some lone wolf act. People thrive best in community; community is inherently political; so the political life is not something forced upon us from outside, but is a natural outgrowth of the sort of beings we are. The polis is our natural habitat. You should distrust political philosophies that treat people as though we were a gas of rarely-colliding particles. We’re more of a liquid: we tug and pull and jostle one another and collectively create emergent behavior similar to how water can have waves and streams and convection in ways that lone molecules of water cannot.

This also means, as we will see later in more detail, that a constitution that mimics the “night watchman state” of the minarchists — concerning itself only with defense and basic criminal law enforcement — is a pitifully impoverished one. A healthy constitution will have a much broader set of concerns, and it is one of the challenges of anarchy to coordinate this in the absence of the short cuts of a ruling class and coercive state.

It’s too much to ask that everybody in the anarchist community share this understanding of enlightened self interest. Fools and sociopaths will likely always be with us. This is one vulnerability of anarchy that we can identify right away, but it’s not unique to anarchy. In a monarchy, there’s a chance you have a noble-minded ruler, and a chance you have a base ruler. In an oligarchy, some oligarchs will have noblesse oblige, while others will just be out for #1. In a democracy, sometimes the people will be restrained, other times the majority will flex its muscles destructively. With anarchy as well, deviations from the ideal are inevitable, but the more the “rulers” (in an anarchy, most everyone) rule wisely, the healthier the constitution will be.

Freedom from Drudgery?

Aristotle thought that one reason people form a political community is to be free from drudgery… that is, to find someone else to do the drudgery for you. In his time that meant slaves, women, migrant workers, and the lower classes. Under the sort of anarchy we’re considering, such options are unlikely to be open to you. But someone will still need to do the drudgery, and it might just be you.

Is this a drawback? Is it too much to ask for someone to be devoted to the health of the anarchy and the flourishing of those in it, and also to take out the trash? Or is this perhaps an advantage? Aristotle had to worry about how to get buy-in from the people who did have to do the drudgery, who were supposed to serve the state but whom the state was not set up to serve. What did they get out of the deal? Why should they tolerate seeing the ruling class living on easy street? Questions like these don’t plague an anarchic constitution that does not privilege a distinct ruling class.

Some suggest “post-scarcity anarchy” is one path our technological future might take — which could free everyone from most drudgery. Would such a thing improve the drive to form healthy anarchies and reduce the eagerness to swindle people into other forms of government, or would it imply such changes to human society as to make previous political philosophy obsolete? I will not hazard a guess.

Justice

Another reason Aristotle gives for why we form political communities is that it allows the virtue of justice to shine forth. In the absence of a political community, when two people come into conflict, the stronger or more ruthless comes out on top. It takes coordination, collective action, subordination to group-held norms and processes, etc. — the constitution of a community, in short — to replace this with some approach to justice. How closely it approaches justice (or on the other hand how much it just becomes a more cumbersome form of might-makes-right) depends on the virtues of the community and on the health of its constitution. I’ll take a more in-depth look at justice further on in this essay.

Citizenship

In Aristotle’s framework a citizen is defined as someone who takes an active role in government — typically a policy-making one, but perhaps also administrative or judicial. The citizenry are those who take part in ruling the polis.

In anarchy, everyone rules themselves, but everyone is also responsible (or ought to be) for guiding, defending, and promoting the flourishing of the anarchic community as a whole. This is what it means to be a citizen of an anarchy.

While such citizenship is open to all, it’s not mandatory. It remains an option for any resident of an anarchy to try to remain aloof from politics. You might become a hermit, or just shyly avoid expressing your opinion or helping to make community decisions. You might distrust your own judgment and cede to someone else’s.

Aristotle might argue that this opt-in citizenship effectively generates a voluntary aristocracy. I can even imagine cases in which an anarchy tolerates a temporary spontaneous monarchy of that one person with the expertise to know what they’re doing for a specific project, or a temporary spontaneous democracy of people who are content to go along with the majority opinion on some subject because that seems about as good as any other option.

What distinguishes anarchy is that none of these things becomes institutionalized. Nobody gets installed in the ruling class or banished from it. The trick is making sure it stays that way. Power corrupts, and a temporary aristocracy, or monarchy, or majority may forget it is temporary and become accustomed to its privileges. But more about that later. Let’s consider more about anarchist citizenship.

The Anarchist Ruling Class

You are a citizen if you participate in promoting the health of the community. So there is a ruling class, of sorts: Anarchy is ruled by those who show up and contribute.

Those who contribute the most also exercise more policy-making authority. This isn’t a quid-pro-quo; instead, they de facto exercise such authority by virtue of the contributions they make. Who decides how wide to make the sidewalk? The people who pay for it and design it and build it do.

This makes the citizen/non-citizen difference something of a continuum. Do you understand the prevailing community understandings enough to participate in their adjudication? do you participate in community events and tasks? The more you can say “yes” the more citizenish you are. The least citizen-like members of the anarchy are nourished by its constitution but do little to help preserve, defend, and improve it. The most citizen-like members of the anarchy do the most to keep it healthy and strong.

I used to have a view of anarchist citizenship that might have been summed up as “mind your own business, and let everybody else mind theirs.” Now I think of that as not anarchy at all, but reclusion. You can care about others without being an interfering busybody, and you can take a healthy interest in the well-being and character of your community without doing so at either end of a gun.

Aristotle noted that a constitution works best when citizens have a common desire for its continued success — that is, when few feel they would be better off under a different system. This remains the case for anarchy, and so a good anarchist citizen who is concerned with the health of the anarchist constitution will be concerned as well with the satisfaction of those in it.

A good anarchist citizen defends the anarchy against internal and external threats from those who would establish a ruling class, and from the sort of decay that makes the constitution more vulnerable to such threats. Anarchy, like other good constitutions, is fragile. A good constitution is important for human thriving, and so it is foolish to pretend aloofness from political concerns. The health of the polis is the proper concern of everyone in it.

This may imply some level of prosperity. If people spend all of their time and energy scraping to get by, they will not have anything left to devote to the health of the community, and anarchy may fall victim to those wealthy enough to spare time to take the reins. For this reason also, it may be useful to encourage an ethos of simplicity. If people have a sensible understanding of what the necessities really are, they will be better able to prioritize those things that are above and beyond the necessities. Whereas if they have a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses sense of what is necessary, they may never feel secure enough in their material possessions to begin to devote their time and resources to good citizenship.

The Fluid Aristocracy of the Generous

A good anarchist citizen participates in the collective decision-making and other responsibilities of the polis. Who decides where to dig the well? The citizens do — that is, the people who show up when a decision has to be made and who devote time and effort to understanding and deliberating. Who digs the well? The citizens do — that is, the people who put on the gloves and grab the shovels. As I’ve suggested, anarchy is in part a sort of fluid aristocracy of those people who are willing and able to take responsibility and get their hands dirty.

But a good anarchist citizen neither cares to do this alone, nor aspires to assume a permanent leadership role. For the health of the polis, and for personal peace of mind, such a citizen will want the virtues appropriate to leadership and civic participation to be found widely in the community, and will encourage others to exercise them.

In the best constitution, as Aristotle noted, the virtues of a good person and of a good citizen are the same. This is part of what makes anarchy that best constitution. This also means a good anarchist citizen will take an interest in the characters of other citizens. In Aristotle’s system, it was important that members of the ruling class develop the complete virtues. In anarchy, this extends to everybody. We all need to carefully tend our characters, and if people around us need help in this process, we need to extend that help eagerly, knowing that this is both generous and in enlightened self-interest.

A good anarchist citizen models good behavior, and also rewards good behavior and calls out bad behavior in others. She or he takes a keen interest in the education of youth, and encourages community-enhancing customs and traditions.

Nurturing the Anarchist Citizen

A constitution grows out of the character of the citizenry, at least to a great extent. Unless the citizens grow into the proper characters to take their places within it, such a constitution is liable to fall.

Monarchist or oligarchical or democratic characters will see anarchy as a void that they are called upon to fill with a ruling class, and a ruling class will certainly seize the opportunity to fill that void. A community of anarchic characters, on the other hand, will set about establishing a healthy anarchy.

Anarchist citizens need to have certain skills, and these skills need to be widespread. In anarchy there is no royal family, aristocratic class, or small set of fully-fledged citizens who are entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining the health of the polis. Instead, that responsibility is spread over the whole population.

There are also certain understandings that need to be made explicit so they can be shared. For example, though political philosophers are fond of discovering intricate justifications for what does and doesn’t count as “property,” as though their definitions were a natural law of the universe, in the real world what counts as property is decided by the consensus of the ruling class. In anarchy, where the ruling class is everybody, there needs to be a widespread, shared understanding of the basic contours of how property rights are established, how inheritance works, and so forth. In any system there will be edge cases and unanticipated complications that will provoke conflict, but if people diverge on even the basics, conflict is inevitable.

How do we deal with people who violate social norms: thieves, cheats, murderers, and the like? How do we operate with people who do not share our norms and understandings: foreigners, immigrants, or people on the borders of our community? How do we defend our community against outside aggression? What are the temptations to tyranny, oligarchy, or democracy, and how can these be resisted? These are all things that need to be part of the community conversation before they become a problem.

Implicit and Explicit Learning

The wisdom of the community on questions like these can be taught in both implicit and explicit ways. Implicitly, people learn by observing those around them and discovering patterns that become heuristics they can apply to their own choices. Explicitly, people are taught as children and through the stories and admonitions they hear.

In any society, customs, norms, shared understandings, myths, ritual practices, and such — “folklore,” in short — are important. In anarchy they also bear much of the weight that under other constitutions is borne by coercive institutions and governing hierarchies. Those other constitutions are a recent development in our evolutionary history. If we put them aside and listen to the wisdom evolution has implanted in us, we can learn a lot. People are political animals, and we have evolved a variety of methods for regulating our social habitats. Our domestication by coercive political institutions has atrophied these skills, but there is every reason to expect them to blossom again if we escape the zoo.

As a student of Aristotelian political science, you are in training to be a physician for bodies of citizens. One way you can help an anarchy is to identify those aspects of the shared culture that contribute to a healthy and harmonious constitution, and those that tend to cause friction and decay.

It can be instructive to study the time-worn wisdom from other cultures in other places and times. But you can no more expect to successfully graft a bunch of other cultures’ practices on to your own than you could expect to combine the capabilities of all the animals by splicing them together like Frankenstein’s monster. Careful, humble experimentation with elements of the best practices of other cultures — not slapdash, wholesale disruption of existing processes — ought to characterize your technique.

Proverbs and Stories

Some norms can be expressed as proverbs. For example, it may be a useful norm in an anarchy that those who take the most responsibility for some aspect of the commons ought to have more policy-making authority over it. Such a norm might be passed down from generation to generation as “don’t cry about how thick the onions are sliced unless you cried while they were being cut.”

Proverbs are one of the best technologies for collecting and passing on information about best-practices. For example, these passages from the biblical book of Proverbs recommend behavior for maintaining the health of the community:

The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him. Whoever derides their neighbor has no sense, but the one who has understanding holds their tongue. For lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisers. Whoever puts up security for a stranger will surely suffer, but whoever refuses to shake hands in pledge is safe. A kindhearted woman gains honor, but ruthless men gain only wealth. People curse the one who hoards grain, but they pray God’s blessing on the one who is willing to sell.

There’s a lot of redundancy in Proverbs, suggesting that it was probably a compilation of the efforts of multiple cultures and generations to find ways to quickly teach heuristics for maintaining a harmonious community, ensuring personal prosperity, dealing with outsiders, and keeping a good reputation.

The poet who can encapsulate good lessons in pithy phrases is a boon to the community. Ben Franklin saw himself in this role when he used his “Poor Richard” persona to issue advice like:

“Whate’er’s begun in anger ends in shame.”

“A quarrelsome Man has no good Neighbors.”

“Better is a little with content than much with contention.”

“Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.”

We do the same sort of thing today, for instance when we deploy proverbs like “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” to warn people away from get-rich-quick scams.

Music can help transmit proverbs. Lyrics stay in memory better than mere phrases, and the form of the melody and rhythm can impart additional meaning or nuance. A wise songwriter may be able to shape a constitution more effectively than a legislator.

Using Stories to Immunize Against Government

Anarchist citizens must stay on guard against the temptations of other forms of constitution.

Some advice I remember hearing a counselor give to addicts dealing with temptation was “play the tape forward.” What was meant by this was that the addict should not stop at thinking about what will happen at the moment cravings are satisfied by giving in to the drug, but should also think about what will happen next, and then after that, and all the way through to the end. Make sure all the consequences of the decision are explicitly considered as part of the package — “I am satisfying my craving and easing into my comforting high (and violating probation, and spending money I need for other things, and risking my job and my relationship with my children, and harming my health, and…)”

Stories are a great way to do this. Tell the story of the person who becomes king promising to solve all the problems, but ends up becoming the tyrant causing more problems than they solved. There’s a great example of this in the Bible too (1 Samuel 8):

Samuel told… the people who were asking him for a king… “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

When a cautionary story like this is part of the common folklore, it’s easier to point out someone with royalist pretensions and say “I remember you from that story about Samuel. Get out of here with your king-talk! I know what that stuff leads to.”

Which stories you tell and ask to be told, which lyrics you sing and which songs you play, which proverbs you repeat — all of these choices are, if only incidentally, political ones, under any constitution. In anarchy, the political choices of ordinary people are of more importance because there are no offsetting rites of a ruling class to counterbalance them. So a good anarchist citizen will choose wisely.

Currently many of the stories and lyrics that dominate our culture are produced with a primarily commercial motive (we’ve even come to expect product advertisements to take responsibility for our culture). These unfortunately often amplify attitudes and behaviors that are harmful to community. Such things make anarchy more difficult to establish and maintain because they discourage responsible action and thereby increase the temptation to establish a responsible institutional authority over people instead.

Anarchists and libertarians have an honorable history of standing for freedom of expression and against government censorship. Because of this, we have typically opposed people who argue that certain sorts of expression must be banned because they are harmful to individuals, degrading of public morality, and encouraging of bad behavior. If the response “even if that is so, government censorship is a cure worse than the disease” did not seem adequately persuasive, we often tried to go further and argue that there’s no evidence that exposure to mere expression has any such harmful effects. I think, though, that this argument is not a good one. We need to acknowledge that culture is powerful, and some of it tends to make people better and some to make people worse, and that as good anarchist citizens we need to make good choices about what to amplify and what to turn up our noses at.

Depending on the health of your anarchy, the messages you want to create or amplify may be different. Do you have a problem of wealth inequality that threatens to pull things apart at the seams? Stories that encourage generosity among the wealthy and denigrate misers, or proverbs that promote thrift and hard work among the poor might be what you’re after. Threatened by a burgeoning oligarchy? Stories about what happens to people who get too big for their britches and start ordering others around ought to be ready in the quiver.

Education

The goal of the education of children in a healthy anarchy diverges from that in other constitutions.

When children are educated, they are being instructed by, and at least initially, governed by grown-ups. The goal of anarchist education is to usher them through this period of apprenticeship into adulthood. The goal of archist education is to do this only for the emerging ruling class; the rest of the children are meant to retain their subordinate status into adulthood. Education trains those underclass children to stunt their growth, to adopt the neoteny of domesticated animals. To this end, these children continue to be governed by adults as they continue through their schooling, rather than being trained to gradually replace their adult governors and to govern themselves.

In preparation for lives as adult children, such underclass students are drilled constantly in the skills they need to be interns, grad students, employees, inmates, soldiers, and subjects. In Aristotle’s framework, such people are typically considered non-citizens at best, slaves at worst.

Anarchist education, on the other hand, seeks to bring children into adulthood with the skills and understandings they need to join the community of adults as responsible equals. Children begin in a position of childish subordination, but transition over the course of their education into ever-greater responsibility over their lives, their learning, their day, and into ever-tighter integration into adult activities.

Children will learn to lead and to follow, to understand how conflicts arise and to learn techniques for resolving them (without running to an authority figure to do it for them), to make decisions for themselves and to cooperate to carry out projects.

The weird transition in which a person is “a student” until they abruptly leave school and assume a place in the adult world is no way to raise anarchic citizens. Inevitably such students cast about for some child-like role that resembles the one they have been trained for (isn’t there some job where I can sit at a desk and do what someone tells me to do?), so they can earn pocket money to spend on comic books, now available as blockbuster movies suitable for all ages.

Gatherings

Opportunities for the community to come together in person may help sustain common understandings and folklore. The Spartan communal meals Aristotle described (I think it sounds nicer to just call them potlucks) are one excellent way of doing this. Sharing a meal at the same table does wonders to bond a community.

In the absence of an official in charge of things like registering titles, marriages, and the like, public declarations at gatherings like these may regain some of the importance they once had. A wedding ceremony today is often just a kind of expensive party, but it once had the purpose of letting everyone know that something important had changed that they should know about. A marriage had important social implications — families might reorganize, property change hands, lines of inheritance change. People with prior or competing claims were given their last chance to put them forward (“If any have reason why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”).

But most things will not need the close attention of the larger community, and people who feel the need to bring every gripe up “in general assembly” ought to be encouraged to work on their working-things-out skills or to seek out a respected arbitrator. If people have to come together and make collective decisions every time there is a conflict, they’ll get sick of it and may demand professionals to do the job for them (and soon your anarchy is swallowed up by a judiciary).

Written Laws

Do written laws have a place in the anarchist constitution? Remember that an anarchist constitution isn’t one without laws but one without a ruling class. Instead of law being orders-from-above, law is collective-understanding: more like the laws of grammar than the Penal Code.

But just as it can be helpful to have the laws of grammar written out and made explicit, perhaps it is also useful to collect and write out the laws in effect in an anarchy from time to time.

Grammarians are sometimes said to come in two flavors: prescriptive and descriptive. The prescriptive grammarians come up with sensible, logical rules that proper speakers ought to follow. The descriptive grammarians look at the messy and sometimes contradictory ways people actually use language and try to understand their contours.

The archic “lawgiver” is like a prescriptive grammarian of law. The anarchic law-recorder is the descriptive counterpart of this. For example, Elinor Ostrom is a notable descriptive law-recorder of anarchic law.

Such a record of laws can be useful for education about community standards, and for enforcing a conservatism that can help an anarchy to resist legal innovations that can destabilize it. It can also be a good way of making explicit the flaws in the existing legal order that might be candidates for reform. However there is also a danger that a written law book can morph over time from descriptive to prescriptive if it comes to be revered or over-relied-on, and also that it can attract a tribe of judges and law-interpreters who may come to covet oligarchical political power.

Incompatible Understandings

Imagine your anarchy has in its domain a grove of trees that the community treats as common property. Anyone can gather firewood there, or even chop down some trees to build a fence if they want. But nobody disturbs the willows. The willows are where the spirits and remembrances of people take up residence when they die. Chopping down the willows for fence-posts would be as disrespectful as going to a graveyard and collecting gravestones to pave your driveway with.

But a stranger comes to town, or a group of nomadic people, or folks from the polis down the road who don’t have a grove of their own… and they don’t hold willows holy in the same way you do and they seem apt to start chopping them down.

Now you’ve got a collective problem on your hands. It’s a conflict of rights, certainly, but it can’t be resolved by normal means because your groups have utterly different ideas of ownership, commons, and what’s sacred. Is the tree “unowned” or “owned by those in the spirit world” or “owned by the community as a whole”? If the spirit owners of the trees don’t even exist to you, the whole question may seem ridiculous.

If you don’t have some way of finding common ground and resolving the conflict, things revert to a might-makes-right state-of-nature scenario.

Anarchist Foreign Relations

To head off the worst effects of that, an anarchy has to have some sort of “foreign relations” process. How do you coexist alongside communities that have different and possibly conflicting understandings and policies? How do you welcome the stranger into your community and under what conditions? How does someone go from being an outsider to being an insider (or on the other hand, what conditions lead to shunning or outlawry)? Under what circumstances ought you to feel obligated to come to the defense of your neighbors against others, and under what circumstances are your neighbors on their own in their conflicts (or even ought to be surrendered for extradition if they have committed a crime against another group)?

What would it mean for an anarchic community to negotiate a treaty? Who would negotiate? Who would such a treaty be binding on? Could those who enter the community or mature to adults within it after the treaty is agreed to be said to be bound by it? Bound how?

Foreign affairs seem likely to be tricky. It seems at first glance comparatively easy to negotiate with a king, get a king’s signature on parchment next to a fancy wax seal and ribbon, and be confident that the king can compel his subjects to go along with it. Negotiating with an anarchy means getting widespread buy-in that is genuine enough that the terms of the treaty become part of the consensually-agreed-to constitution of the anarchy. This is not impossible, or even necessarily more difficult, but it may be harder to understand or navigate for those foreign powers that are used to dealing with a smaller ruling class or a designated institution.

Anarchist Defense

How does an anarchy defend itself from outside aggression? History is full of examples of anarchies being preyed on by neighbors with other forms of constitution, and anarchies have often fared poorly and have either been conquered or have had to reorganize themselves as a sort of subterranean parallel constitution operating in territory that is formally under the control of another sort of state (see for example James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed).

Both militia-style defense and the emerging science of nonviolent, civilian-based state defense are easy to imagine in anarchist forms. Indeed, the latter seems most likely to succeed in an anarchist population: people who are used to governing themselves and refusing the temptations of a ruling class are most well-equipped to make themselves ungovernable by an invading aggressor.

But both of these options are most likely to succeed if the population is well-trained, and, at least in the case of a militia-style defense, well-equipped. This presents another coordination problem an anarchy will have to solve if it wants to be able to defend itself well.

States rely not only on their actual defense capabilities, but on deterring aggressors by signaling their ability and willingness to inflict discouraging harm on anybody who attacks them. It may be harder for an anarchy to broadcast a legible signal of this sort. Aggressor states may not find it credible that an anarchy can defend itself or can inflict harm on them that they will regret. History is full of examples of powerful, arrogant states stomping confidently on poorer, smaller, less-well-equipped groups and underestimating the harm that will rebound on them. Defeating an aggressor state may be easier than deterring their aggression in the first place, which is of course the preferable option.

Justice as a Virtue

People often talk about justice in terms of rights and results: Does a particular outcome or process respect the rights people have, and does it result in the right disposition of goods or people or privileges or what-have-you?

Aristotle instead wanted us to consider justice as a variety of virtue — a habitual state of character possessed by the just person and expressed by the desires the just person has and the acts those desires induce the just person to take.

What motivates a just person to not try to craftily get more than their fair share?: The fact that it’s better to be just and have less than to be unjust and have more. One’s eudaimonia (thriving, flourishing, happiness) is improved more by being just than by sneakily getting more stuff or more glory or whatever.

Becoming a just person, in Aristotle’s framework, is primarily about developing the character of a person who desires to be just, and only secondarily about becoming better informed about the nuances of what makes certain acts more just than other ones. In contrast most modern ethical philosophy can split endless hairs about trolley problems, without ever addressing how to incorporate a love for justice into one’s character.

“How convenient it is to be a reasonable creature,” Benjamin Franklin noted, “since it enables one to make or find a reason for whatever one has a mind to do.” If you have a sophisticated enough understanding of justice, but no just character, you can justify any short-sighted selfish whim. If, on the other hand, you want to be just, you will study just enough ethics to help you make a just decision, without getting lost in a swamp of sophistry.

However, since not everybody is going to be self-motivated in this way, you may find that in your anarchy it is important to praise just actions in others, and to disparage unjust ones. In this way you bestow honor to compensate those who for the sake of justice forego material advantages and feel this to be a sacrifice, and depreciate the superficial gains of the unjust with public shame.

Justice is Socially Constructed

Aristotle thought that to practice justice requires a certain sort of political context. Indeed he felt that one of the primary reasons people form political communities is to enable them to develop and cultivate this virtue.

To some extent, justice is only possible in a political community that defines some standards against which to weigh competing claims. For instance, for a person to “own” a piece of property means that other people respect that ownership in certain ways. That means those other people must become aware of and respectful of things like changes of ownership via contracts, transactions, judicial procedures, movement of boundary markers, and so forth, and must have protocols for understanding which such transactions are valid and which are bogus, and this can only happen in a political context.

There is a sort of baseline justice — not preying on people with violence or deceit, and not submitting to the violence or deceit of others — that anyone can and should practice anywhere. But the more advanced and nuanced justice of the political community requires a well-tuned understanding of how people relate and have related to one another, to the shared understandings and values of the community, and to the processes of negotiation, adjudication, and rectification that people respect. This sort of wisdom is specific to a particular community at a particular time.

Ideally these two sorts of justice are in harmony with one another: the sophisticated political justice supplements a more baseline universal justice. But it’s not uncommon for them to conflict: For example, perhaps some traditional and accepted practice of your community, on closer inspection, turns out to be fundamentally unjust (e.g. slavery), or to have unusual corner cases where its heuristic value fails and it conflicts with baseline justice.

There may be legitimate reasons in any particular such case for you to either value justice absolutely and so behave “unlawfully” in the face of the community’s unjust customs — or for you to permit certain injustices to remain unredressed in favor of community harmony and the stability of the anarchy. Thoreau was weighing such cases when he wrote:

Sometimes also, laws and customs come into conflict with each other. Some act is mandatory under one law and forbidden under another. This happens all the time with precise law codes written by careful lawyers, and so we should not be surprised to see this also in the more organically-derived heuristics of the anarchist community. I can imagine Antigone playing out much the same way, and being just as tragic, without a King Creon.

Aristotle taught that another virtue, equity, supplements justice and permits those who possess it to make decisions that improve on the strict commandments of law and tradition. When laws conflict, or when the application of a law would lead to a poor result, the person with a sense of equity will know how to break the letter of the law in favor of the spirit of the law. This is more of an art than a science, and it requires careful discernment since the parties in a conflict will naturally have self-interested motives to plead the cause of equity to bend the law in their own favor.

Aristotle described equity this way:

It is equity to pardon human failings, and to look to the [intentions of the] lawgiver and not to the law; to the spirit and not to the letter; to the intention and not to the action; to the whole and not to the part; to the character of the actor in the long run and not in the present moment; to remember the good rather than evil, and good that one has received, rather than good that one has done; to bear being injured; to wish to settle a matter by words rather than by deeds; lastly, to prefer arbitration to judgment, for the arbitrator sees what is equitable, but the judge only the law, and for this an arbitrator was first appointed, in order that equity might flourish.

Political Equality

Aristotle taught that justice between people requires that those people have some minimum level of political status as well. One does not treat one’s slaves or one’s children with “justice” or “injustice” except perhaps metaphorically, in Aristotle’s system.

So in a tyranny, where the only real law is “what the tyrant says, goes,” there is little hope of establishing justice. In an oligarchy, there is one set of rules for the oligarchs, and another for the rest of us, so there may be political justice of a sort within each group, but at the boundary between them something else takes place. The systems most of us live under today are notorious for setting up some people above the law, and oppressing others by using the law as an arbitrary billy club.

This is certainly one of the selling points of anarchy: that it does not give some class of people special legal privileges, but treats everybody as a “citizen” — that is, as having equal political rights. An equal, inclusive form of justice — something so attractive that most other systems at least pay lip service to it — is actually achievable under anarchy.

Aristotle had to start pulling out equations and ratios and geometry when he discussed distributive justice because, in his view, people have discrete social statuses in society, and so transactions between people, in order to be just, must respect those different social statuses and not disrupt them. In anarchy, this is greatly simplified. Privileges and common goods and rights don’t need to be divvied up proportionally depending on people’s ranks, but can just be distributed equally.

However this won’t happen automatically and without attention. For instance, iniquitous discrimination can poison the constitution of an anarchy as it can any other. But anarchy denies a common avenue for small-minded people to leverage their bigotry via state coercion, and so limits the damage it can do.

Laws and Customs

In constitutions with a formal legal code, and a ruling class of legislators, prosecutors, judges, executives, and so forth, there is usually something of a sharp distinction between what is legal/illegal on the one hand, and what is customary/frowned-upon on the other. Law covers some things, custom others. In the constitution of an anarchy, this distinction is likely to be much fuzzier.

Custom in some parts of life has the force of law, and woe to whoever violates it. In other parts it is more like the rules of manners, and violators at worst risk being seen as disrespectful (though reputation and character are much more valuable under the constitution of an anarchy, so this means more than it does under other constitutions). In other parts, custom is more like good advice, and violators are seen only as foolish or eccentric.

Ideally the “laws” of the anarchist polis, in addition to defining conventional things like property and explaining best-practice processes, enjoin people to the virtues, that is, they advise everyone to be (and how to be) the best sort of flourishing people. In such a heavenly polis obedience to law coincides exactly with virtue: to be law-abiding is to be virtuous which is to be operating in your own best interest as well as the interest of the healthy constitution.

There is an additional advantage to an anarchist constitution without a ruling class: it is easier for people to submit gently to law/custom than to rulers/officers, because this is less likely to trigger feelings of being dominated or losing face.

Heading Off Instability

Aristotle identified several sources of instability that threaten the constitutions of democracies, oligarchies, and monarchies. Most of them have counterparts that anarchies need to be concerned with.

You might think that anarchy would at least be free from destabilization by people who pursue profit and honor through the devices of government. Without any government to bestow profit and honor, a healthy anarchy does indeed keep this at bay. But if there is any deviation from anarchy — for example “temporary,” “just this once,” “during the crisis” forms of institutionalized government — this tendency will seep into the cracks and widen them.

So it would be wise for the anarchist Aristotelian political scientist — the physician of the body politic — to consult Aristotle’s list of suggestions for how to preserve and stabilize a constitution.

Not all of these will be relevant to a constitution without a distinct ruling class. But, for example, the advice to try to strip citizens away from their old loyalties and attach their loyalties to the polis remains sound. It has a kind of dreadful ring to it when it is put starkly that way, but benign examples of this would include efforts to reduce ethnic or religious divisiveness in society, to establish truces between rival gangs, and so forth.

The Corrupting Power of Wealth

Commerce and the pursuit of money is potentially corrupting, causing people to get caught up in accumulation at the expense of providing for their needs and developing the virtues necessary for the health of the polis.

Economic inequality can disrupt political equality. Can an anarchy survive in a polis divided into haves and have-nots?

Accumulated wealth can also encourage hostile neighbors to invade, so there’s a security aspect as well.

On the other hand, economic growth helps the success of the polis and prosperity allows people the leisure time they need to pursue the complete set of virtues. So there’s a tension here, or perhaps a “golden mean” to carefully pursue.

In economics as in other things, be cautious about innovation, and conservative about reform. Consider the likelihood of unintended consequences of large-scale societal changes. Be skeptical of utopian ideas like sharing all property in common, or dissolving family ties into one big communal family. Such things are unlikely to succeed in reality as well as they do on paper. A good polis is a harmonious mixture of diversity, not a blending into homogeneity. Diversity is less brittle than uniformity.

That said, some amount of property held-in-common is a good idea. And an ethos of voluntary generosity that evens out wealth inequality ought to be encouraged. Involuntary redistribution of wealth is unlikely to turn out well, and probably implies that your anarchy has been undermined by some other constitution.

More important than reducing inequality or poverty is inculcating the virtues so that people have a healthier attitude towards money and possessions and justice. Do this, and the rest will follow. Redistribute wealth without instilling the virtues and you’ll end up just causing more problems than you solve.

What to Do with the Oligarchs

As I’ve mentioned, anarchy allows for a sort of fluid aristocracy-of-the-willing, and so it can be very satisfactory to particularly virtuous aristocrats, who fit right in. Ordinary oligarchs, however, coasting on their wealth or their family name, are likely to feel short-changed, as they do not get the respect or authority they feel they are entitled to. This can be a source of instability.

You might want to give such people some token ceremonial roles of pomp and dignity that they can occupy without causing much trouble but that will keep them satisfied (parade grand master?). But keep an eye on them.

What to Do with the Democrats

Temptations to majoritarian democracy will crop up periodically. If there is an issue that requires group buy-in but on which there is a strong difference of opinion — an issue that by its nature must be decided one way or the other with no compromise or middle ground — genuine consensus may be out of reach. It will be impossible to make everybody happy.

In such a case, the party that can marshal the majority opinion will likely come up with good-sounding reasons why that should be enough to decide the question. If those self-serving reasons are repeated often enough and earnestly enough, they may start sounding like wisdom to the unwise.

If wiser heads can prevail, they may counsel that it would be better off to toss a coin than to make an exception in favor of majority rule. While majoritarian decision-making ensures that the people with the hard feelings are always in the minority, it can also mean that the same minority gets screwed again and again. This will be a source of instability in your constitution, and may indicate that you have already lost your anarchy to the temptations of democracy.

An Ounce of Prevention

How do you prevent the majority, or the rich, or the strong, from trying to enact their interests by force once they realize their strength? Perhaps one way is to seek out ways to give them some sort of extraordinary advisory roles or something so they feel adequately respected without permitting them to be actually coercive.

There’s always the temptation, once a faction realizes its strength, for it to try to force its way. “Who’s going to stop us?” This is of course not just a problem of anarchies; other systems claim to prevent this, but they’re really just examples of it.

The Aristotelian political scientist will anticipate these attempts and head them off. It is easier to discourage such a faction before it has had a taste of success than after.

Anarchist Government

Is “anarchist government” an oxymoron? To say that an anarchy is “self-governing” or governed by “spontaneous order” is nice, and perhaps even true in some ways, but it is not very revealing. Self-governing how? What kind of spontaneous order?

Do some things need to be decided by an assembly about which everyone in the polis is notified so that they may be present? How is this accomplished? Who does the work of making sure the assembly runs smoothly and stays on-topic, and how is that person compensated for their work?

How are the commons maintained? Who adjudicates disputes and how are they compensated? Who keeps records of contracts, dispute resolutions, treaties, and so forth, and how are they motivated to maintain the integrity of these records? Who represents the polis in diplomatic negotiations with foreign institutions, with how much authority, and how are they compensated for their work? How is the militia or nonviolent defense force structured, how does it train, and how is it coordinated? How do we help those who cannot help themselves? How are we to be protected from people who exhibit vicious behavior?

These are among the hard questions that people under any form of constitution must solve. In states with a ruling class and an institutionalized government, the solutions usually take the form of adding a new wing onto that governmental structure: add a department, appoint an official, fit them into the hierarchy, write some regulations, and there you have it: some patched-together attempt at a solution.

Anarchies have to be more creative, which is sometimes harder but can lead to better solutions than boilerplate bureaucracy building. One disadvantage is that states leave lots of written records which other states can use as templates for their own systems. Anarchies have fewer precedents they can rely on. There are many theoretical systems, and some promising anthropological studies, and there are some things we can learn from the “Occupy” assemblies and from experiences we have in temporary autonomous zones in which we can experiment with new forms of organization outside of the control of the governments we are subjected to, but this remains an understudied area.

In many cases, however, the solutions are hidden in plain sight. The government has greedily absorbed things that were previously provided in non-coercive ways, and all we have to do is relearn those old ways. Take libraries, for instance. Public libraries, supported by taxes, are ubiquitous today, but privately-funded, subscription libraries have also been common and would likely fill the gap if tax-funded libraries were to vanish.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

Defense

For defense against predatory people, a subscription-based defense organization seems like the sort of solution that might naturally develop in anarchy. But Robert Nozick has outlined a plausible path by which such an organization becomes a sort of state, with those who direct it (the subscribers, at least initially, but eventually possibly the organization’s officers themselves) becoming the de facto ruling class. The Aristotelian political scientist/doctor may want to keep an eye out for such symptoms in order to suggest possible remedies before things get out of hand and the constitution becomes destabilized.

Collective Decision-Making

Aristotle discussed the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon, in which the judgments of many people are averaged together and (at least in some circumstances) these judgments seem reliably better than the judgments of any particular person. Aristotle saw juries and assemblies as good approximations of this phenomenon, but it strikes me that with today’s technology it should be easier to apply this principle even more widely and less approximately. It seems to me that there are some decisions that an anarchist polis might be able to make through a kind of averaging of this nature, or maybe something like a prediction market, without the drawbacks of majoritarian, winner-takes-all voting.

“Wage Slavery”

Aristotle’s definition of slavery and his conception of employees as temporary-slaves or as slavish-for-the-duration are interesting from the perspective of modern criticisms of “wage slavery”. According to Aristotle, you are a slave to the extent that you are someone else’s tool. But Aristotle thought that some people were naturally tools, and that the master/slave relationship can be of mutual benefit in such cases — he did not see slavery as necessarily exploitative.

Aristotle also anticipated a sort of technological emancipation in which mechanical tools would do the jobs then done by slaves, but this was a sort of throwaway comment and he didn’t enlarge on what the political ramifications of this might be.

How the culture of your anarchy envisions slavery, employment, and human dignity will have important implications for how its economy is structured.

In Conclusion

I have been trying to see the issues of the anarchist polis as Aristotle might have seen them, and to use his techniques and assumptions (as much as possible) to examine them.

It has been exhilarating to exercise my imagination in this way. But it’s also been humbling to confront the size of the subject and to see how superficially and incompletely I have had to deal with most of it.