Humans are social beings, and the kind of crea­ture that a per­son becomes depends cru­cial­ly on the social, cul­tur­al and insti­tu­tion­al cir­cum­stances of his life.

This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself.

We are there­fore led to inquire into the social arrange­ments that are con­ducive to peo­ple’s rights and wel­fare, and to ful­fill­ing their just aspi­ra­tions — in brief, the com­mon good.

For per­spec­tive I’d like to invoke what seem to me vir­tu­al tru­isms. They relate to an inter­est­ing cat­e­go­ry of eth­i­cal prin­ci­ples: those that are not only uni­ver­sal, in that they are vir­tu­al­ly always pro­fessed, but also dou­bly uni­ver­sal, in that at the same time they are almost uni­ver­sal­ly reject­ed in practice.

These range from very gen­er­al prin­ci­ples, such as the tru­ism that we should apply to our­selves the same stan­dards we do to oth­ers (if not harsh­er ones), to more spe­cif­ic doc­trines, such as a ded­i­ca­tion to pro­mot­ing democ­ra­cy and human rights, which is pro­claimed almost uni­ver­sal­ly, even by the worst mon­sters — though the actu­al record is grim, across the spectrum.

A good place to start is with John Stu­art Mil­l’s clas­sic On Lib­er­ty. Its epi­graph for­mu­lates ​“The grand, lead­ing prin­ci­ple, towards which every argu­ment unfold­ed in these pages direct­ly con­verges: the absolute and essen­tial impor­tance of human devel­op­ment in its rich­est diversity.”

The words are quot­ed from Wil­helm von Hum­boldt, a founder of clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism. It fol­lows that insti­tu­tions that con­strain such devel­op­ment are ille­git­i­mate, unless they can some­how jus­ti­fy themselves.

Con­cern for the com­mon good should impel us to find ways to cul­ti­vate human devel­op­ment in its rich­est diversity.

Adam Smith, anoth­er Enlight­en­ment thinker with sim­i­lar views, felt that it should­n’t be too dif­fi­cult to insti­tute humane poli­cies. In his The­o­ry of Moral Sen­ti­ments he observed that, ​“How self­ish so ever man may be sup­posed, there are evi­dent­ly some prin­ci­ples in his nature, which inter­est him in the for­tune of oth­ers, and ren­der their hap­pi­ness nec­es­sary to him, though he derives noth­ing from it except the plea­sure of see­ing it.”

Smith acknowl­edges the pow­er of what he calls the ​“vile max­im of the mas­ters of mankind”: ​“All for our­selves, and noth­ing for oth­er peo­ple.” But the more benign ​“orig­i­nal pas­sions of human nature” might com­pen­sate for that pathology.

Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism ship­wrecked on the shoals of cap­i­tal­ism, but its human­is­tic com­mit­ments and aspi­ra­tions did­n’t die. Rudolf Rock­er, a 20th-cen­tu­ry anar­chist thinker and activist, reit­er­at­ed sim­i­lar ideas.

Rock­er described what he calls ​“a def­i­nite trend in the his­toric devel­op­ment of mankind” that strives for ​“the free unhin­dered unfold­ing of all the indi­vid­ual and social forces in life.”

Rock­er was out­lin­ing an anar­chist tra­di­tion cul­mi­nat­ing in anar­cho-syn­di­cal­ism — in Euro­pean terms, a vari­ety of ​“lib­er­tar­i­an socialism.”

This brand of social­ism, he held, does­n’t depict ​“a fixed, self-enclosed social sys­tem” with a def­i­nite answer to all the mul­ti­far­i­ous ques­tions and prob­lems of human life, but rather a trend in human devel­op­ment that strives to attain Enlight­en­ment ideals.

So under­stood, anar­chism is part of a broad­er range of lib­er­tar­i­an social­ist thought and action that includes the prac­ti­cal achieve­ments of rev­o­lu­tion­ary Spain in 1936; reach­es fur­ther to work­er-owned enter­pris­es spread­ing today in the Amer­i­can rust belt, in north­ern Mex­i­co, in Egypt, and many oth­er coun­tries, most exten­sive­ly in the Basque coun­try in Spain; and encom­pass­es the many coop­er­a­tive move­ments around the world and a good part of fem­i­nist and civ­il and human rights initiatives.

This broad ten­den­cy in human devel­op­ment seeks to iden­ti­fy struc­tures of hier­ar­chy, author­i­ty and dom­i­na­tion that con­strain human devel­op­ment, and then sub­ject them to a very rea­son­able chal­lenge: Jus­ti­fy yourself.

If these struc­tures can’t meet that chal­lenge, they should be dis­man­tled — and, anar­chists believe, ​“refash­ioned from below,” as com­men­ta­tor Nathan Schnei­der observes.

In part this sounds like tru­ism: Why should any­one defend ille­git­i­mate struc­tures and insti­tu­tions? But tru­isms at least have the mer­it of being true, which dis­tin­guish­es them from a good deal of polit­i­cal dis­course. And I think they pro­vide use­ful step­ping stones to find­ing the com­mon good.

For Rock­er, ​“the prob­lem that is set for our time is that of free­ing man from the curse of eco­nom­ic exploita­tion and polit­i­cal and social enslavement.”

It should be not­ed that the Amer­i­can brand of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism dif­fers sharply from the lib­er­tar­i­an tra­di­tion, accept­ing and indeed advo­cat­ing the sub­or­di­na­tion of work­ing peo­ple to the mas­ters of the econ­o­my, and the sub­jec­tion of every­one to the restric­tive dis­ci­pline and destruc­tive fea­tures of markets.

Anar­chism is, famous­ly, opposed to the state, while advo­cat­ing ​“planned admin­is­tra­tion of things in the inter­est of the com­mu­ni­ty,” in Rock­er’s words; and beyond that, wide-rang­ing fed­er­a­tions of self-gov­ern­ing com­mu­ni­ties and workplaces.

Today, anar­chists ded­i­cat­ed to these goals often sup­port state pow­er to pro­tect peo­ple, soci­ety and the earth itself from the rav­ages of con­cen­trat­ed pri­vate cap­i­tal. That’s no con­tra­dic­tion. Peo­ple live and suf­fer and endure in the exist­ing soci­ety. Avail­able means should be used to safe­guard and ben­e­fit them, even if a long-term goal is to con­struct prefer­able alternatives.

In the Brazil­ian rur­al work­ers move­ment, they speak of ​“widen­ing the floors of the cage” — the cage of exist­ing coer­cive insti­tu­tions that can be widened by pop­u­lar strug­gle — as has hap­pened effec­tive­ly over many years.

We can extend the image to think of the cage of state insti­tu­tions as a pro­tec­tion from the sav­age beasts roam­ing out­side: the preda­to­ry, state-sup­port­ed cap­i­tal­ist insti­tu­tions ded­i­cat­ed in prin­ci­ple to pri­vate gain, pow­er and dom­i­na­tion, with com­mu­ni­ty and peo­ple’s inter­est at most a foot­note, revered in rhetoric but dis­missed in prac­tice as a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple and even law.

Much of the most respect­ed work in aca­d­e­m­ic polit­i­cal sci­ence com­pares pub­lic atti­tudes and gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy. In ​“Afflu­ence and Influ­ence: Eco­nom­ic Inequal­i­ty and Polit­i­cal Pow­er in Amer­i­ca,” the Prince­ton schol­ar Mar­tin Gilens reveals that the major­i­ty of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is effec­tive­ly disenfranchised.

About 70 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, at the low­er end of the wealth/​income scale, has no influ­ence on pol­i­cy, Gilens con­cludes. Mov­ing up the scale, influ­ence slow­ly increas­es. At the very top are those who pret­ty much deter­mine pol­i­cy, by means that aren’t obscure. The result­ing sys­tem is not democ­ra­cy but plutocracy.

Or per­haps, a lit­tle more kind­ly, it’s what legal schol­ar Conor Gearty calls ​“neo-democ­ra­cy,” a part­ner to neolib­er­al­ism – a sys­tem in which lib­er­ty is enjoyed by the few, and secu­ri­ty in its fullest sense is avail­able only to the elite, but with­in a sys­tem of more gen­er­al for­mal rights.

In con­trast, as Rock­er writes, a tru­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem would achieve the char­ac­ter of ​“an alliance of free groups of men and women based on coop­er­a­tive labor and a planned admin­is­tra­tion of things in the inter­est of the community.”

No one took the Amer­i­can philoso­pher John Dewey to be an anar­chist. But con­sid­er his ideas. He rec­og­nized that ​“Pow­er today resides in con­trol of the means of pro­duc­tion, exchange, pub­lic­i­ty, trans­porta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Who­ev­er owns them rules the life of the coun­try,” even if demo­c­ra­t­ic forms remain. Until those insti­tu­tions are in the hands of the pub­lic, pol­i­tics will remain ​“the shad­ow cast on soci­ety by big busi­ness,” much as is seen today.

These ideas lead very nat­u­ral­ly to a vision of soci­ety based on work­ers’ con­trol of pro­duc­tive insti­tu­tions, as envi­sioned by 19th cen­tu­ry thinkers, notably Karl Marx but also — less famil­iar — John Stu­art Mill.

Mill wrote, ​“The form of asso­ci­a­tion, how­ev­er, which if mankind con­tin­ue to improve, must be expect­ed to pre­dom­i­nate, is the asso­ci­a­tion of the labour­ers them­selves on terms of equal­i­ty, col­lec­tive­ly own­ing the cap­i­tal with which they car­ry on their oper­a­tions, and work­ing under man­agers elec­table and remov­able by themselves.”

The Found­ing Fathers of the Unit­ed States were well aware of the haz­ards of democ­ra­cy. In the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Con­ven­tion debates, the main framer, James Madi­son, warned of these hazards.

Nat­u­ral­ly tak­ing Eng­land as his mod­el, Madi­son observed that ​“In Eng­land, at this day, if elec­tions were open to all class­es of peo­ple, the prop­er­ty of land­ed pro­pri­etors would be inse­cure. An agrar­i­an law would soon take place,” under­min­ing the right to property.

The basic prob­lem that Madi­son fore­saw in ​“fram­ing a sys­tem which we wish to last for ages” was to ensure that the actu­al rulers will be the wealthy minor­i­ty so as ​“to secure the rights of prop­er­ty agst. the dan­ger from an equal­i­ty & uni­ver­sal­i­ty of suf­frage, vest­ing com­pleat pow­er over prop­er­ty in hands with­out a share in it.”

Schol­ar­ship gen­er­al­ly agrees with the Brown Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar Gor­don S. Wood’s assess­ment that ​“The Con­sti­tu­tion was intrin­si­cal­ly an aris­to­crat­ic doc­u­ment designed to check the demo­c­ra­t­ic ten­den­cies of the period.”

Long before Madi­son, Artis­to­tle, in his Pol­i­tics, rec­og­nized the same prob­lem with democracy.

Review­ing a vari­ety of polit­i­cal sys­tems, Aris­to­tle con­clud­ed that this sys­tem was the best — or per­haps the least bad — form of gov­ern­ment. But he rec­og­nized a flaw: The great mass of the poor could use their vot­ing pow­er to take the prop­er­ty of the rich, which would be unfair.

Madi­son and Aris­to­tle arrived at oppo­site solu­tions: Aris­to­tle advised reduc­ing inequal­i­ty, by what we would regard as wel­fare state mea­sures. Madi­son felt that the answer was to reduce democracy.

In his last years, Thomas Jef­fer­son, the man who draft­ed the Unit­ed States’ Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, cap­tured the essen­tial nature of the con­flict, which has far from end­ed. Jef­fer­son had seri­ous con­cerns about the qual­i­ty and fate of the demo­c­ra­t­ic exper­i­ment. He dis­tin­guished between ​“aris­to­crats and democrats.”

The aris­to­crats are ​“those who fear and dis­trust the peo­ple, and wish to draw all pow­ers from them into the hands of the high­er classes.”

The democ­rats, in con­trast, ​“iden­ti­fy with the peo­ple, have con­fi­dence in them, cher­ish and con­sid­er them as the most hon­est and safe, although not the most wise depos­i­to­ry of the pub­lic interest.”

Today the suc­ces­sors to Jef­fer­son­’s ​“aris­to­crats” might argue about who should play the guid­ing role: tech­no­crat­ic and pol­i­cy-ori­ent­ed intel­lec­tu­als, or bankers and cor­po­rate executives.

It is this polit­i­cal guardian­ship that the gen­uine lib­er­tar­i­an tra­di­tion seeks to dis­man­tle and recon­struct from below, while also chang­ing indus­try, as Dewey put it, ​“from a feu­dal­is­tic to a demo­c­ra­t­ic social order” based on work­ers’ con­trol, respect­ing the dig­ni­ty of the pro­duc­er as a gen­uine per­son, not a tool in the hands of others.

Like Karl Marx’s Old Mole — ​“our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work under­ground, then sud­den­ly to emerge” — the lib­er­tar­i­an tra­di­tion is always bur­row­ing close to the sur­face, always ready to peek through, some­times in sur­pris­ing and unex­pect­ed ways, seek­ing to bring about what seems to me to be a rea­son­able approx­i­ma­tion to the com­mon good.