By Shannon Brincat
This essay deals with a peculiar problem that has plagued anar-
chist thought throughout its history: how to develop and main-
tain an anarchistic civil society that at once ensures the freedom
of all its members and overcomes all threats of domination within
it but which is at the same time non-coercive. To be fair, this is
not a question that perplexes just anarchism but the entirety of
political philosophy since Hegel. In his recent volume, Anarchy as
Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity, Mohammed A.
Bamyeh (2010) has grappled with this question, and his curious
solution—a reliance on what he calls civic humanity—while of
noble intention, suffers from an indelible weakness in balancing
subjective freedom with the freedom of others in community. I do
not here propose my own solution to this fundamental problem.
Rather, my aim is to outline what is at stake in this debate and
thereby highlight the urgent need for critical dialogue on this
issue because the future of anarchism is, in no small measure,
intimately bound with how we approach this question: whether
we succumb to an individual voluntarism that is seemingly con-
gruent with the spirit of anarchism but permissive of potentially
dominating behaviour in civil society, or, we arrive (somehow) at
a collective form capable of sustaining individual freedom in ethi-
cal life with others. While I am not satisfied in framing the ques-
tion in this dualistic way, it is perhaps the most incisive method
to focus on the key tensions involved.
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