 Cover of the 1970 edition | |
| Author | Robert Paul Wolff |
|---|---|
| Original title | In Defense of Anarchism : With a Reply to Jeffrey H. Reiman's In Defense of Political Philosophy |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Anarchism |
| Publisher | Harper and Row |
Publication date | 1970 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover andPaperback) |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 0-06-131541-9 |
| OCLC | 82066344 |
In Defense of Anarchism is a 1970 book by the philosopherRobert Paul Wolff, in which the author defendsphilosophical anarchism. He argues that individualautonomy and stateauthority are mutually exclusive and that, as individual autonomy is inalienable, the morallegitimacy of thestate collapses.[1]
First published byHarper and Row in 1970 asIn Defense of Anarchism: With a Reply to Jeffrey H. Reiman's In Defense of Political Philosophy, it has since run to five editions, the latest of which is theUniversity of California Press 1998 edition.[2] It is regarded as a classical work inanarchist scholarship.[1]
The book has three parts: "The Conflict between Authority and Autonomy", "The Solution of Classical Democracy", "Beyond the Legitimate State", and an appendix, "Appendix: A proposal for Instant Direct Democracy".[1] The book opens with Part I, "The Conflict between Authority and Autonomy", which Wolff begins by asserting that the moral autonomy of the individual can never be made compatible with the legitimate authority of the state".
Part II, "The Solution of Classical Democracy", is Wolff's account of democratic liberalism, the dominant political structure of the late 20th century. He investigatesunanimous direct democracy,representative democracy, andmajoritarian democracy, drawing onRawlsian arguments for the practicality ofconsensus decision-making. Wolff argues that consensus is limited by the requirement that participants are generallyrational andaltruistic, and that the community in question is not too large.[1] He goes on to critique the notion ofdemocratic representation, pointing out that representation is an illusion as representatives do not obey the wishes of their constituents, and that it is impossible not to distinguish between the rulers and the ruled in a representational system.
In Part III, "Beyond the Legitimate State", Wolff arrives at the foreshadowed conclusion that because autonomy and the legitimacy of state power are incompatible, one must either embraceanarchism or surrender one's autonomy, asThomas Hobbes proposed, to whichever authority seems strongest at the time.[1] Democracy, in this schema, is no better thandictatorship,a priori, as both require forsaking one's autonomy.
The book was well received not only in academic philosophy and in traditional anarchist circles, but also byanarcho-capitalists such asMurray Rothbard, whose letters of praise "chagrined" Wolff, who was shocked to have a position that was consonant to those he thought of as "right-wingers".[3]
Wolff's premising of "the State" and the "autonomous individual" as fixed, given entities has been criticised by Thomas Martin inSocial Anarchism as reflecting "basic assumptions arising fromRenaissance humanism,Enlightenment liberalism, and the alliance of capitalism and central authority that has marked the industrial era."[1] Such notions have been critiqued by late-20th-century currents inanarchist thought such aspost-left anarchy,insurrectionary anarchism and particularlypost-anarchism.
In Wolff's later work,The autonomy of reason; a commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals, he mentioned that his views had been revised considerably as a result of criticisms that he received from a student, Andrej Rapacznski, at Colombia University in the late 1960s.[4]
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