Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

V. The Plan for the Dissertation 
The chapters that follow can be divided into two parts. Part I (Chapters I and II) develops 
an 
Anti-Authoritarian Perspective on Freedom and Power
, while Part II (Chapters III and IV) 
uses this perspective to make 
Interventions in Democratic Theory
.
Part I: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives on Freedom and Power 
In Part I, I proceed in a somewhat unconventional fashion. Indeed, the most natural place 
to build a foundation for a radically democratic politics outside the state would seem to be with 
students and practitioners of anarchism who have developed visions of how a decentralized, non-
hierarchical society might be organized. To be sure, there is a long history practical experiments 
with radical democracy, ranging from the anarchists and syndicalists during the Spanish Civil 
War (Orwell 1952; Bookchin 2007, 91-92), to the Students for a Democratic Society in the 
United States (Hayden and Flacks 2002), to the Paris Commune of 1968 (Ross 2004). More 
recently, social movements have emerged from the jungles of Chiapas (Notes from Nowhere 

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2003) to the factory floors of Argentina (Sitrin 2006), from the streets of Seattle to the streets of 
Athens (Schwarz, Sagris and Void Network 2010), from the occupied Tahir Square (Madgrial 
2011) to occupied Zuccotti Park (Taylor and Gessen 2011). In all of these places – and 
regardless of the specific demands or stated objectives of these movements – a similar model of 
decentralized organization, decision-making, and action has been employed and continually 
redeveloped. However, rather than drawing primarily on these practical examples, or on the 
classical anarchist thinkers – in particular, theorists associated with what Ackelsberg (1997, 158) 
calls “communalist anarchism” (e.g. Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon) – I opt for an alternative 
approach to developing this “anti-authoritarian perspective.”
I focus, instead, on sources of anti-authoritarian political thinking from a) within the 
libertarian political tradition, and b) from the anthropology of non-state societies. I think these 
are under-utilized sources within political theory for the development of such a perspective and 
are worthy of additional attention. Making an argument for a radical democracy from within the 
classical anarchist tradition would not be particularly novel, nor would it speak to people who do 
not already share the same basic political commitments. In contrast, building an account of 
radical democracy that has foundations in libertarian thinking – generally assumed to be 
essentially synonymous with neoliberalism in the U.S. context – and from anthropological 
accounts of “primitive societies” – generally assumed to be non-democratic or even pre-political 
– may be more intriguing and can possibly speak to a broader audience. At a minimum, I hope 
to show that there are some surprising affinities between these schools of thought, and useful 
insights to be gleaned from them about the nature of freedom and power, and the relationship 
between these two concepts. 

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In Chapter I, “Reclaiming Libertarianism,” I contend that, in the United States, 
libertarianism has become wrongly identified with neoliberalism. Rather than challenging the 
centralization of state power, neoliberalism seeks to redirect state power in the interest of capital.
After disentangling this problematic association, I position libertarianism within the anarchist 
and anti-authoritarian political tradition. In the bulk of the chapter, I reinterpret two key 
libertarian theorists, F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, to argue that their most basic political 
commitments – support for individual freedom and skepticism toward centralized power – need 
not lead down the path of radical individualism, which understands freedom as a fundamentally 
private affair and conceptualizes democracy as a form of majoritarian coercion. Instead, I 
contend that the libertarian skepticism toward centralized power is compatible with – and even 
points in the direction of – a conceptualization of freedom in public and egalitarian terms. After 
showing why the standard libertarian commitments to self-sovereignty and freedom as non-
interference are wrongheaded, I offer an alternative account of freedom as non-domination, 
grounded in the republican tradition. Non-domination, by focusing on power inequities between 
people, conceptualizes freedom as fundamentally relational and non-sovereign. In this way, I 
open the door to a conversation between libertarian and radically democratic politics, showing 
how each can draw on and learn from the other. I conclude by arguing that libertarians, who 
have a basic commitment to individual freedom, ought to theorize and endorse democracy as a 
form of political organization in which power is widely and equitably distributed so as to avoid 
relationships of domination. 
In Chapter II, “The Indian Against Leviathan,” I move from concerns about self-
sovereignty and freedom, to concerns about state sovereignty and centralized power. I begin by 
arguing that the republican concept of freedom as non-domination (argued for in the previous 

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chapter) is, from an anti-authoritarian perspective, a fundamentally anti-statist principle. The 
sovereign state – “the principle of an authority which is external and the creator of its own 
legality” (Clastres 1987, 44) – is a dominating entity. Republican and liberal attempts to limit or 
constrain the state – through institutions such as divided powers and rights – while not trivial, do 
not change the nature of sovereignty. To be sovereign is to have the final word and to possess 
the means of violence to enforce that word. Moreover, to be sovereign is to be able to make 
exceptions to the rules, if not to change them outright. Such an entity in society is fundamentally 
at odds with freedom as non-domination.
Then, in the second half of the chapter, I show that there is an alternative to state 
sovereignty and centralized power. While the statist organization of power seeks to concentrate 
or unify society’s capacities for violence into a single entity (the state) in order to quash acts of 
violence by others in society, I will argue that this is neither a necessary nor desirable move, at 
least from the perspective of freedom as non-domination. To develop this alternative, I turn to 
the field of anthropology, specifically studies on the ways that non-state societies both resist state 
incorporation and organize themselves without recourse to the state-form. Although nonstate 
societies were indeed permeated by political power, this fact did not lead inexorably to the 
centralization of power in the state-form, but instead fostered power’s decentralization. Indeed, 
power was organized in ways that prevented the rise of the state, and the monopolization of 
power it entails. As I make these two arguments, I slowly develop two opposing logics of 
power. The first logic I call 
centripetal power
, which is an organization of power that tends 
toward its centralization – it is the logic expressed in Hobbes’ 
Leviathan
. The second logic of 
power I call 
centrifugal power
, which is an organization of power that tends towards its 
dispersion – it is the logic expressed by certain non-state, indigenous peoples. . Throughout the 

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chapter, I characterize this distinction between 
centrifugal
non-statist power and 
centripetal
statist power as a conflict between the “Indian,” on the one hand, and the “Leviathan,” on the 
other.