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

CHAPTER TWO 
 
THE INDIAN AGAINST LEVIATHAN: 
ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVES TO SOVEREIGNTY AND 
CENTRALIZED POWER 
 
“Far from giving us the lackluster image of an inability to resolve the question of 
 political power, [Indian] societies astonish us by the subtlety with which they have posed and 
settled the question. They had a very early premonition that power’s transcendence conceals a 
mortal risk for the group, that the principle of an authority which is external and the creator of 
its own legality is a challenge to culture itself. It is the intuition of this threat that
determined the depth of their political philosophy.”
– 
Pierre Clastres (1987, 44)
 
 
Introduction: Non-Domination as an Anti-Statist Principle 
The view of freedom as non-domination advanced in the previous chapter is a radical 
concept – more radical, indeed, than its defenders often recognize. Recall that “domination 
consists in standing in a set of relations which makes an agent 
able
to interfere arbitrarily with 
the actions of others” (Young 2007, 48). To pit freedom against domination and to be opposed 
to domination entails hostility toward any hierarchies that enable the more powerful to arbitrarily 
interfere with the lives of the less powerful. According to this view, then, freedom is 
incompatible with the sort of sharp power inequalities that characterize much of our world today: 
the power of the U.S. military in the Middle East, the power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the 
power of the drug cartels in Mexico, the power of finance capital the world over, the power of 
bosses in the workplaces, the power of border patrol agents over migrants, the power of police 
over citizens. To advocate for freedom as non-domination entails hostility toward these (and 
other) centers of concentrated power and a commitment to more equitable power relations 
throughout society. If centralized power fosters domination, dispersed power is the antidote. 
However, since the ideal of freedom as non-domination has primarily been advanced 
within the republican tradition – a political perspective that has long countenanced certain forms 

---

65 
of the state – its advocates have not taken seriously the extent to which non-domination is in 
tension with state power. In short, I contend that freedom as non-domination is, fundamentally, 
an anti-statist concept. Though a state is by no means the only entity that might be able to 
interfere arbitrarily with the actions of others, it is undeniably one such entity. And, the 
distinctive feature of the state – that it alone has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence
6
within society – makes it particularly problematic from the perspective of freedom as non-
domination. How does such an entity 
not
run the risk of becoming 
a 
source, if not 
the
source, of 
domination? This chapter, then, connects the first defining characteristic of libertarian/anti-
authoritarian thought – commitment to individual 
freedom
– with the second defining 
characteristic of such a perspective – skepticism of and opposition toward centralized 
power
, 
including most notably the state. Just as the first chapter articulates an account of freedom that is 
oriented toward an egalitarian and democratic politics (rather than an individualist and capitalist 
politics), this chapter seeks to develop an account of power that can be useful to radically 
democratic theory and practice. 
While Pettit usefully sets up the idea of freedom as non-domination, which I believe 
clarifies the link between individual freedom and opposition to centralized power, he does not 
follow through on the anti-statist implications of freedom as non-domination. Indeed, he does 
not even conceive of the question of political freedom as separable from the state: 
Suppose we think of freedom as something