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

the position
of a macrosubject supposed to bring society as a whole under 
control and simultaneously act for it (Habermas 1996, 372). 
In a sense, I agree with Habermas: no one group can “occupy 
the position
of a macrosubject” 
that can legitimately govern all of society. But, he misses the bigger picture. First, his objection 
applies to the state as much as it does social movements – both of which can represent “the 
people” only partially, given our fundamental plurality. Second, Habermas fails to think outside 
of the boundaries of sovereignty by assuming that there is, or ought to be, 
one
entity that acts for 
all of society. He is wrong to assume that “democratic movements emerging from civil society” 
want to “bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it.” Indeed, while 
social movement actors do want to act in ways that mobilize power, some of them, quite self-
consciously, want to act for themselves, but not for others, and certainly not for everyone. The 
network structure of social movements provides the mechanism for making this possible: they 
enable coordinated action, allowing people to amplify each other’s power, without anyone 
dictating how others must act. In this way, networks achieve some harmony between the 
democratic ability to act together and the anti-authoritarian rejection of centralization, unity, and 
sovereignty. Social movement networks can be a way to mobilize power while simultaneously 
dispersing it. In short, distributed social movement networks can exemplify centrifugal power in 
action.

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The impetus to disperse power is the common thread between the chapters, and also the 
common thread between the quite distinct theoretical traditions mobilized in the dissertation. We 
heard from anthropologists and economists, anarchists and libertarians, defenders of the market 
and anti-capitalist critics, radical democrats and those who are skeptical of democracy. I think it 
noteworthy that one basic point of agreement between these diverse theorists is their skepticism 
of concentrated power and their consequent commitment (mobilized in various ways and for 
different reasons) to dispersing power. I believe this basic dichotomy – between centralization 
and decentralization, concentration and dispersion, sovereignty and non-sovereignty – is 
constitutive of a broad anti-authoritarian perspective. Further, this perspective upsets traditional 
political oppositions, for example, between the “left” and “right,” between socialism and 
capitalism, between state and market. As the economist James Boyce (2002, 126) puts it: 
The degree to which a society deserves to be called ‘democratic’ or the opposite, 
‘oligarchic,’ does not hinge on whether it accords a bigger role in economic 
affairs to the market or the state. Both states and markets function democratically 
when power and wealth are widely diffused; both function oligarchically when 
power and wealth are concentrated in few hands. 
On the anti-authoritarian perspective, democracy does not name any particular institutions or any 
particular processes, but rather names an imperative: disperse power. From this angle, 
democracy entails opposition to the centralization of power in all its manifestations. We can thus 
reimagine the political spectrum, with “democracy conceived as 
the
radical position, as 
radicalism itself” (Lummis 1996, 10). In this way, the preceding chapters and the diverse 
theoretical traditions they employ all point toward a particular conception of democracy: 
democracy as the dispersion of power.