Anti-statism
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Anti-statism is a term describing opposition to state intervention into personal, social and economic affairs.[1] Anti-statist views may reject the state completely as well as rulership in general (e.g. anarchism), they may wish to reduce the size and scope of the state to a minimum (e.g. minarchism), or they may advocate a stateless society as a distant goal (e.g. autonomism). Henry David Thoreau expressed this evolutionary anti-statist view in his essay Civil Disobedience:
- I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. [2]
General categories
Radical anti-statists differ greatly according to the beliefs they hold in addition to anti-statism. Thus the categories of anti-statist thought are sometimes classified as collectivist or individualist.
A significant difficulty in determining whether a thinker or philosophy is anti-statist is the problem of defining the state itself. Terminology has changed over time, and past writers often used the word, "state" in a different sense than we use it today. Thus, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin used the term simply to mean a governing organization. Other writers used the term "state" to mean any law-making or law-enforcement agency. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. According to Max Weber, the state is an organization with an effective legal monopoly on the use of force in a particular geographic area.
Anti-statist philosophies
- Completely anti-statist
- Libertarian socialism
- Anarchism and its inner schools.
- Voluntaryism
- Anarcho-capitalism
- Philosophy of Max Stirner
- Partially anti-statist, or anti-statism as an ideal or deferred programmatic goal
- libertarian capitalism
- Political philosophies related to classical liberalism and minarchism.
- Political philosophies related to Marxism and communism.
Chronology of anti-statist writing
- 1548 – Étienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
- 1793 – William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
- 1825 – Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital
- 1840 – Pierre Joseph Proudhon, [2]
- 1844 – Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
- 1849 – Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
- 1849 – Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
- 1849 – Gustave de Molinari, The Production of Security
- 1851 – Herbert Spencer, The Right to Ignore the State
- 1866 – Michael Bakunin, Revolutionary Catechism
- 1867 – Lysander Spooner, No Treason
- 1886 – Benjamin Tucker, [3]
- 1902 – Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid
- 1935 – Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State
- 1962 – Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy & State with Power and Market
- 1983 - Samuel Edward Konkin III, The New Libertarian Manifesto
- 1985 – Anthony de Jasay, The State
- 2001 – Kevin A. Carson, The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand