Evolution of Society: From Athens To Anarchism

Since the birth of the neolithic world, organized society has been the basis of all social cooperation in every corner of the world. However, as our models of social organization have become more sophisticated they’ve simultaneously become more deceptive, unequal, and burdensome. The institutions of today dictate all human activity and their functions have become increasingly harmful, yet also harder to discern. Heartache invariably looks for the alternative; a better, more just society that maximizes the utmost rich aspect of the human condition. To find this better alternative, it’s incumbent to target what society and human nature have historically been, such that we can know where to go forward.

The most recognizable form of philosophical and political dialogue traces back to the Ancient Greeks, who created constructs that would lend themselves to both individual and societal harmony. Plato in his treatise, the republic, explained that the most fundamentally insidious element of the state is when the “weaker are commanded to do, not what is for the interest..but for the stronger”. Plato was not just speaking of the rigid class system that was imposed across Europe, but of the relationship enforced between people. He denoted that horrid societies make it entirely unclear whether the physician is “a healer of the sick or a maker of money”. Plato, with his keen insight, found that while the government institutions and economic organizations occupy different domains, they principally function the same: Plato exclaimed that the “physician is also a ruler, having the human body as a subject”. This asymmetric relationship between ruler and subject runs coarsely throughout history. From slaves and masters to serfs and lords, and now, to owners and workers. The burden of the present has always been to soften the inherently unequal relationship. Plato noted that this subordinate relationship is maintained within unequal, aristocratic, societies because the “government is the ruling power”; Within these states, laws are made and if broken, punishment comes forth; This relationship transcends illegal and legal, instead it morphs into, unjust and just. Plato noticed a clear contradiction, for if the laws are made by a powerful few, then there is only “one principle of justice” which will be centered on the “interests of the stronger”. Plato objected to this because if the peoples are denied rights and representatives then the state is acting criminally, making its laws naturally unjust. Thus, as one of Plato’s students, Thrasymachus, said, “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger”. Plato thought it a principle violation of personal dignity for “any other persons’’ to be denied a role in decision making. His framework sets the ground for the rationale behind vesting power in the people; For democracy is, as Plato notes in his book, the apology, the true “origin and nature of justice”. Plato most professed democracy because he wanted people to live without needless coercion. As in monarchies, the ruling classes pushed a uniform set of mannerisms and practices that those of lower esteem abide by. Plato wished that within a democracy, people would communally control society and make it non-coercive, such that “the unjust man can be entirely unjust” while the “just man be entirely just”, ensuring that “nothing is to be taken away from either”. Human nature, for Plato, was best maximized when people could explore themselves and the world, and engage in activities ``desirable..only in themselves”. Democracy was the natural political projection of this innate desire for free creative inquiry.

This roadmap of both a righteous government and individual satisfaction was generally regarded as a truism but one whose practical application was more difficult to navigate.

Aristotle encapsulates the potential faults of democracy alone, by noting in his work, politics, that if all classes can vote, then the poor will express their anger by voting to take away the property of the rich and dissolve all systems. This, to Aristotle, was not just because it violated personal rights and would bring about anarchy, thus true participatory democracy would be fatal because of its susceptibility to class resentment. Aristotle did not abandon democracy on these grounds, rather he felt the need to pair it with an economic system that respected limited private ownership while caring for the common good. Aristotle wasn’t just producing conjecture, he outlined specific proposals such as communal councils to ensure sufficient means, and other, what we would term, welfare state policies. Aristotle believed that society could not survive as a democracy paired with inequality, any society of that sort would have two options: reduce democracy or reduce inequality, Aristotle sided with the latter and in doing so he hoped “no individual or class would become too powerful”. The followers of Plato, however, believed that without communal control and active democratization of all structures, human nature would be unfulfilled and livelihoods would become laborious. Aristotle objected due to his belief in property rights as necessary for an effective organization but shared the perception that lower classes should have a say in the society’s production. He noted in Nicomachean ethics that just as war is the grudging activity that precipitates peace, production is the grudging activity that precipitates leisure. Thus all good societies will orient production such that efficiency lends for increased leisure until the need for active production ceases to be necessary. Aristotle saw it as a moral imperative to ensure leisure in its abundance, for if society only grants small quantities of leisure, then it will naturally be used for amusement, but ample leisure time would allow for the noblest of actions: contemplation. Aristotle believed that if citizens have the capacity to contemplate then they will be able to see themselves and society through clearer lenses and thus democracy will be richer. The essential contradictions and symmetries between the two great philosophers of Athens, Plato, and Aristotle, encapsulate the essence of the time: a space of progressive critique of power and the birth of action through consent, all for the purpose of allowing man, and notably, only man, to exercise his human capacity for free thought and political expression. However, subsequent times provide a more fledged and blistering critique of power as well as a more nuanced view of who we are and what we can be.

The enlightenment is regarded as one of the most essential time periods in the formation of theories around governance, economics, and human nature. However, its progression is not a linear formation, rather it’s a set of contradictory ideas with the common goal of ensuring the best of society. One of the most notable and most distorted, figures of the enlightenment was Adam Smith. He was a theorist who noted that contemporary feudal systems and textile ownership were despicable, not because the work itself was degrading but because of the manner in which the system operated. Adam Smith in his famed book, Wealth Of Nations, lambasted the “masters of mankind”, in his day merchants and manufacturers, who were “by far the principal architects’’ of society and who ensured their interest was “most peculiarly attended too”, no matter how “grievous” its impacts on the common person. Smith hoped that markets would produce virtual egalitarianism because the business owner would be an average person who through his own sympathy would ensure his workers are compensated fairly, as opposed to the callousness of a few feudal lords who were disconnected from workers entirely and thus ceased any sympathy because they lacked proximity. In fact, this basic assumption that humans are innately sympathetic and compassionate is the basis of functioning markets. Smith illuminates this by positing in his book, theory of moral sentiments, what would happen if an owner can receive cheaper labor outside of his home country? Smith wrote that this situation is plausible but that the business owner would not use cheap labor because he’ll have basic compassion for his workers, and thus as if by an “invisible hand” the workers will be taken care of. The belief of Smith in the human condition as multifaceted but at its core, rich and compassionate personhood also underpins his bitter condemnation of division of labor. Smith noted that “He [the worker in a society where the division of labor occurs] naturally loses…the habit of…exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him.. incapable of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any judgment.” At its core, the richness of human life was utterly unachievable to a human who was mechanized and subordinated to power. This overarching framework works its way into governance as well. The philosopher David Hume, operating under Smith’s paradigm of human nature but through an empiricist lens, found “nothing more surprising” than “to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.” Hume believed in humans to be partially free but in need of organization through limitation, thus making total subordination without public input as contrary to learned human nature. Maintenance of this abusive relationship, as noted by Hume, was explained a century earlier by Thomas Hobbes who observed that “the power of the Sword is, and ever hath been, the Foundation of all Titles to Government” and thus, only though force does non-democratic government express itself. Hume lacked a cohesive governmental theory in accordance with his view of human nature, mainly because of his fidelity to dogmatic empiricism. However, Voltaire, who took Smith’s view of human nature but forgoed Hume’s empiricism, noted that all humans can be rich in nature, but only when they have the unrestrained capacity to express their thoughts. He famously wrote in a letter to M.le Riche, an opposing writer, “I do not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death for your right to say”. Voltaire viewed political guardianship as a means of protecting the innate human principle of human expression. The enlightenment, through its mundanes and nuance, can be reduced to a critical view of the “masters of mankind” in the hopes that common men can become the “principal architects’ ‘ of society and use it as a vehicle to express themselves.

The common presupposition from the dawn of western civilization is the need for government, through a given competing system, aristocracy, kleptocracy, democracy, etc. However, within the 20th and 21st centuries, there emerged a new strand of political theory that questioned the very function of government: Anarchism. Contrary to popular political discourse, anarchism is not a euphemism for violence and chaos, rather it’s a prescriptive lens of power. Rudolph Rocker, an anarchist activist, and intellectual described anarchism as not “a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which…strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life”. The dissident intellectual, Noam Chomsky wrote in his book on anarchism that to achieve the ends described by Rocker, philosophical anarchism poses a test to all systems of hierarchy and domination: justify yourself. Power is, in the anarchist paradigm, illegitimate by assumption, and therefore if it is to remain, it must directly justify itself to the people, and if unable, it should be dismantled and reconstructed from below. However, this anarchist lens, which is virtually a truism, only encapsulates philosophical anarchism. Political anarchism comes with certain prerogatives, mainly the deconstruction of the state and its surrounding capitalist institutions. One of the principal founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, wrote in his book, limits of state action, that the state veers to making “man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes.. it follows that the state is a profoundly anti-human institution.” It follows from this that the state is therefore incompatible with “unhindered’’ voluntary association and creation, making it an illegitimate power structure worthy of dissolution. The same paradigm is noted within corporations. Noam Chomsky noted in an essay entitled on propaganda that corporations are totalitarian institutions in which orders are given from above and commanded to be followed by those below. This relationship represents a constriction on individual freedom as it coerces people, through the threat of destroying their economic livelihoods, to participate in institutions over which they have no ownership or representation within. The educator and socialist thinker, John Dewey questioned: “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.” These artificial constructs designed for coercion are inhumane precisely because they are a violation of personhood. Mikhail Bakunin eloquently put, humans have an innate “instinct for freedom” which commands them to be free of coercion and domination through illegitimate hierarchical institutions, making cruelty a necessity against the innate disposition of man.

The case for anarchism is, as Rocker noted, based on its belief that it represents a “definite trend” in the scope of human affairs. Indeed, it seems his lens is vindicated by historical thought. Beginning in Athens, Plato sought to dismantle the notion of “justice” which through state hierarchy was a verbal modality for “the interests of the stronger”. Achieving this meant for persons to participate in the formation of society, to make him “the principal architect” of society. Aristotle objected for practicality’s sake, thus he limited democracy in order to serve market efficiency. However, today’s society has vindicated Plato, as democracy is hijacked in the market economic system by interests who distort policy to serve their “vile maxim”, regardless of how “grievous” its impacts on the common man. This troubling reality is because, as Hobbes noted, “the power of the Sword is, and ever hath been, the Foundation of all Titles to Government”. The state creates structures of violent coercion such that it makes “man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends”, whether they be for state power or private profit. Thus to evaluate the rhetorical question posited by John Dewey, “how far[can] genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime?” It seems we are destined for a limited sphere of true freedom, not until we construct a society that fulfills the innate human “instinct for freedom” to explore and create, not under the threat of the bludgeon or poverty, but by his/her own means. As Noam Chomsky described, society since Plato has “made serfs out of slaves” then “made wage earners out of serfs” and now we shall make a society “which abolishes the proletariat in an act of liberation… that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers”.

Anarchism is commonly tagged with the phrase: no god, no master. Rudolph Rocker in his book, anarcho-syndicalism in theory and practice, described ‘no god’, not in the religious sense but as a means of expressing utter disdain for “ecclesiastical political guardianship” and ‘no master’ as the opposition to subordination, domination, in all its forms. The phrase encapsulates the society that works for people and serves their freedom; no god, no master.