Abstract

Much of the previous scholarship on classical anarchism focused on assessing the feasibility of a society without coercive political institutions. While expressing an important concern, I contend that this focus has overlooked many of the important insights of the classical anarchists. Moving beyond evaluating the feasibility of their society, we find that the motives behind the attacks on coercive political institutions by the classical anarchists and the alternatives that they offer express subtle concerns about the effects of the rules we choose to govern our society as well as the theories, be they ethical or political, that we use to determine those rules. My goal in this dissertation is to elucidate those concerns, revealing their dramatic significance for ethical and political theories. After discussing the objections of the classical anarchists to the state in chapter one, I argue, in chapter two, that by adopting a formal analysis of rules, we can generalize the classical anarchists' complaints to apply to any system of rules and not just those that compose coercive political institutions. This generalization enables me to distinguish among four forms of anarchism which are differentiated, not by their commitment to a particular economic system, but by the types of systems of rules that will allow. In chapter three, working with these four forms of anarchism, I argue that we can understand not only political theories, but also ethical theories as being arrayed on a continuum with respect to their dependence on coercive systems of rules. To determine the dependence of an ethical theory on coercive political institutions, I develop the Ethical-Political Test that requires an ethical theory establish the basic conditions for the surivial of a community without having to rely coercion. In chapter four, I apply this test to contractarianism, utilitarianism and natural law theory to evaluate their reliance on coercive systems of rules. In chapter five, I discuss some of the implications of the results of the Ethical-Political Test for classical anarchism, morality in general and contemporary liberalism