Robert A. Dahl on Anarchism

“Yet despite our imperfect capacity for predicting human change, in appraising anarchism we cannot avoid judgments about human tendencies and possibilities.”

“Although the anarchist critique of democracy is unconvincing, it is important to recognize its strengths. As we saw, several of its assumptions are widely shared, among others by advocates of democracy. Moreover, in portraying the possibility of society without a state, anarchism reminds us that, as a form of social control, coercion by law is marginal in most societies most of the time and in democratic orders always.”

“Like the idea of democracy in early classical Greece and again in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and America, anarchism presents a novel vision of human possibilities, a society in which the major institution of organized coercion has disappeared. It would be easy and convenient to dismiss that vision as utterly impractical if it were not for the familiar fact that the revolutionary ideas of the impractical visionaries of one epoch sometimes become the orthdoxy of the next.”

“In sum, the following judgments seem reasonable:1. In the absence of a state, highly undesirable forms of coercion would probably persist. 2. In a stateless society, some associates might in any case acquire sufficient resources to create a highly oppressive state. 3. A degree of social control sufficient to avoid the creation of a state appears to require that an association be highly autonomous, very small, and united by multiple bonds. 4. Creating such associations on a significant scale in the world today appears to be either impossible or highly undesirable.These judgments support the conclusion that it would be better to try to create a satisfactory state than try to exist in a society without a state.”