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I come to praise anarchism, not to bury it: book review

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The Politics of Postanarchism, by Saul Newman, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 200

pp., ISBN978-0-7486-3496-5, £??

I come to praise anarchism, not to bury it.

Anarchism, Saul Newman argues, articulates the 'eternal aspiration of the radical tradition',

namely to break free from the conventions of sovereignty and enjoy a life without

government and in a condition of autonomy. His bold claim, made in the opening pages of

this book, seems to be addressed to a readership which identifies with radical politics, but not

necessarily with anarchism. What follows, then, is a defence of anarchism; an attempt to

persuade non-anarchist radicals, principally Marxists of various stripes, that the concept of

equal liberty and the principle of democracy can only be realised outside a statist framework

and that this positively utopian aspiration was also Marx's. However, running alongside this

first discussion is a second, addressed to a rather different postanarchist audience. This

threads of the book are structured by Newman's identification of a tension 'central to

anarchism', between the anti-politics which stems from the rejection of the state, and the

politics that anarchists develop through their activism. Endorsing the anarchist project,

Newman seeks to formulate an ‘anti-politics politics’ which questions the ideas that

anarchists have traditionally espoused and reflects instead on the possibilities arising from its

tensions and aporia. Deconstruction provides the key to this and it involves a wholesale

rejection of the conceptual frameworks that anarchists have employed as well as what

Newman sees as anarchism's flawed essentialism and the enlightenment thinking which

underpins it.

Newman uses the term postanarchism to describe this project, although the term – like

'communitarianism' - refers to a looser body of thought, now principally associated with the

1
work of Lewis Call, Todd May and Richard Day. As Süreyyya Evren has argued however,

Newman is pre-eminent in the field and his work has achieved international recognition not

only because he was one of the first to provide a scholarly account of postanarchism, but also

because he has produced a sustained body of research which highlights the distinctiveness of

postanarchism in contemporary political theory. In this book Newman is at pains to argue that

postanarchism is a creative engagement with anarchism. It is neither an attempt to 'move

beyond' anarchism since it does not signify a temporal shift, or a coming 'after' anarchism's

presumed 'end'. Nor does the 'post' in postanarchism indicate that anarchism is somehow

being left behind. To the contrary: postanarchism only makes explicit anarchism's politics of

anti-politics (p. 11). It could be objected that this close association of anarchism and

postanarchism is not always well supported in the text and the benchmarks that Newman uses

to demonstrate exchange between the two are sometimes set quite low. At one point a refusal

to dismiss anarchism becomes the test of the engagement and Newman indicates that

postanarchism's theoretical and critical interrogation of anarchism in fact amounts to a

revision. By incorporating 'insights from different thinkers and perspectives not commonly

associated with the anarchist tradition', Newman's aim is to radicalise anarchism, to 'broaden

its scope and expand its possibilities' (p. 20). Elsewhere, he introduces a different conception

of postanarchism's outside: a 'moment beyond anarchism' (p. 69). Pinpointing precisely how

he wants to couch the relationship between anarchism and postanarchism is one of the

fascinations of the book, and it is major theme in the two sets of discussions that run through

it.

The slipperiness of the relationship between anarchism and postanarchism might be

explained by the way the relationship works in the two strands of Newman's argument. These

are closely inter-connected. Indeed, the positions which he recommends in the course of the

analysis emerge through a kind of dialectical unfolding, in which the focus of the discussion

2
shifts between critiques of various forms of anarchism and Marxism. The opening chapters,

where Newman re-assesses classical anarchism and outlines the features of an-archy or

ontological anarchism (terms used interchangeably with postanarchism) might be thought of

as the first movement. This provides an anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist platform for the

second. Drawing on the anarchist principles highlighted, Newman proceeds to discuss Marx,

Leninism, the post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe and the neo-Marxism of Hardt and Negri,

highlighting both the heretical value of anarchist critique and the anarchistic currents buried

within contemporary radical politics. In the final movement, the argument comes full circle.

Against Murray Bookchin and John Zerzan, both presented as exponents of classical

anarchism, Newman illustrates the distance between anarchism and postanarchism to argue

that postanarchism supports a neo-Stirnerite yet solidaristic emancipatory ethics. At the same

time, he develops a review of radical politics to show how postanarchism resonates with

actual movements and resistance struggles and the autonomous, utopian, horizontal practices

they support.

Underpinning all these discussions is a critique of the friend/enemy distinction that

lies at the heart of Carl Schmitt's conception of politics. Newman does not wholly reject

Schmitt's understanding but he argues that Schmitt's claim, that opposition to the state is

tantamount to the rejection of politics, is mistaken. Newman argues that the autonomy of

politics that Schmitt rightly wanted to defend was wrongly tied to the state and that it is only

properly located in the antagonism, as Mouffe puts it, that exists beyond the depoliticised

order and uniformity that the state enforces. The faultiness of Schmitt's elision of the state

and politics is that it represses the conflicts inherent in human relations. To reject the

depoliticised order of the state is not, then, to advocate an apolitical social order as an

alternative to the state or to fall victim to the dichotomy between the state and society that

Schmitt constructed. Like Schmitt, postanarchists recognise the autonomy of politics but

3
argue that it can only exist beyond the boundaries of the state, in the insurgent forces of

democratic anti-state resistance. Newman's neat formulation is that postanarchists

acknowledge that the 'autonomy of the political ... invokes the idea of the politics of

autonomy'. (p. 10) The arguments he subsequently develops against Leninism and in defence

of Stirnerite libertarian ethics are contextualised by this suggestion.

Newman’s arguments are presented with characteristic fluency and clarity but also

with passion and commitment. His mastery of the literature and the firmness of his political

convictions enables him move deftly through complex fields of critical theory. The

evaluations he presents are concise, and even those who are not as deeply immersed in

Continental political theory as he is should find it easy to follow. However, the analysis is

sometimes truncated: Newman tends to play ideas off against each other, using postanarchist

criteria to adjudicate between them and to present a kind of balance sheet of success and

failure. This approach subordinates detailed analysis theory to the assessment of principles or

positions that are selected because they dovetail, reinforce or run counter to his own. Simon

Critchely, for example, 'is right to suggest that the state today is too powerful for full-scale

assaults' but wrong to argue that it is 'a permanent, inevitable feature of political life'. Slavoj

Žižek 'raises important questions about the efficacy of politics outside the state' but his

alternative, which revives 'the vanguard party, the proletarian dictatorship and revolutionary

state terror' is 'completely defunct and outmoded.' (p. 116) Alain Badiou 'is correct in

suggesting that the (Hardt) and Negri thesis ... 'mirrors and fetishes the fluxes and flows of

global capital'. He is also right to think that 'the moment of separation essential for radical

politics must be theorised on a different ontological register, not that of History, but that of

the Event'. But his treatment of the political event as something 'so rare ... that it almost never

happens' is mistaken. Newman's view is that the event is something that takes place 'on an

everyday basis' (pp. 128-9).

4
 Newman adopts the same approach to anarchism, and the attention he pays to the

contrasts between anarchism and postanarchism take up the greater part of the book. In the

past, Newman's account of anarchism, or what he calls classical anarchism has attracted

considerable criticism, particularly from historians of ideas. Since these have been so well-

rehearsed it seems churlish to go over the ground here. Yet it is difficult to move on from

debates about Newman's interpretation of anarchism and concentrate on the substance of the

normative argument for as long as anarchism or classical anarchism is used as the aunt sally

for postanarchist analysis. Moreover, the critique of anarchism that Newman develops sheds

some light on the nature of his own political theory.

The theoretical shortcomings of anarchism are listed early on in the book and they

include 'an essentialist conception of the subject; the universality of morality and reason, and

the idea of the progressive enlightenment of humankind; a conception of the social order as

naturally constituted (by natural laws, for instance) and rationally determined; a dialectical

view of history; and a certain positivism, whereby science could reveal the truth of social

relations'(p. 6). Variations on this sketch appear at regular intervals throughout the book and

they are advanced with blunt insistence. Classical anarchism, Newman reminds us later on,

is 'a political philosophy that is framed within an Enlightenment rationalist-humanist

discourse. Central to anarchism is the idea of rational progress, the unfolding of an immanent

social logic, and the emancipation of the subject from external constraints and oppressions –

motifs which ware incorporated also into liberalism and Marxism.' (p. 46)

A mainstay of Newman's critique is the idea that anarchism is Manichean. For

example he claims that Kropotkin proposed 'a sort of moral and conceptual division between

society and the state, between humanity and political power' (p. 36). But this framing was not

confined to Kropotkin’s work. The 'Manichean division –between the natural social principle,

and the artificial political principle, between, in other words, society and the state', Newman

5
tells us, is 'central to classical anarchism' (p. 110). The point, Newman insists 'is that for

anarchists, people are intrinsically and organically part of a social whole, and that their

cooperative instincts tend to come to therefore in this social context. There is a kind of social

essentialism here, the idea that society embodies a rationality and a morality which is

immanent, whose laws and processes are scientifically observable; a logic ... that is unfolding

and emerging in opposition to the logic of power' (p. 39). The reason Newman insists on this

point might be explained by his concern to answer Schmitt's critique. The dichotomy between

the natural and the social that Newman builds into classical anarchism illuminates the

originality of the postanarchist challenge to the conception of politics and sovereignty that

Schmitt proposed. He argues: 'for anarchists, the autonomy of the political signifies precisely

the triumph of the organic and rational social principle over the artificiality of the political

principle of state power.' Postanarchists have a 'different way of thinking about the political

principle'. He continues: 'This is where the autonomy of the political translates into the

politics of autonomy ... In this formulation, the autonomy of the political is retained – it is

not subordinated to an organic social principle – but it is disconnected from the principle of

state sovereignty which has for so long served as the prison house of politics' (p. 99).

This claim does significant violence to non-postanarchism. For example, Newman

bypasses the discussion of sovereignty and critique of state theory which Kropotkin presents

in The State: Its Historic Role. He ignores the substantial body of sociological and

anthropological research that anarchists have discussed since the nineteenth century and

which belies the treatment of 'natural' society that he attributes to classical traditions.

Newman says that postanarchism 'seeks to detach society from a natural, moral foundation

outside politics' (p.112). Kropotkin would have agreed. Newman's attempt to counter the

position leads him to read back into anarchism an understanding of the distinction between

the state of nature and government, familiar in contract theory and central to Hobbes'

6
construction of sovereignty, that Kropotkin and others dismissed as a myth designed to

legitimise monopolistic and hierarchical configurations of power. But it also hints at the

limits of postanarchist thinking, for in categorising anarchism as anti-political in Schmittian

terms, Newman reveals the extent to which postanarchism is rooted in a theoretical approach

that is deeply statist, even while he seeks to move beyond it. The real disagreement with

Kropotkin is that Newman aims 'to detach the notion of politics from the state' (p. 112)

whereas Kropotkin wanted to practice a different kind of politics by challenging statist

principles and organisation. On his account, the state is not a depoliticised order, but an order

in which politics is practiced in particular ways. The political extended across a spectrum of

forms, from anarchy to state; it was not rooted in one particular order or another.

The tripartite distinction between the depoliticised state, postanarchist politics and

depoliticised natural anarchy frame Newman's discussions of power and utopianism. The

principle claim Newman seeks to make is that anarchism naively anticipates the abolition of

power, unlike postanarchism which understands that 'even radical politics' is 'an activity

conducted within a field constructed by power'. This argument seems to depend on the

conceptualisation of power that Newman develops. Following Foucault, he argues that

power relations 'are both pervasive and constitutive of social identities, practices and

discourses' (p. 6). While Newman is clearly correct to argue that anarchists have not typically

conceptualised power in these terms – and certainly not the nineteenth-century proponents of

classical anarchism that he identifies in the book - the warning he issues to anarchists about

the permanence of power relations is actually rooted in the conjunction between power and

politics rather than the nuances of poststructuralist analysis. The uncontroversial statement

that politics 'suggests ... some sort of engagement with relations of power' gains its full force

when set in the context of the claim that anarchists believe 'power and authority are unnatural

and inhuman' (p. 6). Newman's observation that this belief is gainsaid by the problem of

7
voluntary servitude and 'a desire for authority and self-domination that was revealed by

psychoanalysis from, Freud to Reich' rings hollow in its application to anarchists who

witnessed phenomena such as jingoism, nationalism, militarism, colonialism, racism, serfdom

and the brutal operation of systems of conscription. But leaving the historical and contextual

arguments aside, the philosophical differences that Newman wants to find also appear quite

thin. The discussion of anarchism's utopianism provides another illustration of the problem.

Newman recommends a particular kind of utopianism as 'a vital dimension of any politics

that takes emancipation and radical transformation as central' (p. 67). In terms reminiscent of

Oscar Wilde, he declares 'that the vision of a society without government has to be taken as

the ultimate ethical and political horizon of any radical politics worthy of its name' (p. 67).

Postanarchist utopianism is defined against the idea of the blueprint. Early on in the book

Newman says that he will 'formulate a different approach to a utopianism' one which will not

'lay down a precise programme for the future' but will instead 'provide a point of alterity or

exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order' (p. 7). While the implication

seems to be that anarchism is utopian in this programmatic sense, the charge of blueprint

utopianism is not one that he lays at anarchism's door. The utopianism of anarchism is

instead located in the harmonious, apolitical natural society that anarchy represents. Once the

assumptions about the apolitical character are set aside, non-postanarchist utopianism

dovetails surprisingly closely with postanarchist forms. Newman comments: 'I have argued ...

that power relations will never be entirely eliminated, and that anarchists must always be

aware of the potential for new forms of domination that can emerge in any form of social

arrangement – even in libertarian ones'. Nevertheless he acknowledges 'that Kropotkin is

correct in stressing the need for some sort of alternative vision of a social order in motivating

political action against the current order' (p. 67).

8
 Newman's discussion of anarchism is only a part of this book, albeit a substantial one,

and it seems a pity that the real contribution that he wants to make, which is to put anarchism

at the heart of radical political theory, depends on a claim to postanarchism's originality that

is distracting and which occupies space that might be given over to a more detailed critical

analysis of the contemporary writers with whom Newman engages. Newman does make

some interesting and important interventions in this book, about the character of the

surveiliance state, the significance of contemporary protest movements, the ideological

permeability of different strands of anarchist and non-anarchist socialisms and the

relationship between ethics and politics. But the analysis supporting these insights is not

always as sustained or developed as it might be: most of the discussion of contemporary

radical theory is covered in 35 pages in chapter 4. Wilde argued that originality was properly

understood to be about judgment and the treatment of a subject, not the development of new

content. On this view, the value of postanarchism does not rest on showing its distinctiveness

from anarchism, in any of the different ways in which this relationship might be cast, but on

the interventions it encourages in current political theory. The Politics of Postanarchism

hints at postanarchism's potential but for all its many merits does not fully exploit it.

Ruth Kinna

Loughborough University

Reference

Evren, S., 2011. 'How New Anarchism Changed the World (of Opposition) after Seattle and

Gave Birth to Post-Anarchism', In: D. Rouselle and S. Evren, eds. Postanarchism: A Reader.

London: Pluto, p. 8.