I’ve sometimes found that people writing in established traditions quite rarely attempt precise definitions of that tradition’s central ideas. Even rarer are admissions that people aren’t entirely sure how to define those central ideas. I think this is understandable (or rather, I understand it) – it seems natural to suppose that “a convincing account must have been offered and agreed on by now, right?”
One example is ’state’. “Anarchists oppose the state”: they don’t think any state can liberate us, they think an ideal society would not have a state. Non-anarchist communists agree about the latter, but disagree about the former. But what is a ’state’? It’s quite easy to give a pointing-type explanation: the state is the government, the legislature, the judiciary, the courts, the police, the army, the civil service, traffic wardens, etc. But examples don’t equal definition – especially when we’re dealing with hypotheticals like a “state-less society”.
Of course, definitions can be found quite easily – just look in a dictionary. But what we tend to find in dictionaries is that, firstly, tricky words get defined in terms of other tricky words. Doing a bit of googledefine-ing, I found a cluster including ‘government’, ’state’, ‘authority’ and ’sovereignty’, all to some extent defined in terms of each other. And secondly, there tend to be a cluster of different short phrases that get used in different dictionaries, with different identifications of what’s crucial. So again, that’s not very helpful for thinking about what things count as a ’state-less society’.
So: what is a state, and correspondingly what is anarchy? To be honest, I’m not totally sure. There are a number of different attributes of states, and negating different ones produces different understandings of anarchy.
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