Anarchism and contemporary political philosophy

In this essay I argue that the anarchist political tradition of the nineteenth and early twenieth centuries represents the first genuinely postmodern movement in philosophy. Through its categorical rejection of representation - the salient characteristic of liberalism, socialism, and political modernity more generally - anarchism emerges as one of the key historical precursors of contemporary poststructuralist thought as expressed in the works of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The first chapter outlines a general theory of politics as social physics and proceeds to define political philosophy in terms of the relationship between the philosophical and the social-physical. In the second chapter, I critically examine the two major philosophies of political modernity - viz., liberalism and socialism - along four conceptual trajectories: (1) descriptive theory; (2) normative theory; (3) political theory; and (4) economic theory economy. This analysis reveals that the foundational concept of political modernity, both at the theoretical and practical level, is representation. The third chapter begins with a historical, exegetical, and critical analysis of the anarchist political tradition, the unifying feature of which is opposition to all representational practices and institutions. To this extent, anarchism exhibits important connections to contemporary postmodernist thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze. Ultimately I argue that anarchism and poststructuralism are distinct but fundamentally similar expressions of one and the same thing - namely, political postmodernity, a rejection of representation coupled with a commitment to thinking beyond representation.