Prometheus Against the Leviathan

The emergence of the modern nation-state created institutions of political and economic power unrivaled in human history. This volume argues that, nonetheless, the existence of the state is not an inevitable “end of history,” provided an informed citizenry remembers that all institutions are fleeting and can change in the face of popular resistance. After all, Costas Despiniadis argues, the state is the exception in human history, a deviation from millennia of stateless societies. Perhaps the most thorough contemporary review of theories of the state and its formation, this book considers the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, and Marx before turning to examine anarchist readings of the state by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Striner, Landauer, and Nietzsche, finding that anarchist criticisms of the state are borne out by history and that their theories more closely resemble the anthropological records of communities that were clearly more egalitarian and less violent.