Our book Constitutionalising Anarchy revives a lost constitutional tradition in the history of anarchist thought to challenge two things: an engrained, state centric view of the constitution as an instrument of government, and the idea that anarchists have no constitutional politics of their own. The aim is to use the second to move us beyond the first. The conventional view (which we reject) defends a vision of the statist constitution as the mainstay of order, usually referring to an otherwise chaotic political universe to make the case: in the absence of the former, the latter will engulf us, it is assumed. At the more controversial end of this line of thinking, the globalisation of the constitution, especially a more liberal type of it, will bring a sort of Kantian ‘perpetual peace’ to the world.

Pushing cutting edge research in contemporary political theory, international relations theory and critical legal theory beyond their own limits, we promote constitutionalising instead. This anarchist politics is presented as an empowering process of communal self-government, one most of us engage in routinely, whether in our workplaces, clubs and societies, towns and regions. We push beyond the idea that you need a single people to give a constitution its power and argue that it is the absence of a final point of authority, and the mutual balance of power between groups that ought to structure our communal inter-relations. The challenges to this way of organising societies are huge. But we show how it can be done in theory and practice, by tracing the history of anarchist thought from the 1840s, through to the practices of three internally diverse grassroots groups – the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Oakland Occupy camp and Radical Routes, a UK housing and workers’ co-op. This case study in anarchist constitutionalising gives us the intellectual, historical and practical organisational tools to show how we can all constitute ourselves to resist domination.

Constitutionalism, we argue, centralises power and promotes uniformity by homogenising difference. In contrast, the anarchist constitution arises from the interactions of multiple, infinitely plural associations in anarchy. Each sets out its declarative principles, institutional framework, rules and decision-making processes and federates to meet common purposes, without fixed, permanent authority. The anarchist constitution constrains power by maintaining its fluidity. It makes all rules contingent, demands active participation, and its legitimacy rests on the conscious (as opposed to assumed), consensual (as opposed to enforced), and changeable (rather than timeless) nature of the constitution.

Dreams of Constitutional Perfection

The best-laid schemes of mice and men, Robert Burns wrote ‘Go oft awry’. Yet as the United States marks the 250^th anniversary of its independence in 2026, the constitution ratified in 1789 is still celebrated as a model of perfection. The US Senate’s webpage proudly boasts that its first three mesmeric words “We The People” affirms ‘that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens’. The ‘world’s longest surviving written charter of government’, it contends, ‘has remained in force’ for all this time ‘because its framers successfully separated and balanced governmental powers to safeguard the interests of majority rule and minority rights, of liberty and equality, and of the federal and state governments’. Job done.

Anarchists have long begged to differ, tending towards Burns’ view. Emma Goldman, underscored the difference between the eighteenth-century designers’ ‘self-evident truths’ and the grim realities of twentieth-century exploitation in the opening line of her 1909 alternative Declaration of Independence: ‘When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions’.  

It seemed to her that the Founding Fathers’ hopes of liberty, equality and happiness were unavoidably doomed to disappointment. Who on earth could possibly conceive of political arrangements fit for all the ages? Starting with P.J. Proudhon, one of anarchism’s ‘granddaddies’, a host of anarchists argued that the idea was borne of religious conceit. The aspiration to determine the remit, scope and powers of government once and for all, they argued, was an expression of a philosophically stunted sort of utopian, even theological dreaming.

After the First World War, Goldman’s friends re-examined the lived experience of constitutionalism and once more rejected the utopian lure. But instead of emphasising the appalling repercussions of the constitutional defence of property, as Goldman had done, the new generation homed in on the founders’ ineluctable failure to devise mechanisms capable of protecting the spirit of the laws. Watching the 1919 Red Scare play out in mass arrests and deportations, they accused police and judiciary of usurping ‘powers’ which ‘the framers of the Constitution and the legislative bodies’ had ‘never dreamt of vesting them with’. The constitution had become outmoded. Its high ideals were being trounced by the officials charged with upholding them.

The observation not only put anarchists on the wrong side of authority but also made them look like nostalgic dreamers. Addressing the attack head on, they argued: ‘[c]lose investigation will demonstrate that Anarchists, so far from being dreamers, are the most practical of human beings. They know exactly what they want, and move directly toward it.’ The conundrum this statement left unsolved was ‘how’? Road to Freedom gave a customary answer. Anarchism was all about mobilisation, about convincing the ‘mass of mankind in every age’ to imagine conditions ‘other than those to which they have become accustomed’. This too, was a kind of dreaming and its realisation hinged on achieving critical mass to overcome ‘inertia’.

Anarchy and the Anarchist Constitution

The theory we resurrect in Constitutionalising Anarchy takes a different tack, retheorising anarchy as a self-regulating, immanent realm of force where order arises through balancing interactions, interests and values, rather than imposition. This metatheory, discoverable by an ‘ideo-realist’ scientific method formulated for the purpose by Proudhon, elicited a sociology of order that exposed the distorting fiction of anarchy as a ‘pre-state’ condition and revealed the dynamics of association, division and balance. Vesting sovereignty in the individual while rejecting liberal individualism, anarchists showed how societies constituted themselves over time by modifying their arrangements to keep pace with changes in social practice. If the US Constitution inaugurated an epochal change in constitutional design, eclipsing a long history of constitutional experiments, anarchist anthropology showed that it was far from being the first constitution.

Exploding the myth of disorder, anarchists exposed constitutionalism as a cover for domination and explained the European state’s colonising, civilising mission as an outgrowth of the drive to institute order. The corollary of this well-known critique was the development of a novel pluralist conception of law as a body of complex, overlapping norms. For anarchists, anarchy is never transcended. We make rules in anarchy, and the defence of that prior anarchy ensures that rules are never made to become permanently entrenched. The accusation anarchists levelled against their republican, liberal and conservative critics was that they had hijacked the constitution and repurposed it to authorise the sovereign’s monopoly of violence and facilitate the exploitation and domination of everything.

On this view, the ‘abolition of the state’ is the abolition of a particular way of ordering society and a defence of society’s inherent pluralism and openness. Following Proudhon, nineteenth-century anarchists argued that destruction was a prerequisite, but the barricades with which anarchists are frequently associated were usually erected defensively. The revolutionary alternative was advanced by building alliances between guilds, regions, towns, cantons, communities, clubs, and comrades, in decentralised federal associations, and by participating in initiatives and projects that pushed the regulatory dial from legal, bureaucratic government to self-governed societal practice. As Road to Freedom argued, the transformation required monumental changes in public perception. But it did not demand mass conversion, only the recognition of what was happening already and its constitutionalisation.

Peter Kropotkin, one of the pioneers of mutual aid, argued that discrimination and neglect had forced and marginalised communities to become experts in self-reliance. Uncolonised indigenous peoples were also specialists in communal self-help. Using these examples, he identified more possibilities for anarchy in a host of other social groups: churches, professional associations, voluntary organisations and sports and cultural societies. In the early twentieth-century, he argued, these networks were already globalising, giving new shape to the world order and international state system.

As we argue in the book, anarchist constitutional practice is not about changing peoples’ deep-held beliefs and somehow turning everyone into anarchists. Nor does it demand a leap of imagination to the ‘impossible’. It invites groups and individuals to do what they already do, but with a vigour and determination that protects self-governing initiatives from absorption into the body of Leviathan.        

Constitutional Practice

Our analysis of constitutional practice traces 19^th and early 20^th century theory into the practices of contemporary anarchist groups. It is based on co-produced work with the Industrial Workers of the World and Radical Routes, and an analysis of documents, including General Assembly minutes and working group notes, archived by Occupy Oakland (and other Occupy encampments). Different currents of anarchism pulse in all three. Our aim was to understand how these organisations constitutionalised and reflect critically on their practice. We neither expected nor found that they followed anarchist constitutional theory to the letter. Indeed, setting our revival of anarchist constitutional thought against the ‘democratic turn’ of contemporary anarchist theory, we used the tension between democratisation and constitutionalising as a frame for analysis, and found the former wanting. Our contribution to contemporary practice is to argue for the normative priority of anarchy over democracy. 

We relate the loss of the constitutional tradition in anarchist thought to the potency of the critique of liberal constitutionalism and a philosophical squeamishness about the concept of individual sovereignty used to advance it. Splitting with republicans, nineteenth-century anarchists on both sides of the Atlantic defended individual sovereignty to resist the collectivisation of constituent power, the repressive power of the popular sovereign and the homogenising idea of ‘the people’. J.S. Mill appropriated this anarchist idea in On Liberty. Yet in anarchist writing, individual sovereignty was not a trump card individuals waved to secure their liberty in law. It was a philosophical device used to undergird a permanent right of secession and gear constitutionalising to meaningful consent and perpetual adaptation.

The tensions between our constitutional perspective and the democratic turn initiated by Murray Bookchin, David Graeber and others are most evident in the research co-produced with IWW and Radical Routes, and our analysis of Occupy Oakland. The research with the IWW focused on a constitutional review initiated in c. 2014 by the Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England Regional Administration (WISE-RA), and alongside a review of the IWW’s international constitution and processes. This did two things: it displaced the US regional administration in the international organisation and replaced this US centrism with a minimalist confederal constitutional structure. The second restructured WISE-RA by delegating powers from the central executive to the union’s local branches. Situating the review in a longer history of the IWW, we found that the reconstitution was constrained by the Union’s declarative principles, particularly its objection to the wage system and its class war ethos. These are outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution, only once amended since 1905. Both stand in the way of the professionalisation of the Union. The concomitant failure was to assess the purchase of the IWW’s American-centric conception of industrial union for workers in a globalised, service-based economy. In other words, it is practically impossible to organise by industry when the shop floors of contemporary industry are functionally disaggregated, pluralised and decentralised (even if corporate control isn’t).

We identified similar constraints in WISE-RA’s internal process: an eagerness to ‘democratise’ the Union failed because asking people to participate isn’t enough: without an examination of individual and collective Union roles and responsibilities and understanding the barriers to participation as constitutionally embedded (often beyond the comprehension of all but the most experienced officials), democracy becomes tokenistic. The solution, we argue, is to recover the anarchistic ethos of the Union, engage the whole Union in recurrent constitutional review, foreground anarchy, not class war, and constrain remuneration and professionalisation within this anarchistic ethos of the three Cs – conscious, consensual and changeable.

Our analysis of Occupy Oakland examined how the camp was constituted as an iconic part of the Occupy movement, as a hub for multiple and diverse local groups and internationally as a symbol of resistance to state violence. The tensions in the camp, we argue, turned on the vexed composition of the ‘99%’. While the identifier mobilised thousands, it was never clear who it included or how Occupy’s norms and decision-making processes facilitated individuals and groups within the constituent body to air their differences – the 99% is never one. Tensions surfaced when the phenomenally successful General Strike of 2 November 2011 tipped a fierce debate about property-damage into an argument about racialised police violence and decolonisation, and the limits of activist non-violence. The lines of division were blurred, but a main fracture appeared between advocates of non-violence keen to retain the camp’s ‘Occupy’ branding and decolonisers for whom ‘occupation’ spelt settler colonialism, and non-violence meant accepting unmitigated racist police aggression.

Occupy Oakland attempted to re-constitutionalise but failed because it had already anchored its normative ethos in ‘real democracy’. Prioritising supermajorities (if not consensus) in order to defend the voice of the movement, contentious but important innovations failed to reach the democratic threshold needed for change. We do not defend simple majoritarianism, rather we argue that a clearer articulation of Occupy’s anarchism, while likely to have alienated many, would have foregrounded anarchy, enabled secession and ought to have shown the principle of the 99% to have been nonsense. As it turned out, the Oakland demos decided to retain the name Occupy and enforce non-violence. Decolonisation failed and Occupy Oakland split acrimoniously.  

With Radical Routes (RR), we examined a review process which was already underway and distinctive because it was fully constitutional, explicitly foregrounded key anarchist values, like mutual aid and equality, and involved the whole organisation. The review was designed to resolve a disagreement about a rule requiring members in each of RR’s member co-ops to undertake work for ‘radical social change’. Some newer members rejected it as too burdensome. In the arguments that ensued, it became clear that the concept itself was unclear and that even those who accepted the principle disagreed about what kind of work advanced ‘radical social change’. But the rule had been established to protect the co-operative’s fundamental anarchist ethos, and to protect against carpetbagging and the intrusion of the state.

The issue was highly emotive for members. To address this, RR set up a review group. Visiting every member co-op, and holding plenary discussions as their quarterly gatherings, the group invited responses to questions about RR’s role and organisation and prompted a much deeper soul-searching exercise. As well as recording the significant changes RR made to its constitution, we also discuss the response individual members made collectively to the review. As members aired grievances in the course of the review, the opportunity to reflect on RR’s aims and purposes and talk openly about the ways of living that membership of RR had enabled also renewed the commitment to RR’s aims and objectives: to de-commodify property, enable individuals marginalised in mainstream society to build rich relationships and flourish in self-managed, self-created spaces. RR members continue to voice concerns about the reach of the co-op. But for us, RR’s exemplary process showed how constitutionalising works, can be replicated and endlessly adapted and mimicked. RR’s experiences are a lesson to us all.

The Dream of Self-Government

Anarchism tells us that it is only possible to ‘take back control’ by rejecting the appeals of the oligarchs, would-be kings and left-wing saviours. It also tells us that self-government is taxing, even for people with the same broad interests and from similar milieu. Yet short of holding out for a world of uninterrupted peace (a prospect we dismiss in an account of anarchism, politics and war), the only alternative is to embrace the messiness of politics, using constitutional tools to redress injustices, resist structured or structureless concentrations of power and counteract the tendency to elitism. In our account, anarchism ‘abolishes’ the state by tilting the balance between multifarious ‘social’ associations and durable ‘political’ bodies in favour of the social. This is not a call to government to redirect resources, but a push towards the reconstitution of politics. It is easy to dismiss the anarchist constitution as an oxymoron or Quixotic impossible dream. Our research shows it to be entirely coherent and not just possible but already widely practiced.