Small Anarchism Could Be Right and Still Not Worth Supporting

There is a position I will call small anarchism, and I want to argue against it in an unusual way: by granting that it is correct.

The Claim

Small anarchism is the idea that if humanity were somehow divided into small sovereign communities, none large enough to field an army or run an empire, then large-scale violence would disappear along with most of the serious problems of our present systems of government. No state big enough to wage war, no bureaucracy big enough to crush anyone, no hierarchy tall enough to lose sight of the people at the bottom.

The people who hold it are not fools. Many of the evils I write about here really are evils of scale, and a world of villages would not have them. So let me not quarrel with the diagnosis.

Assume small anarchism is right. Assume that a world of small sovereign entities would in fact be more peaceful, more free, and more humane than the one we have. What follows?

What Follows Is Nothing

Ask the question the theory never asks: what do the large bodies do while the small ones are being small?

Suppose one region actually manages it. It dissolves its state, splits into communities of a few thousand, and lives as the theory says it should. It is now surrounded by neighbours that did not do this. They have armies, tax bases, and the ordinary appetites of states. The region has become a collection of undefended and prosperous villages sitting next to organised force.

They will be taken. Not out of ideological hatred, necessarily, though that will be available too, but because taking them is cheap and profitable and nothing stands in the way. A haven of small sovereignty in a world of large sovereignty is not a political experiment. It is a resource waiting for a claimant.

We Have Run This Experiment

This is not speculation about how states might behave. It is how they behaved the last time a new form of government appeared in one place before it appeared everywhere.

When representative government arrived by revolution, the monarchies around it did not wait to see whether it would work. Revolutionary France was at war with Spain, with Austria, with Prussia, with Britain, within a few years of 1789, and while the causes were mixed, the surrounding crowns were entirely explicit that the ideas themselves had to be silenced before they spread. Sometimes the intervention succeeded and sometimes it failed, but it was attempted every time, and it was attempted because a neighbouring regime organised on a different principle is a threat by its mere existence.

And representative government was a strong form of organisation. It could conscript, tax, and field armies, which is the only reason France survived the attempt. Small anarchism, by construction, cannot do any of these things. The very features that make it attractive make it indefensible.

The Game-Theoretic Shape

Put it in the language of strategy, because the shape is exact.

Small anarchism is a cooperative equilibrium: it is good for everyone if everyone adopts it. But it is not a stable one. Any single large actor that declines to adopt it does better than the adopters, at their expense, and the adopters have no move available in reply. It is the prisoner's dilemma played between a village and an empire, and the village has already chosen cooperate.

So small anarchism can only exist if the whole world adopts it at the same time. Not gradually, not region by region, not by demonstration effect, because every partial adoption is immediately punished by the parts that have not adopted. It has to be simultaneous, and it has to be universal, and it has to stay that way, since a single defector rebuilding a state would restart the whole process.

The probability of that is not small. It is zero, for the ordinary reason that seven billion people distributed across every culture and every level of development do not do anything simultaneously.

What This Kind of Argument Is

I want to be clear about the form, because it applies well beyond anarchism.

A political proposal has to pass two tests, not one. The first is whether the destination is good. The second is whether there is a path to it that survives contact with the people who have not yet arrived. Most political argument spends all its time on the first test, and treats the second as an engineering detail to be worked out later.

It is not a detail. A destination with no reachable path is not a proposal; it is a description. Small anarchism is an accurate description of a world that might be better, and it tells you nothing about what to do on Monday, because every step toward it is a step toward being conquered.

That is why I do not support it, and why I would not support it even if I were convinced it was correct. Correctness is necessary. It is not sufficient. The world you have to pass through on the way is also real, and it has armies.