Exploring Anarchism with Judith Gregory

What Political Principle?

Originally published in The Catholic Worker, Volume XXVII, Number 10, 1 May 1961

Most things are easier to preach than to practice. “Anarchism,” on the contrary, is easier to practice than to preach. It is very difficult to practice it, but it is impossible to preach it, because it is impossible to make it coherent. The anarchist rejects the state, and law, and refuses to cooperate with them on principle (though in practice he often obeys just Iaws). He considers the state to be evil because it is coercive, and he denies its necessity. As Ammon wrote in the January Catholic Worker, anarchism is “voluntary cooperation with the right of secession. Laws, good people don’t need them, and bad people don’t obey them, so what good are they?” 

However, Christian anarchism—and Ammon’s anarchism is precisely this—is a contradiction in terms, because in effect it denies original sin and requires the perfection and independence of every person in order to operate. But man is certainly social and also political by nature, and not in consequence of the Fall. Sin merely (!) makes the situation more complex for through its effects it makes the state more necessary and less truthful.

The anarchist rejects the state, and yet he remains a member of the body politic (see the discussion in Maritain’s Man and the State, Ch. 1). He rejects the state, but the state continues to claim him. It taxes him, drafts him and jails him when he resists these claims, and also offers him a number of benefits. Some of these benefits he politely refuses, some he grudgingly accepts, and some he scarcely recognizes because he has, in most cases, never lived outside the body politic and takes them for granted. 

Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (see especially Ch. 9, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man” and Ch. 13, “Ideology and Terror”) discusses the subject of statelessness, of the life of those excluded from any body politic at all, and the picture she draws of actualities and of possibilities is a bitter and appalling one. 

“The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal … If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human right.” (p. 286)  “Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.” (p. 297) 

People so often say that you can’t practice non-violent civil disobedience against the totalitarian government. Perhaps one reason for this is precisely that they have destroyed the state as we have understood it. The state may be a previous thing; the very condition for protest, for the practice of civil disobedience. 

In her preface, Hannah Arendt says that “human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in anew law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, pooled in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.” This is a large order. The question is what political principle? Can there be a new political principle? 

In a fascinating article reprinted in Cross Currents, Martin Buber discusses “The Validity and Limitation of the Political Principle,” basing his discussion on Jesus’ saying about the tribute money. The article is difficult to condense, but a few quotations will give an idea of Buber’s meaning. 

“The human person, ontologically regarded, constitutes not a single sphere, but a union of two spheres. By this I in no way imply the duality of body and soul, allotting to one the kingdom of Caesar and to the other the kingdom of God… I mean the sphere of wholeness and that of separation or division. . . . Thus giving to the state, giving that which is due it in the sphere of separation, is authorized by the sphere of wholeness in which we give to God what is due Him: ourselves . . . Give to God your immediacy, the laying about tribute money says to us, and from so doing you will learn ever anew what of your mediacy you shall give to Caesar.” “

By ‘the political principle’ I designate that so-to-speak practical axiom that predominates in the opinion and attitude of a very great part of the modern world. Formulated In a sentence, it means roughly that public regimes are the legitimate determinants of human existence. Chief emphasis lies naturally on the adjective ‘legitimate’.’’ “I am not undertaking to set material limits to the validity of the political principle. That, rather, is just what must take place In reality time after time, soul after soul, situation after situation; I mean only to say that this occurrence has obviously become an exceptional one.” “If the political organization of existence does not infringe on my wholeness and immediacy, it may demand of me that I do justice to it at any particular time as far as, in a given inner conflict, I believe I am able to answer for.” 

According to Buber, then, we should not reject the political principle out of hand, as the anarchists do. Neither should we seek anew political principle, as Hannah Arent says—far from it. Rather we should learn more effective ways of controlling the political principle, to make sure that it does not rule our lives. Perhaps this is what Hannah Arendt also means. They are using the term “political principle” differently in any case —that much is clear— and Buber’s use of it is more restricted. The main difference between Arendt and Buber is that she seems to be asking for the moon and he is simply asking that each political commitment each of us makes should be deeply considered, as to whether it infringes on “my wholeness and immediacy”—that is, on the domain of what is God’s. Of course, this may be the moon too, but it is on this side of it, at any rate! 

I heard once of someone who stopped studying philosophy because she felt that the philosophers were offering nothing but various alternatives to the Gospel! Could this be true in the realm of political philosophy, and what would it mean? It seems to me that really this is what Ammon is saying: that the only political principle (in the wider sense) that it is possible to derive from the Gospel is what he calls “anarchism.” If we live the Gospel we won’t need any state or any political philosophy. Whether this is true or not, the fact remains, that we don’t live the Gospel. This is because of sin. In the Church we can get rid of our sins through the sacrament of penance, and thus work to live up to the counsel of perfection. But political society has no such sacrament, and the sins committed in it—our sins—don’t just fade away. On the contrary, they accumulate and make a terrible mess. The importance of finding a “new political principle” or of limiting the political principle —whichever way you look at it— is in finding a way to restrict the effect of sins in political society. This is what Peter Maurin must have meant about making a society where it is easier for people to be good. If this is possible only through the restriction of sin generally then Ammon is right, and personal holiness the one man revolution — is in the long run the only effective political principle there is. 

In this article I want to mention two other approaches to political action. One is satyagraha and the other is from Buber again, set forth in Paths in Utopia (a most wonderful book, available for $1.50 In a Beacon Press paperback) and especially in the chapter on Landauer. 

Gandhi discovered only with some difficulty a satisfactory name for the kind of political action that he developed in South Africa. Finally he called it satyagraha, the force which is born of adherence to truth. Gandhi said of it (in Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 339): paid if I have in these pages demonstrated with some success: “I will consider myself amply rematchless weapon, and that those who wield it are strangers to disappointment or defeat.” 

Gandhi obviously considered satyagraha to be a political principle suitable for all occasions, and much more beside. How, if at all, does it differ from Ammon’s anarchism? The main difference, it seems to me, is that Gandhi doesn’t come right out and say that there is no truth in the realm of the state, or that a man adhering to truth can have nothing to do with the state. Rather, satyagraha involves exactly what Buber is talking about when he speaks of a fresh decision in each situation—a grasping at the truth in each situation. This refusal to reject law and the state explicitly is very important, and in fact, in some respects satyagraha even presupposes law. Gandhian civil disobedience is not simply the open refusal to obey a certain law. It is the refusal, by someone who respects the body of the law that he considers just, to obey any law that he considers unjust, and to take the full consequences of this refusal according to the law, never using violence. Whoever does this is deeply involved in political society, and in fact his power to evoke a free conversion of those enforcing the unjust law depends on his acceptance of the general body of the law. Gandhi’s position, in accepting the binding power of just law, is the same as that of St Thomas. 

It is true, however, that Gandhi never really figured out the problem of the use of force by the state to punish infractions of the law. In this respect his position was closer to Ammon’s, but as far as I know he remained equivocal, and I do not believe that Gandhi ever became an “anarchist” though at times he did come close to it. Who doesn’t? 

Buber’s constructive suggestions on the subject of political action can be glimpsed in a few quotations. First he says, quoting Landauer: “The State is not, as Kropotkin thinks, an institution which can be destroyed by a revolution. ‘The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently’.” (p. 48) Then he says, and this is the key to his approach: “People living together at a given time and in a given space are only to a certain degree capable, of their own free will, of living together rightly; of their own free will maintaining a right order and conducting their common concerns accordingly. The line which at all time limits this capacity forms the basis of the State at that time; in other words, the degree of incapacity for a voluntary right order determines the degree of legitimate compulsion. Nevertheless the de facto extent of the State always exceeds more or less—and mostly very much exceeds—the sort of State that would emerge from the degree of legitimate compulsion.” (p. 47). 

Finally, Buber sets forth his idea of political action: “The task that thus emerges for the socialists, i.e., for all those intent on a restructuring of society, is to drive the factual base-line of the State back to the ‘principal’ base-line of socialism. But this is precisely what will result from the creation and renewal of a real organic structure, from the union of persons and families into various communities and of communities into associations. It is this growth and nothing else that ‘destroys’ the State by displacing it. The part so displaced, of course, will only be that portion of the State which is superfluous and without foundation at the time; any action that went beyond this would be illegitimate and bound to miscarry because, as soon as It had exceeded its limits it would lack the constructive spirit necessary for further advance” (p. 48).

It seems to me that what is needed is a synthesis of satyagraha with its emphasis on non-violent political action of a highly practical and specific nature, as well as on voluntary poverty and the necessity for trust in God; and of Buber’s ideas on the structure of society. (The latter perhaps answers Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that the new political principle be “rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.”) 

If there were such a synthesis, what would become of the political principle? When you strive to practice adherences to truth, love of neighbor, civil disobedience whenever necessary; when you strive to establish communities and to push back the base-line of the estate; when you do all these things, what place is left for the state? It is still there, certainly, and no doubt it always will be, but its place is very hard to define. It is necessary, and helpful, but also most of the time untruthful. It is something to work against, to whittle down and replace, and always more pervasive than it should be.

Further Clarification