In July, I published two articles introducing concepts that I no longer consider adequately named: Introduction to Renewal Libertarianism and Introduction to Anarcho-Panarchy. I am not abandoning the fundamental ideas behind either article, but I think my terminology obscured what I was actually trying to describe. What I previously called Renewal Libertarianism I will now call Dark Libertarianism, while what I called Anarcho-Panarchy I will simply call polycentrism. The “dark” in Dark Libertarianism does not mean reactionary, authoritarian, nihilistic, or membership in the Dark Enlightenment. Dark Libertarianism is also neither left-wing nor right-wing, nor is it centrist. Centrism still accepts the political spectrum and merely attempts to position itself somewhere between its competing poles; Dark Libertarianism rejects the necessity of that spectrum altogether. It does not attempt to synthesize Left and Right, borrow equally from both, or discover a moderate position between them. Libertarian principles stand independently of these political classifications, and voluntary arrangements should not require ideological conformity to either side. The “dark” instead represents the rejection of the comforting assumption that abolishing the State must produce a predetermined libertarian society. Anarcho-capitalists may imagine private courts, firms, landlords, and competitive legal systems; anarcho-communists may imagine communes, common ownership, federations, and mutual aid; mutualists and individualist anarchists have their own expectations. But there is something contradictory about opposing centralized political planning while trying to intellectually plan the civilization that must emerge after the State. Dark Libertarianism instead distinguishes libertarian principles from predictions about libertarian society: we can reject political sovereignty while admitting that anarchy is an unknown outcome. This also separates it from the Dark Enlightenment. Where neoreactionary ideas such as Patchwork can fragment political sovereignty into many smaller territorial sovereigns, Dark Libertarianism takes decentralization further by rejecting sovereignty itself: statism means one territory and one sovereign order; Patchwork means many territories and many sovereign orders; Dark Libertarianism means many overlapping orders and no sovereignty.
My second correction follows directly from this. In Introduction to Anarcho-Panarchy, I imagined people living in the same geographical area while following radically different economic and social arrangements and asked why one system had to prevail over all the others. I still believe the question is fundamental, but Anarcho-Panarchy was the wrong name. Panarchy already has a long intellectual history going back to Paul-Émile de Puydt’s 1860 Panarchie, which proposed separating political association from territorial jurisdiction by allowing different governments to coexist within the same geographical space. There is also an existing anarchist development of panarchist ideas generally known as pananarchism. Although the terminology and precise definitions vary among writers, pananarchism already occupies much of the conceptual territory suggested by a phrase such as “anarcho-panarchy.” Using Anarcho-Panarchy for my own concept therefore creates unnecessary confusion: a reader could reasonably assume that I simply mean pananarchism, an anarchist interpretation of panarchy, or that I am proposing another name for an already existing tradition. My original concept was not intended to rename pananarchism, and discovering this existing terminology is another reason to retire Anarcho-Panarchy. Panarchy itself attacks territorial monopoly but does not necessarily abolish government or sovereignty, which is why polycentrism better describes the particular point I was trying to make. Yet polycentrism should not simply mean replacing one State with several private legal systems, private courts, or neatly separated ideological communities. William Gillis’s criticism of this picture is important: actual anarchistic relations could form fluid, overlapping networks in which individuals simultaneously participate in different economic, social, contractual, familial, and mutual-aid relationships without belonging completely to any single “system.” I agree, but reality would probably be more complicated still. Some people genuinely want stable communities, communes, cooperatives, religious associations, extended families, and tightly integrated social structures, while others will prefer much more individualistic lives. A genuinely polycentric society can contain both. There can be fluid networks and permanent communities, formal arbitration and informal negotiation, markets and communes, individual and collective arrangements, without any one of them becoming the sovereign order for everyone else.
Personally, I would prefer the development of a considerably more individualistic society based increasingly on direct individual ownership: one owner, one individual, direct control, with no landlordism, no dependence on wage labour, and fewer permanent institutions standing between individuals and the things they use and control. But Dark Libertarianism requires me to distinguish that preference from political authority. I can dislike landlordism without demanding an authority prohibit landlords; prefer independent production over wage labour without prohibiting employment; and prefer individual ownership while recognizing the freedom of others to voluntarily establish communes, cooperatives, religious communities, or other collective arrangements. Likewise, communists cannot impose collectivization on their neighbours, Rothbardians cannot make their preferred property conventions territorially sovereign, and communities cannot acquire jurisdiction over outsiders merely because their members voluntarily accepted extensive internal rules. Preference is not authority. Dark Libertarianism therefore neither predicts atomized individualism nor prescribes communalism: it accepts that free individuals will probably create both, alongside arrangements we cannot currently predict. I have strong preferences about what I hope such a society would look like, but anarchism does not mean discovering which libertarian faction gets to design the world after the State. It means creating conditions under which nobody gets to. Dark Libertarianism begins where the blueprint ends.
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