Hoppe and Kropotkin on the State: Middle age anarchy and how we lost it
Pyotr Kropotkin and Hans-Hermann Hoppe differ in time, in place, in philosophy, and in economics. But both have retained the title of “anarchist”. While a complete definition of anarchism is a contentious issue, there will be little controversy in the partial definition that a necessary condition for anarchism is an opposition to the State. As political philosopher Andrew Fialia writes, “Political anarchists focus their critique on state power, viewing centralized, monopolistic coercive power as illegitimate. Anarchists thus criticize 'the state'.” This partial definition is an apt description of both Hoppe and Kropotkin who opposed the institution of the State. But while they are both fierce critics of the state, they carry different understandings of what a state is and its origins. In this article I will briefly compare and contrast some of the views that these two anarchist thinkers have regarding the state and its origin.
What is a State?
For Hoppe, a State is defined as “a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the State itself”. This means that in any case on conflict over some resource, the state decides who is the legal victor. If Jones and Smith conflict over a television, the State and the State alone is the ultimate judge of who is the rightful owner of the television. This ultimate judgeship is not limited only to cases in which the State is a third party to the conflict. Even in cases of conflict in which the State itself is involved, it is the ultimate judge. First, this means that when conflict does arise between the State and others, the State can rule in its own favor. But this is only the first layer of a twofold problem. Not only can the Sate rule in its own favor when conflict arises, but the State is incentivized to create conflict in order that it can judge in its own favor when that conflict arises. It is by this means that the state is able to legislate. The State rules that property which was previously held by private property owners is now the property of the State. Since the State is the ultimate arbiter in cases of conflict, no one can succeed in objecting to this usurpation of property as the State will rule in their own favor. As Hoppe writes, “[A]ll legislation, is not law at all, but a perversion of law: orders, commands, or prescriptions that do not lead to peace, but to conflict, and hence are dysfunctional of the very purpose of laws.”
For Kropotkin, the State has some important elements which are not present in Hoppe’s definition. In his 1896 lecture [“The State and Its Historic Role”,] (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-state-its-historic-role) Kropotkin begins his definition of a State by contrasting the State with government. He writes;
The State has also been confused with Government. Since there can be no State without government, it has sometimes been said that what one must aim at is the absence of government and not the abolition of the State. However, it seems to me that State and government are two concepts of a different order. The State idea means something quite different from the idea of government. It not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies.
While the government and the State are different, they are still inextricably linked. For Kropotkin, the state can only arise insofar as there is a government. But, beyond a government, whose characteristics here include “a power situated above society” and in his 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “Anarchism”, a production of harmony “by submission to law, or by obedience to ... authority”, there are two other criteria for a state; control over the of many functions in the life of societies being held by few people and that control having a territorial concentration in one area. Kropotkin offers The Roman Empire as the quintessential example of a state as the power to control people’s lives across the Empire was held by a select few (the senate or Emperor) in the city of Rome.
Hoppe’s State certainly makes for the concentration of power over the lives of many within the hands of a few. The state apparatus, made up a minority of the population, has the right to control the entirety of the people and their property within a territory via legislation. But this is not what makes the State a State. What is the result of the State for Hoppe is, in part, the definition of the State for Kropotkin.
As for Kropotkin’s second criterion of territorial concentration, Hoppe’s State has no such necessity. The power to legislate and uphold legislation can be territorial dispersed. A legislator may live in California, Texas, or New York but may still exercise control across the entire country. As Hoppe points out, there is certainly a tendency towards centralization, but it is not of conceptual necessity for the existence of a State. Kropotkin’s observation concerning States does have historical precedence. In his example of the Roman Empire, Kropotkin notes that magistrates, who took orders from Rome, exerted control over their constituents. This sort of centralized control was also common during the colonial era in which governorships and viceroyships exerted control over colonial populations taking orders from London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and other European centers of power. The reason for this may be technological necessity. While it is conceptually possible that all American Congressmembers could vote from their home states, historically, it was necessary that there be a central meeting place for politicians to debate and vote on legislation. Thus, D.C. emerged as a territorial center with a concentration of power.
The Origin of the State
In the same introduction, Kropotkin makes the following declaration: “[The State] implies some new relationships between members of society which did not exist before the formation of the State.” As will be shown, both Hoppe and Kropotkin believe in a literal beginning of States and thus agree that there once existed a time in human history prior to the existence of a State.
Kropotkin suggests that man was born into the social structure of the clan which he claims predates the patriarchal family by tens of thousands of years. When different clans met during their migration, they sought to make their interactions less violent and thus developed an “international law code” of reciprocal violence; an eye for an eye. According to Kropotkin, the law was as follows: “Your members have wounded or killed one of ours; we have a right therefore to kill one of you or to inflict a similar wound on one of you, and it did not matter who, since the tribe was always responsible for the individual acts of its members.”
After this clan stage, humanity progressed to what Kropotkin calls “the village”. In the village there are various families living together on commonly held land. Within the village, conflict resolution was decided upon by a heterogeneously gendered committee of all the heads of households which he refers to as the “plenary assembly”. This assembly was, according to Kropotkin, “was the judge, the only judge, in civil and criminal matters.” For Kropotkin, this did not yet signify a state (although he admits that it was this institution which the State eventually co-opted for its own judicial purposes). But, for Hoppe, it would. If this assembly is the only judge and thus must be the judge in cases of conflict including itself. Since villages were built on one piece of communally owned land, this means that the assembly had a territorial judicial monopoly and thus meets all three necessary conditions for Hoppe’s State: it is a territorial legal monopoly of ultimate decision-making in all cases of conflict including cases in which it itself is involved. Thus, in Kropotkin’s ‘short history of man’ Hoppe’s State arises once man reaches the “village” stage of development. For Kropotkin, the advent of the State comes much later.
It is in the Middle Ages where the State origin stories of Hoppe and Kropotkin begin to see some similarities. It is during this time that Kropotkin suggests that “free cities” living communitarian lifestyles began to emerge. What separated these free cities from states is that they could choose their judges. Kropotkin writes,
As soon as the inhabitants of a particular borough felt themselves to be sufficiently protected by their walls, they made a ‘conjuration’. They mutually swore an oath to drop all pending matters concerning slander, violence or wounding, and undertook, so far as disputes that might arise in the future, never again to have recourse to any judge other than the syndics which they themselves would nominate. In every good-neighborly or art guild, in every sworn brotherhood, it had been normal practice for a long time. In every village community, such as had been the way of life in the past, before the bishop and the petty king had managed to introduce, and later impose on it, its judge.
Hoppe would agree with Kropotkin that this represents a Stateless situation. If one has the right to choose their own judge, and need not resort to a legal monopolist, then Hoppe’s state cannot be said to be present. In fact, Kropotkin alludes to a sort of legal pluralism which existed among free cities asking, “On how many occasions would a particular city, unable ‘to find the sentence’ in a particularly complicated case, send someone to ‘seek the sentence’ in a neighboring city! How often was the prevailing spirit of that period — arbitration, rather than the judge’s authority — demonstrated with two communes taking a third one as arbitrator!”
These free cities protected themselves by hiring out “military defender” for the period of one year. Or, if they could not defend themselves, they would keep a permanent defender who would be a prince or bishop. Kropotkin explains that cities were always concerned with limiting the power and control of these defenders so much so that “they were even forbidden to enter the city without permission. To this day the King of England cannot enter the City of London without the permission of the Lord Mayor."
In his 2004 lecture, “The Production of Law and Order” , which will become the sixth chapter of his upcoming book, Hoppe also identifies a Stateless social system of protection which existed during the Middle Ages. Hoppe explains,
In these feudal times there existed, so to speak, landlords... and they had tenants. … Both were contractually connected. … And the contract between the landlords and the tenants typically provided for [the following]: The landlord provides protection and the tenant works for a certain period of time for the landlord and is, in cases of conflict, also willing and prepared to fight on the side of the landlord.
These landlords did not represent a relationship of State and subject, but rather, it was a relationship of landlord and tenant. The landlord did not have the power to legislate. Instead, as Hoppe explains,
Law at that time was considered something that was given. Law was not considered to be something that was made by people but something that existed eternally and that was just simply discovered. People learned what it was. New law was, from the very outset, considered to be suspicious because law had to be old; it had to be something that had always existed. Anybody who some up with some sort of new thing was dismissed as probably a fraud.
It was this conception of law as natural or given which gave the right unto the tenants to resist their landlord if he broke this law “up to the point of killing the landlord”.
How did this period of statelessness come to an end? Kropotkin accepts a version of Ludwig Grumplowicz’ conquest theory of the state (the theory also accepted by Rothbard). He writes that feudal lords made war with the free cities and eventually overpowered them using a combination of warfare and selling favors to members of the cities in exchange for their submission. These feudal lords ruled over the conquered cities as Kings, treating the conquered as subjects; to do his bidding or to be destroyed if he so chose. Hoppe disputes this exogeneous theory of the origin of the state arguing it is self-contradictory, "... this view suffers theoretically from the problem that conquest itself seems to presuppose a state-like organization among the conquerors. Hence, the exogeneous origin of states requires a more fundamental theory of the endogeneous origin of the state."
Hoppe’s conception of the turn from Stateless to Statist societies certainly accepts that war-making and conquest played a role in the expansion of state power. But Hoppe’s description of the original “sin” of statism has a much richer judicial history. As Hoppe explains in his 2019 lecture, “So to Speak”, the Middle Ages did not have states, or ultimate arbiters. In the cases of conflicts, you could always appeal to someone else. Even in the case of conflict with the King, one could appeal to the Pope. But then,
A big step, then, occurred (and the most decisive step occurred) when one of these voluntarily chosen judges, competing for respect against other judges, elevated himself to the position of being the monopoly judge. … This, we would call an absolute king. He eliminates all his potential competitors; all the other nobles, judges that you could previously appeal to if you were not happy with the first decision as it was made.
This, for Hoppe is the origin of the modern state as it has existed after the Middle Ages. We moved from a social system without a territorial legal monopolist, to a system with one. In this way, absolute kings became the first States after the Middle Ages and were able to legislate. In similar fashion to Kropotkin, Hoppe suggests that this was made possible by giving favors and positions of privilege to those whom the absolute king subjected.
While both Hoppe and Kropotkin are rightfully called “anarchists” their idea of that thing which they oppose, the state, takes on two different meanings and origins. Nonetheless, their ideas about the origin of the state also share important similarities. Their conception of a stateless societies in the Middle Ages suggests that more in depth study of these societies may bear fruit for creating solutions to modern problem for anarchists, both left and right.