Gellner Inflections 2
The genealogy from classical anarchism to post-anarchism traces a noble but troubled arc of resistance to domination. From its early formulations in the 19th century, anarchism centered its critique on the state, capital, and hierarchy. Classical anarchists envisioned a cooperative world free from coercive institutions, replacing them with voluntary federations and mutual aid. But classical anarchism always struggled with the problem of enforcement: how to prevent domination without new structures of domination. It sought to build new collective forms of life, but it lacked a fully realised theory of power containment, how to deal with bullies.
Post-anarchism, emerging in the wake of post-structuralist and postmodern critiques, sought to radicalize anarchism’s anti-authoritarianism by decentering power altogether. Thinkers such as Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis Call rejected essentialist ideas of human nature, stable identities, and class-based politics, focusing instead on the micropolitics of resistance, the fluidity of identity, and the dispersal of power across discourse, subjectivity, and the everyday. This shift helped anarchism escape the rigidity of Enlightenment rationalism and embrace plurality, but it also came at a steep cost: the abandonment of serious institutional thinking. Post-anarchism’s deep suspicion of institutions, whether the state, unions, schools, or civic associations, has left it with a profound blind spot. By treating all formal structures as suspect and prioritising ideological critique over functional analysis, post-anarchist politics has left itself unequipped to address the actual mechanics of power in modern life. Its theoretical sophistication regarding language and identity has been inversely proportional to its practical understanding of how power operates in bureaucratic, legal, and social institutions, and how those same institutions, when functioning well, can constrain bullies, protect the vulnerable, and reproduce forms of solidarity and equity. Worse still, current Trumpian politics seems like a fulfilment of post-anarchist theory rather than its repudiation.
The failure of post anarchism is now mirrored in the contemporary forms of anti-racism and feminism that have inherited post-anarchism’s epistemic focus on ideology, identity, and discourse. Critical race theory, as it is popularly and institutionally practiced, often centres on the interrogation of language, representation, and implicit bias, emphasising cultural critique over material political-economic reform. Likewise, dominant forms of academic feminism, especially within humanities departments, have emphasised performativity, affect, and discursive regimes of gender, often at the expense of practical institutional reform and enforcement. While these critical approaches have rightly illuminated the deep entanglement of language and power, they have largely abandoned the question of how to build, maintain, or repair institutional mechanisms that prevent sexist or racist domination.
This is where Adolph Reed Jr.’s approach to anti-racism stands as a crucial counterpoint. Reed, grounded in a Marxist and institutionalist tradition, critiques contemporary identity politics for its neglect of structural political economy. He argues that the overemphasis on race as a cultural or discursive phenomenon has sidelined the real work of building durable institutions that ensure health care, education, union power, and material redistribution. For Reed, anti-racism is not primarily about individual attitudes or symbolic representation, but about the architecture of institutions that can reduce inequality and prevent domination regardless of identity. His position reflects a lost insight from earlier left politics: that civil society institutions, though flawed, uneven, and compromised, provide the scaffolding that makes freedom real and bullies accountable.
By contrast, much of today’s anti-racist and feminist politics remains captive to a post-anarchist sensibility that overestimates the power of critique and underestimates the importance of institutional form and function. This has had dire consequences. Without practical mechanisms for enforcing norms, holding aggressors accountable, and protecting the vulnerable, symbolic victories and ideological clarity do little to stop the advance of reactionary bullies, whether in workplaces, online spaces, schools, or political discourse. The return of overtly misogynistic, white supremacist, and anti-democratic figures in public life is not simply the consequence of reactionary backlash; it is the result of a vacuum left by institutional neglect.
Thatcherite and Reaganite neoliberalism accelerated this institutional collapse, replacing civic handrails with market discipline and individual competition. Their policies dismantled unions, hollowed out the welfare state, and rendered civic life precarious. As civil society weakened, individuals were left exposed, without the support structures that once mitigated social vulnerability and constrained domination. The liberal state became more technocratic, obsessed with efficiency, metrics, and policy instruments, and less concerned with meaning, community, and solidarity. This opened the space for post-anarchic affective politics, where the charismatic bully could thrive and the strongman could reassert order amidst chaos. The bullies returned, not just as a failure of civility or culture, but as a failure of institutional imagination. In the vacuum left by dismantled civil society, post-anarchism and identity-based critique provide a framework for the Trumpian mode: performative masculinity, tribal resentment, anti-intellectualism, anti-science and authoritarian longing. In this light Andrew Tate’s popularity among disaffected young men is not merely an ideological phenomenon, it reflects a social order in which the institutional checks on domination have been destroyed, leaving the law of the jungle in their place.
If feminism and anti-racism are to survive this moment, they must recover a politics of institution-building. Not a return to oppressive bureaucracies, but to fragile, participatory, and democratic structures that can contain aggression, redistribute power, and rebuild solidarity. This requires moving away from post-anarchist suspicion and toward an ethics of collective maintenance embodied in civic society institutions. As with happiness, civil society may not be achievable by direct design, but it must be cultivated, protected, and fought for all the same.
However, this intellectual allergy to institutional thinking is not limited to anarchism and post-anarchism. As Ernest Gellner forcefully argued, a broad swath of 20th-century philosophy and critical theory fell victim to what he saw as the vice of philosophical idealism: the belief that the central political or social problems of modernity were primarily problems of thought, language, or conceptual framing. In Words and Things and later writings, Gellner took aim at both the later Wittgenstein and the heirs of Saussure, including Derrida and the post-structuralists, accusing them of a kind of scholastic retreat from the world. For Gellner, these modes of thought shared a common pathology: they mistook conceptual confusion for real political pathology and assumed that philosophical diagnosis, rather than institutional reform, was the key to human liberation. Gellner’s critique of Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy was especially pointed. He saw in its obsession with linguistic usage a kind of genteel quietism, a turn away from the real material and social structures that govern human life. Language, in this school, became a self-enclosed system, and philosophical clarity became the highest virtue. But for Gellner, this was a category error: the problems facing modern societies were not simply linguistic misalignments or conceptual misunderstandings but structural, institutional failures that demanded political, not merely philosophical, solutions.
His critique extended with even greater intensity to post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, whom he saw as indulging in a kind of nihilistic play with meaning that eroded the possibility of stable, shared frameworks for social action. The post-structuralist emphasis on indeterminacy, textuality, and the endless deferral of meaning struck Gellner as not merely obscure, but socially irresponsible. It displaced attention away from the real, coercive, and often invisible forms of domination that existed in institutional life, education, bureaucracy, law, medicine, by treating them as symbolic constructs rather than material systems with enforceable power. In Gellner’s view, the idealist bent of these movements meant that philosophers once again succumbed to their perennial temptation: to assume that it was philosophy itself that needed fixing, rather than the institutions through which people lived, worked, and organized collective life.
This is precisely the vice inherited by post-anarchism and the critical-cultural politics that surround it. Its endless deconstruction of categories, gender, race, identity, law, has rarely translated into viable institutional alternatives. Its distrust of structure is so profound that even democratic institutional mechanisms are viewed as suspect. The consequence has been a politics of unanchored critique, unable to resist the return of coercive forms of power it had no tools to contain nor seemingly the imagination to anticipate. It is as if no anarchist or post anarchist thinker could picture what would happen in a typical playground if there was no adult around. These are theories that cannot envisage a bully.
Gellner’s emphasis on the functionality of institutions and the stability provided by shared cultural systems now appears prescient. He understood that civil society, though built on partial truths and institutional inertia, was not a fraud to be unmasked, but a fragile achievement to be preserved and reformed. His critique is not a call to return to conservative tradition, but a call to recognize that meaning, solidarity, and power are mediated through institutions that must be maintained, not merely theorized, even if fraudulent.
In this light, the failure of post-anarchism, like the failure of much of post-structuralist and critical theory, lies in its blindness to this lesson. It has mistaken the map for the territory, the ideology for the infrastructure, the bully’s language for his actual domination. It has built an arsenal of brilliant concepts, but left the gates open to the return of the bullies, now armed not with ideas, but with the raw power that arises when no one is left to enforce the rules. Gellner’s critique gains even more force when read alongside the rise of post-structuralist social theory, for example the thought of Michel Foucault and, later, Bruno Latour.
These thinkers profoundly shaped the intellectual landscape inherited by post-anarchism. Foucault’s insistence that power is everywhere, that it is productive rather than merely repressive, and that it works through discursive regimes rather than through sovereign command, shifted the focus of political critique away from concrete institutions and toward the analysis of knowledge, normativity, and discourse. This was a radical and often valuable move. But as Gellner would likely observe, it also carried with it a dangerous corollary: the erasure of the very institutional structures of rule and constraint that hold bullies at bay. In Foucault’s later work, the state dissolves into diffuse networks of biopolitical management and disciplinary power, leaving little room for collective political action beyond localized resistance. The problem is that his framework offers little guidance for building institutions that can protect the vulnerable, contain arbitrary domination, or reproduce civic trust. It oddly cannot even distinguish between power arrangements before and after neoliberalism.
And post-anarchism inherits this suspicion of institutionality while adding its own theoretical suspicion of liberal universalism, procedural justice, and Enlightenment rationality. What remains is a politics of critique without construction, a deconstruction of authority that has no answer when new forms of domination arrive. Bruno Latour, for his part, extends this anti-institutional mood into the realm of science and technology studies, where the focus shifts from institutional integrity to the distributed agency of nonhuman actants, material-semiotic networks, and the instability of fact itself. While Latour’s work illuminates how modern institutions rely on networks of translation and stabilisation, his later writings flirt with a kind of post-truth relativism that can be easily co-opted by reactionary forces. He undermines the conceptual distinction between nature and society, fact and belief at precisely the moment when the defense of shared realities is most politically urgent. What begins as a progressive critique of technocratic rationality ends, paradoxically, by preparing the ground for the Trumpian suspicion of science, expertise, and institutional knowledge altogether.
As I noted just now, Gellner’s allergy to such theoretical maneuvers was grounded in a robust functionalist realism. He believed that institutions exist not only to reproduce power but to stabilise meaning, regulate conflict, and enable cooperation. In his view, modern liberal societies function not because they fully embody democratic ideals, but because they institutionalise constraints, rules, norms, habits, that prevent chaos. In dismissing civil society as a bourgeois fraud, both leftist and post-structuralist traditions failed to see that fraudulence may sometimes be functional. Stability often rests not on truth but on durable fictions, narratives of equality, neutrality, and rule of law that do just enough to prevent descent into Hobbesian violence.
But as Adolph Reed and others in the Black Marxist tradition have argued, this focus on critique over construction has led to a neglect of the material supports such as labour protections, housing policy, public education, voting rights and union strength. Meanwhile, the dismantling of these very institutions has allowed bullies, reactionaries, and charismatics to thrive in the vacuum. Reed warns that ironically identity-based politics often abandons the structural in favour of the moral, reproducing liberal assumptions even as it claims to resist them. The practical result is not liberation, but the absence of any framework capable of restraining violence, economic precarity, or coercive dynamics.
The bullies, quite simply, have returned and they are not interested in epistemology. They exploit the vacuum of authority that post-anarchist and post-structuralist ideologies helped to create. Here again, the irony is stark: theories that began by seeking emancipation from coercive authority now find themselves templates for the raw exercise of power by the very forces they oppose - patriarchy, racism, authoritarianism - because they have rejected the very institutional tools that might have contained them.
Thus the suspicion of institutional power, taken to its extreme, becomes complicity with the powerful. Post-anarchism’s disdain for institutional form and its suspicion of functionalist thinking is not simply a matter of theoretical orientation, it constitutes a fatal vulnerability when faced with actual, embodied social power. The movement’s genealogy, from Stirner’s egoism to Bakunin’s anti-statism, through to the poststructuralist interventions of Saul Newman and Todd May, has been obsessed with deconstructing the symbolic order, dislodging hegemonies, and destabilising categories like gender, race, and class. But in so doing, it has inherited a pathology of idealism that renders it ill-equipped to confront the material persistence of domination. In its critique of coercive systems, it has neglected the need to theorise legitimate containment, failing to ask what replaces collapsed structures beyond a hope in spontaneous cooperation, and in this way it underwrites the rise of violent informal hierarchies. Out of this, the anarchist’s horizontal commune becomes Andrew Tate’s Discord server.
As Ernest Gellner warned, particularly in his critiques of Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy and of Derridean post-structuralism, intellectual trends that reduce the social world to problems of meaning, ideology, or language confuse philosophical puzzles for social and political pathologies. This is the ‘humanities’ and ‘philosopher’s’ vice where thinkers assume that thinking is the primary locus of both the problem and the resolution. Against this, Gellner insisted on the institutional basis of social life.
For him, civil society is not the mask of ideology, but the fragile mechanism by which a modern plural order functions at all, composed not only of associations and rules but of routines, expectations, and guardrails. Post-anarchist and radical discourses that reduce everything to language or ideology inadvertently disarm the very infrastructure needed to resist domination. And so, the bully problem returns with a vengeance. When anarchists and post-anarchists fail to theorise coercion, fail to ask what happens when solidarity fails, or when the strong prey on the weak, they allow power to be seized by those who feel no compunction about dominating others. White supremacist movements have been particularly effective at exploiting this vacuum. Unlike liberal anti-racism, which often relies on bureaucratic procedures and norms of civility, and unlike critical race theory, which emphasises discursive deconstruction, these movements build loyalty and structure through direct, affective, even tribal forms of identification. They echo a pre-civil society logic, like that seen in Tocqueville’s description of tribal resistance in Algeria, but they are stripped of religion or communitarian ethics. They offer a return of meaning through belonging, but only in the form of aggressive purity and exclusion. Post-anarchism, with its disavowal of order and authority, is disturbingly silent before these movements.
The irony is devastating: in attempting to destroy all authority, post-anarchism helps dissolve the civic scaffolding needed to protect people from arbitrary power. And in dismantling the liberal ideal of the individual as embedded in social institutions, it unwittingly clears the stage for a different kind of subject, the post-anarchic strongman. Donald Trump, with his contempt for rules, fetish for transgression, and performance of uncensored will, is in some ways the realization of the Stirnerite ego, the unmediated individual unconstrained by duty or tradition. Andrew Tate, with his blend of violence, self-interest, and simulated sovereignty, is a perverse fulfilment of the commune turned into a gang. In these figures, the critique of bourgeois civility becomes the performance of domination. The anti-ideological posture turns into pure charisma and cruelty. What anarchism imagined as emancipation from the state, they realise, but they also imagine it as emancipation from mutual obligation and it's hard to see why the corrosive theories of anarchism and post anarchism can without contradiction argue that that they shouldn’t.
Post-anarchism offers a compelling diagnosis of the decomposition of foundational authority, it grasps Trumpism, toxic masculinity, and post-liberal race panic not as returns to order but as convulsions of meaninglessness, but it suffers from a disabling omission. In its turn away from classical anarchism’s humanism, and its embrace of post-structuralist anti-foundationalism, it has largely abandoned the question of institutional function. It has inverted classical anarchism’s excessive faith in natural sociability with an excessive suspicion of any form of order at all. In so doing, it has inadvertently converged with the neoliberal dismantling of public life.
This is the critical blind spot. Post-anarchist theory, in treating power as always diffuse and contingent, has failed to theorise when and how coercion becomes legitimate, protective, or necessary. It mistrusts structure per se, and thus has little to say about what resists the charismatic bully, the affective strongman, or the whisper networks of male dominance that arise once liberal proceduralism breaks down. In its allergy to universalism, it often remains silent on the problem of scale and governance. In its hyper-attunement to symbolic violence, it has under-theorised structural protection.
As Ernest Gellner argued in his critiques of Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy and the later post-structuralist turn, the philosophical obsession with meaning and discursive critique involves a disastrous retreat from sociological reality. Gellner accused post-structuralism of indulging in a self-defeating idealism: assuming that if we can just critique the language, the social problem will resolve itself. But this ignores the brute fact that domination is not simply symbolic. It is institutional, embodied, and often enacted outside language altogether. Bullies, patriarchs, and racists do not need metaphysical justifications and they thrive in institutional vacuums. When institutions are discredited without being reimagined, the bullies emerge. This explains the strange impotence of much contemporary anti-racism and feminism, especially in liberal states hollowed out by decades of technocratic neoliberalism. As Adolph Reed has long insisted, the dominant forms of identity politics today focus obsessively on discourse and representation, while neglecting the material supports of racial and gender equality. Anti-racism becomes a matter of checking language, not funding schools. Feminism becomes a matter of visibility, not redistributing domestic labour. These critiques of ideology float freely from the institutional terrain that once enabled collective emancipation. In this sense, both neo-liberalism and post-anarchism have converged in their failure to provide real containment. Neo-liberalism, through managerial technocracy, outsourced judgment to markets and algorithms, while depoliticising public life. Post-anarchism, through its radical skepticism, deconstructed every foundation but offered nothing to replace them. Both have left the civic sphere exposed to the return of charismatic, tribal, and bullying forms of power. This is why white supremacist movements have flourished in this moment. They are not founded on coherent ideology, but on the affective satisfaction of domination, tribal identity, and rage. They fill the vacuum left by institutional retreat and critical disorientation. Trump, the reactionary anarch, performs this vacuum, not as a coherent authoritarian, but as a chaotic symbol of unmoored will. He is the anti-institution made flesh.
Thus, if post-anarchism helps us see the internal decomposition of sovereignty, it also must be turned against itself. We must ask what it leaves us with. If authority is always retroactively constructed, if there is no outside to power, if every institution is a site of potential domination what then protects us from domination itself? What prevents a politics of permanent exception from becoming the new normal? What stops the bully? The answer is not a return to foundationalism but it may require a rethinking of function, containment, and institutional ethics.
We must think again, with Gellner, of how civil society protects difference not by purity but by imperfection, by routines, norms, and flawed but resilient institutions. We must think with Adolph Reed, of how anti-racism and feminism can regain material traction by organising around structures, healthcare, education, work, housing, not merely discourse. We must think beyond both the neo-liberal fantasy of neutral governance and the anarchist dream of pure horizontality. Post-anarchism illuminates the psychic and political decay of patriarchal sovereignty, the spectacle of Trumpian exception, the libidinal economy of contemporary racism and misogyny. But it cannot suffice as a political horizon. Its refusal of institutions has helped leave the vulnerable exposed to informal tyrannies. Its obsession with critique has crowded out construction. It cannot escape the accusation that Trumpian politics is not a distortion of post anarchy but its fulfilment.
We are living in the ruins of both state legitimacy and radical hope. The old authorities are dead. The new bullies have arrived. The task is not to restore old foundations, but to forge a new ethic of resistance: one that is neither nostalgic nor nihilistic, neither managerial nor mystical. This ethic will require institutions, not as monuments to authority, but as tools for survival. It will require ideology, not as dogma, but as orientation. And it will require us to admit that sometimes, to protect freedom, one must build a wall, not around others, but around the weak, the wounded, and the future.
What emerges from this is a paradox: the same cultural and theoretical forces that rightly tried to dismantle oppressive foundations - patriarchy, white supremacy, metaphysical sovereignty - have also cleared the ground for the bully’s return. Trump is not the shadow of the classical patriarch or the fascist state; he is their degraded parody. His sovereignty is not grounded in theological unity but in the affective chaos of spectacle, resentment, and unaccountable will. He is not the Father but the Troll-Father - an icon of disintegration masquerading as strength. His power lies in his ability to weaponise norm collapse, not to reimpose order and as such he is the unwitting spawn of post anarchic thinking.
Post-anarchism, in its refusal of foundationalism, has been his midwife. Trumpian sovereignty is performative, identity is constructed through power, and it’s clear that resistance must operate in the cracks rather than from a place of innocence. Post anarchism grasps the ungovernability of our moment better than liberalism or orthodox leftism because post-anarchism theory is fulfilled by the Trumpian regime. Its failure to distinguish between forms of power: between domination and protection, between structure and coercion, between the institution as cage and the institution as shield is intellectually catastrophic and that catastrophe has now been unleashed as our new hegemony.
In abandoning the classical anarchist faith in the rational subject and the human essence, post-anarchism gained sophistication but it lost clarity about what matters when the bully walks into the room. It failed to theorise the informal dominations that flourish when formal protections are dismantled. It left us with brilliant critiques but few resources for collective defence. As the public realm was gutted by neoliberal technocracy, and as discourse became the main terrain of struggle, material domination quietly reasserted itself - armed, viral, and algorithmic.
This is where Gellner’s critique bites: it is not enough to expose illusions; we must ask what replaces them. The obsession with language, with symbolic representation, with identity critique as seen in many corners of philosophy, radical politics, contemporary feminism and critical race theory has allowed the real terrain of political struggle to shift: away from redistribution, collective bargaining, and public goods, and toward fragmented spectacles of recognition and performative outrage. Adolph Reed’s critique of this politics is not reactionary but grounded: it reminds us that the many forms of poverty and oppression are not primarily discourses but durable structures, reproduced through economic precarity, institutional failure, and material neglect. We thus need a political theory adequate to the bully problem, not just in its crude playground form, but in its structural manifestations.
Patriarchal violence, racial resentment, and post-liberal strongmen thrive where symbolic authority has collapsed and no institutional check remains. The question is not only how we critique domination, but how we build forms of containment that do not reproduce the dominations they resist. This is the task for a future , to build institutions that are transparent, revisable, and grounded in care rather than command, but institutions nonetheless. To reconstruct solidarity, not from imagined essences, but from shared vulnerabilities. To accept that in a world without metaphysical guarantees, freedom is not the absence of structure, but the presence of protection, reciprocity, and responsibility. The reactionary anarchs like Trump will not be defeated by appeals to civility or by critique. They must be countered with alternative forms of legitimacy: democratic, inclusive, institutional, and affectively grounded.