Gellnerian Inflections 4
Post-anarchism emerged in the late twentieth century as a radical rethinking of classical anarchism in light of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. Thinkers like Saul Newman, Todd May, and Lewis Call challenged the essentialist assumptions of early anarchist thought, replacing its rationalist belief in human nature and moral progress with a more nuanced, anti-essentialist and contingent view of subjectivity and power. Drawing on Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze, post-anarchists argued that power is not simply concentrated in the state, but diffused throughout social and psychological life, and that domination can no longer be addressed solely by seizing or abolishing centralized institutions. Authority, they claimed, is enacted and internalized in ways that require new tools of resistance, such as ironic subversion, desubjectivation, and micro-political refusal. In this sense, post-anarchism is less a program than a sensibility, one that foregrounds fragmentation, fluid identities, and a suspicion of normativity itself.
Yet despite its intellectual sophistication, post-anarchism never adequately solved the central problem that haunts all anti-authoritarian projects, the bully problem. Classical anarchism, from Bakunin to Kropotkin, imagined a spontaneous human goodness that would flourish once hierarchical institutions were dismantled. Post-anarchism, disavowing such romanticism, nonetheless retained a faith in the liberatory potential of deconstruction, fluidity, and horizontal resistance. But neither variant seriously accounted for the structural dynamics of domination that emerge precisely when institutional constraints are removed. The bully problem names this blind spot: what happens when the strong, the charismatic, the violent, or the shameless exploit the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of formal authority?
In this light, it is not surprising that the rise of Trumpism, toxic masculinity cultures like that of Andrew Tate, and the resurgence of hyper-individualist authoritarian personalities can be understood as perverse fulfillments of the post-anarchist vision. These formations do not restore order in the Schmittian sense, they do not reassert sovereign authority or legal clarity, but they do assert a kind of primal pre-institutional will to power, a post-anarchic ethos unburdened by bureaucratic restraint, civic responsibility, or shared norms. Trump’s persona is not one of legal authority but of transgressive invincibility, the bully who revels in being beyond judgment. Tate’s ‘commune,’ with its appeal to disaffected young men through misogynistic discipline, martial dominance, and sexual conquest, mirrors the commune ideal emptied of ethical content. Post-anarchism thought it was escaping the liberal state’s repressive rationality, but in doing so, it opened a path for tribal, hierarchical, and deeply coercive orders to reassert themselves without even the mask of legitimacy.
Women are a major group who have been directly affected by all this. If anarchism failed to imagine a world with bullies, feminism has often failed to imagine a world where bullies do not care about critique. The ethics of care, solidarity, and intersectionality, while politically and morally essential, often lack the material or rhetorical force to withstand the brutal charisma of post-anarchic domination. The slow erosion of civic institutions like unions, welfare protections, neighborhood solidarity, informal codes of mutual respect has stripped many women and marginalized communities of the protective buffer that civil society once offered. The liberal state, with all its flaws, at least provided some imperfect handrails. Now, in its absence or decay, the public square is often left to those who shout loudest, intimidate most effectively, and broadcast the clearest vision of invulnerability.
Ernest Gellner’s reflections on civil society are helpful here. As he and others like Fustel de Coulanges and Tocqueville understood, the modern liberal individual is not simply a freed monad but a being sustained by the invisible architecture of voluntary, non-coercive associations. Unlike the kinship-bound tribalism of pre-modern societies or the rigid castes of feudalism, civil society creates a form of individuality that is mobile, associative, and structurally buffered from domination. Yet Marx, rightly in some respects, argued that this very buffering is a fraud, a mask for capitalist domination. In our time, this insight has been reappropriated by post-anarchists and right-wing ideologues alike. Both insist that liberal proceduralism is hollow, that norms are ideological veils, that power is everywhere and thus nowhere legitimate. But when that critique is coupled with the actual erosion of civil society by technocratic neoliberalism, by the replacement of collective institutions with managerial metrics, of moral discourse with economic efficiency, the result is not emancipation, but the emergence of a post-anarchic void into which only bullies step with confidence.
The technocratic tendencies of neoliberalism, with their insistence on market logic and depersonalised governance, exacerbate this collapse. In the name of efficiency, institutions have hollowed out the symbolic and affective life of politics. Voters are treated as consumers, choices are framed as trade-offs, and solidarity is replaced by targeted algorithms. This flattening of political life plays directly into the hands of post-anarchic figures like Trump, who restore meaning not through reasoned debate but through spectacle, myth, and domination. The more liberal states retreat into procedural neutrality and data-driven policymaking, the more they abandon the field of symbolic power to those who weaponise affect, identity, and resentment.
This is why the restoration of civil society must not be understood as a nostalgic wish, but as an existential necessity. The liberal state’s legitimacy depended, however fraudulently, on the presence of unions, churches, civic clubs, state schools, and informal networks that distributed dignity and restraint. Their absence does not leave a neutral void, but a battlefield. And on that battlefield, the bullies win.
The mistake of anarchism, and its poststructural heirs, was to mistake authority for domination, and to imagine that power could be dissolved rather than shaped. The mistake of Marxism in the last century was to focus so exclusively on class structure that it neglected the question of interpersonal ethics and emotional coercion. That resulted in Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
What is needed now is not a return to some idealised past, nor a utopian leap forward, but a sober reckoning with the political implications of the bully problem. If liberal society was always a fragile construct, it is because it depended not just on rights and institutions, but on the willing containment of those who would smash them for pleasure. Post-anarchism has created the intellectual mood music for the new operations of power and subjectivity and legitimised a world in which power needs no justification and domination is an aesthetic. The bullies are not coming, they are already here, and unless we find new ways to contain them, all our freedoms will become performances in their circus.