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In this article, I argue that contemporary theories of collective intentionality force us to think about anarchy in new and challenging ways. In the years since Wendt declared the state a person, the collective intentionality of groups has become the focus of important scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. But this literature will not sit easily with mainstream International Relations for two reasons. First, contemporary theories of collective intentionality are difficult to square with the idea that the personified state is an intentional agent, with first-person plural self-awareness and moral obligations. However, by contrast, the same theories make it eminently plausible for all sorts of other groups to be intentional, agential, moral persons and can tell us how states are constructed. In short, this set of theories radically pluralises and transforms standard political ontology while also accounting for common misperceptions. I push these insights further to argue that radical pluralisation suggests that anarchy may be the structural context for politics as such. What we know from mainstream International Relations theory is that politics without an orderer is well-ordered regardless. It may be time to recast these insights in order to demonstrate how complex pluralism is not chaos but anarchy.

Anarchism does not feature in contemporary international relations (IR) as a discreet approach to world politics because until very recently it was antithetical to the traditional use-value of a discipline largely structured around the needs and intellectual demands of providing for the world's Foreign Offices and State Departments. This article tells part of the story of how this came to be so by revisiting the historiography of the discipline and an early debate between Harold Laski and Hans Morgenthau. What I will show here is that Morgenthau's Schmittian-informed theory of the nation state was diametrically opposed to Laski's Proudhon-informed pluralist state theory. Morgenthau's success and the triumph of Realism structured the subsequent evolution of the discipline. What was to characterise the early stages of this evolution was IR's professional and intellectual statism. The subsequent historiography of the discipline has also played a part in retrospectively keeping anarchism out. This article demonstrates how a return to this early debate and the historiography of the discipline opens up a little more room for anarchism in contemporary IR and suggests further avenues for research. Adapted from the source document.

In July 2010 a conference was convened at the University of Bristol on the theme of 'Anarchism and World Politics'. This short article introduces and contextualises the five papers selected for publication from the 16 presented at that conference alongside the commissioned contribution from Professor Richard Falk. The aim here is to set out some of the broad concerns of anarchist scholarship and practice, to demonstrate the pertinence of anarchist thinking to International Relations (IR) and a not inconsiderable tradition of thinking about world politics from an anarchist perspective.

David Held's international political theory is an echo of many of the core ideas at the heart of the anarchist tradition. These include an attempt to mediate a course between liberalism and Marxism, the centrality of the principle of autonomy to his political theory, a similar critique of the state and the economy based on this principle, and a vision for politics that is decentralised, multi-level and federal. The core differences revolve around a different reading of the history of state formation, the centrality of the democratic legal state to Held's work and the rejection of the same by the anarchists. From an anarchist perspective, it is internally contradictory for Held to call for the continued existence of the institution which has historically been the antithesis of autonomy — the state. I will argue that because he has not taken the anarchist literature seriously, his defence of the state is left open to an anarchist critique. My argument will be that anarchy, rather than the state, is the precondition of autonomy. My dual aim with this article is to help bring anarchism in from the cold and to show where anarchist theory and contemporary cosmopolitanism might fruitfully learn from one another. My conclusion is that David Held is not an anarchist, but a more consistent Heldian political philosophy would be.

AbstractAnarchism does not feature in contemporary international relations (IR) as a discreet approach to world politics because until very recently it was antithetical to the traditional use-value of a discipline largely structured around the needs and intellectual demands of providing for the world's Foreign Offices and State Departments. This article tells part of the story of how this came to be so by revisiting the historiography of the discipline and an early debate between Harold Laski and Hans Morgenthau. What I will show here is that Morgenthau's Schmittian-informed theory of the nation state was diametrically opposed to Laski's Proudhon-informed pluralist state theory. Morgenthau's success and the triumph of Realism structured the subsequent evolution of the discipline. What was to characterise the early stages of this evolution was IR's professional and intellectual statism. The subsequent historiography of the discipline has also played a part in retrospectively keeping anarchism out. This article demonstrates how a return to this early debate and the historiography of the discipline opens up a little more room for anarchism in contemporary IR and suggests further avenues for research.