Naive Anarchism as a Package Deal

Properly understood, anarchism is a legal doctrine which prohibits aggression. The naïve (or proto-) anarchist thesis lumps this in with the absence of hierarchy. We have a package deal: no aggression and no hierarchy. The two concepts do not belong together and must be analysed separately. Abolishing hierarchy would require that aggression be used against people who wish to form a hierarchy—hierarchy is a term that refers to the specific structure of society, aggression is a term that refers to a type of action, these are simply different areas of study.

We might as well say that anarchism is a doctrine that opposes aggression and the eating of chocolate ice cream on Sunday—this example makes clear why these belong to different terms: anarchism and no-chocolate-ice-cream-on-Sunday-ism. The anarcho-frogists make this same error: lumping the legal doctrine of anarchism within some other random moral belief or economic preference that they hold “I am an anarchist who likes frogs, therefore I am an anarcho-frogist.”