Alex Prichard

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• PhD
• Professor of International Political Theory at University of Exeter

Published in 1861, War and Peace is arguably the first socialist account of the causes of war and the principles of international right. It was also highly controversial, proposing a theory of a tacit right of force in history and society, one which underpins all systems of right and is exercised most brutally in war. All law, Proudhon argued, is a...

Anarchism is a lived tradition of thought and practice that has shaped the world around us in striking ways. In this book, Alex Prichard takes the reader from the earliest stirrings of anarchist thinking in the 1790s through to the anarchist themes in contemporary art and popular culture. Along the way we learn about the emergence of anarcho-syndic...

Kenneth Waltz once stated, unequivocally, that, ‘I consider myself to be a Kantian, not a positivist’. I explain what Waltz might have meant by this, and how deep this professed Kantianism ran. Such is the depth of the engagement, I argue, that it is no exaggeration to claim that Waltz’s political philosophy, his philosophy of history, his philosop...

RESUMO Apesar de escrever quase 2.000 páginas sobre política internacional, as obras do anarquista Pierre-Joseph Proudhon simplesmente não aparecem na historiografia ou no estudo da teoria contemporânea das Relações Internacionais. Defendo que isto é injustificável, ilustrando suas convincentes e duradouras percepções sobre a história e a natureza...

Proudhon’s War and Peace. On the principle and constitution of the rights of peoples (1861 [2022]), is arguably the first extended reflection on the ethics of war in the industrial age, remains one of the only anarchist approaches to this subject, and has been almost completely ignored by mainstream academia, by those who have engaged his thinking,...

La teoría anarquista de las RRII es posiblemente la primera teoría moderna de las RRII. Si entendemos por modernidad una cosmovisión euro -céntrica, originada con la Revolución Francesa, y convertida en un ordenmundial marcadamente colonial, tecnocrático, racista, industrial, capitalis-ta y patriarcal, centrado en la proliferación y alabanza del Es...

Anarchy has been a key concept in the discipline of IR from at least the 1970s, but has much deeper roots in the social contract tradition stretching back to the late middle ages. In this context, the debates that the concept has generated have been epochal and claim to make sense of some of the most pressing problems of our time, from sovereignty...

This volume describes the various movements and thinkers who wanted social change without state intervention. It covers cases in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The first part discusses early egalitarian experiments and ideologies in Asia, Europe and the Islamic world, and then moves to early socialist thinkers in Britain, France, and German...

This short book provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. It questions standard understandings of anarchy and anarchism as an ideology of chaos and disorder, and sheds new light on anarchism as a lived set of prefigurative practices, with a rich historical legacy. The book explores anarchist approaches to public health p...

This short book provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. It questions standard understandings of anarchy and anarchism as an ideology of chaos and disorder, and sheds new light on anarchism as a lived set of prefigurative practices, with a rich historical legacy. The book explores anarchist approaches to public health p...

This short book provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. It questions standard understandings of anarchy and anarchism as an ideology of chaos and disorder, and sheds new light on anarchism as a lived set of prefigurative practices, with a rich historical legacy. The book explores anarchist approaches to public health p...

This short book provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. It questions standard understandings of anarchy and anarchism as an ideology of chaos and disorder, and sheds new light on anarchism as a lived set of prefigurative practices, with a rich historical legacy. The book explores anarchist approaches to public health p...

This short book provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. It questions standard understandings of anarchy and anarchism as an ideology of chaos and disorder, and sheds new light on anarchism as a lived set of prefigurative practices, with a rich historical legacy. The book explores anarchist approaches to public health p...

This short book provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. It questions standard understandings of anarchy and anarchism as an ideology of chaos and disorder, and sheds new light on anarchism as a lived set of prefigurative practices, with a rich historical legacy. The book explores anarchist approaches to public health p...

I begin by offering a brief summary of Proudhon’s argument, and make the case that War and Peace is one of the first socialist expositions of the philosophy of war, history, and right. It is this aspect of the text that I then trace through its subsequent intellectual history in the third part, tracing War and Peace through the works of Tolstoy, Ge...

Anarchist organising is often considered a contradiction in terms. It's not. Those who refuse to organise with bosses, representatives and states are obliged to develop original, direct and more participatory methods for organising. Anarchic Agreements shares years of experience of working with and in anarchist organisations and outlines a new prac...

Neste artigo recuperamos temas republicanos, como não dominação, tirania e escravidão, no anar-quismo clássico, para expor os limites da revitalização republicana neorromana contemporânea. Para anarquistas, o Estado-nação moderno e a propriedade privada são antitéticos à liberdade como não dominação, atuando como limites estruturais à liberdade em...

Lawson advances and defends a quite conservative theory of revolutions, one which is methodologically and normatively statist. In other words, if the revolutionary groups are not concerned with capturing state power, they do not feature in the analysis. What concerns me in particular is the absence of the anarchists and anarchism in the analysis. T...

In this essay, my aim is to clear some ground for thinking about global ethics from an anarchist point of view. With one or two exceptions (Falk 1978, 2010, Weiss 1975, Gaby 2008, Prichard 2013), anarchism has had no voice in academic debates about the means and ends of global justice, even though broad swaths of the global justice movement is toda...

Anarchism and Marxism are the central tendencies through which left wing praxis has been articulated. Building on previous work that examined the history of the convergence and divide between these two tendencies (Prichard, Kinna, Pinta and Berry 2012), and the philosophical and political grammar of this convergence and divide today (Prichard and W...

Is it possible to write a publishable, peer-reviewed academic paper in a day? We attempted this task in 2016, motivated by a desire to find new ways of doing academic work in the face of our growing sense of alienation within the neoliberal academy. This paper provides our analysis of academic alienation and an auto-ethnography of our experiment. W...

In this article we recover the classical anarchist deployment of republican tropes of non-domination, tyranny and slavery, to expose the conservative limits of the contemporary neo-Roman republican revival. For the anarchists, the modern nation state and the institution of private property are antithetical to freedom as non-domination, acting as st...

In this chapter I survey the ways in which anarchists have understood the concept of freedom. I argue that anarchists have understood freedom in three ways, which often overlap and combine. Anarchists understand freedom negatively, as freedom from domination, positively, in terms of the enabling conditions of freedom, and freedom with or freedom in...

This paper provides the first comparative reading of the minutes of the General Assemblies of three iconic Occupy camps: Wall Street, Oakland and London. It challenges detractors who have labelled the Occupy Wall Street movement a flash-in-the-pan protest, and participant-advocates who characterised the movement anti-constitutional. Developing new...

While international relations scholars make many claims about violence, they rarely define the concept. This article develops a typology of three distinct kinds of violence: direct, indirect, and pacification. Direct violence occurs when a person or agent inflicts harm on another. Indirect violence manifests through the structures of society. We pr...

While International Relations scholars make many claims about violence, they rarely define the concept. To address this gap, this article develops a typology of three distinct kinds of violence: direct, indirect, and pacification. Direct violence is when a person or agent inflicts harm on another. Indirect violence is manifested through the structu...

The fact that anarchist ideas in the nineteenth century developed within a culturally diverse and geographically diffuse group of autodidacts and political revolutionaries rather than professional philosophers may go some way toward explaining their eclectic and unorthodox character. Motivated by a common disgust with bourgeois thought and its fail...

In this concluding chapter I want to explore some of the problems that come with classifying IR theory in the way we do. I want to open up a problem. Why is it we call theories of world politics theories and not ideologies? To answer this question I will engage in a bit of metatheory – that is, theory about theory – to expose some of the complexiti...

How do anarchists constitutionalise? How should anarchists constitutionalise? This short book develops the results of a research project trying to answer the first question into a set of simple principles and practices to answer the second.

Modern IR theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border wars, and internally disaggre...

In this introduction to the Special Issue, we undertake a little ground clearing in order to make room in international relations for thinking differently about anarchy and world politics. Anarchy’s roots in, and association with, social contract theory and the state of nature has unduly narrowed how we might understand the concept and its potentia...

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...

In this article, we argue that despite there being little evidence of an ideological convergence between Marxism and anarchism, such a convergence is not only sorely needed, but also eminently possible. We propose an open discussion on the appropriate terms of such a convergence, the context in which it should take place, and the reasons why it sho...

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first to clearly articulate a political philosophy of anarchism. Born in the Franche-Comté region of France, Pierre-Joseph's father was a cooper and his mother a cook. Proudhon's schooling was cut short due to the family's poverty, but when he later took work with a notable local printing press he taught himself Latin...

In this article I argue that the contemporary normative analysis of EU foreign policy is predominantly Kantian. This, I argue, is highly problematic, because at the heart of Kantian and neo-Kanitan accounts of ethics is a moral universalism that ought not to animate EU foreign policy unless that foreign policy desires to be neo-colonial. I set out...

The writings of the anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1890-1865) can be used to explore key concepts of order and formal organization within political systems and international relations as a whole. The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon provides a methodologically rigorous, contextualised account of the first extens...

The history of the left is usually told as one of factionalism and division. This collection of essays casts new light on this history showing in more detail how the boundaries between marxism and anarchism have been more porous and more productive than is conventionally recognized. Bringing together original and ground-breaking pieces on some of t...

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 te...

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...

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 vis...

Anarchist practice is localist and anarchist theory has generally followed in its disregard for the structures of global politics and the ways in which these undermine the possibility of the anarchist ideals. In this paper I set out one set of reasons as to why this state of affairs has come about and go back to the origins of anarchist thought to...

In this chapter I will set out a general introduction to the ethical foundations of Proudhon’s anarchism. I will contextualise it within Proudhon’s own intellectual development, the arguments his contemporaries and near contemporaries were making, and against the socio-historical background of late-nineteenth-century France. This aspect of his thou...

The influence of the anarchist writer and political philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon on his times, and his importance within and for understanding the two centuries since his birth, has been the subject of major controversy, due to three main features of his life and writings. First, Proudhon was the first to openly declare himself as an anarchis...

Francisco Pi y Margall, born in the Spanish region of Catalonia in 1824, became the president of the first Spanish Republic in 1871. Despite the strong separatist and nationalist character of its leading politicians, Pi never fully identified with the Catalan cause. Pi was a federalist, but a doctrinaire one. His ideas were formed by two main figur...

This book chapter is from the book, Contemporary Anarchist Studies [© Routledge]: http://www.routledge.com/books/Contemporary-Anarchist-Studies-isbn9780415474023 Accepted for publication

Despite penning nearly 2000 pages on international politics, the works of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon simply do not feature in either the historiography or the study of contemporary IR theory. I argue that this is unjustified by illustrating his compelling and enduring insights into the history and nature of `the international'. Proudhon e...