Center for a Stateless Society No. 17 (Winter-Spring 2014), download this study PDF Introduction: The Primacy of Everyday Life David Graeber chose, as the epigraph to his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a quote from Pyotr Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism for the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it Kropotkin stated that, in an anarchist society, harmony…

Governance, Agency and Autonomy: Anarchist Themes in the Work of Elinor Ostrom [PDF] This paper is intended as one in a series, to be read along with my previous one on James C. Scott, on anarchist and decentralist thinkers whose affection for the particularity of local, human-scale institutions overrides any doctrinaire ideological labels. The Governance…

Ostrom begins by noting the problem of natural resource depletion—what she calls “common pool resources”—and then goes on to survey three largely complementary (“closely related concepts”) major theories that attempt to explain “the many problems that individuals face when attempting to achieve collective benefits”: Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons,” the prisoner’s dilemma, and Olson’s “logic…