Banality and Iniquity: Some Objections to Anarchism Rossella Di Leo (1996)

“Anarchy? Beautiful, but impossible!” “Authority is necessary to go beyond the state of nature and organize society!” These are some of the objections commonly put forward against anarchist political thought by those who see the state as the only possible organizing principle of society. Di Leo takes these objections seriously, asking some key questions: are these arguments well grounded? Are they rooted in the will to exorcise the most radical conceptions of freedom and equality ever conceptualized? Di Leo deconstructs and denaturalizes some of the most prominent commonplace arguments that have been leveraged against anarchism over many years.