Recipient organisationUniversity of ExeterSource-published name: University of Exeter
Funding£13K
PeriodNov 2025 — May 2026
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Anarchist thinkers from the 19th and early 20th centuries left detailed plans for how societies could govern themselves without a central state—and this project digs through their original letters, pamphlets, and manuscripts to recover those forgotten constitutional designs. Why this matters: Liberal democracy is under strain, and state socialism has largely failed. The project argues that anarchism’s core idea—decentralised federalism, where communities govern themselves through voluntary, federated networks—offers a practical alternative that balances freedom and equality. Yet most modern political theory ignores these historical blueprints because the primary sources are scattered and hard to access. This research fills that gap by consulting the Paul Avrich Collection at the Library of Congress, the world’s richest archive of anarchist writings. Potential impact: If the project succeeds, it could inject concrete, historically grounded models of decentralised governance into contemporary debates on devolution, indigenous rights, subsidiarity, and economic inequality. These ideas might influence how policymakers think about regional autonomy, cooperative ownership, or community-led decision-making. The work is primarily fundamental political theory—it will not directly change a law or a supply chain tomorrow—but by recovering lost constitutional principles, it could reshape the intellectual toolkit available for rethinking how power and resources are distributed.
View original technical description
Freedom and equality are two of the most important values of modern political thought. Their realisation is the aspiration underlying how our contemporary political and economic institutions are organised today. Rival schools of thought, such as liberalism, socialism, and libertarianism, weigh these values differently and put more emphasis on one over the other. With the failure of state socialism and the crisis of liberal democracy, there is a significant need for an alternative approach that delivers both equality and liberty. This project draws from anarchism, an anti-statist and anti-capitalist political thought that emphasises both values through self-government and decentralised federalism. Classical anarchists envisioned and described types of political systems that can emancipate people from the structures of economic oppression, and remove the coercive, centralised, punitive, and exploitative agency of the nation state. This project argues that the anarchist political economy of decentralised federalism is relevant to our contemporary political and economic problems, more than ever, and speaks to questions of devolution, asymmetric federalism, subsidiarity, inequality, justice, indigenous rights, and multiculturalism. By consulting the unique resources only available at the Library of Congress (LoC), particularly the Paul Avrich Collection, I will be tracing the evolution of decentralised federalist principles in the 19th and early 20th century anarchist movement, through primary texts, correspondences, and secondary sources on Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rocker, Woodcock, Berneri, Goldman, and Ward. Incorporating these rare historical materials will not only enhance my research, but also make it more relevant to the contemporary public and scholarly discussions on federalism.
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