The Freedom to Live Together

We live in a society in which the state exercises supreme political authority within its territory. It makes laws to which everyone is subject, organises common services and ultimately possesses the power to enforce its decisions through coercion, even against those who have never personally consented to them. We have come to regard this territorially organised state power as the necessary centre of our social order, the institution that must unite the divergent interests of individuals and groups into a coherent whole. Yet when we also recognise that every human being possesses original and inalienable rights—rights not bestowed by the state—a question arises that reaches beyond the organisation of government. Have we, in organising society, become too accustomed to assuming that common interests can be pursued only where a political power exists with the authority to impose its decisions upon everyone? Have we perhaps conflated two things that ought, by their very nature, to remain distinct: the necessity for people to cooperate and the supposed necessity for them to be subject to a higher political authority in order to do so?

After all, it was not the state that created the human capacity for cooperation. Long before the modern state acquired its present form, people formed communities, divided responsibilities, developed mutual obligations and established social organisations. Even today, a considerable part of our social life rests upon cooperation that is not continuously prescribed by political authority. People establish enterprises, form associations, develop shared facilities and enter into agreements in which they themselves determine the ends they wish to pursue together. Rules, relationships of authority and obligations may arise from these activities, but they need not necessarily originate in a political power that dictates from outside how cooperation must be organised. The capacity for social organisation belongs to human beings themselves. Why, then, should we assume that the state must be the original source of the authority to act collectively?

Here, perhaps, lies an opportunity to approach the tension between individual human rights and collective interests from an entirely different perspective. What would happen if we ceased to regard social order primarily as a whole governed by a central political authority, and instead conceived it as a plurality of independent associations in which people pursue common purposes by voluntary agreement? When such associations establish their own rules, allocate responsibilities and undertake obligations—not because a higher power grants them permission, but because the individuals involved possess the right to organise themselves—a different relationship between individual and collective begins to emerge. The collective is no longer treated as an independent source of rights against its members, but derives its authority from the people who constitute it. Individual freedom is then not sacrificed to the possibility of cooperation; it becomes the very foundation upon which cooperation rests.

We call this principle autonomism: a social order founded upon sovereignty, self-organisation and polycentric governance. What distinguishes this idea is that it prescribes no particular political, economic or social arrangement. It does not demand that people adopt a free-market economy, nor that they organise their society along socialist or communist lines. Those who freely wish to associate in order to hold the means of production in common and distribute the fruits of their joint labour according to mutually agreed rules should be just as free to do so as those who choose private property, enterprise and voluntary market relations. What matters is not the content of the social convictions people wish to realise together, but the legal and moral basis on which they are entitled to give those convictions expression through common organisation. The starting point is not what people ought to want together, but how they may live together in freedom and in a peaceful society.

This distinction deserves emphasis, precisely because we commonly judge political ideas by the social order they seek to establish. Liberalism, socialism and the many other political traditions differ substantially over the distribution of property, the relationship between markets and government, the organisation of public authority and the aims society should pursue. Whichever political current wins that contest can impose its preferences upon the rest of the population.

Autonomism operates at another level. It asks not which of these convictions should apply to everyone, but whether people holding different convictions may be free to organise their own social associations accordingly, without a single overarching political power claiming the right to subject every association to the same collective objectives. Individuals may participate simultaneously in several communities, which partly overlap and cooperate on the basis of mutual recognition of one another’s independence and legal order. This opens the possibility of a polycentric social order, in which no single supreme authority allocates all powers, but independent communities organise their relationships with one another. Political diversity then ceases to be merely a problem to be resolved through central decision-making; it also becomes an opportunity for different forms of social organisation to exist alongside—and in cooperation with—one another.

It would, of course, be naïve to suggest that all the problems of human coexistence have thereby been solved. For as soon as we take voluntary consent seriously, difficult questions present themselves. How are conflicts between independent communities to be resolved? What rules apply when their activities affect people who do not belong to them? How are facilities organised on which many depend but to which not everyone is willing to contribute? How do we prevent a community founded upon voluntary consent from gradually becoming a structure of power that subjects its members to obligations they no longer accept? And perhaps most difficult of all: what is the legal position of children born into such a community who, like the citizens of our present states, did not choose the social relationships into which they were born?

These are not peripheral questions; they go to the heart of the proposed principle. Whoever accepts voluntary consent as a foundation of legitimate authority cannot then subject individual freedom within the community to a new collective presumption. The sovereignty of a social association must not quietly become a right to dispose of its members. For why should a person, free in their own right, have to tolerate a master above them?

Nor can the independence of one community justify violating the original rights of people outside it. A social order founded upon individual freedom must therefore reconsider not only the relationship between the state and other collective bodies, but also the relationship between every collective and the individuals who compose it. Autonomism offers an alternative starting point, whose practical development calls for legal-philosophical and institutional inquiry that has scarcely begun with the statement of this principle.