A very interesting article that aligns very much with my own thinking, not that I have thought about it as much as the writer. But it has long been obvious that the state – certainly the British state – fails on every level, time and time again. (At least in China failed and corrupt officials are removed, imprisoned or killed. Here we give them promotions and knighthoods etc). And I have long said that something like the Swiss Canton model of local democracy is the one to follow.
The trans-national organisations are every bit as repulsive as the state, a magnet for the ambitious and useless whose main objective in life is to tell others what to do while stealing their money.
I couldn’t agree more.Being a part time resident of the wonderful land of William Tell, the Swiss Cantonal model is superb. This is as near democracy as you will ever get, and frankly way beyond the moronic demos,who make up the British population. Good point about China, that I have always ignored. Their process of let us say, ‘retribution’ has much to said for. Oh the joy of public executions in perhaps Wembley or Lords, of those vile creatures you speak of so eloquently. In Britain today, failure is a virtue, that leads to the ultimate cess pit, or as some would say the “pit of eternal stench”, the House of Lords. Sadly there is no chance whatsoever that either Boris or ‘Dom’ could or even would want to change this revolting charade, so deeply is it embedded in the British Political and Administrative psyche.
Interesting, apart from your elitist notion of the British demos. As Oxford University is proving this very week, the highly educated among us are not necessarily very bright.
I agree entirely. It can only be a matter of time before that original Temple of Wokedom, Cambridge follows.
Robert Flack
3 years ago
Essentially this is about decentralising power. The UK has been on this path since the Anglo-Saxon Witan. We now have Parish Councils, Borough Councils, Mayors of large cities and devolution. These have been brought about by quiet evolution not gobby revolution. We should continue on this path and not keep seeking a civil war. Finally I would like to point out that the EU is all about centralisation and Empire. Glad we left.
The same councils etc that impose 20mph limits on A roads, recently closed the parks, toilets, beaches and anything else they had in their control ?
Katy Randle
3 years ago
A thought-provoking article; thank you. I need to go and do more reading and thinking in this direction, and it’s a good stepping-off point.
Having lived and worked in Germany for many years, it shocked me on my return to realise quite how little voice we have in the UK on a local level. I was used to being able to grill the equivalent of local mayors and councillors on specific problems; here it seems that barriers are put up all the way, and obfuscation and powerlessness are the order of the day.
A version of the Swiss cantonal system seems like an interesting direction.
Bill Brookman
3 years ago
Another fun piece by Aris Roussinos! How do you keep it up? Ceaseless erudite PhD ramblings which I love. Each section is like a Persian miniature in its succinct beauty.
Wasted, of course, on Chaz. The place doesn’t count as a valid experiment because the city council gave the little darlings toilets. Well, anybody can run Utopia if Daddy keeps turning up to fix all the boring bits. But they managed to build a toy-town Trump-like wall round it with nicked council owned giant Lego bricks ““ Perhaps they don’t do irony.
“In northeastern Syria, a far more divided society than the UK”
Are you sure ?
Michael Sweeney
3 years ago
As an American, we have destroyed small business. The Bush to Obama transition made Banks BIGGER. This filters into everything when the facts are, “Small is beautiful”, at least in my life. Hard to understand the Syrian references, but good article.
Tom Knott
3 years ago
It’s refreshing to see anarchism discussed without pretending it’s a synonym for chaos.
Robin Lambert
3 years ago
In UK Just having More Politicians, of whatever colour ,doesn’t mean ”We are More represented” In Uk Welsh assembly,Scottish parliament are an expensive waste at £1.5billion annually from uk taxpayers,; 15 paid City mayors,9 Regional Mayors,GLA are all a wase of Whatever political hue, Unless Some Charismatic Jeffersonian leader (Small Government is best governmet) emerges. looking at Johnson,starmer,Davey,Sturgeon,Drakeford We are governed by Clowns..No wonder i haven’t voted for one of the four main parties since 1990…
Nick Whitehouse
3 years ago
I indeed found this article interesting, but perhaps not very practical. It may work in a part of a war torn country, where nearly everybody would wish to coalesce to stop outside invasion, but would it work in England in the present. After all England has been a unified country for over a thousand years, not easy to break that up. The fact that idea of regions, was firmly squashed in a referendum in the North East demonstrates that.
The idea that Guilds are wonderful, is somewhat novel. They may have started with the best of intentions to keep up standards, but they deteriorated over time to become a closed shop and stopped anything new happening. It became a means to enhance the income of the producers against the consumers.
I believe the Swiss are keen on Referendums, and I would like more of them. They would stop the politicians ganging up against the general population, although after the Brexit vote I am not sure they would be very popular in Westminster!
dichebach
3 years ago
I highly recommend anyone who wishes to comprehend why centralization seems inevitable give a read to E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s “The Nuer.” In it, he lays out what I’ve always considered his most important contribution to social science and one of the most under-appreciated models for understanding human social evolution: the concept of segmentary-opposition. This concept, wed with notions like “social cheater detection” and in-group / out-group maintenance psychological mechanisms from evolutionary psychology is where the real future of edification for social and political sciences lies in my humble opinion; but such brands of theory have been out of fashion since the 1960s. With segmentary opposition in mind, it makes sense that Rojava is functioning brilliantly in its present context: being surrounded by chaos and horror. But what happens when peace settles in? Will the solidarity (both voluntary and enforced or even coerced) remain so solid?
Vern Hughes
3 years ago
A provocative distillation of ideas that are important for the emerging new politics. The ‘anarchist’ theme is a timely corrective to the revival of statism under the guise of pro-Brexit re-affirmations of the nation state. But one can be a patriot without being a statist. Anarchism can only be a corrective to statist excess. The middle ground, between statism and anarchism, can best be found in a civil society-based politics, which may have its liberal or communitarian or social democratic or mutualist leanings, but which is firmly not statist in the full Fabian, New Labour or Big ‘C’ Conservative traditions, but not anarchic either. Voluntary association and mutualism are at its core. A civil society-based politics of this kind can genuinely claim to be ‘centrist’, rescuing centrism from the distaste which some pre-modern conservatives and post-liberal social democrats seem to share. See civilsocietypolitics.org
Tony Reardon
3 years ago
If smallish localities are going to provide services, these presumably have to be paid for by money raised from within those communities and this can be problematic. The idealists/anarchists seem to think that the wherewithal will just appear but this does not always happen and can lead to virtual ghettos.
Having lived in the U.K. , Australia and the U.S.A., I have found it very interesting to see the impact that the different local government & local property tax systems had on the various societies. England and Australia feel very similar and property taxes pay for certain local services such as refuse collection but major areas of expenditure such as education, police and health care are funded by other taxes and higher levels of government. The local controls, and thus the local differences between areas, are limited but not so in the U.S.A.
Where I lived was a wealthy township called Lake Forest just north of Chicago. Property taxes were very high which acted as a natural barrier to less well off people. The local services were excellent and the place was a pleasure to live in, if you could afford it (except perhaps for the middle of winter!). This was not a gated community, nor was it in any way explicitly exclusionary to anybody, but it did make for somewhere that felt like it could have been set up that way. For example, there are beaches on Lake Michigan and anyone can use the beaches. However, the beaches are down a steep, longish drive and the only parking at the bottom was for local residents so the practical result was that the beaches are reserved for the wealthy.
The example of Detroit shows the problems that a reliance on property taxes give rise to with a vicious spiral occurring when problems happen. Business and the middle class started moving away so taxes fell further and services collapsed leaving an extremely disadvantaged poor local population.
paul.salveson
3 years ago
A really good piece. There is much in the English political tradition that is relevant, including some of the ethical socialism pre-1914. Lancashire writer Allen Clarke wrote Effects of the Factory System advocating decentralised small units of production. Directly influenced by Tolstoy who translated the book into Russian. Edward Carpenter is better known, and also has much to offer…
benbow01
3 years ago
Anything the Left touches will fail. Communes don’t survive because they don’t work, because… Human nature. Humans are social by nature, not Socialist which is contrary to Man’s nature so has to be imposed.
Anarchy only works when it truly is… nobody shouting the odds and redistributing the sweeties plundered from one to give to another… each member of the community works in their own interest but has to serve the interests of others, not by intention or desire, but in order to become prosperous themselves.
Oh! That’s free market capitalism in a competitive environment, voluntary exchange, in order to get wealthier you have to make the other person wealthier.
It was what started the Industrial Revolution and the greatest surge in prosperity for all in the entire history of Man. But, Government could just not mind its own business and progressively has taken over many aspects provided by the competitive private sector and over which it exercise a State monopoly which everyone has to pay for even if they choose not to use. And inevitably the State attracts an ensemble of clients, on social welfare and corporate welfare.
chris forrest
3 years ago
Unherd has been a breath of fresh air in my day since being told about it, this article should be compulsive reading for all politicians. why has this Syrian AANES system been kept so quiet? Good news is not news?
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
3 years ago
One day I hope more speak up for the aristocrats (the old money families). They aren’t all bad, and I don’t know why they’ve disappeared. Maybe the new-money liberals squeezed them out. Sad.
Dan Poynton
3 years ago
What a writer/thinker this Mr Roussinos is. Makes my mind nearly explode with ideas every time.
benbow01
3 years ago
‘… Hobbes, who traces the origin of the state in the acquiescence of the mass to authority, for its own protection from anarchy and extortion?’
Thanks that reference gave me a good laugh… two minutes.
The State being ruled by a self-selecting, self-serving exclusive mob – legalised Mafia – which plunders and extorts the idiot mass, fled willingly into its open maw.
Anarchy means no head/government, not replacing one mob with another, and requires free exchange between members of a society for mutual benefit, peace and stability.
Bill Gaffney
3 years ago
Another embarrassing diatribe by this agent provocateur. Embarrassing that UnHerd publishes this tripe by this AP.
Agreed. I’ve said before, I blame the lazy tutors who should be encouraging him to reconsider his career direction. Poor boy seems to believe a large volume of words will impress readers of Unheard.
A very interesting article that aligns very much with my own thinking, not that I have thought about it as much as the writer. But it has long been obvious that the state – certainly the British state – fails on every level, time and time again. (At least in China failed and corrupt officials are removed, imprisoned or killed. Here we give them promotions and knighthoods etc). And I have long said that something like the Swiss Canton model of local democracy is the one to follow.
The trans-national organisations are every bit as repulsive as the state, a magnet for the ambitious and useless whose main objective in life is to tell others what to do while stealing their money.
I couldn’t agree more.Being a part time
resident of the wonderful land of William Tell, the Swiss Cantonal model is superb. This is as near democracy as you will ever get, and frankly way beyond the moronic demos,who make up the British population.
Good point about China, that I have always ignored. Their process of let us say, ‘retribution’ has much to said for. Oh the joy of public executions in perhaps Wembley or Lords, of those vile creatures you speak of so eloquently.
In Britain today, failure is a virtue, that leads to the ultimate cess pit, or as some would say the “pit of eternal stench”, the House of Lords.
Sadly there is no chance whatsoever that either Boris or ‘Dom’ could or
even would want to change this revolting charade, so deeply is it embedded in the British Political and Administrative psyche.
Public executions? Really? Are you mad?
Have you suffered a ‘sense of humour failure’ due to C-19? Poor chap!
Killing him softly with your words…
Interesting, apart from your elitist notion of the British demos. As Oxford University is proving this very week, the highly educated among us are not necessarily very bright.
I agree entirely. It can only be a matter of time before that original Temple of Wokedom, Cambridge follows.
Essentially this is about decentralising power. The UK has been on this path since the Anglo-Saxon Witan. We now have Parish Councils, Borough Councils, Mayors of large cities and devolution. These have been brought about by quiet evolution not gobby revolution. We should continue on this path and not keep seeking a civil war. Finally I would like to point out that the EU is all about centralisation and Empire. Glad we left.
The same councils etc that impose 20mph limits on A roads, recently closed the parks, toilets, beaches and anything else they had in their control ?
A thought-provoking article; thank you. I need to go and do more reading and thinking in this direction, and it’s a good stepping-off point.
Having lived and worked in Germany for many years, it shocked me on my return to realise quite how little voice we have in the UK on a local level. I was used to being able to grill the equivalent of local mayors and councillors on specific problems; here it seems that barriers are put up all the way, and obfuscation and powerlessness are the order of the day.
A version of the Swiss cantonal system seems like an interesting direction.
Another fun piece by Aris Roussinos! How do you keep it up? Ceaseless erudite PhD ramblings which I love. Each section is like a Persian miniature in its succinct beauty.
Wasted, of course, on Chaz. The place doesn’t count as a valid experiment because the city council gave the little darlings toilets. Well, anybody can run Utopia if Daddy keeps turning up to fix all the boring bits. But they managed to build a toy-town Trump-like wall round it with nicked council owned giant Lego bricks ““ Perhaps they don’t do irony.
Unbelievably, my son’s ex-fiancée is one of them. She’s lovely, and she’s got a brain so she must know the word irony (and infantilism), and she’s got a Fine Art degree and a post-grad Fine Art degree from London AND another one from a Florentine art school.
Anyway, blue-collar workers will clear it all up when they leave all their mess behind.
you were right
“In northeastern Syria, a far more divided society than the UK”
Are you sure ?
As an American, we have destroyed small business. The Bush to Obama transition made Banks BIGGER. This filters into everything when the facts are, “Small is beautiful”, at least in my life. Hard to understand the Syrian references, but good article.
It’s refreshing to see anarchism discussed without pretending it’s a synonym for chaos.
In UK Just having More Politicians, of whatever colour ,doesn’t mean ”We are More represented” In Uk Welsh assembly,Scottish parliament are an expensive waste at £1.5billion annually from uk taxpayers,; 15 paid City mayors,9 Regional Mayors,GLA are all a wase of Whatever political hue, Unless Some Charismatic Jeffersonian leader (Small Government is best governmet) emerges. looking at Johnson,starmer,Davey,Sturgeon,Drakeford We are governed by Clowns..No wonder i haven’t voted for one of the four main parties since 1990…
I indeed found this article interesting, but perhaps not very practical.
It may work in a part of a war torn country, where nearly everybody would wish to coalesce to stop outside invasion, but would it work in England in the present. After all England has been a unified country for over a thousand years, not easy to break that up.
The fact that idea of regions, was firmly squashed in a referendum in the North East demonstrates that.
The idea that Guilds are wonderful, is somewhat novel. They may have started with the best of intentions to keep up standards, but they deteriorated over time to become a closed shop and stopped anything new happening. It became a means to enhance the income of the producers against the consumers.
I believe the Swiss are keen on Referendums, and I would like more of them. They would stop the politicians ganging up against the general population, although after the Brexit vote I am not sure they would be very popular in Westminster!
I highly recommend anyone who wishes to comprehend why centralization seems inevitable give a read to E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s “The Nuer.” In it, he lays out what I’ve always considered his most important contribution to social science and one of the most under-appreciated models for understanding human social evolution: the concept of segmentary-opposition. This concept, wed with notions like “social cheater detection” and in-group / out-group maintenance psychological mechanisms from evolutionary psychology is where the real future of edification for social and political sciences lies in my humble opinion; but such brands of theory have been out of fashion since the 1960s.
With segmentary opposition in mind, it makes sense that Rojava is functioning brilliantly in its present context: being surrounded by chaos and horror. But what happens when peace settles in? Will the solidarity (both voluntary and enforced or even coerced) remain so solid?
A provocative distillation of ideas that are important for the emerging new politics. The ‘anarchist’ theme is a timely corrective to the revival of statism under the guise of pro-Brexit re-affirmations of the nation state. But one can be a patriot without being a statist. Anarchism can only be a corrective to statist excess. The middle ground, between statism and anarchism, can best be found in a civil society-based politics, which may have its liberal or communitarian or social democratic or mutualist leanings, but which is firmly not statist in the full Fabian, New Labour or Big ‘C’ Conservative traditions, but not anarchic either. Voluntary association and mutualism are at its core. A civil society-based politics of this kind can genuinely claim to be ‘centrist’, rescuing centrism from the distaste which some pre-modern conservatives and post-liberal social democrats seem to share. See civilsocietypolitics.org
If smallish localities are going to provide services, these presumably have to be paid for by money raised from within those communities and this can be problematic. The idealists/anarchists seem to think that the wherewithal will just appear but this does not always happen and can lead to virtual ghettos.
Having lived in the U.K. , Australia and the U.S.A., I have found it very interesting to see the impact that the different local government & local property tax systems had on the various societies. England and Australia feel very similar and property taxes pay for certain local services such as refuse collection but major areas of expenditure such as education, police and health care are funded by other taxes and higher levels of government. The local controls, and thus the local differences between areas, are limited but not so in the U.S.A.
Where I lived was a wealthy township called Lake Forest just north of Chicago. Property taxes were very high which acted as a natural barrier to less well off people. The local services were excellent and the place was a pleasure to live in, if you could afford it (except perhaps for the middle of winter!). This was not a gated community, nor was it in any way explicitly exclusionary to anybody, but it did make for somewhere that felt like it could have been set up that way. For example, there are beaches on Lake Michigan and anyone can use the beaches. However, the beaches are down a steep, longish drive and the only parking at the bottom was for local residents so the practical result was that the beaches are reserved for the wealthy.
The example of Detroit shows the problems that a reliance on property taxes give rise to with a vicious spiral occurring when problems happen. Business and the middle class started moving away so taxes fell further and services collapsed leaving an extremely disadvantaged poor local population.
A really good piece. There is much in the English political tradition that is relevant, including some of the ethical socialism pre-1914. Lancashire writer Allen Clarke wrote Effects of the Factory System advocating decentralised small units of production. Directly influenced by Tolstoy who translated the book into Russian. Edward Carpenter is better known, and also has much to offer…
Anything the Left touches will fail. Communes don’t survive because they don’t work, because… Human nature. Humans are social by nature, not Socialist which is contrary to Man’s nature so has to be imposed.
Anarchy only works when it truly is… nobody shouting the odds and redistributing the sweeties plundered from one to give to another… each member of the community works in their own interest but has to serve the interests of others, not by intention or desire, but in order to become prosperous themselves.
Oh! That’s free market capitalism in a competitive environment, voluntary exchange, in order to get wealthier you have to make the other person wealthier.
It was what started the Industrial Revolution and the greatest surge in prosperity for all in the entire history of Man. But, Government could just not mind its own business and progressively has taken over many aspects provided by the competitive private sector and over which it exercise a State monopoly which everyone has to pay for even if they choose not to use. And inevitably the State attracts an ensemble of clients, on social welfare and corporate welfare.
Unherd has been a breath of fresh air in my day since being told about it, this article should be compulsive reading for all politicians. why has this Syrian AANES system been kept so quiet? Good news is not news?
One day I hope more speak up for the aristocrats (the old money families). They aren’t all bad, and I don’t know why they’ve disappeared. Maybe the new-money liberals squeezed them out. Sad.
What a writer/thinker this Mr Roussinos is. Makes my mind nearly explode with ideas every time.
‘… Hobbes, who traces the origin of the state in the acquiescence of the mass to authority, for its own protection from anarchy and extortion?’
Thanks that reference gave me a good laugh… two minutes.
The State being ruled by a self-selecting, self-serving exclusive mob – legalised Mafia – which plunders and extorts the idiot mass, fled willingly into its open maw.
Anarchy means no head/government, not replacing one mob with another, and requires free exchange between members of a society for mutual benefit, peace and stability.
Another embarrassing diatribe by this agent provocateur. Embarrassing that UnHerd publishes this tripe by this AP.
Agreed. I’ve said before, I blame the lazy tutors who should be encouraging him to reconsider his career direction. Poor boy seems to believe a large volume of words will impress readers of Unheard.