Den Staat zerschlagen! Anarchistische Staatsverständnisse

The evils of the state cannot be fixed through reforms, checks and balances, elections, international treaties, or virtuous politicians. Because the state is always a violent structure of domination it must be replaced by non-state social arrangements without domination. At least that is what anarchists think. This edited volume presents their diverse accounts of what the state is and does, how it came to be, and how it can be overcome.

Included are the classics Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Landauer. Additional topics are the praxis of Jewish female exiles in the US and of anarchists in the Spanish Revolution as well as the anarchist critique of violence, alienation, and civilisation. On the one hand it is shown how anarchism gives reasons for its hostility towards the state (a stance that is much more radical than Marxist or liberal critiques of the state); on the other hand weaknesses of anarchist accounts of the state become apparent.