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Wild Democracy: Anarchy, Courage, and Ruling the Law
Wild Democracy calls for a more anarchic, more courageous democracy. This is an ethic for people who know the rights they hold, and who struggle to rule themselves. This is an ethic for unfinished revolutions; an ethic for those who will not be mastered. This is an ethic for those who hold fast to the rights they have by nature. This is an ethic that requires courage.
Democracy is always a risky business; full of promise and danger. The promise is the freedom to rule ourselves. The danger is fear of the unknown, fear of the unruly, fear of one another, fear of anarchy. Fear leads to authoritarianism. The fearful look for a strong hand, a powerful leader, a protector, a gun. Anarchy leads to courage, to self-reliance, self-discipline, self-rule, and solidarity. Anarchy is the nursery of democracy. It is not anarchy we have to fear, it is authoritarianism.
We have been taught to see the people as a problem to be managed. Anne Norton sees them as a source of strength. Anarchic democracy grows springing from the everyday actions of ordinary human beings.
Liberalism and conservatism alike have turned away from the democratic, to institutions, rules, and regulations. Anne Norton turns to anarchic people who practice democratic ethics.
Democracy is always a risky business; full of promise and danger. The promise is the freedom to rule ourselves. The danger is fear of the unknown, fear of the unruly, fear of one another, fear of anarchy. Fear leads to authoritarianism. The fearful look for a strong hand, a powerful leader, a protector, a gun. Anarchy leads to courage, to self-reliance, self-discipline, self-rule, and solidarity. Anarchy is the nursery of democracy. It is not anarchy we have to fear, it is authoritarianism.
We have been taught to see the people as a problem to be managed. Anne Norton sees them as a source of strength. Anarchic democracy grows springing from the everyday actions of ordinary human beings.
Liberalism and conservatism alike have turned away from the democratic, to institutions, rules, and regulations. Anne Norton turns to anarchic people who practice democratic ethics.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
238 pages, Hardcover
Published March 7, 2023
5 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 20, 2025
Your rights are yours.
November 30, 2025
how nutty is this book?
This fragment of a book review should lay it out in spades
Waste of Trees
Waste of a Mind
Waste of your time, unless you really really like drinking bitter coffee and reading cesspools of stupidity
She's a former fanatical disciple of Leo Strauss
you have been warned
//////
The knowledge of the commons may not be common knowledge right now, but it will be one day because Anne Norton is its prophet.
'If we are to be democrats,' she says, 'we must learn anarchy.'
That means practicing the discipline needed to live with others with whom we differ and joining with others to democratize law.
Part ethics, part politics, part how-to book, Wild Democracy is a brilliant cri de coeur.
Written for readers of all classes and backgrounds, this book is a powerful, empathic call to the democracy of ungovernability needed to counter tyranny, authoritarianism, the rule of experts or judges, today's faceless algorithms, and whatever's coming next.
Bonnie Honig, author of Shell-Shocked and A Feminist Theory of Refusal
////////
Wild Democracy is a beautifully written manifesto, a path forward, a philosophical tone poem, a luscious essay, an inspiration, a very different way to see. Norton imagines what real democracy looks like - bold, anarchic, piratical - and guides us through its prospects and its pitfalls. This is the most exciting and iconoclastic book I've read in a long time.
James A. Morone, author of Republic of Wrath and Hellfire Nation
///////
Norton shows us that democracy is not stable but is always open to change. Democratic life does not coincide with voting.
Massimiliano Tomba, author of Insurgent Universality
///////
honestly I think Carl Schmitt is far less pernicious to Political Science
and he's even more right-wing than Leo Strauss ever was, or the Cheneyoids who seemed to mostly be 'students of Leo Strauss'
[Schmitt's work is considered to have influenced neoconservatism in the United States]
[Strauss - the old Neocons?]
[Schmitt - the later Neocons? ..... and a heck of a lot more]
///////
[The connection between Carl Schmitt and George W. Bush refers to scholarly arguments that Bush's post-9/11 policies, particularly the Unitary Executive Theory and the expansion of presidential power, echoed Schmitt's theories on the state of exception and a sovereign's ability to suspend the rule of law in a crisis.]
[Some analysts have pointed to this as a parallel between Bush's actions and Schmitt's justification for authoritarianism]
[Certain presidential doctrines were praised by Carl Schmitt, himself, who believed that Germany should have adopted its own Monroe Doctrine for Central Europe; the 1823 Monroe Doctrine stated that the U.S. would interpret any European intervention in the western hemisphere as an act of war.]
[The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 declared the Middle East to be a region of key strategic interest to the U.S. and Middle Eastern nations could request aid if it was threatened by armed aggression.]
[Even more specifically, the Carter Doctrine, proclaimed in 1980, zeroed in on the Persian Gulf as an area of vital interest and any attempt by an outside force to control it would be repelled by any means necessary, including military force (Brzezinski, 1983).
[Throughout the 1990s, the preponderance of American global power, defined by Charles Krauthammer (1991) as the ‘unipolar moment,’ rendered the community’s enemy as much more ambiguous and harder to define. Such a situation, Carl Schmitt thought, was dangerous and would eventually lead to the overthrow of the nation by external enemies who are more politically united against who they perceive as their enemies. Whereas the presidential doctrines of the Cold War were propagated to mobilise the community behind the president, to confront the enemy that was the Soviet Union, the Clinton Doctrine of the 1990s defined the community’s enemy as crimes against humanity which supposedly threatened the nation’s interests, but not its survival. In Clinton’s (1999) final National Security Strategy, he claimed that national interests do not affect the nation’s survival, but it must be forced to act when humanitarian abuses occur “because our values demand it” and that national interests, such as promoting human rights, “do not affect our national survival, but… do affect our national well-being and the character of the world in which we live.” For Schmitt, such thinking is a mistake and counterintuitive for the nation and the political community’s survival. Clinton, as sovereign, provides no substantive markers of identity and, therefore, undermined the community’s political existence. To perpetuate the political community and the authority of the chief executive over it – who serves as the sovereign in Schmitt’s view – a clearly identifiable enemy would be needed.]
[Carl Schmitt argued that democracy was the sole principle of legitimacy to garner mass support, the challenge was to reinterpret democracy into authoritarian terms since “the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (Dyzenhaus, 2020).]
[In conclusion, this article has demonstrated that Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political thesis, in which he defines the political distinction as being that between friends and enemies, finds a blatant expression within the Bush Doctrine.]
[This piece highlighted a unique theoretical implication, through the use of Schmitt’s philosophical prism, into how the Bush Doctrine legitimated the aggrandizement of presidential power through appealing to the friend-enemy distinction. In turn, the article has sought to convey that politics, within liberal states, has often expressed the illiberal friend-enemy distinction with great intensity to justify the ever-increasing centralisation of executive power.]
[The article, then, has been motivated to provide the IR scholarly community with a unique theoretical perspective as to how the Bush Doctrine, the propagation of which is often considered as a watershed moment in international relations, manifested at the level of the political itself.]
//////
[My point is that Leo Strauss were the old Neocons, and Schmitt were the other later neocons]
///////
[Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he was noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism.]
[His works covered political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology. However, they are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for, and active involvement with, Nazism. n 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and utilized his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime. He later lost favour among senior Nazi officials and was ultimately removed from his official positions within the party.]
[In July 1934 he published in it "The Leader Protects the Law", a justification of the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives with Hitler's authority as the "highest form of administrative justice.]
[Among other things, his work is considered to have influenced neoconservatism in the United States.]
[Most notably the legal opinions offered by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo et al. by invoking the unitary executive theory to justify the Bush administration's legally controversial decisions during the war on terror (such as introducing unlawful combatant status which purportedly would eliminate protection by the Geneva Conventions, the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program and various excesses of the Patriot Act) mimic his writings.]
[Professor David Luban points out that the American legal database Lexis has:
five references to Schmitt in the period between 1980 and 1990
114 between 1990 and 2000
420 between 2000 and 2010]
///////
“The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.... it does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
////////
“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”
Carl Schmitt
////////
“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”
Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
////////
“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”
Carl Schmitt
///////
“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
//////
“Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity . . . "Humanity" thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as "human being" thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby "asymmetrical.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
//////
“All that can justify killing is 'an existential threat to one’s own way of life.... To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.”
Carl Schmitt
//////
“If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
///////
“As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
///////
“Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
This fragment of a book review should lay it out in spades
Waste of Trees
Waste of a Mind
Waste of your time, unless you really really like drinking bitter coffee and reading cesspools of stupidity
She's a former fanatical disciple of Leo Strauss
you have been warned
//////
The knowledge of the commons may not be common knowledge right now, but it will be one day because Anne Norton is its prophet.
'If we are to be democrats,' she says, 'we must learn anarchy.'
That means practicing the discipline needed to live with others with whom we differ and joining with others to democratize law.
Part ethics, part politics, part how-to book, Wild Democracy is a brilliant cri de coeur.
Written for readers of all classes and backgrounds, this book is a powerful, empathic call to the democracy of ungovernability needed to counter tyranny, authoritarianism, the rule of experts or judges, today's faceless algorithms, and whatever's coming next.
Bonnie Honig, author of Shell-Shocked and A Feminist Theory of Refusal
////////
Wild Democracy is a beautifully written manifesto, a path forward, a philosophical tone poem, a luscious essay, an inspiration, a very different way to see. Norton imagines what real democracy looks like - bold, anarchic, piratical - and guides us through its prospects and its pitfalls. This is the most exciting and iconoclastic book I've read in a long time.
James A. Morone, author of Republic of Wrath and Hellfire Nation
///////
Norton shows us that democracy is not stable but is always open to change. Democratic life does not coincide with voting.
Massimiliano Tomba, author of Insurgent Universality
///////
honestly I think Carl Schmitt is far less pernicious to Political Science
and he's even more right-wing than Leo Strauss ever was, or the Cheneyoids who seemed to mostly be 'students of Leo Strauss'
[Schmitt's work is considered to have influenced neoconservatism in the United States]
[Strauss - the old Neocons?]
[Schmitt - the later Neocons? ..... and a heck of a lot more]
///////
[The connection between Carl Schmitt and George W. Bush refers to scholarly arguments that Bush's post-9/11 policies, particularly the Unitary Executive Theory and the expansion of presidential power, echoed Schmitt's theories on the state of exception and a sovereign's ability to suspend the rule of law in a crisis.]
[Some analysts have pointed to this as a parallel between Bush's actions and Schmitt's justification for authoritarianism]
[Certain presidential doctrines were praised by Carl Schmitt, himself, who believed that Germany should have adopted its own Monroe Doctrine for Central Europe; the 1823 Monroe Doctrine stated that the U.S. would interpret any European intervention in the western hemisphere as an act of war.]
[The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 declared the Middle East to be a region of key strategic interest to the U.S. and Middle Eastern nations could request aid if it was threatened by armed aggression.]
[Even more specifically, the Carter Doctrine, proclaimed in 1980, zeroed in on the Persian Gulf as an area of vital interest and any attempt by an outside force to control it would be repelled by any means necessary, including military force (Brzezinski, 1983).
[Throughout the 1990s, the preponderance of American global power, defined by Charles Krauthammer (1991) as the ‘unipolar moment,’ rendered the community’s enemy as much more ambiguous and harder to define. Such a situation, Carl Schmitt thought, was dangerous and would eventually lead to the overthrow of the nation by external enemies who are more politically united against who they perceive as their enemies. Whereas the presidential doctrines of the Cold War were propagated to mobilise the community behind the president, to confront the enemy that was the Soviet Union, the Clinton Doctrine of the 1990s defined the community’s enemy as crimes against humanity which supposedly threatened the nation’s interests, but not its survival. In Clinton’s (1999) final National Security Strategy, he claimed that national interests do not affect the nation’s survival, but it must be forced to act when humanitarian abuses occur “because our values demand it” and that national interests, such as promoting human rights, “do not affect our national survival, but… do affect our national well-being and the character of the world in which we live.” For Schmitt, such thinking is a mistake and counterintuitive for the nation and the political community’s survival. Clinton, as sovereign, provides no substantive markers of identity and, therefore, undermined the community’s political existence. To perpetuate the political community and the authority of the chief executive over it – who serves as the sovereign in Schmitt’s view – a clearly identifiable enemy would be needed.]
[Carl Schmitt argued that democracy was the sole principle of legitimacy to garner mass support, the challenge was to reinterpret democracy into authoritarian terms since “the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (Dyzenhaus, 2020).]
[In conclusion, this article has demonstrated that Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political thesis, in which he defines the political distinction as being that between friends and enemies, finds a blatant expression within the Bush Doctrine.]
[This piece highlighted a unique theoretical implication, through the use of Schmitt’s philosophical prism, into how the Bush Doctrine legitimated the aggrandizement of presidential power through appealing to the friend-enemy distinction. In turn, the article has sought to convey that politics, within liberal states, has often expressed the illiberal friend-enemy distinction with great intensity to justify the ever-increasing centralisation of executive power.]
[The article, then, has been motivated to provide the IR scholarly community with a unique theoretical perspective as to how the Bush Doctrine, the propagation of which is often considered as a watershed moment in international relations, manifested at the level of the political itself.]
//////
[My point is that Leo Strauss were the old Neocons, and Schmitt were the other later neocons]
///////
[Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he was noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism.]
[His works covered political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology. However, they are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for, and active involvement with, Nazism. n 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and utilized his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime. He later lost favour among senior Nazi officials and was ultimately removed from his official positions within the party.]
[In July 1934 he published in it "The Leader Protects the Law", a justification of the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives with Hitler's authority as the "highest form of administrative justice.]
[Among other things, his work is considered to have influenced neoconservatism in the United States.]
[Most notably the legal opinions offered by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo et al. by invoking the unitary executive theory to justify the Bush administration's legally controversial decisions during the war on terror (such as introducing unlawful combatant status which purportedly would eliminate protection by the Geneva Conventions, the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program and various excesses of the Patriot Act) mimic his writings.]
[Professor David Luban points out that the American legal database Lexis has:
five references to Schmitt in the period between 1980 and 1990
114 between 1990 and 2000
420 between 2000 and 2010]
///////
“The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.... it does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
////////
“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”
Carl Schmitt
////////
“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”
Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
////////
“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”
Carl Schmitt
///////
“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
//////
“Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity . . . "Humanity" thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as "human being" thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby "asymmetrical.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
//////
“All that can justify killing is 'an existential threat to one’s own way of life.... To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.”
Carl Schmitt
//////
“If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
///////
“As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
///////
“Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
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October 22, 2025i printed this out and used LOTS of my printing dollars … will be invoicing prof
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