'David Apter once argued that ‘the virtue of anarchism as a doctrine is that it employs a socialist critique of capitalism with a liberal critique of socialism’ (1970: 397-398). While this is inevitably an over-simplification, for those familiar with anarchist theory and David Held’s work on cosmopolitan democracy, the argument of this paper is probably obvious. But since so few are familiar with both these literatures, the argument goes like this: David Held has ought to walk a path between and ‘Beyond Liberalism and Marxism’ (Held, 1984) and has sought to place ‘the principle of autonomy’ (1995) at the heart of his political theory. From here he has set out to recast the social democratic project in an age of globalisation (Held 2004) claiming that the liberal democratic state of the past is no longer fit for purpose and unregulated free markets are not conducive to human flourishing.
These empirical arguments are responded to politically and normatively by renegotiating the social democratic project. What this means in practice is that Held seeks to redeploy the instruments of national, subnational and transnational democratic processes, constituted by ‘multilayered citizenship’ (and institutions through which these democratic impulses are to be realised) in the interests of casting a new compromise between state, capital and labour (ibid: 13-14) and one that meets the ethical principles of cosmopolitan democracy. Viewed from the perspective of only the last, social democratic part of this summary, David Held is clearly not an anarchist. However, if we focus on the first part of the summary, look more closely at his attempt to move beyond liberalism and Marxism, his defence of autonomy, and then the attempt to recast democracy in radically new ways, things become a little less clear. Indeed, if we take his political and theoretical argument to what I will argue to be more logical conclusions, then the defence of social democracy becomes less obviously warranted and more room is opened up for an anarchist intervention in this debate about globalisation and the polis of the future. I will argue that David Held is not an anarchist, but taking his arguments to their logical conclusions suggest he could be.'