Politics, Government and the State 85
state as a concentrated form of oppression: it reflects nothing more than
the desire of those in power, often loosely referred to as a ‘ruling class’, to
subordinate others for their own benefit. In the words of the nineteenthcentury
Russian anarchist, Michael Bakunin (1814–76), the state is ‘the
most flagrant, the most cynical and the most complete negation of
humanity’. Even modern anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard
simply dismiss the state as a ‘criminal band’ or ‘protection racket’, which
has no legitimate claim to exercise authority over the individual. Modern
anarchists, however, are less willing than the classic anarchist thinkers to
denounce the state as nothing more than an instrument of organised
violence. In The Ecology of Freedom (1982), for instance, Murray Bookchin
(see p. 197) described the state as ‘an instilled mentality for ordering
reality’, emphasising that in addition to its bureaucratic and coercive
institutions the state is also a state of mind.