Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Mutual Exchange Radio


The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS.org) is an anarchist think-tank and media center. Its mission is to explain and defend the idea of vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority.

In particular, it seeks to enlarge public understanding and transform public perceptions of anarchism, while reshaping academic and movement debate, through the production and distribution of market anarchist media content, both scholarly and popular.

It is also the home of Mutual Exchange Radio, a new podcast on anarchist thought, hosted by Zachary Woodman. The show brings together a wide variety of guests, from academics, to on-the-ground activists, to Center scholars, to entrepreneurs to discuss the latest developments in the philosophy and practice of market anarchism.

Jul 30, 2019

Welcome to Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Joining me today is Will Gillis. Will is the director of the Center and is a second generation anarchist who’s worked as an activist in countless projects since getting involved in the lead-up to N30. He studies physics and writes regularly on the egalitarian potential of markets. His writing can be found on his website, humaniterations.net, as well as on C4SS.org.

Today’s discussion centers around a technical topic in political philosophy that has utmost importance for real-world political movements and many ideological debates: the distinction between positive and negative liberty. Will positions himself as defending a universalist conception of positive liberty as primary and against particularly neo-Lockean libertarian views that place negative liberty as fundamental, but in many ways he comes at it from a different, more highly consequentialist perspective than most theorists. He also has some interesting theories for how a heavy priority on negative liberty has lead many American libertarians towards alt-right and fascist perspectives. This was a fun, philosophically exciting conversation and I hope it is as thought-provoking for you as it was for me. Be warned though, it is a long one which is necessary since we covered a lot of ground and Will takes a lot of great philosophical sophistication and thoughtfulness into his views, which I hope comes across here.