The point of comparing agorism and progressivism is not that they overlap, because they barely do, but that they offer the cleanest contrast between two ways of approaching the same machine. Konkin looked at the regulatory-administrative state and concluded that the only path to a free society ran through starving it. Lippmann, Croly, Addams, and the rest of the Progressive Era looked at the same machine and concluded that the only path to a humane society ran through funding it properly and staffing it with people who knew what they were doing. Both traditions are American, both are 20th-century inventions in their self-conscious forms, and both have produced influential ideas that are alive in 2026 in transformed shape. The contrast is therefore live in a way that comparing more distant traditions is not.
TL;DR
- Agorism wants to scale counter-economic activity until the state cannot fund itself; progressivism wants to fund the regulatory commission properly and let it manage industrial capitalism.
- Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto (1980) is the founding agorist text; Croly's Promise of American Life (1909) and Lippmann's Drift and Mastery (1914) are the canonical progressive ones.
- The contemporary agorist tradition lives in crypto-libertarian and Center for a Stateless Society circles; contemporary progressivism lives in the post-2010 Democratic Party left, the Working Families Party, the foundation-funded policy world, and large parts of academic political science.
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Agorism | Progressivism |
|---|---|---|
| Economic vision | Voluntary networks coordinated through counter-economic activity outside state regulation | Regulated capitalism with administrative agencies managing concentrated corporate power |
| View of state | The largest single barrier to a free society; the goal is to starve it of revenue and legitimacy | An indispensable instrument for managing industrial-capitalist dislocation; the goal is to staff it competently |
| Origin | Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto (1980); J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night (1979) | American Progressive Era (1890s-1920s); Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose campaign |
| Modern champions | Cryptocurrency-libertarian writers, Center for a Stateless Society, the Movement of the Libertarian Left | Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the Squad, Lina Khan's FTC, the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for American Progress |
| Internal tension | Crypto delivered the technology Konkin predicted but the political results have been mixed | The administrative-state apparatus has proved harder to staff competently than the founders assumed |
Where they agree
The agreement is empirical rather than political. Both traditions take seriously the observation that concentrated corporate power and concentrated state power are linked, and that the relationship between them is rarely the arm's-length contest the textbook version assumes. Konkin wrote about regulatory capture from a libertarian vantage in the 1970s; the progressive tradition has been writing about it since Lippmann's Drift and Mastery (1914). The contemporary Brandeisian anti-trust revival around Lina Khan, Tim Wu, and the Khan-era FTC reads the empirical material the same way agorists do: that the regulatory state, as actually constituted, often serves the firms it regulates rather than constrains them. They diverge sharply on the implication. Agorists conclude that the state itself is the problem and the only response is to starve it. Progressives conclude that the state is the only instrument capable of constraining concentrated private power and the response is to staff it with people who will use it correctly.
Both traditions also share a skepticism of professional electoral politics as the principal site of meaningful change. The progressive tradition's faith in technocratic administration rests on the assumption that elected officials cannot themselves do the detailed work that running a complex industrial economy requires. Konkin's faith in counter-economic activity rests on the parallel assumption that voting cannot produce changes the state will let stand. Both look past the legislature to the institutional infrastructure underneath: the progressive looks at administrative agencies, the agorist looks at the market activity that operates outside the agencies' reach.
A third area of agreement is over the limitations of contemporary American political vocabulary. Both traditions feel out of place inside the contemporary two-party system. Progressives have a partisan home in the Democratic Party but spend most of their political energy fighting Democratic moderates. Agorists have no partisan home at all, and the closest thing they have is the rotating insurgent presence inside the Libertarian Party that lost most of its institutional infrastructure to the Mises Caucus takeover in 2022. The shared sense of being political orphans is not a basis for political alliance, but it is a recognisable common condition.
Where they diverge
The deepest divergence is over what political institutions are for. The progressive tradition treats public institutions as the proper site of collective action on problems markets cannot solve alone: child labor, monopoly power, environmental contamination, racial segregation, urban poverty. The Progressive Era's catalog of legislative achievements (the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Federal Reserve Act, the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, the Pure Food and Drug Act) reflects a serious bet that public institutions can deliver social goods that voluntary cooperation cannot. Agorism treats the same institutions as the principal source of the problems they claim to address. Konkin would read the FTC Act as a barrier-to-entry mechanism that protects established firms from new competition, not as a constraint on concentrated corporate power.
A second divergence runs through what counts as the relevant unit of analysis. Progressivism thinks in terms of populations, cohorts, and statistical distributions, because that is what the administrative state can act on. Agorism thinks in terms of individuals, transactions, and voluntary networks, because that is what counter-economic activity actually consists of. The progressive looks at a regulatory question (say, drug safety) and asks how the system can deliver acceptable risk across the whole population. The agorist looks at the same question and asks how the individual can be left free to make their own assessment of the trade-off. Both answers have intellectual integrity; neither addresses the question the other is asking.
A third divergence is over what the empirical record says. Progressives point to the major social-policy achievements of the post-1933 period (Social Security, the Wagner Act, the GI Bill, Medicare, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the Affordable Care Act, the Inflation Reduction Act) as evidence that the program works. Agorists point to the steady growth of the unreported and informal economy across the same period as evidence that the population has been voting with its feet against state economic management. The two readings of the same period are not entirely incompatible. Both can be true. But they point in opposite directions for what to do next.
A fourth divergence is over the role of cryptocurrency. The post-2009 Bitcoin and broader crypto movement is closer to a working implementation of Konkin's strategy than anything earlier libertarians produced. The decentralized-finance, encrypted-communications, and peer-to-peer commercial infrastructure that has grown up since 2010 carries the agorist analytical framework into territories the state has not figured out how to fully tax or regulate. Progressives, by contrast, treat cryptocurrency mostly as a regulatory problem. The progressive policy program for crypto looks like the Securities and Exchange Commission program for the rest of finance: disclosure rules, anti-fraud enforcement, consumer protection. The two traditions are not even using the same vocabulary about the same technology.
Who tends to hold each view
Agorists in 2026 are a small intellectual current with disproportionate cultural reach. The Movement of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society in Arkansas are the named institutional homes. The cryptocurrency-maximalist communities (especially around Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and crypto-privacy infrastructure) carry the analytical content to a much larger audience that mostly does not know the name. The audience tends younger, more technologically oriented, more skeptical of formal political institutions, and includes both libertarian-leaning and post-libertarian writers. Cody Wilson's work on 3D-printed firearms and on cryptocurrency development is the contemporary case of explicit agorist activity at institutional scale.
Progressives in 2026 are the dominant intellectual current inside the post-2010 American Democratic Party left and the broader center-left ecosystem in Europe. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the Squad anchor the Congressional presence. The Center for American Progress, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute carry the policy infrastructure. Lina Khan's FTC and the broader Brandeisian anti-trust revival inside academia are the contemporary intellectual home of the Progressive Era anti-monopoly tradition. The audience tends older than the agorist one, more institutionally embedded, more comfortable with formal political process, and much more politically influential.
What the Votely quiz would say
The quiz reads agorism as far down the libertarian half of the governance axis and roughly neutral on the economic axis (the strategic vehicle is markets, but the markets it cares about are counter-economic ones operating outside the regulated sector). It reads progressivism as more authority-accepting on the governance axis and clearly to the economic left, with a strong commitment to administrative-state instruments. A test-taker who scores high on both is reading the same political environment and reaching opposite conclusions about what to do, which is rare but not unheard of in the libertarian-left tradition that overlaps both vocabularies.