The two traditions sharing the "anarcho-" prefix here are about as far apart as any pair in this dossier collection. Anarchism in its dominant social-anarchist form, descending from Bakunin and Kropotkin through Goldman and Graeber, rejects state and capitalism together and treats hierarchical authority as the political problem in nearly all its forms. Anarcho-feudalism, in its serious-engagement form, rejects the central state and treats hierarchical authority inside privately owned jurisdictions as the program. Both traditions can be described as anti-state, and that is the only thing they share. The shared label is a source of considerable contemporary confusion, and untangling the two is one of the cleaner exercises in seeing what "rejecting the state" can actually mean.
TL;DR
- Both traditions reject the state. The social-anarchist tradition rejects hierarchy generally; anarcho-feudalism accepts private-sovereign hierarchy inside competing jurisdictions.
- The thought-experiment form of anarcho-feudalism is the Nozickian critique of anarcho-capitalism: competing protection agencies converge into state-like or feudal patterns under stress.
- The serious-engagement form (Yarvin patchwork, Hoppe covenant communities, Srinivasan network states) treats those same patterns as the design specification.
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Anarchism | Anarcho-Feudalism |
|---|---|---|
| Founding figures | Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Graeber | Yarvin (Moldbug), Hoppe, Srinivasan, Gebel |
| View of hierarchy | Rejected, including private hierarchies | Accepted inside competing private jurisdictions |
| View of capitalism | Rejected (social-anarchist form) | Accepted and intensified through private sovereignty |
| Coordination mechanism | Federated voluntary association, mutual aid | Competing jurisdictions with individual exit |
| Reference case | Rojava, Zapatistas, Spanish CNT 1936 | Próspera (Honduras); Yarvin patchwork (theoretical) |
| Contemporary milieu | Post-Occupy, mutual-aid networks, anarchist press | Tech-right networks, crypto-aligned investors, Thiel circle |
Where they agree
The agreement is narrow but real. Both traditions reject the central state as currently constituted. Both treat consent as analytically important, even if they mean very different things by it. Both share an intellectual ecosystem with broader libertarian and post-libertarian writing, and both engage with the cryptocurrency and decentralised-technology milieu, even where they read the technology's political implications in opposite directions. The contemporary crypto-political environment contains writers and projects that can be read as either anarchist or anarcho-feudal depending on which features one foregrounds, and the labels are not always self-applied.
The methodological agreement runs through skepticism of state-administrative coordination. Both traditions are confident that the modern state is too large, too bureaucratic, and too remote from the people it claims to serve. Both treat exit, in different forms, as analytically important: anarchists treat the ability to leave a coercive arrangement as evidence that the arrangement was never legitimate, and anarcho-feudalists treat the ability to leave a jurisdiction as the accountability mechanism that disciplines bad governance. The frameworks share a vocabulary about voluntary association even where the underlying content differs.
The shared diagnostic also includes a real critique of the failure modes of liberal-democratic governance. Both traditions hold that contemporary state institutions have been captured by interests that are not the interests of the people the institutions claim to serve, that the procedural-democratic infrastructure has degraded in ways the official self-understanding does not admit, and that some alternative arrangement is required. The two traditions disagree fundamentally about what the alternative looks like, but they share the diagnostic premise.
Where they diverge
The divergence is total on the question of hierarchy. Anarchism in its dominant social-anarchist form treats hierarchical authority as the political problem in nearly all its forms. Bakunin's expulsion from the First International in 1872 was partly about Marx's centralism, but it was also about Bakunin's insistence that any organised authority above the level required for the immediate task at hand tends to entrench itself and reproduce the patterns of coercion the revolution was supposed to abolish. The contemporary tradition reads this through Kropotkin's mutual-aid framework and Graeber's anthropology of dispersed coordination. Anarcho-feudalism rejects this move entirely. Yarvin's patchwork concept proposes a political order composed of sovereign joint-stock corporations, each governing a territorially defined population under corporate-governance rules. Hoppe's covenant communities accept hereditary ownership of jurisdictional authority. The network-state program treats private capital as the legitimate organising principle of sovereign jurisdiction. Hierarchy is not the problem in this tradition; the central state is.
The second divergence runs through the question of what consent actually requires. Anarchism, particularly in its social-anarchist form, treats formal-voluntary contracts in conditions of structural inequality as inadequate to legitimate the resulting authority. The worker who signs the employment contract because the alternative is destitution is not, on the anarchist reading, exercising the kind of consent that legitimates the resulting power relation. Anarcho-feudalism inherits the libertarian-individualist position that formal contract is sufficient. The dispute mirrors the older anarchist-versus-anarcho-capitalist split, but it is sharpened by the network-state program's explicit acceptance of private-sovereign authority over residents whose practical exit is constrained by capital, geography, or labor-market position. Imagine a low-income worker in a Próspera-style zone whose employer is also the landlord, insurer, and contracting party for access to courts. Exit, in any meaningful sense, becomes functionally indistinguishable from the medieval serf's right to move.
The third divergence is empirical and runs through the historical record of weak-state environments. The contemporary failed-state and weak-state political environments (parts of Somalia, parts of Libya, cartel-controlled regions of northern Mexico, parts of contemporary Sudan and Haiti) present what the thought-experiment form of anarcho-feudalism predicts: local strongmen, private security, families ruling territory through coercion dressed as voluntary arrangement. The social-anarchist tradition treats this empirical record as evidence that the anti-statist refusal has to be paired with something more concrete (mutual aid, federated coordination, dispersed defensive capacity) to avoid collapsing into exactly the feudal patterns Nozick predicted. The serious-engagement form of anarcho-feudalism treats the same record as evidence that decentralised political infrastructure delivers outcomes that central-state infrastructure cannot, with the failure modes being design problems to engineer around rather than structural objections to the program.
Who tends to hold each view
Anarchism in its contemporary social-anarchist form has a recognisable base. Younger, urban, often connected to mutual-aid networks, tenant unions, or post-Occupy organising. The intellectual home is the David Graeber lineage, the contemporary academic anthropologists working in this tradition, and the broader cluster around CrimethInc., AK Press, and the Institute for Anarchist Studies. The political home is Rojava, the Zapatistas, the contemporary tenant-organising milieu, and the broader transnational direct-action ecosystem. The reading list runs through Kropotkin, Goldman, Graeber, and contemporary writers like Cindy Milstein and Saul Newman.
Anarcho-feudalism's serious-engagement form has a very different base. The contemporary network-state current operates principally in the Silicon Valley libertarian and crypto-aligned networks, in the "tech-right" world around Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and parts of the American tech-investor class. The 2025 elevation of network-state-adjacent intellectual content into mainstream American political influence (the Vance vice-presidential office, the Thiel-aligned personnel networks across the second Trump administration, the Andreessen-Horowitz political engagement) is the live test case for whether this current can deliver political outcomes at federal scale. The intellectual home runs through Yarvin's Gray Mirror Substack, Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed, Srinivasan's The Network State, and Titus Gebel's Free Private Cities.
What the Votely quiz would say
The quiz reads the two traditions as occupying very different positions despite the shared anti-state vocabulary. Anarchism in its dominant form sits firmly in the libertarian-left quadrant: anti-state on governance, anti-capitalist on economics, generally progressive on social questions. Anarcho-feudalism sits in the libertarian-right quadrant: anti-state on governance but accepting private hierarchical sovereignty, market-oriented on economics, often traditional or hierarchical on social questions. If your answers cluster around rejection of state authority paired with strong egalitarian commitments, you sit closer to the anarchist tradition. If your answers cluster around rejection of state authority paired with acceptance of private hierarchical sovereignty and competitive jurisdictions, you sit closer to the anarcho-feudal tradition. The two refusals of the state point in genuinely opposite institutional directions.