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This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power.

This article interrogates the performative effects of mutualist ideas in the context of market-making. Mutualism is a variety of anarchism associated with the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who argued for the centrality of market exchanges and mutual credit as a means for emancipating workers from capitalist exploitation. The discussion is informed by an ethnographic inquiry within a Local Exchange Trading System in Spain – the Moneda Social Puma – which illustrates how actors put mutualist ideas to work. This research makes three contributions: first, it frames a view of market multiplicity and plasticity that broadens the current scope of market studies beyond a managerialist focus. Second, it reveals how actors mobilise anarchist theories to shape – rather than escape – markets. Third, this work elucidates how actors negotiate and stabilise conflicting forms of valuation as mutualist ideas are implemented. In particular, we draw attention to a set of infrastructural practices and mutual credit arrangements whereby the market is cooperatively managed as a common. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our work for extant debates concerning post-capitalist politics, markets and anarchism.

The article considers several working anarchies in the networked environment, and whether they offer a model for improving on the persistent imperfections of markets and states. I explore whether these efforts of peer mutualism in fact offer a sufficient range of capabilities to present a meaningful degree of freedom to those who rely on the capabilities it affords, and whether these practices in fact remain sufficiently nonhierarchical to offer a meaningful space of noncoercive interactions. The real utopias I observe here are perfect on neither dimension. Internally, hierarchy and power reappear, to some extent and in some projects, although they are quite different than the hierarchy of government or corporate organization. Externally, there are some spectacular successes, some failures to thrive, and many ambiguous successes. In all, present experience supports neither triumphalism nor defeatism in the utopian project. Peer models do work, and they do provide a degree of freedom in the capabilities they provide. But there is no inexorable path to greater freedom through voluntary open collaboration. There is a good deal of uncertainty and muddling through. The last part of the article suggests a theory of freedom that supports the significance of even these obviously imperfect peer systems with incomplete coverage of necessary human capabilities, and explains why expanding the domain of mutualism improves freedom and well-being under conditions of persistent market imperfection and an inevitably fallible state. Peer mutualism doesn’t have to be perfect; it merely needs to offer a new dimension or sufficient diversity in how it instantiates capabilities and transmits power to offer us, who inhabit the systems that these peer systems perturb, a degree of freedom.

Despite penning nearly 2000 pages on international politics, the works of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon simply do not feature in either the historiography or the study of contemporary IR theory. I argue that this is unjustified by illustrating his compelling and enduring insights into the history and nature of `the international'. Proudhon employed a sociological and psychological theory of justice; he saw war and conflict as the motors of change in society; and he saw order as emergent from the deep anarchy of (global) society. The paper provides a contextualised reading of his works to illustrate its historical importance, and demonstrates its potential to contribute to current IR theory through a comparison with contemporary Critical Theory. `As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.' `Man's belligerent nature is all that saves him from despotism.'

We develop a framework for defining the boundaries of within-population market segments, differentiated based on type and level of resources. Using this framework, we propose a theory of the moves between market segments of all firms in an organizational population across its evolution. Focusing on commensalistic interdependence within a segment, we adapt density dependence theory to predict that processes of mutualism and competition operate concurrently, even across high counts of density, and affect firms' propensity to desert their segment. Analyses of moves between market segments by firms in the U.S. auto industry between 1895 and 1981 confirm our predictions and suggest the operation of a basic ecological process that shapes the evolution of population structure.

In the process of characterizing the dialectics of adversarialism and mutualism, a case is made for a reciprocal approach to peacemaking criminology. As part of the rationale for a reciprocity of making war or making peace, critiques are leveled at both ‘peacemaking’ and ‘warmaking’ criminology. The purposes of this essay are, on the one hand, to reinvigorate peacemaking criminology that is often too isolated and marginalized from hegemonic interaction to influence struggles for positive peace and social justice. On the other hand, the article seeks to expose the kinds of reflective thinking and social analysis that a peacemaking criminology must confront if its goals of overcoming or neutralizing a warmaking criminology are ever to materialize at home and abroad.