Is equality unstable in anarchy?

The argument of the previous chapter is, very roughly, that anarchy requires community, for only in community can social order be maintained without the state. Community in turn clearly requires a measure of economic equality – a rough equality of basic material conditions – for as the gap increases between rich and poor, so their values diverge, relations between them are likely to become less direct and many-sided, and the sense of interdependence which supports a system of (generalised and near generalised) reciprocity is weakened. The economic equality that is a condition of community need be far from perfect: only gross inequality undermines community.

But according to a traditional argument, associated especially with writers of a liberal persuasion, economic equality or approximate equality would not survive for long in the absence of the state. An egalitarian distribution (or any other distribution) of resources would soon be disrupted, as individuals appropriated previously unowned resources or gave away, stole and above all exchanged resources in the absence of any restraint or rectification by the state. If this is so, and if anarchy is possible only in community while community is incompatible with inequality, then anarchy does not appear to be viable. I propose in this chapter to show that this is not so: to defend the view that an approximate economic equality can be maintained in the absence of the state – but only in community. On my account, then, community needs equality and at the same time provides conditions in which it can survive.