ABSTRACT
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-proclaimed anarchist, once wrote that in anarchism ‘the notion of Government is succeeded by that of Contract’. 1 When this claim is juxtaposed with Sir Henry Maine’s famous dictum that the development of modern liberal society constitutes above all a ‘movement from status to contract’, anarchism can then be seen either as the apotheosis of the liberal conception of society, in which contractual relationships finally replace all coercive ties, or as its unintentional reductio ad absurdum. Indeed, Murray Bookchin has recently argued that contractual notions of freedom constitute no advance over bourgeois conceptions of justice, but rather a capitulation to them, since the notion of contract is irredeemably tied to bourgeois notions of equivalent exchange. 2
