James Martel’s extraordinarily imaginative new book is a tour de force of disappointment, and I do not mean that as an insult. Indeed, this work actively aims to disappoint, in the idiosyncratic use of the term that Martel employs: it is written as a rich broadside against what he calls the “archist” appointment of power, the sovereign insistence that power must be imposed from without, from above, rather than allowing that political authority derives from the immanent, horizontal, and collective practices that he terms anarchism.

Martel’s introduction sets the terms of his substantive discussion, which is organized in two parts, a theoretical one focusing on big thinkers and a (mostly) practical one focusing on concrete politics and the literary imagination. Part I has four chapters, the first of which describes the archist argument Martel opposes, namely that obedience to authority is the sine qua non of political life, and indeed of physical existence altogether. In appointing an image of law that secures salvation from death, archism, Martel argues, amounts to a political theology, and hence the canon of Western political thought can be read as a series of prophets who enjoin obedience to this unreal source of power, however ostensibly egalitarian their work may appear. Contrary to this vision, Martel proposes that political theory indulge a negative theology taught by anarchist prophets who see through the illusion of a salvific protector and emphasize instead collective, democratic agency in political life. Anarchist prophets accordingly disappoint by design, undoing the divine fantasy of archism.

Each of the three chapters that follow offers close textual readings of canonical thinkers whom Martel takes as anarchist prophets, often despite themselves: Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin. With the arguable exception of Benjamin, moreover, these figures are not anarchists in any normal anti-statist sense, in line with Martel’s general argument that all political thought contains an inextirpable tension between the Apollonian imperative of order and the Dionysian temptation of chaos. In Chapter 2, Martel presents the monster of Malmesbury as an authoritarian well aware of the emptiness of authority, whose omnipotent archeon Leviathan ultimately hangs by a common thread of the people’s willingness to displace and disguise their own collective power. Chapter 3 takes up Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in whose activities, like our own, it is difficult to prise apart anarchistic and archist urges: despite the archist guise of preaching a new morality for all, Martel interprets him as “merely assist[ing] us in recognizing the vision we have already engaged—perhaps the result of our having killed God—through the exercise of disappointment” (p. 119). Chapter 4 concerns Walter Benjamin, a thinker who represents the apotheosis, so to speak, of an anarchic prophet cum negative theologian. For Martel, Benjamin’s distinction between mythic violence (in Martel’s words, “the violence of projection and self-assertion, of empty power posing as ontologically based truth” [p. 126]) and divine violence parallels the distinction between archist appointment and anarchistic disappointment, insofar as Benjamin is also painfully aware of the unavoidably fetishistic character of appeals to God. After Feuerbach and Nietzsche, that is, the invocation of a deus absconditus can be nothing but an invocation of our own collective power. This section of the book makes for fascinating, exhilarating, and occasionally frustrating reading, for Martel’s treatments tend to chafe against standard and even prima facie plausible interpretations of his cast of characters. Whatever objections one can raise in fine or even gross against particular aspects of Martel’s readings (for example, in his discussions of the will in Hobbes and individualism in Nietzsche), however, their creativity and imaginative insight are undeniable, and this section of the book is highly rewarding.

The two diffuse chapters of Part II shift focus from anarchist prophets to anarchist prospects. Chapter 5 examines how anti-archism plays out in real politics and literary imaginations, with its principal referents the anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War (or “Revolution,” as Martel prefers), the Kurdish struggle for autonomy in contemporary Syria, Jose Saramago’s novels Blindness and Seeing, and Octavia Butler’s novels The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents. Martel’s discussions of these and other subjects are far too rich to capture in a review, and readers will undoubtedly have varying assessments of their success, not to mention Martel’s inclusions and exclusions. Martel’s romantic view of Spanish anarchism, revolving largely around the figure of Buenaventura Durruti and critiques of “leaderism,” downplays the conflict’s astonishing brutality, whether its violence is considered mythic or divine (to its victims, incidentally, the two are indistinguishable). A work not mentioned, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, whose author had impeccable anti-archist credentials, gives a decidedly more desultory view. At the same time, Martel pays little attention in his discussions of Civil War Spain and Civil War Syria to the great power (archist) conflicts that created space for both anarchist experiments. The footing in the novelistic excurses is surer because the imagination has no reality to upset it, but Martel’s discussions are nonetheless illuminating for the complicated conceptual dance of an/archism.

Chapter 6, finally, focuses on the conditions of possibility for the “death” of archism, which Martel associates with the ultimate loss of a need for authoritative transcendence and the acceptance of an immanentist ontology corresponding to which collective, democratic power is the be all, end all of political engagement. Spinoza is presented as the immanentist par excellence, a thinker who has fully dispensed with the need for archism altogether. Martel interestingly finds a real world analogue to Spinoza’s refusal of exteriority in Melanesian cargo cults, for whose adherents “there is no ‘outside’ from which to order and hierarchize human communities. There is no special perch that is not itself part of the world, no site for an archeon to view and judge the world even as it exempts itself from that vision” (p. 224). The chapter is rounded out with readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a critique of the archist’s monstrously untrue promise of immortality and the recent television show The Leftovers as a generative representation of life in the (non-)shadow of the loss of God. Martel sums up by writing that “without the colonizations and interpellations that archism foists on us, we would occupy our own anarchic selves in utterly different ways. Without the burden of finding out who we ‘really are’ or having to follow a moral law that is really just, as Lacan notes, a form of sadism, we have the distinct pleasure of ‘becoming who we are,’ as Nietzsche beautifully put it” (p. 255).

Martel’s conclusion gestures in various ways towards post-archism, and how our political vocabulary might have to transform should we finally acknowledge that all authority is, as he puts it, “inherently collective, and actually anarchist” (p. 262). These range from the banal and symbolic, like renaming buildings dedicated to archists, to more substantive, if elusive, movements like reconstructing social space democratically through “anarchitecture” (p. 288). The reader leaves with the sense that the aim is not so much concrete political transformation as the wholesale reordering of our conceptual and hence political lives; as Martel is wont to say, after all, “life and anarchism … amount to the same thing” (p. 46).

Such an (archist?) totalizing sense is at once what makes this book at times so exciting and at times so frustrating, and even, yes, disappointing (in the common sense signification). Its vision is so broad that, a few concrete examples notwithstanding, it remains difficult to see how one might even begin, before a conceptual revolution, that is, to attack the archism it addresses. Part of the problem may be its expansive notion of anarchism; indeed, it is not clear why the language of “anarchism” rules here rather than that of, say, “freedom” or “democracy,” both of which might also capture much of what Anarchist Prophets intends. It therefore suffers, on the one hand, from an affliction that affects much anarchist thought, namely the refusal to distinguish between better and worse real world political regimes, a blindness that in real life surely matters more than conceptual questions about archism tout court. On the other hand, while I take this work’s aim to be different than most other “anarchist” works, it would have still been helpful to see some wrestling with the anti-statist tradition for the purpose of drawing a clearer bead on how archism might be undermined. Thus although David Graeber and Murray Bookchin make cameo appearances, we hear nothing of the anti-archist prospects of federalism (Proudhon), collectivism (Bakunin), communism (Kropotkin, Goldman), or syndicalism (Rocker, Malatesta), for example, or Bookchin’s searing indictment of “lifestyle anarchism,” which—with the appropriate squint—could seem consonant with Martel’s own pan-critical vision, let alone, say, the “postanarchism” of Saul Newman or the abolitionist Black anarchism of William C. Anderson. Grappling with real anarchists rather than their notional prophets might have given this work more practical political purchase. These critical observations should not be taken, however, to impugn the fruitful brilliance of Anarchist Prophets, a work that deserves a place in the pantheon of anarchist writings, for it incisively and inventively expresses the central critique of the domineering, dominant, and often self-obscure sovereign aspiration at the heart of the vast majority of Western political thought.