After my yesterday’s post about republicanism, I received a detailed comment from @evgenii_pavlovich, which I thought it would be appropriate to publish.
I suggest watching the lecture where Rodion explained his views more clearly and fully. Much of it overlaps with what you considered in the video from St. Petersburg.
How to find balance?
Although I wasn’t asked, I will allow myself to answer.
From the perspective of republicans, anarchism in itself is not an end value; it is not the final goal, because anarchism is merely a teaching that denies the legitimacy of the state based on certain grounds, simply because the state is an organized crime group (To see/recall the arguments of Spooner and Rothbard on why the state is an OCG. There is no point in retelling them in polite society). That is, in political philosophy, the state as an internally contradictory concept has been dismantled and is dead, but as a phenomenon of political reality, it continues to exist by inertia as a misunderstanding. From this point of view, statists in political philosophy are something like followers of the phlogiston theory in chemistry, and anarchists who today engage exclusively in the negation of the state are reinventing the wheel and solving a problem already solved before them in the 19th century, adding nothing new.
In practice, however, we see that anarchists do not simply remain anarchists, but study how a free society functions and propose all sorts of improvements: Rothbard writes about private security companies as insurers oriented toward natural law, understood as the inalienable right of private property; David Friedman talks about the development of competing legal systems in a free market; our youth in well-known public pages discuss panarchism and create the concept of contractual jurisdictions without appealing to the ideas of natural law; Russian libertarians create a party, call for participation in politics, infiltration into government bodies and an “anti-state dictatorship” with lustration and deregulation. In other words, all these people are engaged in designing and building a republic. While remaining anarchists, they become republicans. For example, agreement between people on the existence of natural law as an inalienable right of private property is a special case of agreement on legal issues upon which a republic is built. Voluntarily concluded contracts are, again, explicitly expressed agreement on legal issues. But, from the perspective of republicans, agreement on legal issues and a commonality of interests may not be expressed explicitly. The main thing is that they exist and you are engaged in a common cause (res publica).
Thus, the balance in fact lies in the fact that anarchists are actually republicans. The only question is what this res publica is, what this common cause is, what it looks like, with which legal norms you agree, and what the commonality of interests consists of, and with whom you share this commonality. Communists also have their own republic and their own agreement on legal issues and commonality of interests. It’s just that their agreement on legal issues differs greatly from the agreement on legal issues of, for example, libertarians.
A few more words on the differences between libertarianism and right-wing republicanism. Our libertarians usually start either from the Rothbardian idea of natural property rights or say that the source of rights and obligations is a contract, and until there is a contract, there are only absolute freedoms. Further, everything depends on how “corrupt” you are and how you understand the word “freedom.” For libertarians, freedom is freedom from violence and robbery. For non-libertarians, freedom is the freedom to commit violence and rob. Further, the issue is resolved, for example, through the physical removal of some by others. That is, in libertarianism, freedom is ontologically primary in political philosophy; it is a natural order, whatever that means. In republicanism, however, judging by what Rodion says in his lectures, un-freedom is ontologically primary: there is no freedom in nature, freedom is a cultural phenomenon, and it is not found in all civilizations, not all people are familiar with freedom, we are not born free, but become so. That is, as I understand it, the initial premises in libertarianism and republicanism are fundamentally different. A possible resolution to the contradiction here is not to mix the “phenomenal world of natural necessity” and the “noumenal world of human freedom,” to use Kantian language. Freedom and good will are exclusively human things in the sense that Rodion speaks of man. The individual as a representative of the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens is part of nature, an animal. If, however, we perceive a human as a project, as a personality, then they must be designed, they must be chosen, they must become: for example, a free person of a free society. And, as is known, man is a free being in the sense that he is capable of acting not only according to nature, but also contrary to it. We do many unnatural things. Sometimes these are actions for the better, sometimes for the worse. So, it is important not to be barbarians and to act for the better: to build a society of free, prosperous people. In answering the question of how such a society is possible, I believe libertarians and right-wing republicans agree, and that is the main thing.