The evolution of states, social hierarchies, and organized religions cannot simply be explained away by coercion or deception. After all, ideas upon which stand an edifice of power often permeate social existence even before the edifice is built up, and even as we realize, however belatedly, that a power edifice was not what one moral idea or another had needed.

Power is built up by those who benefit from it, but also by its eventual victims. Anarchy thus does not describe how we would have lived had states not existed. The idea of anarchy emerges of course out of longing for a less coerced, more voluntary, and negotiated social existence. But anarchy is not about reliving some ideal past or returning to a state of nature. Rather it is about adding something to humanity that is actually not yet evidently in it, even though we perceive it because certain dimensions of the human experience show a clear quest after it.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh, Anarchy as Order (2009).