Rancière’s equality and anarchism

With my master’s thesis I want to understand the relationship between Rancière’s political ideas  and anarchism. To formulate it as a question: Is Rancière an anarchist? If so, regarding what or in which sense? For that purpose, I will analyze a concept that is one of the pillars of liberalism and central in Rancière’s theory and, which is egalité, and compare it to the main anarchist’s theorists’. I might even investigate the relationship between equality and liberty in both philosophies but I am not sure yet due to the fact that it might broaden the topic considerably.

My thesis will have three chapters:

  1. Rancière’s political thought and his perception about democracy. I will analyze not only his ideas but also his sources and clarify what he means by egalité (in oder to do that I may need to contrast it with liberté).
  2. The main anarchists (who theorized about it): Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and Tucker.
  3. How much does Rancière fit in the tradition of anarchism? There is already a controversy in this point since Rancière himself sometimes admits and other times denies that his thought is anarchist.
I will use the above mentioned authors’ works as well as the recent works publishing about Rancière.

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