Essays in Anarchism and Religion

The Anarchē of Spirit^245

remained politically conservative and ultimately too profoundly
horrified by the European revolutions of 1848 to have been com-
fortable with Eller’s appellation of “that ancient anarchist”.^23
Kierkegaard’s personal anxiety about revolutionary Europe,
the death of King Christian VIII and the end of absolute mon-
archy in Denmark, along with his reaction against the Hegelian
leadership of the new post-1848 Danish People’s Church, are also
in alignment with his critical stance towards the notion of a bour-
geois state—itself ensuing from a suspicion towards the wisdom
of “the crowd” which he describes as essentially an expression
of “untruth”.^24 Under the gaze of Kierkegaardian solitude, “the
crowd” evokes not only the revolutionary mob, but the primal
image of the cacophonic crowd who howl for the crucifixion of
Jesus—while also signifying the folly of the State trial of Socrates
(an image which itself tempers any Hegelian romanticisation of
the mythical Greek state).^25 In contrast to Eller’s reading, Perkins
thus explicitly considers Kierkegaard’s critique of “the crowd” as
actually tantamount to a critique of anarchy itself:

Kierkegaard’s point is that any popularly based government cannot

govern in the interest of the crowd because the party is the creature

of the crowd at the same time that it manipulates the crowd. For

Kierkegaard, the development of popular government answerable

to the crowd was the way to anarchy [...] As Kierkegaard per-

ceives the facade of the modern liberal state it is a mask for the

grossest anarchistic hedonism imaginable. Everything in modern

politics depends on who manipulates the crowd.^26

As Perkin’s reading demonstrates, Kierkegaard ostensibly elides
hedonism with both anarchy and egotism: “In the modern state,
aesthetic egotism instead of being merely destructive of the single
person, as presented in Either/Or, has become a politics of ego-
tism, avariciousness, and anarchy.” In other words, an aesthete’s
life of hedonic self-indulgence expresses the way in which even
the ostensibly individualistic libertine easily becomes a cell within
a collective ego-State. Kierkegaard’s view, as Perkins observes, “is
that a state which possesses a power base only in the crowd, its
whims, and ill-defined but boundless desires has no rational and
essential unity.”^27