Agorism is the philosophy and strategy of building a free society through counter-economics: peaceful exchange and mutual aid operating outside state control, gradually rendering government obsolete by withdrawing cooperation and building parallel institutions. Founded by Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), agorism synthesizes individualist anarchism, Austrian economics, and left-libertarian mutualism into a revolutionary program centered on the “agora” — the free market in all its forms, both legal and illegal.
This reading list traces the intellectual lineage from 19th-century individualist anarchism through SEK3’s systematic theory to contemporary applications in cryptography and decentralized technology. It includes foundational theory, anthropological and economic context demonstrating how voluntary order emerges, practical strategy for counter-economic living, and fiction exploring agorist societies.
I. Foundational Theory#
Lysander Spooner: “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority” (1867-1870) [wikipedia] - Individualist anarchist and lawyer’s argument that U.S. Constitution binds no one who did not personally sign it, rejecting social contract theory and government legitimacy. Provides the individualist-anarchist foundation on which later agorist theory rests.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “What is Property?” (1840) [wikipedia] - Foundational mutualist text establishing critique of property-as-monopoly and legitimacy of possession-based alternatives. Essential background for SEK3’s left-libertarian positioning distinguishing agorism from anarcho-capitalism.
Benjamin Tucker: “Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One” (1893) [wikipedia] - Collected essays establishing Tucker’s individualist anarchism as direct intellectual ancestor of SEK3’s synthesis. Advocates free markets, anti-statism, and labor-based exchange without anarcho-capitalist property theory.
Frédéric Bastiat: “The Law” (1850) [wikipedia] - French classical liberal’s moral vocabulary defining legal plunder and seen/unseen consequences. Direct precursor to framework agorists use to analyze state predation versus market production.
Murray Rothbard: “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto” (1973) [wikipedia] - Systematic natural-rights case for anarcho-capitalism from Austrian economist. Supplies moral scaffolding SEK3 drew on, even where agorist and anarcho-capitalist traditions diverge on property theory and class analysis.
Samuel Edward Konkin III: “New Libertarian Manifesto” (1980) [wikipedia] - The definitive text defining agorism and strategy of counter-economics as mechanism for rendering state obsolete. SEK3’s systematic presentation of revolutionary program centered on expanding black and gray markets to starve state while building alternative institutions.
Samuel Edward Konkin III: “Counter-Economics” (posthumous) - More operationally complete than New Libertarian Manifesto, expanding theory of counter-economic action and class analysis. Develops practical framework for understanding which economic activities strengthen versus weaken state power.
Samuel Edward Konkin III: “An Agorist Primer” (2008) - Condensed introduction to agorist definitions, class theory, and moral framework of the Agora. Accessible entry point explaining core concepts: counter-economics, agorist class theory, and distinction between productive and parasitic classes.
Wally Conger: “Agorist Class Theory” (various essays) - Elaborates Konkin’s distinction between productive class (engaged in voluntary exchange) and parasitic class (living off state coercion). Clarifies how agorist class analysis differs from both Marxist and capitalist frameworks.
Morris and Linda Tannehill: “The Market for Liberty” (1970) - Earlier and arguably purer treatment of private law and stateless order than Friedman’s work. Less cited but highly relevant examination of how market mechanisms can provide security, law, and defense without state.
David Friedman: “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism” (3rd edition, 2014) [wikipedia] - Economic and utilitarian case for private law and full privatization of state functions. Note: Friedman is anarcho-capitalist and consequentialist — a compatible but distinct tradition from SEK3’s natural-rights agorism.
II. Anthropological and Economic Context#
F.A. Hayek: “The Use of Knowledge in Society” - American Economic Review, 1945 (journal article) [wikipedia] - Single essay establishing why dispersed, local, tacit knowledge cannot be aggregated by central planners. Theoretical core of the metis argument explaining why counter-economic actors have knowledge advantages over state regulators.
Marcel Mauss: “The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies” (1925) [wikipedia] - Foundational anthropological study of reciprocity, demonstrating how gift exchange creates durable social bonds and obligations functioning as informal economic system. Shows voluntary cooperation predates and operates independently of state enforcement.
James C. Scott: “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” (1998) [wikipedia] - Explains how states require legibility — standardized names, maps, records — to exercise power, and how informal local knowledge (metis) resists that legibility. Essential for understanding how counter-economics exploits state’s inability to see decentralized voluntary exchange.
James C. Scott: “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” (2009) [wikipedia] - Historical account of populations using geography and culture to remain deliberately illegible and untaxable. Demonstrates successful strategies for evading state control throughout history.
Elinor Ostrom: “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action” (1990) [wikipedia] - Nobel laureate economist’s empirical evidence that commons self-govern without state or full privatization. Directly relevant to agorist institution-building and refutes both statist and pure-privatization defaults.
III. Practical Strategy#
Karl Hess: “Community Technology” (1979) - Blueprint for radical decentralization and local self-sufficiency, focused on disconnecting communities from state infrastructure. Practical guide to building alternative institutions at neighborhood scale.
Per Bylund: “The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives” (2016) - Austrian analysis of how regulation suppresses unrealized value, identifying where counter-economic alternatives can outcompete state-sanctioned markets. Shows opportunity spaces for counter-economics.
Robert Axelrod: “The Evolution of Cooperation” (1984) [wikipedia] - Demonstrates through game theory why reciprocal cooperation is dominant long-term strategy in absence of central enforcer. Provides mathematical foundation for understanding how voluntary order emerges.
Peter Leeson: “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates” (2009) - Demonstrates stateless legal and economic order emerging historically among pirates. Useful empirical grounding for agorist institutional claims showing how voluntary governance actually functioned.
Derrick Broze & John Vibes: “The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality” (2013) - Modern synthesis covering digital privacy, alternative institutions, and practical counter-economic living. Contemporary application of agorist principles to 21st-century technology and activism.
Timothy C. May: “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” (1988) - Foundational cypherpunk text envisioning how cryptography enables untraceable pseudonymous transactions beyond state control. SEK3 died before cryptographic counter-economics became viable; this literature extends his project into domain he could not anticipate. Available online.
David Chaum: Writings on digital cash and cryptographic privacy - Computer scientist’s foundational work on anonymous digital transactions and blind signatures. Technical foundations for cryptocurrency as counter-economic tool.
IV. Fiction#
J. Neil Schulman: “Alongside Night” (1979) [wikipedia] - Explicitly agorist novel written in direct collaboration with SEK3. Depicts counter-economic underground, parallel institutions, and collapse of state as backdrop. Essential fictional illustration of agorist revolution in practice.
Robert A. Heinlein: “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (1966) [wikipedia] - Lunar colony’s revolution against Earth’s authority. Spontaneous order, voluntary association, and TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) as political philosophy embedded in narrative. Influential on libertarian and agorist thought.
Neal Stephenson: “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” (1995) [wikipedia] - Fragmented post-state jurisdictions, phyles as voluntary governance structures, and nanotechnology enabling radical individual autonomy. Most technically prescient entry exploring how technology enables exit from territorial states.
Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter: “The Long Earth” (2012) [wikipedia] - “Stepping” renders territorial monopoly on governance physically impossible as populations disperse across infinite parallel Earths. Dissolves state’s coercive foundation by eliminating its precondition: captive territorial population.
Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974) [wikipedia] - Anarchist society rendered with genuine intellectual seriousness, contradictions included. Left-libertarian in spirit, valuable precisely because it does not idealize. Explores tensions within voluntary communities.
L. Neil Smith: “The Probability Broach” (1980) [wikipedia] - Alternate-history anarcho-capitalist North America where government was abolished in 18th century. Less literary than Le Guin but more explicit in working through institutional alternatives to state.
V. Cultural Prerequisites for Free Societies#
Free societies require more than sound theory or useful technology — they require specific cultural and psychological foundations. The philosophical case for liberty often obscures a critical reality: voluntary cooperation at scale depends on widespread trust, habits of mutual aid, robust civil society institutions, and particular ways of thinking about individuals and communities. Ayn Rand’s influential fiction has created a persistent misconception that libertarianism celebrates atomized self-sufficiency and heroic individualism, when in fact functioning free societies depend on cooperative, community-oriented people practicing reciprocity across overlapping social circles. Markets and voluntary institutions work only when embedded in cultures that cultivate impersonal trust, rule-following, personal responsibility balanced with mutual obligation, and the intermediate institutions that stand between isolated individuals and centralized state power.
Alexis de Tocqueville: “Democracy in America” (1835/1840) [wikipedia] - French aristocrat’s examination of why American democracy succeeded where European revolutions failed. Argues free institutions require supportive cultural ecology: habits of voluntary association, local self-governance, religious morality providing individual restraint, and robust civic engagement. Constitutional design matters less than cultural foundations — the definitive classical argument that liberty depends on civil society.
Joseph Henrich: “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” (2020) [wikipedia] - Evolutionary anthropologist’s empirical demonstration that Western individualism, impersonal trust, analytical thinking, and rule-following are culturally produced and historically unusual. WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology enables markets and democracy but most human societies lack these traits, remaining kin-based and collectivist. Shows why institutional transplants fail and why building free societies requires cultural transformation, not just constitutional engineering.
Fareed Zakaria: “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” (2003) [wikipedia] - Journalist’s analysis distinguishing democracy (elections) from constitutional liberalism (rule of law, property rights, tolerance). Exporting elections without liberal culture produces illiberal democracies — voting without freedom. Constitutional liberalism requires cultural foundations that cannot be imposed by force, explaining failures of democracy promotion in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Francis Fukuyama: “Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity” (1995) [wikipedia] - Political economist’s examination of how high-trust versus low-trust cultures produce different economic outcomes. Capitalism requires cooperation norms, social capital, and impersonal trust that emerge from culture, not just property rights or constitutions. Same institutions function differently in different cultural contexts — empirical demonstration that culture determines whether markets and freedom can flourish.
Peter Kropotkin: “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” (1902) [wikipedia] - Anarcho-communist’s evolutionary and historical argument that cooperation and reciprocity, not competition or state coercion, sustain successful communities. While Kropotkin’s property theory differs from market anarchism and his vision errs toward universalist collectivism rather than recognizing society’s rich fabric of overlapping social circles with varying degrees of mutual responsibility, his empirical documentation supports the core insight that free societies require cultures practicing voluntary mutual aid — not heroic individualism or state enforcement.
Ayn Rand: “The Virtue of Selfishness” (1964) [wikipedia] - Collection of essays arguing rational self-interest is the proper moral foundation and altruism is destructive. Rand’s philosophy has created widespread misconception that libertarianism celebrates atomized individualism and disdain for mutual obligation, when functioning free societies actually require balance between self-interest and concentric circles of social responsibility — family, community, voluntary associations — that provide cooperation, trust, and mutual aid essential for voluntary order to emerge.
James Q. Wilson: “The Moral Sense” (1993) [wikipedia] - Political scientist’s argument that humans possess natural moral sentiments including sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty, but these require cultivation through family, community, and culture. Free society depends on people who have developed moral capacities for cooperation and restraint, not merely on institutional design or self-interest correctly understood. Character formation is prerequisite for liberty.
Laurence M. Vance: “War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism” (2013) - Baptist theologian’s comprehensive Christian case against warfare state, military intervention, and Christian nationalism. Argues Christian ethics require non-aggression principle and opposition to state violence, providing theological foundation for libertarian non-intervention. Shows how religious conviction can sustain principled resistance to state power.
Donald B. Kraybill: “The Amish and the State” (2003) - Sociologist’s detailed examination of how Amish communities maintain autonomy through strategic negotiation with government: resisting Social Security, avoiding state education, operating parallel mutual aid systems, and securing exemptions through peaceful persistence. Empirical case study in successful counter-economic community practicing agorism for religious reasons — building functioning alternatives to state services.
Norman Horn: “The Christian Libertarian Manifesto” (2017) - Founder of LibertarianChristians.com’s systematic theological case synthesizing Reformed Christianity with libertarian political philosophy. Argues non-aggression principle follows from Christian ethics, voluntary charity superior to state welfare, and early church practiced voluntary association. Demonstrates how religious framework can provide moral foundation for mutual aid and cooperation beyond mere self-interest.