The dream of workers prospering without bosses has long intrigued academics, practitioners, and politicians, particularly on the political left. Anarchists have always believed that it’s not just the state but all forms of authority that are coercive and pernicious, and that a libertarian alterna- tive would free workers and create a fundamentally better form of society. Although we can trace the origins of such leaderless forms of existence back to both ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers, they are more usually related to the works of William Godwin, Max Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Makhno, and the like. In terms of practice, their presence is less obvious, but they were important influencers on the 1871 Paris Commune, the mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921, and of course, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). But our understanding of how we could organize work without managers is rather less colored by such events and often colored by other forms of romantic nostalgia.

So, while the theoretical attempt to distance organizational forms from the moral and ethical dilemmas of conventional hierarchies have continued over time, there are few substantive and scholarly accounts of what these forms might be—or why they might not prove viable. This collection is an attempt to address this lacuna and to establish whether peer-based alternatives to leader–follower hierarchies can work—the first part of the collection; or why they might or might not—the second part; or why they won’t work—the third part. A final chapter considers looking beyond all these debates.