What is a society without a state? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

What is a society without a state? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on social organisation. A Talk by Prof. Henry Somers-Hall.

It is a common starting point when looking at societies to see them in terms of power – the more a society is able to marshal its resources, the more advanced the organisation of that society. In this talk, I want to explore the implications of this assumption for how we conceive of society. I also want to set out the argument by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for the claim that power, at least in the way we have traditionally understood it, is not central to social organisation, showing some of the possibilities that open up once we reject this assumption.

Henry Somers-Hall is a professor of philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work focuses on the interplay between 19th century German idealism and the 20th century French philosophical tradition. His most recent books are Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge University Press: 2022), The Deleuzian Mind (co-edited with Jeffrey Bell, Routledge: 2025)), and Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, 2026).