Table of Contents
Cite This Article
Choose a citation style and copy the reference.
William Blake spent most of his life in a quiet fury against anyone who claimed the right to rule other people’s minds or bodies. He did not care whether the ruler wore a crown, a black gown, a factory owner’s coat, or the mask of pure reason. What he kept attacking was the basic relation itself: one side commands, the other is expected to obey. That is why his work sits so naturally beside an anarchism that starts from hierarchical systems rather than from class alone.
In this view of anarchism, hierarchy is a structure of relations. An elite position accumulates power (religious, political, epistemic, patriarchal, monetary, symbolic) and converts it into the capacity to dominate. Domination itself works through many modes at once: ruling and being ruled, speaking and being spoken about, defining the rules and living inside them, claiming knowledge while constraining what others can think. Blake saw almost all of these modes in action, and he named them with unusual clarity.
Mind-Forg’d Manacles and Manufactured Consent
Start with the lines everyone knows from “London”:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
Blake is describing more than external force. He is pointing to the way hierarchical systems get inside people. The manacles are forged in the mind. Consent is manufactured so thoroughly that the constraints begin to feel natural. People start to police themselves. That is one of the three main control mechanisms that keep hierarchies running: dependency, manufactured consent, and the background threat of coercion. Blake isolates the middle one with perfect precision.
The same process appears in “The Garden of Love”:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
Here religious power is doing several things at once. It is disciplining. It is defining the rules. It is producing meaning and forcing the subordinate to internalise that meaning. Joy and desire are not simply forbidden; they are bound. The elite position (the priest) authors the framework; the living energy of the person is forced to live inside it.
Religious Hierarchy and the Modes It Uses
Blake never treated the Church as a gentle spiritual guide when it acted as a ruling power. In the Songs of Experience the official voice of religion repeatedly occupies the elite seat. It speaks while others are spoken about. It names while others are named. It claims epistemic authority and then constrains what the subordinate is allowed to know or feel.
Look at the second “Chimney Sweeper”:
And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
Several modes are running together. The child is exploited. The child is spoken about and represented by adults who claim to know what the situation means. The child is named as someone who has suffered “no injury.” Religious, political, and economic power affirm one another. The same system that uses the child’s labour then walks off to praise God, Priest, and King. That is affirmative interplay between hierarchical systems.
Blake also shows how the elite appears as a singular, recognisable figure (the Priest, the King) while the subordinate is absorbed into a category or a mass. The sweepers become “them.” Their particular suffering is smoothed into a general moral lesson that serves the powerful.
Industrial Power and the Dark Satanic Mills
The famous question in “Jerusalem” still hits hard:
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
The mills are sites of monetary and industrial power, but Blake never isolates that power. The same mills depend on religious justification, political protection, and a whole apparatus of discipline. Children are reduced to labouring bodies. Agency is concentrated in the owners and overseers; the workers become the material upon which action is performed. That is the mode of active subject and passive object.
In “The Human Abstract” Blake pushes the analysis further:
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
The hierarchy first creates the poverty, then congratulates itself for the pity. Rights and comforts accumulate upward; duties and risks accumulate downward. The elite retains the position of the generous individual while the poor are treated as a category that exists to receive charity.
Urizen and Epistemic Authority
Blake’s most sustained portrait of hierarchical power is Urizen. In The Book of Urizen he separates himself, writes the books of metal, and tries to bind the entire world in laws and measurements. He is the purest image of epistemic authority. He monopolises legitimate knowledge. He decides what counts as real and what must be treated as chaos or error. Everyone else’s cognition is constrained by that monopoly.
Urizen also works through several other modes at once. He defines the rules. He names. He produces the categories through which reality is to be understood. He turns living energy into something that must be measured and limited. The subordinate position is forced to inhabit the interpretation he has created.
Against him stand Los and Orc. Los keeps forging, keeps trying to give form to prophetic vision. Orc rises in rebellion. Blake is not offering a new supreme leader. He is showing the living forces that hierarchical systems try to capture and that keep breaking out of the frame.
From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
Energy is Eternal Delight.
Reason is not destroyed. It is put back in its proper place. It is no longer allowed to sit in the elite seat and treat energy as something to be ruled. That is a direct refusal of hierarchical inversion.
Speaking, Naming, and the Illusion of Participation
Blake is especially sharp on the mode of speaking and being spoken about. Official voices constantly narrate the lives of the poor, the young, and the rebellious while those lives remain silenced or distorted. The same pattern appears in the way institutions offer the subordinate a kind of simulated participation. People are told they are free, or loved by God, or part of a great national story, while real initiative stays elsewhere. Blake had no patience for that illusion.
In “A Song of Liberty” the tone is blunt:
Empire is no more! and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
Empire here is the hierarchical form itself. When it falls, the predatory relations that depended on it fall too.
Autonomy Instead of a New Master
Blake did not want a better king or a more enlightened committee. He wanted the recovery of what he called the Poetic Genius in every person. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he writes:
The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. and loving the greatest men best. those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
The emphasis falls on capacities that already exist in people. Hierarchy tries to monopolise meaning, desire, and creative activity. Blake’s counter-move is to relocate those things back into the living person. That is close to the anarchist strategy of displacing dependencies. You do not wait for a new elite to grant freedom. You begin to exercise the energies the hierarchy has tried to bind.
Where the Fit Is Strong
Blake refuses reduction. He goes after religious power, political power, industrial power, and epistemic power in the same movement. An anarchism that tracks multiple forms of power and multiple modes of domination can follow him without having to flatten everything into economic exploitation.
He understands that domination is dense because the modes reinforce one another. The priest who binds desire, the owner who extracts labour, the moralist who produces the categories, and the reasoner who constrains cognition are often working together.
He treats manufactured consent as real and dangerous. The mind-forg’d manacles are not a side issue.
And he looks for the release of energy and autonomy rather than the installation of a new commanding centre.
Where the Fit Remains Imperfect
Blake works in vision, myth, and image. He does not give you a practical method for mapping municipal power or building federated assemblies. The anarchism that focuses on hierarchical systems is more explicit about the concrete work of relocating survival and flourishing nodes into transparent, recallable structures. Blake supplies the depth of diagnosis and the insistence on liberated energy. The organisational work still has to be done in the present.
His language can also become so cosmic that the everyday mechanisms of power risk turning into pure symbols. The strongest reading keeps both levels alive: the attack on Urizen and the concrete binding of the chimney sweeper’s life.
Why Blake Still Matters for This Kind of Anarchism
Blake keeps reminding us that hierarchy settles into the way people see, speak, desire, and understand themselves. Any serious attempt to displace unjustified rule has to deal with the manacles forged in the mind as well as the ones forged in law and economy. At the same time, his refusal to reduce domination to a single form keeps the critique wide enough to catch the priest, the boss, the moralist, and the system-builder together.
That combination (wide diagnosis plus the demand for liberated energy) is what makes him still useful for anyone who starts from hierarchy, looks carefully at the modes of domination, and refuses to settle for a new set of rulers.
Possible Discussion Questions
- In “London,” how does the image of mind-forg’d manacles relate to the manufacture of consent inside hierarchical systems?
- In the Experience version of “The Chimney Sweeper,” how many different modes of domination can you identify working at the same time?
- How does Urizen embody epistemic authority and the constraint of cognition? What other modes does he also use?
- When Blake writes that reason should be only the outward bound of energy, what kind of non-hierarchical relation is he pointing toward?
- Where does Blake’s visionary language strengthen an anarchist critique of domination, and where does it leave practical questions of organisation unanswered?
Why does William Blake fit an anarchism focused on hierarchical systems?
Because he attacked multiple forms of power (religious, political, industrial, epistemic) and showed domination working through many modes at once, rather than reducing everything to economic class. That matches an anarchism that starts from hierarchy itself.
What are the mind-forg’d manacles in Blake?
In “London” Blake hears mind-forg’d manacles in every cry and every ban. He is describing the way people internalise hierarchical categories until the constraints feel natural. This is close to the manufacture of consent that helps hierarchical systems run without constant open force.
How does Blake show modes of domination interlocking?
In poems such as “The Chimney Sweeper” (Experience) and “The Garden of Love,” exploitation, religious discipline, naming, speaking-for, and the production of meaning operate together. Blake presents them as a dense texture rather than as separate problems.
What does Blake offer instead of hierarchy?
He points toward the liberation of creative energy and the recognition of the Poetic Genius in each person. Reason is returned to its place as the bound of energy rather than its master. The direction is toward autonomy and mutual recognition, not a new commanding centre.
Is Blake an anarchist?
He did not use the word or write organisational theory. What he did develop was a fierce, multi-sided critique of ruling relations and a vision of liberated energy that sits comfortably beside an anarchism focused on hierarchy, modes of domination, and the refusal of unjustified power.