Brian Patrick Mitchell

After seven years in infantry and counterintelligence, he left the Army and became an associate editor of Navy Times, an independent weekly newspaper.

Mitchell rooted his distinction of archy and kratos in the West's historical experience of church and state, crediting the collapse of the Christian consensus on church and state with the appearance of four main divergent traditions in Western political thought: Mitchell charts these traditions graphically using a vertical axis as a scale of kratos/akrateia and a horizontal axis as a scale of archy/anarchy.

Eight Ways was largely ignored by the political mainstream but received favorable reviews from libertarians and paleoconservatives, who welcomed the attention and the critique.

[3][4] Anthony Gregory of the Independent Institute named Eight Ways "the best explanation of the political spectrum," saying it "makes sense of all the major mysteries.

Mitchell elaborated on this theme in his doctoral dissertation, published by Pickwick in 2021 as Origen's Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female.

[7] Following Greek patristic theology, which identifies the Father as the archē of both the Son and the Holy Spirit, Mitchell terms relations within the Trinity archical and not hierarchical.