ANARCHISM, SORT OF

An interesting line of comments has cropped up on this blog in the last 24 hours and I thought I would try to respond. The discussion was kicked off by Eric who wrote, in part, “Professor, I came away from reading In Defense of Anarchism rather disappointed. Not being an anarchist myself but open to hearing new ideas, I had gone into it expecting a description of what a thriving society organized under an anarchist ethos might look like, and a plan, or series of suggestions, of how we might transform our current state into such a society. Instead, as I think you acknowledge in one of the prefaces, you ended up writing a negative defense of anarchism, essentially just an attack on hierarchical forms of government and on the assumption that representative democracy is inherently the best and most practical form of government.”

 

Let me begin by apologizing. Eric had every right to suppose that a book with a title like that would contain some sort of description of what an anarchist society would look like and there is not so much as a suggestion of a hint of that in the book, so perhaps I should begin by repeating the story I have told before about how the book came into existence and how it got that title.

 

It all began in the fall of 1963 with an argument with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Harvard faculty club about nuclear disarmament.  I had been deeply involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament for several years at that point and had been shouting at the top of my voice about the dangers of nuclear weapons, getting nowhere needless to say. I think I must have snapped during my argument with Brzezinski because I came up for air running as fast as I could up Massachusetts Avenue toward Harvard Square having a full-blown anxiety attack. When I got back to my apartment and had calmed down with the aid of a Valium tablet, I realize I could not go on this way. The fruitless attempt to alert everybody to the dangers of nuclear weapons was getting to me. So I did what any self-respecting philosopher would do – I retreated to the level of theory. 

At some point in that time I wrote an essay titled, as I recall, “The Problem of Democracy,” which I delivered various places including Columbia.  The next fall I started my professorship at Columbia and at the same time went into a full scale Freudian psychoanalysis. Needless to say, I was doing everything I possibly could to make money to pay for the analysis. One of my new colleagues, a young associate professor named Arthur Danto, had contracted with Harper & Row publishers to edit a big volume to be called The Harper Guide to Philosophy, one of a number of Harper guides that would be beautifully bound in leather and sold to be displayed on the shelves of Middle America. The guide was supposed to have 10 lengthy essays, each one on a different subdiscipline of philosophy. Arthur had rounded up really a distinguished crew of people to write the essays but Isaiah Berlin had turned him down for the one on political philosophy so when I showed up in Morningside Heights he asked me whether I would write it. My reply was simple: “How much is the advance?” Arthur said it was $500 which would pay for more than a month of analysis at 1964 rates so I said yes. The essay, which was due at the end of the following summer, was supposed to be a survey of the forefronts of the field but I had not the slightest clue about the forefronts of political philosophy or any of its other fronts so when I sat down to write the essay the next summer I decided simply to write my own political philosophy. I figured nobody would read the book – the editor, Fred Wieck, had told me that Harper & Row was “aiming at the book buying rather than at the book reading public.” So I banged out an 80 page essay and turned it in, thereby avoiding having to cough up the $500, which would have been impossible for me to manage.

 

Alas, the series of Harper Guides never came out and Arthur’s collection languished. As the years passed, Wieck handed it off to Al Prettyman who in turn passed it on to a young man named Hugh Van Dusen who headed up a new division of Harper called Harper Torchbooks.  By 1970 I had gotten tired of referring to the essay as “forthcoming” so I called Hugh and asked them whether it would be all right if I used the material in it in a standalone essay of my own. He was rather embarrassed and said of course I could. Then I had an idea. “What about bringing it out as an independent little book?" I asked. Hugh loved the idea and with some excitement said “Great! I can bring out a series of 10 little books. But Political Philosophy is not a very catchy title. Can you suggest something better?”

 

I had an idea. When I was a boy growing up in a little row house in Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York I would rummage about in the unfinished attic to see what was there. One of the things I found was a complete set of the works of Mark Twain which my parents had bought many years earlier. Among the volumes, which I read with the greatest of pleasure, was a volume called Literary Essays. In with such famous essays as “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Errors” was an essay Twain had written about the first wife of the famous English poet Shelley. Shelley’s second wife was of course Mary Wollstonecraft, remembered forever as the creator of Frankenstein, but his first wife was a young woman with whom he had a child and whom he then cast off unceremoniously. Shelley, his companion Byron, and the other young poets had nothing but scorn for Harriet, which infuriated Twain so he wrote an essay taking her side in the marriage which he called “In Defense of Harriet Shelley.”

 

When Hugh Van Dusen asked me for a better title for my essay on political philosophy, I thought of Twain and said “How about In Defense of Anarchism?”  “I love it!” Hugh responded, and six months later the little book appeared. When I wrote it in 1965 it probably would have made little or no stir at all but by 1970 America was being torn apart by opposition to the Vietnam War and the book took off like a rocket. In the intervening half-century and more it has sold 200,000 copies in English and has been translated into a dozen languages. If I am remembered for anything after I die it will be for that little book but it was never intended as a discussion of how one might organize a contemporary society without a state and it is not therefore strictly speaking a defense of anarchism.  Rather, it is a philosophical argument that there is not and could not be a de jure a legitimate state.

 

So Eric is quite right to be disappointed. I am afraid the title is a good example of what is called in the world of commerce “bait and switch.”

 

All of which is a good story but leaves unanswered his question, How would an anarchist society be organized?  Well, sometimes the truth is really quite simple, and the truthful answer to this question is “I have not a clue.” I am absolutely certain that the argument I gave in that little book is correct and that there is not and could not be a de jure legitimate state. But unlike people like David Graeber, I have given very little thought to the matter of what an anarchist society might look like. After writing several other books, I turned my attention full time to the thought of Karl Marx and devoted the next 20 years of my life to struggling with and clarifying his analysis of capitalism and the exploitation that is at its root. I have never been a member of an anarchist collective, I am not particularly drawn to the idea of growing my own vegetables or resoling my own shoes, and happily yield the stage to those who have thought about such things.

 

One thing I am reasonably confident of, however. In the world in which we now live, the success or failure of small-scale communitarian living accommodations or productive activities will tell us nothing at all about possible alternatives to capitalism as it now dominates the world.