THE IDEAL UNIVERSITY

Forty years ago, I published a little book called THE IDEAL OF THE UNIVERSITY in which, reflecting on my experiences as a student and professor at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, I attempted to think through the principles underlying my vision of university education. My mode of discourse was utopian, both in the good sense of being inspired by my conception of the ideal forms toward which I thought education ought to strive, and in the bad sense – mocked by Engels in his little book, SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC – of being abstract, rootless, unconnected to real social movements from which new forms of education might emerge.

For all of those forty years, I have continued to pursue my vision, in my classroom teaching, through a series of undergraduate and graduate programs that I created or had a hand in creating, and in my ceaseless musing and daydreaming about what a truly ideal college or university would look like.

I am no closer now than I was in 1969 to seeing my dreams become a reality. Indeed, in the past two decades or so, everything in higher education, worldwide, has been moving in precisely the wrong direction. The corporatization of education has proceeded apace, with profitability replacing knowledge as the measure of institutional success and students ever more strongly dissuaded by crippling loan burdens from following the arc of their curiosity.

Nevertheless, as I pass the middle of my seventy-sixth year, I find myself turning more and more frequently to the dream I have for so long cherished of an educational community that embodies the ideals to which I have devoted my life. This little blog, now visited regularly, I do believe, by at least eleven people, and perhaps a few more, offers me a forum for the deliberate articulation of that dream. In a series of postings, I shall spell out my vision with as much specificity as I can muster. I hope that for those of you who read this, it will be a source of reflection and even inspiration, and that a few of the people who have found something of value in my book over the past four decades will find their way to this site, in order to discover what more I have been thinking all that time.

My plan is to elaborate the vision in a series of postings, each of which is accompanied by a link to the entire series preceding it. [I believe I have figured out how to do this, without seeking the help of single young person!] I very much welcome your thoughts and responses, should you feel so moved. I remind you that my email address is rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

ANARCHISM: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

With this post, I begin a series of posts that will explore the relationship between the philosophical and political doctrine of anarchism and the dramatic transformations in modern political activity wrought by the internet and electronic communication. I invite comments and responses. The locus classicus for these arguments is of course my little book, In Defense of Anarchism, published thirty-nine years ago and available now in a paperback reissue by the Univetrsity of California Press.

I. What is Anarchism?

Anarchism, put simply, is the thesis that there never has been, never will be, and never could be a morally legitimate state. The state is a group of people who claim the right to issue commands and the right to have them obeyed by the people over whom they assert their authority. Sometimes the state is one person [L’etat, c’est moi, as Louis XIV of France is reputed to have said.] Sometimes the state is a military junta, or a hereditary class, or a financial oligarchy. Sometimes, as in a democracy, the state is the totality of the population, and the government merely their chosen servants or representatives. In all cases, the claims of the state must inevitably come into conflict with the moral autonomy of the individual – which is to say, the obligation that each of us has to make for ourselves the decision as to what to do. This obligation, as Immanuel Kant demonstrated, follows from the fact that we are rational moral agents, able to reason about alternatives and to make choices, for which we are then responsible. Thus anarchism is not a doctrine of irresponsibility, but, to the contrary, a doctrine of absolute individual responsibility. When I bow to a king or kiss the Pope’s ring or pledge undying allegiance to a military commander, I am forfeiting my autonomy, and thereby giving up my rationality and moral responsibility. If loyalty is the unquestioning submission to the commands of another, then loyalty is the foundation of immorality.

The defenders of the democratic state argue that when the people, through their chosen representatives, make the laws to which they are to submit, then they are truly free, for in obeying the laws, they are obeying only themselves, and hence retain their autonomy. This, in a sentence, is the argument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s great treatise, Of The Social Contract. But despite his philosophically brilliant tergiversations, Rousseau is wrong, for when I submit to the will of a majority whose laws I judge to be ill-considered and immoral, I am forfeiting my autonomy as surely as if I were the loyal subject of a despot.

next post: The Problem of Social Coordination