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TWO CHEERS FOR ANARCHISM: SIX EASY PIECES ON AUTONOMY, DIGNITY, AND MEANINGFUL WORK AND PLAY By James C. Scott Princeton Univ. Press 169 pp. $24.95
FOR THOSE OF US WHO REMEMBER THE 1970s as a time of lifestyle liberation and economic malaise, the word "anarchy" was nothing less than a punk cry of affirmation and an existential call to action. "I am an anti-Christ/I am an anarchist," snarled Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols in 1976, in one of the great forced rhyme schemes of all time. Yet the band's song "Anarchy in the U.K."-and punk more generally-presaged not a collapse of British or American or even Western civilization, but a do-it-yourself revolution in cultural production and consumption that rejected top-down, centralized authority and hidebound tradition. Not coincidentally, economic decentralization took place too-President Jimmy Carter deregulated airline pricing and interstate trucking rates, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher loosened government controls on business, and even French president François Mitterrand, a Socialist, ultimately sold off state-owned industries. The Iron Curtain, rusted out for decades, finally collapsed by the early 1990s, literally incapable of keeping its repressive, soul-killing act together.
In Two Cheers for Anarchism, James C. Scott channels Proudhon more than punk while making a case for a kinder, gentler form of rebellion than the sort of bomb-throwing, street-fighting revolution typically associated with anarchism. Following Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the 19th-century French theorist who asserted that "property is theft," Scott defines anarchism loosely as "mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule' (emphasis in the original). His rejection of "a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy" is mirrored in the structure of the book, which consists of what he terms "fragments" rather than traditional chapters, the better to underscore the provisionality and narrow scope of his insights.
For Scott, anarchy is less a full-blown program than a tendency that privileges "politics, conflict, and debate" and shows a robust "tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning." Most of all, it's a rejection of rule by elites of any and all stripes, especially those who seek to remove themselves from scrutiny by claiming some sort of impersonal scientific basis for their rule.
Scott recognizes that total revolution often leads to...