So are academics just behind the curve here?It’s possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy willbe overrun by anarchists. But I’m not holding my breath. It does seem that Marxism has an affinity withthe academy that anarchism never will. It was, afterall, the only great social movement that was inventedby a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movementintending to rally the working class. Most accounts of the history of anarchism assume it was basically similar: anarchism is presented as the brainchild of certain nineteenth-century thinkers—Proudhon,Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.—it then went on to inspire working-class organizations, became enmeshed inpolitical struggles, divided into sects... Anarchism, inthe standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’spoorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed butmaking up for brains, perhaps, with passion andsincerity. But in fact, the analogy is strained at best. The nineteenth-century “founding figures” did notthink of themselves as having invented anythingparticularly new. The basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed tohave been around about as long as humanity. Thesame goes for the rejection of the state and of allforms of structural violence, inequality, or domination(anarchism literally means “without rulers”), even theassumption that all these forms are somehow relatedand reinforce each other. None of it was presented assome startling new doctrine. And in fact it was not:one can find records of people making similar argu-ments throughout history, despite the fact there is
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Why are there so few anarchists in theacademy?
It’s a pertinent question because, as a political philos-ophy, anarchism is veritably exploding right now. Anarchist or anarchist-inspired movements aregrowing everywhere; traditional anarchist princi-ples—autonomy, voluntary association, self-organiza-tion, mutual aid, direct democracy—have gone fromthe basis for organizing within the globalizationmovement, to playing the same role in radical move-ments of all kinds everywhere. Revolutionaries in Mexico, Argentina, India, and elsewhere have increas-ingly abandoned even talking about seizing power,and begun to formulate radically different ideas of what a revolution would even mean. Most, admit-tedly, fall shy of actually using the word “anarchist.”But as Barbara Epstein has recently pointed out anar-chism has by now largely taken the place Marxismhad in the social movements of the ‘60s: even those who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to define themselves in relation to it, and drawon its ideas. Yet all this has found almost no reflection inthe academy. Most academics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismissit with the crudest stereotypes. (“Anarchist organiza-tion! But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”) In theUnited States there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozenscholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists.
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