Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith

Abstract

Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith Roger Rothman (bio) M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error. —Karl Marx, foreword to The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847 Even more than the attacks on it from the right, it has been the attacks on it from the left that have relegated anarchism to the margins of academic discourse. It appears however that anarchism's fortunes are changing. Though the casual dismissal of it as simply "some vague embrace of chaos, anti-intellectualism, or disorganized violence" is still commonplace, a more complex reception of anarchism has been developing since the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.1 In 2002, David Graeber was among the first to propose that academics need to come to grips with the fact that "most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism" and that "taking this movement seriously will necessarily also mean a respectful engagement with it."2 Eight years later, Todd May declared similarly, but with a focus on anarchism's adherents, rather than detractors: "Anarchism is back on the scene. Theoretically as well as practically, anti-authoritarian thought is in a resurgence that has probably surprised many of those who have been involved in it in one way or another over the years."3 May, in fact, has proposed that we are witnessing a "third wave" of anarchist discourse (after the first [End Page 429] wave in the late 1800s–early 1900s and the second in the 1960s) (May, introduction to New Perspectives on Anarchism, 1).4 Nevertheless, what Graeber said about anarchism in 2004 is still largely true today: Most academics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss it with the crudest stereotypes. ("Anarchist organization! But isn't that a contradiction in terms?") In the United States there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozen scholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists.5 Indeed, the greatest impediment to the advancement of anarchist thought is not the everyday misperception of it as a philosophy of chaos and violence but the Marxist dismissal of it as theoretically immature and naively utopian.6 For scholars like Allan Antliff and Jesse Cohn, the hegemony of Marxist thought had relegated anarchist studies to the distant margins of their respective fields (art history and literary studies). As Cohn notes, despite the recent attention to the role of anarchist thought within the development of literary history, the question of anarchism in literary theory has been "consigned to official oblivion."7 Likewise, Antliff draws attention to the fact that "for most of its [Art History's] existence anarchism in the arts has figured, if at all, as a marginal subject. … The situation has not been helped by the numerous Marxist-oriented art historians firmly ensconced in the academy who are already predisposed towards taking anarchism less than seriously or attacking it as a threat to their perspective."8 What is the source of the Marxist predisposition to dismiss anarchism as unserious? There are a number of ways to approach this question, but I propose we begin with the conflict between David Harvey and Simon Springer that erupted a few years back in "Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist." There, Springer argues that radical geographers, including Harvey, have all but ignored the "anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s."9 Harvey, among the most influential of the Marxist geographers of the 1970s, is singled out by Springer for having persisted in defining anarchism "as nothing more than opposition to the state, while also dismissing—or at least affording little consideration to—anarchism's shared rejection of capitalism and its refusal of the institution of private property" (Springer, "Radical Geography," 250). Harvey's lengthy...