Anarchism is summarized as follows:
1) Anarchism is not disorder or chaos, but rather opposes all forms of government that use violence and are unnecessary.
2) Anarchism philosophy advocates for a new social order based on individual liberty without laws, and equal freedom and solidarity between all people.
3) There are four main approaches to achieving anarchism - armed revolution, civil disobedience, propaganda by deed (violent acts to inspire uprising), and transvaluation (changing societal values through education).
Slide show prepared for a series of lectures on Anarchism for PS 240 Intro to Political Theory at the University of Kentucky, Fall 2007. Dr. Christopher S. Rice, Lecturer.
Slide show prepared for a series of lectures on Anarchism for PS 240 Intro to Political Theory at the University of Kentucky, Fall 2007. Dr. Christopher S. Rice, Lecturer.
Slightly abbreviated text from:
Lester Frank Ward, "The Psychic Factors of Civilization",
chap. 38, pp. 313-330, Boston, U.S.A., Ginn & Company Publishers, 1893,
as reprinted in:
John Buck and Sharon Villines, "We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy", app. A, Washington, DC, U.S.A.,
Sociocracy.Info Press, 2007 (http://www.sociocracy.info).
A lecture given for Arts One at the University of British Columbia. Discusses sublimation, repression, unconscious/preconscious/conscious, id/ego/superego in addition to this text.
You can find a video of this lecture on the Arts One Open site: http://artsone-open.arts.ubc.ca (go to "lectures and podcasts" and search for Freud).
Slightly abbreviated text from:
Lester Frank Ward, "The Psychic Factors of Civilization",
chap. 38, pp. 313-330, Boston, U.S.A., Ginn & Company Publishers, 1893,
as reprinted in:
John Buck and Sharon Villines, "We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy", app. A, Washington, DC, U.S.A.,
Sociocracy.Info Press, 2007 (http://www.sociocracy.info).
A lecture given for Arts One at the University of British Columbia. Discusses sublimation, repression, unconscious/preconscious/conscious, id/ego/superego in addition to this text.
You can find a video of this lecture on the Arts One Open site: http://artsone-open.arts.ubc.ca (go to "lectures and podcasts" and search for Freud).
3Is There No Virtue Among Us”Democracy in an Age of Rage and.docxstandfordabbot
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“Is There No Virtue Among Us?”
Democracy in an Age of Rage and Resentment
The West’s souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.
—Edward Luce
The most obvious explanation for American political life since the end of the Cold War is that we have become an unserious country populated by an unserious people.
—Jonathan V. Last
Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.
—James Madison
AN UNVIRTUOUS NATION
It is disturbing enough to realize that our neighbors might be good people but bad citizens. But what happens if the citizens of a democratic nation, whatever their civic habits, are no longer virtuous enough as a people to sustain their own institutions? Good people can, from time to time, be bad citizens. Nations, like families, can persevere through periods of anger and estrangement. Liberal democracy, however, cannot long survive among an unvirtuous people. The collapse of virtue, public and private, leads not only to bad citizenship, but also to the eventual impossibility of producing good citizens at all.
Even more than questions about what makes a good or bad citizen, questions about virtue seem intrusive and judgmental. Democracies, we might think, are not based on virtue, but on everyone behaving moderately well while minding their own business. To ruminate on who is a virtuous person is a matter for ancient philosophers; to investigate the feelings or beliefs of other citizens is the road taken by the eternal social and political busybody. As Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1928, “the right to be let alone” is “the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Just as liberal democracies long ago rejected literacy tests and poll taxes for the universal franchise, they cannot today institute some sort of moral test at the entrance to the voting booth. In a tolerant, secular democracy, what’s in our hearts when we show up to vote is between us and our conscience.
And yet, as much as Americans may prefer to ignore this part of their national history, the Founders of the American republic understood the existential link between virtue and democracy. They knew that to believe in some magical difference between how we live our lives as individuals and how we conduct ourselves as citizens in a community was only a reassuring fantasy. “Public virtue,” John Adams wrote in early 1776, “cannot exist in a nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.” A year earlier, his cousin Sam (in a letter sneering about the well-known adultery of a doctor who turned to the British during the Revolutionary War) wrote, in his characteristically blunt way: “There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.”1
More important, the Founders understood that institutional design could n.
Slidedeck for a presentation delivered on September 17, 2010 for the Arts and Sciences Teaching and Technology series, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY.
3. “I must tell you first of all what anarchism
is not. It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos.
It is not robbery or murder. It is not a war
of each against all. It is not a return to
barbarism or to the wild state of man.
Anarchism is the very opposite of all that.”
– Alexander Berkman, American anarchist,
1929
6. Anarchism
The philosophy of a new social
order based on liberty
unrestricted by man-made law;
the theory that all forms of
government rest on violence and
are therefore wrong and harmful,
as well as unnecessary.
28. “Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it
humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything,
man is nothing, says religion. But out of that
nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so
tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught
but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world
since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to
rebellion against this black monster. Break your
mental fetters, says anarchism to man, for not until
you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of
the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to
all progress.”
- Emma Goldman
38. Anarchism “seeks the complete
development of individuality
combined with the highest
development of voluntary
association in all respects, in all
possible degrees for all imaginable
ends.”
~Kropotkin
39. The highest level of individual
freedom possible for the
individual, the fulfillment of each
individual’s full human potential,
while at the same time developing
human society to the highest
degree possible.
41. “Of all the things which interfere
with the free activity of the
individual, which reduce liberty
and compel us to act in ways
different from those we would
choose, the most powerful and
pervasive is the state.” (Jennings)
42. The essential function of the state
is to maintain the existing
inequalities in society…
44. Godwin: each article of property
ought to belong to the individual
whose possession of it would yield
the greatest good for the greatest
number; thus, property should be
distributed according to claims of
need.
46. “The only demand that property
recognizes is its own gluttonous
appetite for greater wealth,
because wealth means power; the
power to subdue, to crush, to
exploit, the power to enslave, to
outrage, to degrade.”
- Emma Goldman
48. “All voting is a sort of gaming, like
checkers, or backgammon, a playing with
right and wrong; its obligation never
exceeds that of expediency. Even voting
for the right thing does nothing for it. A
wise man will not leave the right to the
mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail
through the power of the majority.”
- Henry David Thoreau