I recently read James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Ⓐnarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play.
It is a good summary of some of Scott’s conclusions about authority’s quest for metrics, legibility, and control, how this backfires, and the ingenious and well-camouflaged ways ordinary people resist it. If you’ve been thinking of reading some Scott but have been intimidated by his more in-depth sociology papers or a thicker book like Seeing Like a State (see my review), this would be a good place to start.
The way he tells it, he noticed himself putting forward ideas based on his research and thinking “that sounds like what an anarchist would argue.” So he decided he ought to familiarize himself with the tradition of anarchist thinking. That accomplished, he discovered not that he was necessarily an Anarchist, but that “if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle.”
Furthermore, “anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anarchist philosophy.” The first of these principles being “mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule.”
His essays explore a variety of topics — including history, education, charismatic leadership, memorials, geographical nomenclature, urban planning, scientific agriculture, playground design, institutions for the aged, traffic lights, the petit bourgeois, and the suppression of politics by bureaucracy — by looking at them through this “anarchist squint.”
He makes a good case that the state, rather than bringing order to an otherwise chaotic and dangerous mass of people, instead erodes the traditions and abilities that naturally bring order to society:
To what extent has the hegemony of the state and of formal, hierarchical organizations undermined the capacity for and the practice of mutuality and cooperation that have historically created order without the state? To what degree have the growing reach of the state and the assumptions behind action in a liberal economy actually produced the asocial egoists that Hobbes thought Leviathan was designed to tame? One could argue that the formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create and which, in fact, it undermines. The state, arguably, destroys the natural initiative and responsibility that arise from voluntary cooperation.
I enjoyed also his description of “anarchist calisthenics.” He describes watching German pedestrians at an intersection, waiting for several minutes for the light to turn green although everyone can see perfectly well that no traffic is coming on the road for a mile in either direction.
I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this. “You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.”
