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    Paul Goodman - Reflections On The Anarchist Principle

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    Excerpted From: Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism Edited by Taylor Stoehr Published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 1994

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    Paul Goodman - Reflections On The Anarchist Principle

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    Stevo49
    311 views2 pages
    Excerpted From: Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism Edited by Taylor Stoehr Published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 1994

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    Paul Goodman - Reflections on the Anarchist Principle

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    Excerpted From: Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism Edited by Taylor Stoehr Published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 1994

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    311 views2 pages

    Paul Goodman - Reflections On The Anarchist Principle

    Uploaded by

    Stevo49
    Excerpted From: Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism Edited by Taylor Stoehr Published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 1994

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
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    Reflections on the Anarchist Principle

    Paul Goodman

    Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable


    behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or vol-
    untary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It
    claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, re-
    ligious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from
    coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscrip-
    tion, States, preordained standardization, excessive planning, etc. Anarchists
    want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is
    a social-psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications.
    Depending on varying historical conditions that present various threats to
    the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid their emphasis in varying places:
    sometimes agrarian, sometimes free-city and guild-oriented; sometimes tech-
    nological, sometimes anti-technological; sometimes communist, sometimes
    affirming property; sometimes individualist, sometimes collective; sometimes
    speaking of Liberty as almost an absolute good, sometimes relying on cus-
    tom and “nature.” Nevertheless, despite these differences, anarchists seldom
    fail to recognize one another, and they do not consider the differences to
    be incompatibilities. Consider a crucial modern problem, violence. Guerilla
    fighting has been a classical anarchist technique; yet where, especially in
    modern conditions, any violent means tends to reinforce centralism and au-
    thoritarianism, anarchists have tended to see the beauty of non-violence.
    Now the anarchist principle is by and large true. And far from being
    “Utopian” or a “glorious failure,” it has proved itself and won out in many
    spectacular historical crises. In the period of mercantilism and patents royal,
    free enterprise by joint stock companies was anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill
    of rights and independent judiciary were anarchist. Congregational churches
    were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The free cities and
    corporate law in the feudal system were anarchist. At present, the civil rights
    movement in the United States has been almost classically decentralist and

    1
    anarchist And so forth, down to details like free access in public libraries.
    Of course, to later historians, these things do not seem to be anarchist, but
    in their own time they were all regarded as such and often literally called
    such, with the usual dire threats of chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist
    principle to the actual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There cannot
    be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state
    of things called “anarchist.” It is always a continual coping with the next
    situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and
    do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and
    monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly
    of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems.

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