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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Anarchism
The first intellectual and social history of American anarchist
thought and activism across the twentieth century In this highly
accessible history of anarchism in the United States, Andrew
Cornell reveals an astounding continuity and development across the
century. Far from fading away, anarchists dealt with major events
such as the rise of Communism, the New Deal, atomic warfare, the
black freedom struggle, and a succession of artistic avant-gardes
stretching from 1915 to 1975. Unruly Equality traces US anarchism
as it evolved from the creed of poor immigrants militantly opposed
to capitalism early in the twentieth century to one that today sees
resurgent appeal among middle-class youth and foregrounds political
activism around ecology, feminism, and opposition to cultural
alienation.
'To a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice,
and one mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his
understanding.' Godwin's Political Justice is the founding text of
philosophical anarchism. Written in the immediate aftermath of the
French Revolution, it exemplifies the political optimism felt by
many writers and intellectuals. Godwin drew on enlightenment ideas
and his background in religious dissent for the principles of
justice, utility, and the sanctity of individual judgement that
drove his powerful critique of all forms of secular and religious
authority. He predicts the triumph of justice and equality over
injustice, and of mind over matter, and the eventual vanquishing of
human frailty and mortality. He also foresees the gradual
elimination of practices governing property, punishment, law, and
marriage and the displacement of politics by an expanded personal
morality resulting from reasoned argument and candid discussion.
Political Justice raises deep philosophical questions about the
nature of our duty to others that remain central to modern debates
on ethics and politics. This edition reprints the first-edition
text of 1793, and examines Godwin's evolving philosophy in the
context of his life and work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years
Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of
literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects
Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate
text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert
introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the
text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Activists explore the possibility that a new practice of communism
may emerge from the end of society as we know it. Society no longer
exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is
only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold
together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric,
through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is
the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a
process of listless implosion.-from Introduction to Civil War
Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used
to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of
these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation:
to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to
unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides-these were all one
word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in
all its forms-absolute, liberal, welfare-has been the continuous
attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary
imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of
governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where
the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its
constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial
power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses
that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of
Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores
the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a
foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of
friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins
of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the
community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now
is not the time to lose courage.
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