How Not to Be Governed

Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left

Contributions by Banu Bargu, George Ciccariello-Maher Vassar College, Katherine Gordy, Vanessa Lemm, Elena Loizidou, Todd May Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University, Keally McBride University of San Francis, Jacqueline Stevens Edited by Jimmy Casas Klausen, James Martel professor of political science, San Francisco State University

Publication date:

13 January 2011

Length of book:

244 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

241x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739150344

How Not to Be Governed explores the contemporary debates and questions concerning anarchism in our own time. The authors address the political failures of earlier practices of anarchism, and the claim that anarchism is impracticable, by examining the anarchisms that have been theorized and practiced in the midst of these supposed failures. The authors revive the possibility of anarchism even as they examine it with a critical lens. Rather than breaking with prior anarchist practices, this volume reveals the central values and tactics of anarchism that remain with us, practiced even in the most unlikely and "impossible" contexts.

1 1. Introduction: "How Not to Be Governed"
2 2. Anarchist Methods and Political Theory
3 3. An Anarchism That Is Not Anarchism: Notes toward a Critique of Anarchist Imperialism
4 4. Beside the State: Anarchist Strains in Cuban Revolutionary Thought
5 5. Kant via Rancière: From Ethics to Anarchism
6 6. Nietzsche, Aristocratism and Non-domination
7 7. Max Stirner, Postanarchy avant la lettre
8 8. The late Foucault's premodernity
9 9. The ambivalent anarchism of Hannah Arendt
10 10. Emma Goldman and the Power of Revolutionary Love
11 11. "This is what Democracy looks like"

It is clear that only the abolition of the state structure can solve a number of oppressions, not least in relation to undocumented migrants. This book invites us to think of emigration not only in the perspective that the world is our homeland, but also because this population movement is a character of dissent from the left of both countries in respect of the so-called home, as Banu Bargu suggests. In short this book does not fail to stir the debate it deserves.