How Not to Be Governed

Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left

Contributions by Banu Bargu, George Ciccariello-Maher, Katherine Gordy, Vanessa Lemm, Elena Loizidou, Todd May, Keally McBride, Jacqueline Stevens Edited by Jimmy Casas Klausen, James Martel

Not available to order

Publication date:

13 January 2011

Length of book:

244 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739150368

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"

Rather than simply rehashing classical anarchism, this work offers a genuinely original and innovative re-engagement with the properly heterogeneous and heretical dimension of anarchist thought, emphasising its untimely timeliness. With the category of 'critical anarchism,' anarchism is taken beyond the epistemological boundaries of the old masters like Bakunin and Kropotkin, revitalized through a dialogue with alternative perspectives such as post-structuralism, and reconsidered in the context of today's struggles against neo-colonialism and global capitalism. Critical anarchism thus brings to light the diversity and liveliness of anarchism, showing that it is more productively thought as a horizon of becoming. Above all, in pointing to the potential of anarchism as an alternative to the failures of statism on the one hand, and capitalism on the other, the book reminds us of the original libertarian-egalitarian impulse at the heart of radical politics and thus makes a vital contribution to what I see as the fundamental political challenge of today: reclaiming the ethical project of how not to be governed from the grasp of the radical Right.