Anarchy as Order
* Book: Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity. Mohammed A. Bamyeh. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (May 16, 2010)
Description
Publisher:
"This original and impressively researched book explores the concept of anarchy__unimposed order__as the most humane and stable form of order in a chaotic world. Mohammed A. Bamyeh traces the historical foundations of anarchy and convincingly presents it as an alternative to both tyranny and democracy. He shows how anarchy is the best manifestation of civic order, of a healthy civil society, and of humanity's noblest attributes. A cogent and compelling critique of the modern state, this provocative book clarifies how anarchy may be both a guide for rational social order and a science of humanity."
...
An argument on behalf of anarchy today responds to the need to humanize global processes, but in ways that are realistic and based on a rereading of the histories of civil society in a variety of world traditions. Covering a broad range of cases, the book identifies basic principles governing state’s relation to civil society. It shows how anarchist ideas and practices emerge naturally in civil society in response to different forms of state power. The book seeks to demonstrate how a proper appraisal of modern anarchy is enriched by a deeper understanding the history of voluntary associational life in different world contexts. Just as well, it shows how such appraisal requires alternatives to common assumptions about human psychology, assumptions propagated by modern social science.
Table of Contents
* Part I: The Idea
Chapter 1: Anarchy as a Science of Humanity
Chapter 2: What Is Anarchy? Anarchy and Humanity; Anarchy and the Critique of the State; Times of Anarchy
* Part II: Around the Idea
Chapter 3: Civil Society and the State: State Reason; The State as Civil Society?; The Responses of Civil Society; The Tax State and the Politics of Alliance; Civil Society, Effectiveness, and Humanity; Informed Publics
Chapter 4: Trust and the Politics of Alliance: Suspicion; Conflict; Alliance
Chapter 5: Freedom and Commitment: Types of Will; Three-dimensional Man; Anarchy and Personality; Freedom as a Historical Experience; Alienation as Choice and Error; Common Good; The Common Good and Governmental Rationality; The Common Good and the Common Person
Chapter 6: Anarchy as a Destination: Living Philosophy and Living History; Persuasion and Uncertainty; Ethics on the Way to Anarchy; Transitions: Administration, Markets, and Spaces of Anarchy
Review
David Baronov:
"Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on “an imposed order” to a society premised on “an unimposed order.” Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works (http://csx.sagepub.com/content/39/4/417.extract)
Excerpts:
“The idea of anarchy emerges of course out of longing for a less coerced, more voluntary, and negotiated social existence. But anarchy is not about reliving some ideal past or returning to a state of nature. Rather it is about adding something to humanity that is actually not yet evidently in it, even though we perceive it because certain dimensions of the human experience show a clear quest after it. And that is the quest to expand the meaning of one’s existence, rather than to rediscover an old, repressed, or forgotten nature .
An example of this quest is the idea of the soul, an allusion to what we think we ought to have: that life deserves a level of nobility beyond what we can observe of it, beyond its mere physical existence and physical appetites, its daily worries and mundane transactions—indeed, beyond its termination. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the idea of the soul describes our aspiration to be human, that is to say, to be more of what we seem to be, to be more than what the world seems to allow. The soul thus is an idea, and we are largely interested in it precisely in this form. We do not usually try to prove the existence of the soul or lack thereof, since we know, deep down, that the least interesting aspect of the idea of the soul concerns whether it could be verified. The idea appeals for other reasons: that it gives us the faint sense that given reality, the prison of “objective determining circumstances,” is not all there is to life. It is for this same reason that we live in ”hope,” meaning that we ponder, even in the face of appearances, “evidence,” and experience, that the world at large, and not just I and thou, must include in its nature a yearning to leave this orchestrated theater of illusions presented as hard, confined reality. Thus the world at large has that which does not appear to be in it, yet gives it nobility and higher purpose. It is in this sense that anarchy is the soul of this world.
And it is also in this sense that we desire change and progress, even when we do not see precisely what kind of change and progress may be most desirable, or how to arrive there. The progressive impulse seems implanted in us by virtue of the difference between imagination and reality. At the personal or social level, we can always imagine a better reality than one we observe or live. Therein resides the progressive impulse: in the difference between imagination and reality. The most fundamental fact of specifically human existence is that imagination is always superior to reality. As a motor of progress, therefore, anarchist thought begins by observing the dynamic nature of humanity, a humanity that seeks to expand its meaning, over and above what appears as an objective reality holding us in its thralls and demanding absolute resignation to its presumably immutable laws of motion or motionlessness.”