Preface from THE POLITICS OF INDIVIDUALISM
I first became interested in anarchist political theory over ten years ago when I was finishing my B.A. at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario. I have not always been an anarchist. After becoming disillusioned with the broken promises of my liberal upbringing, I encountered at Queen's University a marvelous introduction to Marxist criticism through the teachings of a passionate and committed sociologist, Friedrich Sixel. I was exposed to a way of looking at the world--a way of making sense of the world--that accounted for the uneasiness I had always felt when I considered our society. The Marxism I embraced was a humanistic vision of society, one that critically revealed inherent contradictions in liberal capitalism and promised a new world where the human individual could be fully realized.
During my fourth year as an undergraduate I happened across an essay by Emma Goldman in a collection of writings on American thought. Her impassioned discussion of anarchism captured both my heart and my mind. She claimed that "the new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life: individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases," (original emphasis). At that time, Goldman's anarchism appeared to me to be simply a widening of traditional Marxist thought to include issues beyond the mere economic. I began to seek out more anarchist writing, by Goldman, Berkman and others. For me there was no contradiction between being both an anarchist and a Marxist--each movement sought to create a new world where everyone could develop to his or her full potential. Marx and Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto that "in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." This seemed to me to be fully compatible with anarchist political philosophy. Anarchism, I then believed, was simply a humanist variation of Marxism.
However, my Marxist comrades scoffed at my foray into anarchist history and thought--"bourgeois liberalism," they cried when I broached the subject. "Nonsense," I replied, "anarchism is simply Marxism carried out of the realm of macroeconomics and applied to the situation of the individual." It was at this juncture that I became aware of certain historical and theoretical incompatibilities between Marxism and anarchism. While each aims for a "free association" among people, I became increasingly troubled by the occasional coercive undertone in Marxist thought and practice. This intensified my commitment to and interest in anarchism. I became more intimately involved in the anarchist movement by writing for and helping to produce two Toronto-based anarchist newspapers, Strike! and Kick It Over. The experience of working collectively with other anarchists and settling differences by consensus was a very valuable one, and certainly has greatly influenced my thought.
I also became interested in the feminist movement. The Sociology Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) offered a wide range of courses on feminist theory, and it was in this context that I was able, during my doctoral studies, to benefit from discussions and debates with professors and other students. In feminism I saw a vital and powerful movement for liberation; however, I also encountered instances of censorship and repression by feminists against others, both feminist and nonfeminist alike. One woman confessed to me that she felt so intimidated by the dominant feminist ideology at OISE that she would take her wedding ring off before coming to school. I found myself drawn back to the humanism of anarchism as I recoiled against the often blind anger of feminism.
I decided nearly four years ago to fashion my research around a critical consideration of the political philosophy of liberal feminism. At that time I immersed myself in the liberal feminist work of John Stuart Mill. What fascinated me most about Mill was how entire passages of his work could have been written by an anarchist, while other parts were not anarchistic in the least. It occurred to me then that my old Marxist comrades were perhaps right; maybe anarchism was "bourgeois liberalism," or at least maybe it shared certain ideas with liberal thought.
I found it puzzling that liberal feminism sounded anarchistic at certain times but not at others. I turned to C. B. Macpherson's idea of liberalism as possessive to help me understand this situation. I noticed that liberal possessive individualism contains characteristics that anarchists believe in (those that I call "existential individualism") as well as characteristics that anarchists oppose (those that I call "instrumental individualism"). This analytical framework allowed me to understand the similarities and differences in liberal and anarchist individualism as applied to the problem of women's subordination.
It became clear to me that if one could replace liberalism's instrumentally competitive aspects with free and voluntary association, anarchism would be the result. Anarchism, as I understand it here, is a way of organizing society to best allow for the free expression of individuals. It is not chaos and disorder, neither is it atomistic, asocial individualism; rather, it is an understanding of individuals within society that argues for the organization of society around non-authoritarian principles. Anarchy is, indeed, order--it is the search for a social order that accommodates the expression of individual free will.
This book is a work of social theory--an example of what the feminist theorist Mary O'Brien calls "traditional theory"--and its purpose is to explore a new way of looking at certain social movements in order that fresh insights into them may be gained. Traditional theorizing, however, has a bad reputation in the social sciences. As Mary O'Brien argues:
What is of concern to us is the fate of traditional theorizing under the onslaught of triumphant scientism. For traditional theory took quite a shellacking. It was argued that theory of this kind did not relate to anything real, but was largely high-class daydreaming with little or no practical application. It was argued that science is objective and describes what is, whereas traditional theory is subjective and describes what ought to be, and why should any one person's theory of what ought to be be any better than any other person's? Theory is not only inexact, but elitist, favouring intellectualism over common sense.
O'Brien, however, defends theory, because only through considered theorizing can we come to better understand the world and therefore be adequately equipped to change it in ways we deem appropriate. O'Brien contends:
We will never liberate ourselves as women until we develop a systematic theoretical analysis of the roots and grounds and development of male history and male philosophy. For theory is not entirely abstract; it is not the absurdity of attempting to give phony substance to a nothing excised from a nothing. Nor is it only poetic vision. Theory at its best is fundamentally a mode of analyzing human experience which is at the same time a method of organizing that experience.
Once I had decided that I wanted to consider the relationship between liberal and anarchist modes of thought, I needed to develop a way of analyzing and organizing how they viewed the world. C. Wright Mills once argued that one of the main questions the social theorist must ask is "what kinds of 'human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each and every feature of society we are examining?" Taking C. Wright Mills' advice, I have endeavoured to answer this question by examining the meaning of "human nature" in anarchist and liberal thought, as well to offer a discussion of the more general ramifications of such underlying assumptions.
It may be asked how the theoretical conceptualizations of the human individual that are explored here relate to the real world of living people. With liberalism, the theoretical tensions that I have identified can be seen in our day-to-day lives. With anarchism a similar comparison is not so easy to make since there is no anarchist society that we can observe. Individuals in our society are constrained by coercive social and political structures. Consequently, we rarely realize our individual potentials. Until we create a society that allows for individual self-determination, we cannot know our true nature. John Stuart Mill makes this point in his essay "The Subjection of Women" when he argues that,
...neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing--the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.
Mill ultimately concludes that in terms of women's true nature, it is "a subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little testimony, and that little, mostly suborned." I would like to extend Mill's observations even further: the true nature of the human individual, male or female, will never be known until all individuals are allowed to live in freedom without external constraints. Only then will we truly know ourselves. Until then, the question of human nature is a matter of speculation, not fact. The argument moves from one of immanent critique to one of political belief.
This work contains both a critical analysis of liberalism and an argument that only in removing the bonds of political, economic and social domination can individuals begin to define for themselves what freedom and nature really are. In this sense, my writing is, like all traditional theory, both a description of "what ought to be" and "what could be."