Professor: Casey Shoop
4 credits
The anarchist imagination infuses many of the radical social movements that inspire and provoke further study today, from the history of anti-colonial and anti-globalization struggles, to its theoretical undercurrents in environmentalism and feminism, to recent popular protests like Black Lives Matter and the Occupy Movement. This course offers students an intellectual history of anarchism’s key concepts through the close and careful reading of some of its early theorists. This theoretical introduction will be supplemented by the cultural history of anarchism’s multi-front critiques of hierarchized political and social life at the turn of the 19th-century: against the state, religion, the bourgeois family, and industrial capitalism. For the purposes of this class, anarchism is not a fixed set of political prescriptions, but a complex and evolving and often internally conflicted discourse that will enable us to pose anew some of the oldest questions in political and cultural life: how do we reconcile individual liberty and social equality? When is competition socially useful? How can we embrace all of the benefits of modernity without hierarchization and bureaucracy? Why does utopia so often turn into its baleful opposite? How and why does the desire for social change harden into dogmatic orthodoxy and violence?