Episode 68: Mark Lance discusses anarchism
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What is anarchism and where did the idea originate?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello, welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykeman. And I'm Jamie Edwards. With us today is Mark Lance, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Justice and Peace at Georgetown University, and he is here to discuss anarchism. Mark Lance, welcome back to Elucidations. Welcome, thanks. Good to see you guys again. Why don't we just begin by talking about what anarchism is? What Where does the idea of anarchism come from, historically?
So the word, you know, obviously is a negative word. You find it in Plato. Anarchism, so a a rejection of rule. There's no archae in society, so no no uh it's a rejection of the legitimacy of organizing society around one group ruling another group. As a political philosophy or m more broadly social philosophy, it really arises in the nineteenth century and is seen positively as a theory of organization and the theory that we should not organize ourselves by one group coercively ruling over another group. no matter how that's institutionalized in society, whether it's institutionalized around economic power or gender power or age power or political power or whatever. But rather we should organize ourselves through cooperative organizations that embody a kind of equality, in in the words of the great nineteenth century anarchist Kropotkin, through mutual aid, through
cooperative involvement in the institutions that matter to us. So There's different forms of anarchism historically that have arisen, people have different specific ideas about how you would do this, but the common core is as a kind of radical democracy. That legitimacy of a way of being together comes from our all participating in that from a place of equality and a place of uh cooperation and participation.
I see. So I guess the driving idea there is that There's a difference between everybody cooperating because they fear retribution from a government authority and everybody cooperating because like that's what they want to do and that's what they're supposed to do.
Right. Exactly. I mean in a certain sense, you know, in some very broad abstract sense, there's sort of three reasons why a person will do something. Either because someone's forcing them to. Or because they just happen to sort of want to as as an I was or because they've decided that it's the right thing to do. And the first one, I take it seems intuitively to anyone to be illegitimate, you've been forced to do something together with other people. The second just isn't going to always happen. We're not all going to have the same desires in any reasonably large society. So if you want to be fair and just, you have to get everyone to have enough buy in into the social project that they recognize this is what we ought to do.
So, you know, if ten of us want to go out to dinner tonight, Obviously we're you know, if I just say I'm in charge, I'll be the czar and decide where we're going to dinner, y the right reaction is going to be, well, you know, piss off, you know. Not not that. It's very unlikely that we'll just by pure chance all want the same thing. So do we vote? What if, you know, five of us want to go to some restaurant and four of us just can't stand the idea of that restaurant or it's a violates our religion to go to that restaurant or some Does the majority get to just decide Well then no no reasonable group going to a restaurant would decide like that. You talk about it. And someone would say, well, you know, I I I keep kosher and someone says I'm a vegetarian and someone says and I hate
this restaurant. And so we find something that we're all you know, we talk about it. And That's the sort of model of how you get to social coordination in a way that's non-coercive.
How do anarchists distinguish voluntary cooperation from coercive authority?
And uh in one way or another, any any anarchist theory is going to try to scale that up as far as it needs to be scaled up to have a society and make do with that sort of organization that you find in groups going to lunch or groups of housemates or churches or clubs or you know any place where no one really has the
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is anarchism and where did the idea originate?
0:00–4:39
2
How do anarchists distinguish voluntary cooperation from coercive authority?
4:39–10:43
3
Why do anarchists prefer local, non‑hierarchical decision‑making over majority voting?
10:43–15:56
4
How can anarchist principles be scaled up to address large‑scale social issues?
15:56–20:21
5
What role do federations and representative spokespeople play in anarchist organization?
20:21–24:58
6
How do anarchists address crime, violence, and harmful behavior without a state?
24:58–29:28
7
What strategies do anarchists use to build power in everyday community struggles?
29:28–34:34
8
Why do anarchists advocate gradual building of alternatives rather than a single revolutionary overthrow?
34:34–42:35
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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