Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play.

• Author: Kuznicki, Jason

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play

James C. Scott

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012, 169 pp.

I often tell aspiring libertarians that they both can and should learn from people who are far removed from them ideologically. Indeed, if they fail to do so, then they are neglecting a vital part of their self-education. When asked whom I have in mind, I almost always mention James C. Scott. Two of Scott's earlier books, Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed, are fascinating intellectual excursions for people of the libertarian bent, as well as for many others.

Scott continues in that vein with Two Cheers for Anarchism. If, in light of Scott's previous work, you have ever asked what exactly makes him tick, you will begin to get a sense of it here. Two Cheers is personal, reflective, and far removed from Scott's academic specialization, which lies in agrarian and subsistence societies and the cultures of resistance that they have often produced. Instead, this book addresses the familiar, everyday life of all-too-typical modern Europeans and Americans. He looks at it, though, with an "anarchist squint." And from that perspective, everything looks different.

Be warned, though, that he pulls no ideological punches whatsoever, and he makes no secret of his disdain for libertarians:

The last strand of anarchist thought I definitely wish to distance myself from is the sort of libertarianism that tolerates (or even encourages) great differences of wealth, property, and status.... There is no authentic freedom where huge differences make voluntary agreements or exchanges nothing more than legalized plunder. We are then piously warned that anarcho-capitalists would defend the sale of children in the name of liberty.

Anyone who has worn the libertarian hat for even a short while has probably heard accusations of this kind before, and probably no reiteration of the idea of inalienable self-ownership will ever help. But I would urge libertarian readers to continue Two Cheers anyway. Perhaps even baby-sellers can learn a bit here. I know that I certainly did.

Scott shares with Robert Nozick a view of government not as a steady state, but as an evolutionary process--one that changes over time and is always the product of human action, but only rarely the successful product of human design. Much more often, government is the product of grand designs gone wrong. Revolutions...