An Anarchist Squint

An Anarchist Squint

short of the demands of scholarship. There are other, better books about conservatism. This one leaves the reader frustrated and unconvinced. It is a missed opportunity.

An Anarchist Squint

In this slim yet intellectually loaded volume, Scott, professor of political science and anthropology at Yale, tries to utilize an anarchist lens to provide lessons for social scientists and other academics. The author does not give an explication of classical anarchist theory but instead tries to use his "anarchist squint" to gain insights from "forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody Proudhon's principle of mutuality without hierarchy." This reviewer would classify Scott as a "neoanarchist," one who uses the anarchist critique without calling for the abolition of the state, similar to analysts such as Roberto Michels, who posited an "iron law of oligarchy" where formal organizations always tend to rule for themselves. Scott goes further than Michels, however, to examine how ordinary people often find ways to defy and disrupt hierarchical institutions from below and thus help spur progressive social change, with perhaps better odds of preventing the recreation of even more virulent hierarchies than conscious revolutionaries. Although one can certainly see Scott's anarchist bent in his previous books, in this new work Scott seeks to find a unity of method and theory through an experimental, free-form style of four to five "fragments" each in six concise chapters that evoke anarchist lessons.

For example, in the first chapter, drawing on his experiences in the former East Germany, Scott calls for the need for an "anarchist calisthenics," that is, practicing disobeying trivial regulations and laws, such as crossing against a light when little or no traffic is present, in order to be ready for the day when one might need to disobey major laws. He cites examples of popular habits of defying authority throughout history, including unplanned and unorganized movements of mass military desertions that subverted repressive regimes and the acts of "poaching, pilfering, and squatting" that served to undermine state attempts to reinforce aristocratic property rights. For Scott, such law-breaking behavior represents "a special type of collective action" that too often goes unrecognized by social scientists yet often contributes to democratic political change. Though unplanned, such actions nevertheless rely