Hayden Carruthfrom Clarification
The most commonly misused words in our language are anarchy, anarchism, and anarchist. Every afternoon on the NPR news I hear these words applied to violence in Kosovo, social disorder in the Congo and Chiapas, scenes of mob uproar at rock concerts in Kalamazoo or Albuquerque, and the like. The situation in the schoolyard after the shooting is always said to be "anarchy." Clearly reporters and announcers have no idea--I mean none at all--of the genesis of these words in ancient philosophy or of how they've been applied in serious political discourse in the western world for the past two hundred years.
An means the inverse. Archy means an organized expression of social and political power, as in monarchy or archbishop. Anarchy means the unState.
Often, including passages in my poems and essays, I've said that I'm an anarchist. My readers generally don't know what to make of this. "Well, there's Carruth being a windbag again," they say. But I mean what I write quite seriously, and I wish people would take the trouble--it doesn't require much--to find out what the word means.
Begin with Mikhail Bakunin, his essays, letters, and pamphlets. After all, for practical purposes he was the founder of anarchism in the modern world in the same sense that Marx was the founder of communism, granting that before them many others made important contributions. Read especially Bakunin's account of the Paris Commune. Bakunin was a Russian aristocrat, a Romantic in the grand tradition of the mid-nineteenth century, a captivating saloniste, a pursuer of women, etc., except that they were usually pursuing him. Like all Russian radicals in Czarist times he lived in exile; he usually wrote in French and signed himself "Michel Bakounine." In his life and his writing he studied a certain flamboyance. Well, so did Teddy Roosevelt, and nobody holds it against him. Bakunin was in fact a person of monumental intellect who organized the first principles of anarchism into a coherent, modern concept.
Everything can't be ascribed to Bakunin, of course, and shouldn't be. Forerunners abounded. Diogenes of Athens, for instance, circa 400 b.c. Or François Villon of Paris, the greatest European poet of the fifteenth century. More to the point, Max Stirner published his extremely influential book, The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum), in 1845, three years before The Communist Manifesto, though it wasn't translated into English until 1907. It was a treatise on individualist, atheist, and anarchist thought. In the United States we had our forerunners too. Josiah Warner, a musician who was conductor of the symphony in Cincinnati, established a colony called Modern Times on Long Island that was distinctly anarchistic, and he published two important books, Equitable Commerce (1846) and True Civilization (1875). Stephen Pearl Andrews of Massachusetts, who was a prominent abolitionist, the populizer of Pitman shorthand in America, and the inventor of Alwato, a precursor of Esperanto, wrote and lectured on "Pantarchy," which was his version of anarchy, during the years after the Civil War. Today it is easy to forget the sweetness of compassionate politics in the nineteenth century, both in Europe and in America, the caring and literally commiserating attitude toward the underclasses that was at the heart of social thought generally and of Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism particularly. It wasn't as fierce as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Congressman Newt Gingrich have liked to believe. We have nothing like it today in our national arena.
Hayden Carruth has published forth-five books, the most recent of which is Dr. Jazz (2001). He has been editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, and for twenty-five years an advisory editor of The Hudson Review.
photograph by Jim Demarest
