Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Anarchism

  • Robert Paul Wolff (1933-2025)

    When John Silber died in September of 2012, Robert Wolff expressed his contempt for the conservative Boston University president in an ironically entitled notice, De Mortuis. Wolff's title alludes to the Latin saying de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  Literally translated: "About the dead, nothing except the good," which is to say, "Speak no evil of…

  • Emma Goldman on Anarchism

    The topic of anarchism surfaced in an earlier thread. Dmitri and Hector introduced us to David Graeber.  But let's go back a century or so for a bit of historical perspective. Herewith, a brief examination of Emma Goldman's definition of anarchism.  ANARCHISM: the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made…

  • Anarchism is to Political Philosophy . . .

    . . . as skepticism is to epistemology. Top o' the Stack.

  • R. P. Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

    Top o' the Stack. Are they logically consistent?

  • Notes on Anarchism III

    Substack latest. R. P. Wolff on the conflict between authority and autonomy.

  • Notes on Anarchism II

    Stack leader. Second in a series. Robert Paul Wolff on autonomy.

  • Notes on Anarchism I: R. P. Wolff on Authority

    Top o' the Stack. One of my better efforts. First in a series. Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (Harper 1970, 1976) is a good book by a clear thinker and master expositor. Here is a first batch of interpretive and critical notes. I use double quotation marks when I am quoting an actual…

  • Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

    Substack

  • You Want Anti-Government? I’ll Give You Anti-Government!

    Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that…

  • What Black Lives Matter and Antifa are About

    Matt Rowe (Headings added): Black Lives Matter: Marxist to the Core The three co-founders of BLM are Marxists to the core. According to the Capital Research Center, all three worked for front groups of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the largest radical Left organizations in the country. Opal Tometi actively promotes Socialism and…

  • Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101: Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists. Lichtenberg's observation puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where…

  • Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101: Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists. That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where…

  • Seductive, but Fallacious

    For an anarchist to claim that without laws there would be no criminals would be like claiming that without chemists there would be no chemicals.

  • Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

    I see that R. P. Wolff has a blog, The Philosopher's Stone.  His post Anarchism and Marxism caught my eye.  In it he addresses the question of the logical consistency of his anarchism and his Marxism.   The answer of course depends on how Wolff employs these terms. First of all, when I call myself an anarchist,…

  • Hocking on the Value of the Individual

    William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) had his day in the philosophical sun, but is no longer much read – except perhaps by those contrarians who take being unread by contemporaries as a possible mark of distinction. Recently I came across this magnificent passage: Life itself is individual, and the most significant things in the world –…