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Details: ...or, "Encyclopedia of Many Varieties of Dissidence, the Practitioners of Which May at One Time or Another Have Met Someone Who Was an Anarchist." Who were the early catalysts... Who are the more recent key players... Is there an anarchist orthodoxy... What organizations are important... How do recent militia and libertarian movements interface with anarchist traditions... What about communism? These and other questions then served as the organizing structure for the inquiy, and the answers the de facto criteria for inclusion of various entires" (from the Preface). The Gays' don't deliver the goods. No satisfactory answers to these questions appear in the pages of the Gays' encyclopedia; no anarchist orthodoxy is identified or explained. Their analysis of militias (what they call "American Antigovernment Extremists") is self-contradictory. "American extremists... are bent on taking over government at the local, state, and national level. They believe in an authoritarian rule that they themselves establish." Clearly this means that they are not against government, but against current governors. They want to substitute themselves for those whom they see as illegitamate political authorities, rather than agitating for the complete abolition of such authority. So how can they be called "antigovernment"? The Gays are confused. Beyond that there are many examples of lazy research and sloppy scholarship. Many of the citations come from the internet; this has the advantages of not being limited to peer-reviewd essays and articles, but this also creates the disadvantage of therefore not being limited to essays and articles that make sense internally. In addition, it makes checking those citations impossible for anyone not hooked into the web. This encyclopedia is not going to help you get a better understanding of what "political anarchy" is all about. Without a better background or familiarity with the subtleties of anarchist thought and practice over the last 150 years, it's difficult at best to try to come up with any kind of encyclopedia that is both comprehensive and critical at the same time. The authors set their sights too high, and wound up hitting way too low. From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, #51 |
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