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It was sort of a wild idea: to propose a year-long course on anarchist ideas, on short notice, for an audience of whoever shows up, and to start off with the elaboration, largely on the fly, of an idiosyncratic anarchist synthesis, drawing on a wide variety of source material. But here we are, finishing up that first and probably most difficult phase of things.

I’m going to tackle two concepts together this week. As an experimental space assembled quickly and redecorated on the fly, “Constructing an Anarchism” has served me pretty well. But it was a space designed for more activity, more encounters with other participants, than it has actually seen—and I would be lying if I said it hasn’t felt just a bit cavernous when I give myself time to think about it. So I want to get the last two components of my anarchism on the table and then perhaps move fairly quickly into the summary.

We want to know how to act like anarchists. And what I’ve suggested in recent posts is that it will be easiest to answer that question in a wider variety of contexts if we can get it right in our most intimate associations—generally the kinds of associations that even non-anarchists might be inclined to keep free of political and economic modeling.

I had anticipated the need for one last serious theoretical intervention at this point, in order to set up the comparatively programmatic elements in the remaining posts. The emergence of some new details in the “social system” section of Proudhon’s Justice—as discussed in the last post—offers a different and more direct path forward.

For Charles Fourier, Guarantism was one of the stages between Civilization, the undesirable present state of things, and Harmony, a state in which the harmonious expression of the passions would occur more or less naturally, thanks to lessons learned and tendencies developed along the way. Guarantism wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough that he resisted describing it too fully, lest we be tempted by its relative splendors.

MAIN PAGE: Constructing Anarchisms All readings (pdf) — updated regularly Suggested readings: Charles Fourier, “Note A” (from Theory of the Four Movements) Related readings: “Mutualism” (Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism) Pierre Leroux, “Individualism and Socialism” (1834) From last week: Week 8 Readings (pdf) E. Armand and “l’en dehors”: An Introductory Selection (pdf) Plucked from the Fields of Anarchist Individualism (gallery) Ways to get lost for a while: Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism (pdf) Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea General: A neo-Proudhonian Synthesis: A Tour of the Lost Continent: Constructing Anarchisms: We’re in […]