“The question I want to pose is this: Are the authoritarian and hierarchical characteristics of most contemporary life world institutions – the family, the school, the factory, the office, the worksite – such that they produce a mild form of institutional neurosis ? At one end of an institutional continuum one can place the total institutions that routinely destroy the autonomy and initiative of their subjects. At the other end of this continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeffersonian democracy composed of independent, self-reliant, self respecting, land-owning farmers, managers of their own smallenterprises, answerable to themselves, free of debt, and more generally with no institutional reason for servility or defer ence. Such free-standing farmers, Jefferson thought, were the basis of a vigorous and independent public sphere where citizens could speak their mind without fear or favor. Somewhere in between these two poles lies the contemporary situation of most citizens of Western democracies: a relatively open public sphere but a quotidian institutional experience that is largely at cross purposes with the implicit assumptions behind this public sphere and encouraging and often rewarding cau tion, deference, servility, and conformity. Does this engender a form of institutional neurosis that saps the vitality of civic dialogue? And, more broadly, do the cumulative effects of life within the patriarchal family, the state, and other hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists.” — James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchism
Posted on: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 20:27:28 +0000
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