by
Les May
QUITE
by chance I saw part of the interview with Professor Ruth Kinna who
is a professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University. She
was being asked about her new book ‘The
Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism’.
In a short article I
wrote in May ‘Just
Pick Up The Litter’
I briefly explained that,
along with Marxism, as
a political philosophy, I
think it’s
a dead duck, though
for diametrically opposite reasons.
That
does not mean that the ideas it embodies have no place in our present
day discourse and actions.
Kinna
did a good job of explaining what some contemporary anarchists
mean by it, but I was a bit troubled when she appeared to stumble a
little when the interviewer asked whether its adherents believed in
democracy. She did not seem to give a hundred percent assurance that
that is the case. Democracy isn’t just about voting, it’s also
about how we treat people we disagree with. Her hesitancy set me
wondering.
Why
is it that people who claim to follow a political philosophy which
extols personal freedom, trust in the individual, working for the
collective good and personal responsibility, so often turn out to be
authoritarian when they band together in groups? How can they claim
to be free themselves if they object, sometimes violently, when
others express a view different from their own?
There’s
no shortage of examples of such authoritarian behaviour which have
been recorded on the Northern Voices blog, some in recent weeks: see below for a few instances* . Why
do they do it?
You
will find details of Ruth Kinna’s book at
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