bAVID T. WIECK institution is unjust if and insofar as persons implicated in it are the «slaves» of others. However benign and altruistically intentioned, «slaveries» violate human being systematically and essentially, and this cannot be made-good. The «masten of course thinks otherwise, and otherwise say his ideologies. Plainly, to strive for the total abolition of «slaveries» is not the only possible mode of response to their recognition: if it were, there would be no liberalisms or Marxisms and anarchists would be everywhere. If convinced that abolition is impossible, one may choose to mitigate, reform or exchange systems of power; without devaluing freedom, one might not hope for more than marginal and sporadic realization of it. Except tor incidental remarks, I shall avoid discussion of practicality and the philosophical problems concerning judgment of it, problems that are particularly difficult because the generalization of anarchist attitudes toward institutions might have significant results, in keeping with anarchist values, even if the ideal aim were never approximated. I limit myself to trying to exhibit the meaning of the anarchist Idea, a project prior to, even though not fully distinguishable from, judgments of practicality, and necessary (I believe) because the degree to which an anarchist perspective restructures perception and anticipation of human being, of society, and of history, is rarely appreciated sufficiently. (Sometimes the characteristics of anarchism discussed here are expressed, by anarchists and others, as anti-authoritarianism. This is an unhappy mode of expression, first because antiauthoritarianism is professed by numerous and diverse political groups; second because there are forms of authority that do not entail power over persons; third because authority is that to which power pretends and which its ideology claims for it; and for other reasons. Authority that is specifically and voluntarily delegated is not power-over-persons, although it may be converted to such power. Recognition of the authority of technical competence is not submission to power, unless the technically competent are permitted to determine ends as well as means, or to determine means in a fashion that determines ends. The authority of each in his or her own sphere of activity is a way of enunciating the freedom of each. Analysis of authority, to distinguish the genuine from the spurious, has been lacking in anarchist literature; the problem is met squarely by Giovanni Baldelli's Social Anarchism, N. Y.: Atherton Press, 1971, from which I have learned much.) 32
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