DAVID T. WIECK run, I shall briefly sketch. At the center of anarchist critique of existing societies is the thesis that they are characterized by the submergence of individuals in networks of powerinstitutions - so that, insofar, the Marxist method of analyzing past history in institutional terms is basically correct in intention, if dogmatic and oversimplifying in its standard applications. Thus the force of the statement that the individual ts the ultimate social reality is normative and programmatic, and the claim is inseparable from other aspects of a complex ethical ideal of human being. Here and now, this «reality~ is an incompletely realized potential. This view of the individual does not entail Stirner's metaphysical and epistemological individualism, which can be regarded as an effort to ground a normative view in philosophyproper. Yet, as I hope I have succeeded in at least suggesting, the affirmation of the individual does not reach its anarchist meaning, and its complete distinctness from bourgeois and other alienating conceptions of individuality, until it is thought in the context of the transcendence of power. For knowledge of that transcendence we have to rely upon our severely incomplete experience of ourselves and others in situations of love and caring and community, where the subjectivity of others is significantly present to us; about these, and about the anarchist ideal, a language of 'person' may be less misleading than a language of 'Individual.' In that context, by the hypothesis of anarchism, the individuals cease to be in systematic antagonism, and 'individual' and 'social' cease to be descriptive of conflict. Such a view of the individual is not, so far as I can see, in essential conflict with a philosophy of social sciences that prefers, for what I would consider reasons of methodology, to regard relations as prior and individuals as derivative. Nature I HAVE SPOKEN only about anthropos, and a few tentative words, no more, about Nature and Humanity must be said. In a profound sense, anarchism is atheistic. (By atheism I mean precisely the negation of theism, not the negation of religious feeling or of spirituality.) The intense atheism of traditional anarchism would seem to be more than terrestrial in its ardor - no more anticlericalism - and more also than negational of God as legitlmator of governmental and clerical 50
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