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Anarchish: James C. Scott’s “Two Cheers for Anarchism”
(lareviewofbooks.org)
James is a weird one. I am a pretty big fan of his books "the art of not being governed" and "seeing like a state" as academic examinations of the conflict between everyday life and statism. I also think his "against the grain" is a fascinating look at how agriculture actually came about. This book though is not it, he writes with the casual defeatism of someone who is among the highest rungs of society. Mustering the same casual defense of the status quo academics and philosophers have been deploying for generations, most humourously skewered in this comic imho https://existentialcomics.com/comic/350
I think if people who might be the audience for this would be better served reading something like Graeber's Debt or The dawn of everything. While they focus on different things they both appeal to the same intellectual liberal audience (as well as other ofc) and the analysis of history is more interesting; Nudging people towards more radical conclusions.
Honestly it's quite sad to see someone who studied peasant resistance and wrote a very even handed criticism of centralisation reduce anarchism to crossing the street on a red light and sometimes listening to crowds.
