Romantic anarchism and pedestrian liberalism

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 313-333

  Herzog, Don ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

Anarchism; Deliberative democracy; Emma Goldman; Ideology; Liberalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248592385     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707299935     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. Emma Goldman, "Was My Life Worth Living?" Harper's Magazine, December 1934, 54,
2. reprinted in Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks (New York: Random House, 1972), 390.
3. For Goldman's further "anticipation" of critical theory, note especially the opening editorial statement of Mother Earth, vol. 1, issue 1 (March 1906), where America is censored more harshly than Russia because America has no censors.
4. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), 56;
5. also "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For," in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 49.
6. Aristotle Politics 1.2.
7. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
8. For a fun contemporary account, see Arthur G. Burgoyne, Homestead: A Complete History of the Struggle between the Carnegie Steel Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers July 1892 (Pittsburgh, PA: privately printed, 1893);
9. for a modern account, Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America (New York: Crown, 2005).
10. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, 2nd ed. (New York: Mother Earth, 1920), 7, 8, 9.
11. Alexander Berkman, "A Greeting," Mother Earth, June 1906, 6.
12. See also Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 497-98.
13. The judgment is that of David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 159.
14. Goldman, Life, 26, 87, 61, 41.
15. Gold, Life, 56.
16. Goldman, Life, 56.
17. Note also Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 72, where Berkman strikes a dear friend: "He had outraged my most sacred feelings: to spend twenty cents for a meal! It was not mere extravagance; it was positively a crime, incredible in a revolutionist."
18. Emma Goldman, "The Failure of Christianity," Mother Earth, April 1913, 41.
19. Goldman, Life, 435-36.
20. Note also Goldman to Berkman, May 14, 1929, in Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Shocken, 1975), 148.
21. Emma Goldman, "Anarchism," in Anarchism, 52;
22. note also Life, 207.
23. Like other theorists of ideology, Goldman sometimes lapsed into talk of conspiracy: note her "The Social Aspects of Birth Control," Mother Earth, April 1916, 468-75.
24. Emma Goldman, "The Traffic in Women," in Anarchism, 194;
25. Emma Goldman, "Victims of Morality," Mother Earth, March 1913, 20.
26. Goldman, "Failure of Christianity."
27. Goldman, "Francisco Ferrer," Mother Earth, November 1909, 275;
28. Emma Goldman, "The End of the Odyssey," Mother Earth, April 1909, 48.
29. Goldman, "Anarchism," 57, 64, 65.
30. Goldman, "Anarchism," 53;
31. Emma Goldman, "Russell Sage," Mother Earth, August 1906, 1.
32. Goldman, Life, 209.
33. Standiford, Hell, 210.
34. Emma Goldman, "Minorities versus Majorities," in Anarchism, 74.
35. Miriam Michelson, "A Character Study of Emma Goldman," Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901,
36. in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 441.
37. Emma Goldman, "Preface," in Anarchism, 43.
38. See David Porter, ed., Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983).
39. Goldman to Evelyn Scott, June 26, 1928, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 85.
40. Goldman, Life, 244.
41. See also Goldman, Life, 215, 343, 382.
42. Goldman to Ted McLean Switz, March 10, 1930, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 45.
43. Note also Goldman and Berkman to Dear Friends, December 9, 1919, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 13; Goldman to Evelyn Scott, June 26, 1928,
44. in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 85.
45. Goldman to Berkman, November 18, 1931, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 49.
46. Radio address from Barcelona, September 30, 1936, in Porter, Vision on Fire, 178.
47. Goldman, Life, 194;
48. Goldman, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard," Mother Earth, February 1910, 391.
49. There is an unholy resemblance hereto a conservative stance and a pointed irony in Goldman's own life. The Honorable Julius M. Mayer, giving Goldman and Berkman their maximum sentences and ordering an investigation of the possibilities for deporting them, noted in his opinion that these anarchists "seek to reach and control the humbler people, some of whom do not understand things" (U.S. Supreme Court, Transcript of Record 702 (October 1917): 448).
50. Crisply stated in Isaac Kramnick, "On Anarchism and the Real World: William Godwin and Radical England," American Political Science Review 66 (March 1972): 114-28.
51. Emma Goldman, "On Trial," Mother Earth, February 1909. 412.
52. Emma Goldman, The Truth about the Boylsheviki (New York: Mother Earth, n.d.), 11.
53. Transcript of Record 702: 448.
54. Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1923).
55. Goldman, Life, 731-32.
56. Goldman, Life, 802
57. ; note Goldman, Life, 872-74.
58. Goldman, Life, 730.
59. Goldman, Life, 738, also pp. 753, 811, 813.
60. Years later, she angrily repelled Trotsky's interest in the Spanish civil war: Emma Goldman, Trotsky Protests Too Much ([Glasgow]: Anarchist Communist Federation, [1938?]).
61. Goldman to Freda Kirchwey, August 2, 1934, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 55;
62. see also Goldman, Disillusionment, ix, xiii, 192-93;
63. Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1924), 10, 25-26, 31, 156-58;
64. Goldman to Roger Baldwin, June 19, 1935, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 60;
65. Goldman to C. V. Cook, September 29, 1935, in Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home, 117;
66. and generally Emma Goldman, The Crushing of the Russian Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1922).
67. Goldman, Life, 863-64.
68. Kropotkin was already opposing the Soviets when Goldman published her Truth about the Boylsheviki, as she noted there.
69. See his "The Russian Revolution and the Soviet Government," in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger N. Baldwin (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 251-53,
70. and his "Message to the Workers of the West," in The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, ed. Paul Avrich (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 1973), 149-51.
71. For later worries about revolution itself, see Goldman to Mark Mratchny, March 4, 1938, in Porter, Vision on Fire, 234.
72. Goldman, Further Disillusionment, 96.
73. Goldman, Life, 779, 873;
74. Goldman, Further Disillusionment, 101;
75. Goldman, Life, 739.
76. Note also Emma Goldman, "There Is No Communism in Russia," American Mercury 34 (April 1935):393-401.
77. Goldman to Roger Baldwin, April 20, 1925, in Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston; Beacon Press, 1989), 106.
78. Theresa Moritz and Albert Moritz, The World's Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman (Vancouver, BC, Canada: Subway Books, 2001), 71.
79. For a dispiriting review of the American Left's dogged loyalty to Russia through Stalin's grotesque years in power, see William L. O'Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York; Simon & Schuster, 1982).
80. But for an argument that Goldman's anticommunism was overstated and had unfortunate consequences, see Wexler, Goldman in Exile, esp. 75-81.
81. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 49.
82. From Spain in the World (July 2, 1937),
83. in Porter, Vision on Fire, 30.
84. Goldman to Frank Heimer, December 26, 1935, in Wexler, Goldman in Exile, 178.
85. For an exhilaratingly provocative treatment, see Mika LaVaque-Manty, Arguments and Fists: Political Agency and Justification in Liberal Theory (New York: Routledge, 2002).
86. See generally Candace Serena Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990);
87. and, for one wrenching example, Goldman to Ben Reitman, September 27, 1908, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 368.
88. Emma Goldman to Ben Reitman, July 26, 1911, in Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 224-25.
89. Goldman to "Bob" [Low], October 11, 1935, in Wexler, Intimate Life, xviii-xix.
90. The catchphrase is from Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London, 1872), but the thought is already Mill's.
91. As, e.g., in Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 306;
92. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 25;
93. Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 163.
94. As, e.g., in "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," in John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 578:
95. "Our exercise of political power is proper only when we sincerely believe that the reasons we would offer for our political actions - were we to state them as government officials - are sufficient, and we also reasonably think that other citizens might also reasonably accept those reasons." See also "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus," in John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 137.
96. And compare Jeremy Waldron, "Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism," Philosophical Quarterly 37 (April 1987): 128: "a requirement that all aspects of the social should either be made acceptable or be capable of being made acceptable to every last individual."
97. As, e.g., in T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 189: "According to contractualism, when we address our minds to a question of right and wrong, what we're trying to decide is, first and foremost, whether certain principles are ones that no one, if suitably motivated, could reasonably reject."
98. A canonical statement is David Hume, "Of Parties in General," in his Essays.
99. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 65.
100. The agenda is already explicit in Arthur Bentley, The Process of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908).
101. I.e., not the kind imaginatively explored in Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
102. Consider Steven D. Smith, The Constitution and the Pride of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
103. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chap. 2.
104. Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41.
105. For more on the nineteenth-century English political and intellectual scene, with a more cautious account of what happened to Mill, see F. H. Amphlett Micklewright, "The Rise and Decline of English Neo-Malthusianism," Population Studies 15 (July 1961): 32-51.
106. In a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll from July 2006, 11 percent rated global warming "not much of a problem," 8 percent "not a problem at all," and 6 percent "haven't heard or read enough about this to say."
107. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 150.
108. Goldman to Stella Ballantine, February 10, 1918, in Wexler, Intimate Life, 247.
109. J. Edgar Hoover, "Memorandum for Mr. Creighton," August 23, 1919, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/deportation.html (accessed January 20, 2007).
110. Arist. Pol. 3.4-5.
111. I borrow that last, of course, from Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance," in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).