The two anarchies
The Arab uprisings and the question of an anarchist sociology

Is anarchism what anarchists do, or is it a much larger social and historical experience? In the history of anarchist thought, we encounter both perspectives: one that states the principles of anarchism as it ought to be practised, while another considers anarchism to be something that has already been practised, across the world and for generations, without being called by the name. This latter tradition, which might be called ‘organic anarchy’, includes different approaches, just as does the former tradition, which might be called ‘self-conscious anarchism’. While neither is an internally unified tradition, each expresses a general approach to anarchy, and imagines it to be endowed with specific features. The anarchist ‘canon’ includes representatives of both traditions, with the activists often (but not always) being self-conscious anarchists.

However, organic anarchy is also associated with important social movements, indeed more so than the self-conscious variety. Francisco Pi y Margall saw Spanish anarchism, for example, as an expression of communal and libertarian traditions already familiar to large numbers in the country (Alexander 1999: 8). The implicit assumption of that argument is that it is easier for a ‘new’ emancipatory idea to become socially established if ordinary people are already familiar with it through their own ‘old’ traditions (Bamyeh 2012a). In this way, emancipation appears as something that is organic to a familiar tradition, rather than as a novelty requiring a fight against tradition. This more general argument was implicit in Peter Kropotkin’s (1902) outline of anarchy as a feature of historical systems of civic ethics (even though he also argued anarchy to be based on the method of modern science). In its basic outline, the arguments for an organic anarchy continue today to be produced especially in anarchist anthropology and geography (Graeber 2004; Macdonald 2009; Gibson & Sillander 2011; Springer 2013): anarchy not so much an acquired ideology, but an already familiar practice or custom.

We can therefore speak of two anarchies: one that is embedded in social traditions and is thus already familiar to large numbers, even though those may not use the word ‘anarchy’ to describe their life. And another anarchy that is self-conscious, which begins its career from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. How do these two traditions relate to each other? In what follows I will focus on the analytical rather than ethical dimensions as we compare the two anarchies. That is to say, I want to explore how one thinks about anarchy from one perspective or the other, rather than determine whether one perspective may be ethically superior to the other. In the end, I will suggest how this comparison may provide some basis for an anarchist sociology. But I would like to start from earth, notably the Arab uprisings that began in 2011, which should offer rich basis for this comparison and for new learning about the sociology of anarchy, including how it may be defined from different social perspectives. (Here I will not address)

The two anarchies [1]

the ‘post-revolutionary’ phase, that is, the period following 2011 in most places. The post-revolutionary phase possesses dynamics that are very dissimilar to what may be called the ‘revolutionary moment’ proper (Bamyeh 2016), even though the two are often confused as if they were the same. Unfortunately, the extraordinary, unique revolutionary ‘moment’ tends to be forgotten when one fixates too much on the aftermath that has very different sociological attributes.)

Beginning with 17 December 2010, a number of spectacular revolutions erupted throughout the Arab World in short order. Within months genuine revolutionary mobilization and large scale protest movements took place in virtually all Arab countries, and in some cases, notably in Libya and Syria, the revolts turned into armed conflicts. Yet in almost all cases, including the early phase of armed conflicts, these revolts shared in common surprising new features—surprising, that is, because they had not been typical of older social movements in the region, except for the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 and to a certain extent the Sudanese uprising in 1985. But until 2011, the earlier Palestinian and Sudanese episodes appeared as exceptions to the rule.

What was ‘anarchic’ about those revolts? The method of revolt was characterized by spontaneous networking, minimal organization, absence of hierarchal guidance and structures, pervasive social solidarity and mutual help, local initiative, individual will, and a broadly shared feeling that the agent of historical change was the ordinary person rather than the great saviour leader. Those qualities were sustained even in conditions that seemed to require more hierarchical structures and central command, such as especially during the early phase of the military campaigns in Libya and Syria. But even in those cases, coordination between autonomous units was explicitly preferred to central leadership, and the partisans never consented to a unified leadership even as outside powers demanded it so that those powers might know who to talk to. Moreover, the anarchic qualities of the uprisings lasted beyond their triumph. Thus even in countries where the head of the old regime was toppled, the revolution itself did not produce its own personnel who were ready to take over. Nor did there seem to be a demand from below to give rise to a charismatic leader who would personify a great collective struggle.

Why those anarchic qualities of revolt appeared at that moment is a theme that requires its own study, especially given that many earlier movements within the same region had possessed non-anarchic attributes. What concerns us here, however, is that the anarchic qualities of the Arab Spring must be based on already familiar traditions, since they were clearly not based on an anarchist political programme or on a conscious anarchist intention (Bamyeh 2013). By ‘familiar traditions’ supplying tools for a revolutionary method, I refer to a process whereby the already familiar spontaneity of everyday life guides the spontaneity of the revolution; the common, pragmatic solidarity in neighbourhoods and towns supplies the model of revolutionary solidarity, and consequently the will to sacrifice and combat; in revolutionary times traditional distrust of distant authorities, based on the ancient proposition that a claim to help or guide is unverifiable in proportion to the power and distance of the authority that makes it, becomes the basis for distrusting any distant authority that claims to stand in for the revolution; and long-enduring traditions of conflict management supply the basis for a non-violent strategy during at least the initial phase of each revolution, and sustain that strategy in the absence of excessive counter-violence.

These revolutionary practices that are already rooted in known traditions rather than learned from revolutionary textbooks, generally describe the method of the revolution during the Arab Spring in 2011. While they may be based on an organic anarchy, organic anarchy is not usually translated into a conscious anarchist political programme. Organic anarchy exists typically in the form of a social order that appears to its inhabitants to be legitimate and practical, since it is an order which they see themselves as having consented to or voluntarily created. But typically it is not an order that is regarded to be the model for a large collective system, even in a revolutionary climate. However, organic anarchy does supply enough ready ethics and methods by which one is able to orchestrate a rebellion, which may not have the intention of propagating anarchy throughout society.

Here I would like to focus on six basic differences between self-conscious anarchism and organic anarchy, including the definition of each practice; the ethics that inform economic order; the question of authority; the source of knowledge; character of radicalism in each perspective; and finally the comparative expectation from revolutionary activity. In the process, I wish to underscore how anarchist sensibilities live on in different domains of social life.

Since it is embedded in customary life, organic anarchy tends to require minimal doctrinal definition. Individuals tend to think of their social order not as an expression of any specific doctrine, but as an order that is appropriate for their needs, one for which they themselves are responsible, and one that is sustained only by their own collective activity rather than by any external authority. In more recent times, realities of self-created and self-governed social orders have been observed by social scientists studying especially new urban environments in the global south. Several of those studies concentrated on environments that would become hotbeds of the Arab uprisings in 2011 and afterward. Focusing on Cairo, Salwa Ismail (2006) described a form of social governance that consisted of a set of informal rules for conflict management that residents have developed, rules that existed largely outside of state and legal channels but were more effective since they relied on neighbours’ knowledge of each other and of local histories. Comparing Cairo and other large metropolitan areas in the Middle East, Asef Bayat (2009) explored ‘quiet encroachment’ as a pervasive strategy used by ordinary people, before the revolutionary wave, to effectively establish new realities and resist state restrictions. That strategy required no organization and no collective planning, only preparedness for mutual help, reinforcement from neighbours, and willingness of so many others to participate in a myriad acts of quiet encroachment, which defined most of their social activity. In a similar vein, Diane Singerman (1996) demonstrated the pervasive role of informal networks, and consequently the informal economy, in making it possible for ordinary people to survive in a political and economic system that was otherwise designed to exclude them.

While none of these studies couch the informal social order they describe as anarchic, it is easy to see organic anarchy as the common thread throughout. That is because, whether geographically concentrated in new neighbourhoods or organized as dispersed networks, we encounter communities that evolve through practices of mutual help, with no support from the state and usually against its rules and regulation, and develop informal rules to govern themselves that are practical in nature and able to accommodate accident and surprise. And it is important to remember that the vast majority of the rebels during the Arab Spring came precisely from those anarchically organized segments of society, who by 2011 had long been accustomed to rely on each other, were familiar with the practical usefulness of spontaneity in their own unpredictable life, and also long accustomed to see the state as an external force from which nothing good was to be expected.

This dimension of organic anarchy, namely the sense of familiarity and ease with which one navigates a known local environment, stands in contrast to the doctrine-rich and often complex debates of self-conscious anarchism. This latter attitude is characteristic of modern ideologies generally. Indeed, it seems that ‘modern’, as an attribute assigned to any idea, itself calls forth additional layers of justification that local knowledge systems need only when they are confronted by an external force intent on replacing them. By contrast, as a local knowledge system, organic anarchy seems content with only general basic principles. An example of these is the notion of ‘social justice’, which during the Arab Spring emerged as one of the key demands. Left commentators sought to translate that demand, and the whole uprising generally, as protest against ‘capitalism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’. However, these latter terms were not used by the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring, including those who were familiar with them, since it appeared that the generic notion of ‘social justice’ encompassed the above and also seemed more intuitively acceptable than analytical terms that required more familiarity with doctrine and definition.

From the point of view of organic anarchy, terms like ‘capitalism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ appear too abstract and thus cannot be felt in a way that motivates principled resistance. This is not so with the more generic concept of ‘social justice’, which became appealing precisely because it summed up better than studious abstractions what the point was all about. Ordinary individuals do not protest ‘neo-liberalism’ in large numbers but, as in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, the disappearance of all free and intimate public spaces, and their replacement with ever more private, cold, profit oriented enterprises. The injury has to be concrete enough, and at the same time appear to be happening everywhere in the country. This kind of injury inspires determined resistance more than any abstraction is ever able to.

Thus while ordinary individuals may be familiar enough with inequalities that they see all around them, they reject most intuitively the absence of countervailing mechanisms to at least ameliorate the effects of inequality, so that it may be tolerable. And this perspective is latent in a traditional reluctance to embrace utopias that no one has empirically experienced. Rather, the organic anarchic perspective seems pragmatic and empirical: it endorses solutions with which it is somewhat familiar via empirical experience, rather than solutions that describe an unknown and never experienced world of, for example, full equality. And the notion of ‘justice’ combines these two elements, by first rejecting the absence of mutualism that among other benefits also makes some form of situational inequality tolerable, and second by positing the solutions along the lines of likely experience rather than an unexperienced, and thus abstract, utopia.

This practically oriented framework of organic anarchy also informs its attitude to the question of authority. Throughout the revolts of the Arab Spring we saw the emergence of a category of activists called ‘coordinators’, who did not see themselves and were never seen as leaders, although they were trusted with important roles especially in militarized uprisings. The term precedes the Arab Spring, and we can already see it in use in older movements as Kifaya and the April 6 movements in Egypt. My own experience in Tahrir Square in Cairo showed that in spite of the egalitarian environment, people generally did solicit advice from those they regarded as knowing better, notably intellectuals who had joined the revolution on the streets, even though they did not need to listen to them. And while they continued to respect certain traditional authorities, for example the Mufti of Egypt, they felt free to ignore such authorities when their instructions did not meet their sentiments. Thus when the Mufti of Egypt issued a fatwa prohibiting people from demonstrating against the regime on 4 February 2011, his fatwa was ignored by millions, even though he continued to elicit broad respect until his eventual retirement.

The above sums up the organic anarchic approach to the question of authority in general: typically, organic anarchy endorses only one form of authority, which might be called customary authority—something for which the model would be that of a teacher, parent, or arbitrator. Customary authority is defined by a situational rather than permanent need: the teacher’s authority ceases when one is no longer a student, that of the parent when one is no longer a minor, that of the arbitrator when the conflict in question has ended. As such, the situational nature of customary authority makes it quite different from the authority of the state over society, since the state is understood as a permanent and general sort of authority with no horizon for its termination. Thus from the point of view of organic anarchy, there is no basis for the classical Aristotelian claim that parental authority in the family provides the model for political authority over society.

In organic processes, an attitude toward authority would be expected to be based on how one has experienced authority, which also means that one is in principle prepared to amend one’s attitude depending on what experience has revealed. Thus from the point of view of organic anarchy, it would be a mistake, for example, to approach the question of authority in terms of absolute, unwavering a priori principles. That is so since organic processes include the possibility of immediate reversal, as we saw in the case of the Arab Spring when traditional authorities are followed only when they express popular sentiments and are ignored when they do not.

In other words, the question of authority, just like all other conceptual issues, is judged from the point of view of organic anarchy on the basis of whether authority itself has proven to be organic to the social order in which it is exercised. This means that organic anarchy acquires its knowledge not in the form of timeless philosophical principles, but through a constant process of adjustment of historical memory. During the Arab uprisings, for example, the clearest example of how historical memory has worked was most evident in how immense social movements, involving millions of participants, did not give rise to great unifying charismatic leaders, as had been the case with similar movements in the same region before. I have argued elsewhere (Bamyeh 2012b) that this difference must be based on historical memory, understood as a summary verdict on the lessons of past protest movements, a verdict that became deposited in an intuitive form in civic culture, whereafter the verdict became organic to that culture. This organicity of memory is evident in how rejection of charismatic and unifying leadership has become so intuitive in regions that had previously generated the exact opposite tendency.

The tendency for organic anarchy to cultivate intuition as a depository of knowledge in place of concepts, distinguishes it from self-conscious anarchism, where intuition itself requires being conceptually justified. One is hard-pressed, for example, to find a term like ‘patriarchy’ or ‘homophobia’ in organic anarchic use, but this linguistic absence does not mean the absence of a strategy to deal with the imposition in question. Rather, linguistic absence suggests that the radical posture that one requires to resolve an injustice is for the time being of a pragmatic rather than conceptual type. Conceptual radicalism begins with a theoretical proposition and commits to it due to the presumed theoretical rightness of the proposition (e.g.: ‘patriarchy represents x, y, z; therefore we have to do a, b, c’). By contrast, pragmatic radicalism organizes social experience or practice not in the form of conceptual propositions, but in terms of opportunities for practical resistance. This resistance, as James Scott (1992) has described, tends to take a minute, everyday form most of the time. Therefore it never appears radical enough from the point of view of self-conscious anarchism, or indeed from the point of view of any analysis that prioritizes large scale, systematic change.

Yet, this same pragmatic radicalism provides the necessary fuel for large scale revolutionary insurrections when the time is right, although it tends to colour that insurrection, too, with its general pragmatic outlook. Invisible but persistent everyday acts of resistance indicate a determined rejection of at least a portion of given reality, namely the portion that intrudes most upon a person’s immediate life. But this resistance is designed to be invisible due to a calculation of an unfavourable balance of power, in which the subaltern decides on a daily basis that she has no chance of victory in a direct and open confrontation with a mighty authority. And this means that all it takes for a revolution to break out is first the subaltern’s recognition of the vulnerability of authority to open resistance, and second that so many others have joined her in that recognition.

Again, the Arab Spring revolts seem to confirm this principle. The revolutions were evidently expressions of long-enduring and pervasive discontent, but they all broke out suddenly and seemed to require nothing more than one example of regime vulnerability. Thus the success of a revolt in Tunisia suggested that it would happen in short order elsewhere, and my own conversations with individuals on the streets of Cairo in January and February 2011 confirm that they tended to look for examples of success of movement elsewhere before they moved in the same way in their own environment. And once such revolts broke out they sustained a radical posture throughout, in the sense that they did not accept any compromise short of at least the head of the old regime. Pragmatic radicalism is therefore not any less radical than conceptual radicalism, only more subterranean for most of the time.

Yet, when it breaks out into an open revolution, the pragmatic radicalism of organic anarchy also tends to infuse the spirit of the revolution with reformist tendencies. That is so for two reasons. The first is that pragmatism in general, even in revolutionary situations, is governed by the limits of experience, meaning that few organic anarchists are willing to accept a model of post-revolutionary society that is not based on a model of liberty that is known to them even in some elementary way. Until today, for example, few in Egypt can imagine a system without a president, including hard core revolutionaries. The discovery of alternatives itself requires further experimentations until one finally confronts the limits of known models, and only after their limits are confronted may they be abandoned. But other than intellectuals, few would do away with a model of liberty they know in some elementary form for another that they have not experienced in any form. An imagination that transcends all known reality requires a sense of profound failure of such reality, including all its known variants.

The second ground for the reformist tendencies of the revolutions of organic anarchy is that a substantial portion of participants in those revolutions are themselves reformist in spirit. Tentative data from Egypt and Libya, for example, suggest that in both societies the original revolution was supported by about 75 per cent of the population.1 However, that figure may be divided equally between revolutionaries and reformists. By ‘revolutionaries’ I mean those who, before the revolution, saw a revolution as the only way to destroy a corrupt system. By ‘reformers’ I mean those who, before the revolution, also wished for a complete destruction of the old system but did not trust revolutions, largely because revolutions for them produced too many uncertainties and were guaranteed to generate a violent regime response that worried them more greatly than the persistence of the status quo.

The revolutions broke out when these two groups, roughly equal in number, joined forces. The revolutionaries struck first, but the reformers immediately joined for two reasons. First, the uncertainties they had worried about all along were going to happen anyway once the revolution was already underway, so there was no longer a point in trying to avoid them. And second, the fact that the regime was certain to respond to its enemies violently if needed created a situation that convinced those who were hesitant reformers that they could best protect themselves from the murderous regime response only if the revolution succeeded.

The combined movement of massive numbers of revolutionaries and reformers meant that the revolution would have a split personality, which is perhaps typical of all popular revolutions. This split personality is further aggrandized by the fact that neither camp is unified internally around a singular post-revolutionary perspective or imagination, and yet all imagine themselves to be united, since during the revolutionary phase all who participate are revolutionaries by definition. But the organic anarchic perspective would be expected to be the one most invested in imagining popular unity, since from the point of view of organic anarchy truth is validated by social consensus. Obviously, this is not necessarily how truth is validated from the point of view of self-conscious anarchism, nor for that matter from the point of view of most social ideologies—except perhaps for the patriotic perspective, whose unsuspected relation to organic anarchy requires a separate study.

The two anarchies and sociology

It may appear from the above that the two anarchies have little ground for mutual communication, and that their strategies and even their assumptions about the nature of social reality may differ substantially enough to preclude the possibility of a synthesis. But this depends on what we understand by ‘synthesis’: if synthesis is something that is produced by acts of knowledge rather than simply by a structured and determined ‘reality’ on its own, then synthesis becomes a function of a will, the will to learn something new that is yet to be provided by reality, even though the ‘new’ may be rooted in an observation of reality. This approach is much more common in artistic and literary experiments than in the social sciences. In a previous work, I did suggest that anarchy as a science of humanity was a particular kind of science that must be practised as an art (Bamyeh 2009: 218). Here I would like to confine my last remarks to how this perspective may be applied in a specific discipline, namely sociology, with specific reference to how an anarchist sociology may approach the question of the two anarchies introduced above.

Sociologists have been aware, at least since Max Weber, of the problems of value neutrality in their work, which are inseparable from the fact that here we are speaking of a science that involves the study of humans, including their values, by other humans who cannot possibly not have values of their own. Some sociologists are quite open about the fact that what they do is simply camouflage their values with the appearance of science, so that instead of their position appearing partisan, it appears as ‘data’ or other kinds of ‘objective’ indicators. Addressing the problem that all data are selected so as to answer specifically a question defined as such by the researcher, is entrusted not to any logic that is inherent to sociology, but to the basic dialogic expectations of a scientific community: someone else contests your data or your interpretation of them, or shows how you failed to posit the original research question properly. Many, however, follow in practice what Weber himself thought to be the best ethical practice, and that is to approach the process of scientific inquiry itself as a ‘calling’, since only in that posture would science transcend our own tendency as ordinary humans to be arrested by the perspectivist limits of our values.

In any case, it was evident to Weber that the question of values may be inescapable in at least one respect, namely in determining the research problem itself. What one eventually learns from pursuing that problem should however follow the ethical model of pursuing a calling. Now if we use this perspective to explore the ways in which anarchism itself may be a ‘calling’, that is to say, a chosen object of inquiry with no conclusions that presuppose the inquiry itself, we come upon certain elements that offer a broad outline of an anarchist sociology. To begin with, it has to be acknowledged that describing a certain reality as being an expression of an ‘organic anarchy’ is a chosen perspective, since that same reality can be and has been described in other terms. But if all perspectives are in the final analysis chosen, what is left for us is to defend the choice. And defending one’s choice of perspective is most coherent when that defense reflects not simply partisan political values, but a general philosophy that can be shown to be capable of organizing, in a meaningful way, a large spectrum of social observations. This activity of organizing information into a perspective may also be described as a method of adhering to a ‘paradigm’. It is one method by which an act of inquiry may be defended as being more scientific than another, so long as the paradigm itself is defensible. But usually scientists are silent about one crucial aspect of this process of knowledge: one does not simply discover new facts. Rather, the discovery adds something to reality, something that did not exist before it was discovered. Had it existed before, it would have been discovered before. The thing comes into being when we see it, and we see it when we need it. A science of this nature is a science that lives with humanity rather than places humanity at its mercy. It is, in other words, an anarchist science.

When applied to sociology, this perspective has, among other advantages, the capacity to transcend an old, tired debate in the discipline between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. When we say that a large spectrum of social observations actually express a unified popular philosophy that might be described as ‘organic anarchy’, we recognize how individuals, restricted as they may be by objective realities that surround them, nonetheless react to these restrictions with creativity and in a way that expands the realm of choices available to them. In other words, individuals are shown not simply to be oppressed by or victims of preexisting structures that mandate obedience to objective conditions. Being oppressed or being a victim is not a particularly interesting human or analytical condition, and simply describing oppression or showing how people are passive, voiceless victims of large global structures, is probably the least inspiring approach to knowledge. When it addresses oppression, a lively science would show how one lives with it in a variety of practical ways, how oppression itself enhances one’s creativity, and how oppression leads to an enrichment of our imagination. Thus here we describe a science that, as Nietzsche would put it, would be an ally of rather than an enemy of life. It shows how life is actively lived, rather than simply how one is victimized by it. As a philosophy of life or as a science, the validity of anarchy resides not in its abstract theoretical propositions, nor even in its presumed ethics, but in its evident universality: throughout history and in the present, large numbers have constructed systems of mutual obligations, solidarity, and trust that became organic to their life. That is to say, those systems survived because they appeared unimposed and capable of allowing individuals to navigate creative pathways around structural limits and distant, unchosen authorities.

An anarchist sociology thus would be the perspective that employs this observed universality as a basis for the further development of a self-conscious anarchism. This anarchism, then, is a strategy of knowledge: what one discovers becomes an added part of an ever expansive philosophy of life, and not simply recorded as another ‘objective fact’. Consider, for example, the first element of the comparison above, namely how a free and non-coerced social order is understood. Here, when we describe organic anarchy as one in which the social order to which one belongs is regarded to be generally voluntary rather than imposed, we immediately encounter a logical problem that is also social in its implications: the term ‘voluntary’ can only describe a free choice within a range of known and accessible options. One cannot voluntarily choose what one does not know, or that which is inaccessible with the aid of any currently viable method. From this observation, anarchist sociology constructs a synthesis: first it pays attention to what organic anarchy is already doing, and then outlines how the range of known and accessible options may be expanded. Needless to say, this sociological work cannot offer limitless universal voluntarism. But it can describe something more felt and lively: how to expand the realm of the possible, on the basis of a philosophy of life but also on the basis of what is observed. Here, while it may not make the world anarchist overnight, anarchist sociology contributes to making the world itself more voluntary in nature, and less imposed.

Put otherwise, anarchist sociology may be understood as a method of adding consciousness to organic anarchy, in a way that expands the possibilities of the latter while in the process subtracting from the maximalist, abstract, and life-antagonistic theoretical propositions of self-conscious anarchism. If for example we recognize the drive toward social justice as a basic orientation of organic anarchy, we may rediscover the merits of ‘mutualism’, that forgotten early name of anarchism itself. Mutualism was in effect a more accurate way of capturing the spirit of social justice of organic anarchy than the various macro-critiques of the general system. Those macro-critiques, in retrospect, seemed to have served only to immobilize self-conscious anarchism, since in macro-critique self-conscious anarchism saw itself to be fighting an alien world governed by abstract capitalist relations that could only be destroyed in their totality—in other words, according to no readily viable method. In contrast to this abstract orientation, anarchist sociology begins with observing the broadly apparent reasonableness of a more basic orientation to social justice, expressed as a broad interest in mutual obligations that have always made inequalities tolerable. If that is the case, then what anarchist sociology can do is explore how the already extant practices of and orientations to a generic notion of social justice may transcend occasional charity, so that social justice becomes a basic expectation of a social system, whose legitimacy is thereafter based in part on its ever more mutualist character.

Likewise would be the approach of an anarchist sociology to the question of authority. Organic anarchy lives at a distance from authorities that are themselves distant from it, and cultivates only those authorities that are customary. But it does not reject the idea of authority as a principled stand. In its basic form, this orientation to customary authority may be translated from the analytical point of view of anarchist sociology as a practical use of what is sometimes but not always needed: situational authority. This is basically the same as customary authority, albeit with no necessary basis in a custom or tradition. Rather, situational authority emerges in an acknowledgment of what we already do: we not only accept but even solicit authority when there is a reason for it, and that authority, which may be technical or require special skills, does not rule us in the same way a state does, nor represent us collectively. Rather, its tasks are to solve a particular problem, or supervise a particular stage in life, or handle crisis situations. Thus whereas customary authority is habitual, situational authority is rational: an anarchist sociology addresses not simply old customs, but new practices of authority that emerge to handle modern connectivities and complexities.

The above remarks suggest that much is expected of an anarchist sociology, both as a source of new knowledge as well as a descriptive approach of how social knowledge emerges. For example, if we accept the notion that historical memory provides basis for the intuitive character of organic knowledge, we also realize that intuition itself, while supplying knowledge in a form that is always ready for immediate use, is also ill-prepared to handle complex conditions, in which case intuition may yield to confusion. Indeed, one way to understand ‘confusion’ is as a condition in which intuitive knowledge supplies no persuasive choice among what appear to be equally unpalatable (or equally palatable) options. In such case it helps most when one knows, with the aid of an anarchist sociology, where one’s intuition had come from, or what it had sought to accomplish to begin with. Here intuition becomes a conscious principle, grounded in knowing why one has been inclined to choose x rather than y. This ability to justify the choice translates an act that is otherwise anchored in faith into one that is anchored in science—in this case, anarchist science.

This new consciousness translates intuition and memory into awareness of the historical reasons for one’s choice, action, and intention. It also supplies the radical posture commonly associated with an anarchist attitude, with a long-term perspective that allows one to assess at each step where one might be along a universal path toward anarchy. Of course, such an assessment does not need to be accurate, even though it may be said to be based on a science. But one can only work with the knowledge tools at one’s disposal, and usually that is good enough so long as one knows that there is still much more to be learned, so long as one understands the process in which one is involved to be universal. Employing this perspective, anarchist sociology supplies the radical posture with a means of measurement, if not with a destination: ‘I am now exactly here, and here is x away from my universal destination. I can now either die, content that I have arrived at the last possible destination in my lifetime; or live on, if possible, and plan for the next step’.

Radicalism is not a matter of a principled stand here or there, but of a life orientation: one acquires from organic anarchy its pragmatic radicalism, which consists of doing one’s work of emancipation in any way possible, even if inaudibly and in small steps. But whether great or small, noisy or quiet, those steps have a universal orientation. They do not simply express an amateurish proposition about freedom, but a deep understanding of its complexity and universal nature, and also of the basic principle that acts of freedom are never solitary even when they appear to be so. They add more freedom to the world, even when they only appear to add freedom to a person.

It is often assumed that radicalism is best expressed in revolutionary insurrections. This attitude is informed by a rich tradition of left and Third World literature and experiences that had been accumulating since the late eighteenth century. The target of revolution in modernity has been the usual suspects: despotism, capitalism, colonialism. In one sense, revolution in modernity was justified by a sense that the enemy was total and possessed systemic nature, which meant that the revolution against it should be equally total and systemic. But this of course was a conception of the world, an idea, which would not have emerged without a new paradigm that came to be known as the Enlightenment. Without a new paradigm there can never be a revolution, since oppression alone does not produce a revolution; slavery, after all, survived for centuries. Just as Thomas Kuhn argued in the case of science, social revolutions can be approached as expressions of a new paradigm replacing an old one. They are unthinkable otherwise, especially if their target is an old and entrenched authority.

But when we discuss revolutions, we often focus too much on their dynamics and fortunes, and forget in the meantime the most significant contribution of revolution to world history: revolution as an expression of a new paradigm and new knowledge, in other words, of ‘enlightenment’ (Bamyeh 2013). If enlightenment proceeds without a revolution in the usual sense, there should be no reason for revolution. There is nothing necessary or inevitable about social or political revolutions. But radical change is unimaginable without a revolution at least in thought, that is to say, without a new knowledge that is experienced as enlightenment.

Anarchist sociology may be understood as one vehicle of such enlightenment. And here it should be clear that when we speak of enlightenment in this sense we are not speaking of discovering an ultimate and binding truth or of a set of specific propositions about the nature of knowledge. Rather, anarchist enlightenment consists of acts of knowledge from below, in which one overcomes immaturity, both self-imposed and external, and in the process experiences oneself to have become free and related to others in ever more complex and varied ways. A science that aims to produce this enlightenment will not, in the final analysis, be called ‘sociology’ or any other name, even though that may be where it had started. It would be called anarchist science, and it will be the potential property of all.

References

[1] For Egypt, this figure is based on tallies from the first round of the presidential elections of 2012, in which candidates associated with different parts of the revolution garnered collectively about three-quarters of the vote. For Libya, the figure is obtained from a rare survey done in 2001 but published only ten years later (al-Werfalli 2011: 124–129). A tabulation of alWerfalli’s figures show that 37.9% of respondents believed that the system could not be reformed and that only radical change would do, whereas 38% supported radical change but were afraid of uncertainty and the consequences of regime response.</strong>