Professor Carol Hamilton
145 C Baker Hall
email: cvh@andrew. cmu. edu
office phone: 8-6451
office hours tba

Anarchy & Culture

"Property is theft."

This course will consider the cultural and social ideas of a neglected political movement whose philosophy is often misunderstood as mere advocacy of violence and chaos. In fact, anarchists developed sophisticated, influential critiques of hierarchy, authority, centrality, nationalism, war, law, prisons, religion, Social Darwinism, and sexual politics. The course will have historical, cultural, and contemporary/ theoretical components.

Assigned texts include Emma Goldman's Living My Life (which gives the anarchist account of the Homestead strike and Berkman's attack on Frick), Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Michael Bakunin's God and the State, William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, B. Traven's novel The Death Ship, a theory text on poststructuralism and anarchism, a cultural studies text on punk rock and anarchism, and an introduction to anarchism entitled Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green.

Graduate students will write a 15-20 page seminar paper with a preliminary 3-page prospectus. Possible paper topics, in addition to those above, include anarcha-feminism, eco-anarchism (Murray Bookchin), the abolition of work (Andre Gorz) , deschooling society ( Ivan Illich) , politics and nationalism (Noam Chomsky), and sexuality (Alex Comfort). Books on these subjects are on reserve at Hunt Library.

Undergraduates will write a 4-page paper and a 7-page paper and will take a final exam.

If class size permits, there will be oral presentations on some paper topics.

Grading considerations: For both undergraduates and graduate students, attendance and participation are expected. This is not a correspondance course. Excellent attendance and active participation are necessary if you expect to make an A in the course. If you rack up a number of absences, even with reasonable excuses, you will be considered to have missed a substantial portion of the course and your grade will be adjusted accordingly. (Anarchists believed in commitment, and a commitment to the course is obligatory.)