Anarchy and the End of History by Michael Ziesing
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Just when you thought it was safe to be a anarchist, Gunderloy and Ziesing are at it again, asking questions you thought you had answered, or maybe forgot to ask.
This anthology brings together a collection of essays by people who positively relish a good think – about anarchy, themselves, and so what difference does it make anyway?
More than a series of opinions, Gunderloy and Ziesing offer a dialogue among people who see their common ground as the greatest opportunity offering diversity, individualism and personal freedom.
Who are the anarchist? What, why and how are they in the world today? Maybe you’ll find some answers here. Maybe not. What you will find is an opportunity and a chakllenge to think about it!”
And make me think it did. This book could well be an 101 in Anarchy, but with all the advanced and meaningful debate that is going on about it in a completely different kind of depth, questioning at some points the very foundations of anarchy — see there? Anarchy is not something that is supposed to have “foundations”, yet we speak of it as a concrete idea, just like any other theory out there. You’ll encounter many such examples when reading this book if only because it includes texts by so many people. I wish I could find the original paper the replies to which comprise most of this book just so I could post it here and further spark debate myself. It was published in 1991, on the eve of the information age. 20 years later a highly anarchical World Wide Web is dominating our lives. You’d think a lot must have changed, surely it must have. You might be surprised.
I found this book completely randomly, in a second hand book sale in Aarhus and got it for only 5kr. It might be extremely hard to find, so if you’d like to read it I can lend it to you — yes, whoever you might be, dear reader (BookCrossing might also work well…) It’s a book I’d like to read again though, there’s just so much thought, references and a lot of optimistic ideas distilled in such a small number of pages.
