John Summers explains why he considers himself an anarchist
I've lauded the piece here before, and was glad to see it in the table of contents for The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, a volume published last year by Oxford University Press and edited by John H. Summers, a visiting scholar at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. But on closer examination, I saw that the editor hadn't simply reprinted the appendix. This version of "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" was rather different: it was taken from the text that Mills had mimeographed for his students in the mid-1950s.
This evidence of digging around in the archives left me eager to read more of the editor's own writings about Mills, listed in the bibliography, to see what insights he might have reached while excavating. And as luck would have it, we were introduced a short time later by a mutual friend. This somewhat expedited things, since Summers was just about to publish Every Fury on Earth (The Davies Group), a far-ranging collection of essays, including several on Mills.
Something of the maverick sociologist's feeling for intellectual craftsmanship runs throughout Summers' work. I don't recall the last time I read anything so ardent about scholarship as a means to soul-making -- or, for that matter, so angry at how academic life can distort that process. One of the remarkable things about Summers as a writer is that his frustration never runs to sarcasm -- no small accomplishment.
We recently exchanged a few rounds of e-mail about his work. A transcript of that exchange follows.
Q: You identify yourself as an anarchist and quote passages in which both James Agee and C. Wright Mills did, too. But it's not clear from your work (or theirs, for that matter) just how much this is a matter of feeling an affiliation with some strand of the anarchist movement, and how much it is a matter of personal temperament. What sort of anarchist are you?
A: May I split the difference between temperament and historical exemplars? Politically, anarchism is a democratic method for criticizing power; philosophically, a rough synonym for pragmatism, especially in William James's effort to defend the creativity of perception against the lure of abstraction and intellectualism.
Several years ago I began to notice writers and scholars whom I admired calling themselves anarchists; not only James, Mills, and Agee, but Dwight Macdonald, who called himself a conservative anarchist. What I did not notice, and still have not found, was a serious discussion of these impulses. (As Macdonald said, most educated Americans mistakenly believe anarchism means chaos). So I was drawn to anarchism out of frustrated curiosity. Sensibility had something to do with it, but that's only to say the same thing twice: I don't discover such things about myself but by reading....
Read entire article at Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
This evidence of digging around in the archives left me eager to read more of the editor's own writings about Mills, listed in the bibliography, to see what insights he might have reached while excavating. And as luck would have it, we were introduced a short time later by a mutual friend. This somewhat expedited things, since Summers was just about to publish Every Fury on Earth (The Davies Group), a far-ranging collection of essays, including several on Mills.
Something of the maverick sociologist's feeling for intellectual craftsmanship runs throughout Summers' work. I don't recall the last time I read anything so ardent about scholarship as a means to soul-making -- or, for that matter, so angry at how academic life can distort that process. One of the remarkable things about Summers as a writer is that his frustration never runs to sarcasm -- no small accomplishment.
We recently exchanged a few rounds of e-mail about his work. A transcript of that exchange follows.
Q: You identify yourself as an anarchist and quote passages in which both James Agee and C. Wright Mills did, too. But it's not clear from your work (or theirs, for that matter) just how much this is a matter of feeling an affiliation with some strand of the anarchist movement, and how much it is a matter of personal temperament. What sort of anarchist are you?
A: May I split the difference between temperament and historical exemplars? Politically, anarchism is a democratic method for criticizing power; philosophically, a rough synonym for pragmatism, especially in William James's effort to defend the creativity of perception against the lure of abstraction and intellectualism.
Several years ago I began to notice writers and scholars whom I admired calling themselves anarchists; not only James, Mills, and Agee, but Dwight Macdonald, who called himself a conservative anarchist. What I did not notice, and still have not found, was a serious discussion of these impulses. (As Macdonald said, most educated Americans mistakenly believe anarchism means chaos). So I was drawn to anarchism out of frustrated curiosity. Sensibility had something to do with it, but that's only to say the same thing twice: I don't discover such things about myself but by reading....