Anarchism today,

by David E. Apter (editor), James Joll (editor)

237p paperback, illustrated cover, good condition,fresh copy, this copy published in the year 1971

Genres: Politics

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

David Ernest Apter (December 18, 1924 – May 4, 2010) was an American political scientist and sociologist. He was Henry J Heinz Professor Emeritus of Comparative Political and Social Development and Senior Research Scientist at Yale University.
He was born on December 18, 1924. He taught at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago (where he was the Executive Secretary of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations), the University of California, (where he was director of the Institute of International Studies), and Yale University, where he held a joint appointment in political science and sociology and served as Director of the Social Science Division, Chair of Sociology, and was a founding fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science in Palo Alto, California, a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer. He has done field research on development, democratization and political violence in Africa, Latin America, Japan, and China.
In 2006 he was the first recipient of the Foundation Mattei Dogan prize for contributions to Interdisciplinary research.
Apter died in his home in North Haven, Connecticut, from complications due to cancer on May 4, 2010.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

In high school I'd become enamoured of radical political theory. Although early reading of Trotsky led me to call myself a Trotskyist by age sixteen, I was actually a sponge, ready to give a mind to any critique of what was being practiced so destructively in and by the USA. Consequently, I got into Gandhi, A.J. Muste, Eugene Victor Debs, Norman Thomas, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Che, Tom Paine, Jean Paul Marat, Robespierre, the Frankfurt School and even some Libertarian stuff while I joined various radical organizations such as the War Resister's League, the S.D.S., Y.P.S.L. etc.

This absorption in radical politics continued through the sophomore year of college. Then, draft resistance interrupting school for a year, I got serious about scholarship more generally. Returning to Grinnell and changing from a history to a religion major led, given my lack of any religious education beforehand, to a rather complete absorption in the field, an interest which propelled me immediately into seminary.

It was only upon obtaining the M.Div. and leaving school that I found the time, or excuse, to return to the old interests in political theory.

I read this collection of sympathetic essays about anarchist theory in the old Volume II Cafe across Sheridan Road from the Lake Shore campus of Loyola University Chicago.

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book that appeared in the early 1970s. It strove to outline the state of anarchism, a particular political perspective, across a variety of societies at the time. Among the places considered--France, the United States, Spain, Japan, Great Britain, India, Argentina, and so on. The book concludes with an essay by James Joll on the "living tradition of anarchism."

A useful examination of the state of this political orientation as of the late 1960s. . . .

[Dena Hankins · Rating 3 out of 5]

They brought a theoretical lens to bear on a subject that is misunderstood as without ideas and gave us the arguments and reasons behind the actions of the hydra that was the anarchistic movements of the sixties. Thick reading for a person long out of college and more apt to pick up fiction, but it left me interested in the progression of the philosophies and belief systems that informed these anarchists.

Recommendations for those wanting to bring themselves more up-to-date after reading this?

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have the 1972 printing.

I wouldn't even bother with this. Staid, academic, untroubled by reality, and out of fucking date, yo.