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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
respect ‘the importance of gaining individual freedom and personal
autonomy’ but that they believe that ‘the truly free individual is at
once an active agent in and the embodiment of a truly free society’.
The argument has been fleshed out in a debate between L. Susan
Brown (put by Bookchin in the lifestyle corner) and the social anarchist
Janet Biehl. Brown defines liberty as private judgement and
individuality, sometimes running these ideas together. Anarchism,
she argues, ‘asserts that human individuals are best suited to decide
for themselves how to run the affairs of their own lives’ and affirms
‘the individual’s freedom to use and develop his or her capacities’.
She calls her idea ‘existential individualism’ on the grounds that an
idea of ‘becoming’ is superior – and more useful to anarchists – than
the more straightforwardly liberal conception of freedom as the
absence of constraint. However, pace Bookchin, she argues that existential
individualism leads neither to introspection nor to an
egotistic regard for the self. It supports a strong notion of voluntary
co-operation. Indeed, existential individualism is compatible with
social anarchism: it provides an impetus for voluntary association
and, in communism, a basis for individuality. 71
Biehl’s critique suggests that this last assertion is mistaken and
she traces the roots of Brown’s error to her treatment of the individual
as an abstract entity, divorced from its social background.
Because Brown considers the individual as a self-determining entity,
Biehl argues, she wrongly posits association on a notion of ‘choice’.
Whilst it’s possible that autonomous individuals might decide to
associate, Biehl believes that the priority Brown attaches to the individual
makes the choice of communism an unlikely one. Moreover,
because the individuals Brown describes are ‘constitutionally unable
to recognise a basic connectedness with one another’ the quality of
any resulting association will be significantly impaired. 72
In a review of the Brown-Biehl debate, Thomas Martin argues
that the differences between anarchists on the question of liberty are
not philosophical. Whilst Bookchin is right to highlight the difficulty
of imagining a situation in which individuals might choose lifestyles
free from external influences, he is wrong to suggest that Brown’s
concern – to defend the individual’s freedom to determine how to
live her life – requires her to treat individuals in this abstract manner.
However, he admits that the issue between ‘lifestyle’ and ‘social’
anarchists revolves around the different and ‘incommensurable’ ways
in which they understand the relationship between the individual
and the community. In other words ‘social’ and ‘lifestyle’ anarchists