Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article attempts to understand the term “freedom” through a comparative analysis of how it was mobilized in various anarchist texts from the nineteenth century. Such an analysis helps to differentiate the anarchist conception from its mainstream liberal and libertarian variants. This is accomplished with the aid of a broad spatial framework in which incommensurable notions of space and spatiality are clarified. Likewise, the framework demonstrates the extent to which popular assumptions about pedagogy from the anarchist tradition are based on a contradictory recognition of ideal educational practices. Such practices often utilize a propaganda model that is in many respects antithetical to their ideas about the spatial dimensions of freedom, as well as the central role of freedom in a moral social relation. Though critical of their conception of state power, the author claims that there is still much to learn from the philosophical foundations of classical anarchist thought, particularly when they draw upon (in a largely critical fashion) some of the indispensable concerns and suppositions of the Enlightenment—which may modestly contribute to the post-postmodern reactualization of theories of subjectivity, ideology, and praxis for our historical moment. The importance of new theories of ideology is emphasized, since the absence of a more sophisticated recognition of the concept is a major reason why the anarchist tradition has often failed to sufficiently consider real power relations in its immediate circumstances—as exemplified by many of its simplistic assumptions about authority and pedagogy in the nineteenth century.
Repository Citation
Vastola, Michael. "Pedagogy, Ideology, and Space in the Classical Anarchist Conception of Freedom." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1–20. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss2/6