Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh

Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order. ’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and