Welcome to The Peaceful Revolutionist
Thank you very much for stopping by. I hope you’ll find this interesting and beneficial. For over a decade, I’ve written frequently for both nonpartisan, nonprofit policy research organizations and for several websites, newspapers and magazines, combining interests in libertarianism, anarchism, socialism, feminism and decentralism, with occasional forays into other areas. Generally, I’m interested in radical movements and their histories, and I’ve been an outspoken critic of war, modern policing, the criminal justice system, the prison system, and other systems of organized violence, oppression, and suffering. I have also embarked on a comprehensive critique of the left-right political spectrum itself, arguing that it lacks explanatory power, that it is needlessly confusing, counter-intuitive, arbitrary, accidental and contingent. To the extent, however, that I do find it useful or necessary to describe my thinking in left-right terms, I see it as squarely on the left—if a part of the left-wing tradition that has been unfairly neglected—the libertarian left. I think of the libertarian left as comprising corners of the left that are anti-authoritarian, free market-friendly, decentralist, anti-government, green, localist, cooperative and mutualistic. These corners are where I’m most comfortable, and it seems to me that both of today’s teams are unhealthily fixated on the gigantism that seems to define modern politics and economics. I generally believe, borrowing the words of E.F. Schumacher, that “people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups,” and that therefore “we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units.” I see this view as completely consistent with free market libertarianism, which is perhaps a controversial position to hold. Given this view, I’m excited by the practical potential of federalism, and I follow Elinor Ostrom in regarding the state-market dichotomy as inadequate.
The name of this endeavor comes from the periodical written and printed by the American radical, inventor and musician, Josiah Warren, primarily in 1833. Much of my project is a conscious attempt to carry on the legacy of the Native American Anarchists, so-called to distinguish the distinctive individualist anarchism (or, perhaps, proto-individualist anarchism, to the extent that some practitioners did not describe themselves as anarchists) of reformers like Warren, Ezra H. Heywood, William B. Greene, Lysander Spooner, J.K. Ingalls, and Benjamin Tucker, among others. Here, I plan to continue and expand that project, discussing the history of American individualist anarchism and applying its insights to contemporary political and economic questions. In addition, I plan to use this forum to expand my writing into other areas, for example, art and film criticism, fiction book reviews, and potentially science fiction shorts.
Again, thanks very much for taking the time to check this out, and please do feel free to reach out to me if there are particular subjects or stories, etc., that you’d like me to discuss here.
