Berry - Guerin, All the faces of subjugation.pdf (234.05 kB)
Rejecting ‘all the faces of subjugation’: Daniel Guerin on direct democracy, self-management and individual autonomy
journal contribution
posted on 2017-12-07, 11:16 authored by David BerryThis article examines the ideas of French writer and revolutionary Daniel Guerin (1904-88), focussing on his conception of democracy. It argues that Guerin’s thinking developed from the ‘macro-social’ to the ‘micro-social’ as his ideological perspective changed. In the 1940s and 50s, Guerin’s unorthodox Marxist approach to the historiography of the French Revolution and his adoption of a Kropotkinian emphasis on the grassroots democracy of the sans-culotte movement led him to see the Revolution as representing the birth of a ‘new type of democracy’. Some form of direct democracy was the only structure which was compatible with what he saw as true, essentially libertarian socialism. In the 1950s and 60s, these conclusions led him to shift the focus of his research onto the history of anarchism and of
worker self-management, anarchism’s most important contribution to socialist and democratic thought. Democracy in the workplace, he argued, was the essential corollary of
the abolition of private property and the socialisation of the economy. Finally, in the 1960s and 70s, partly because of his own struggles with heteronormativity and having discovered Stirner, he focussed on disalienation and personal autonomy. Each of these three levels of liberation was seen as a precondition of an authentic socialist democracy.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Journal of Political IdeologiesVolume
24Issue
3Pages
314 - 336Citation
BERRY, D., 2019. Rejecting ‘all the faces of subjugation’: Daniel Guerin on direct democracy, self-management and individual autonomy. Journal of Political Ideologies, 24 (3), pp.314-336.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Political Ideologies on 4 July 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13569317.2019.1633102.Acceptance date
2017-12-04Publication date
2019-07-04ISSN
1356-9317eISSN
1469-9613Publisher version
Language
- en