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Title: ‘Anarchy Brown’
Author: Jack Goody
Date: 1999/2000
Language: en
Topics: anthropology; academy; biography
Source: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology Vol. 21 (3), pp. 1–8
Notes: Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/23818707

Jack Goody

‘Anarchy Brown’

‘Authorities’ in one’s academic discipline are always difficult to

imagine as social revolutionaries or even reformists. That is true with

many of our predecessors whom it is common to identify with colonial

anthropology. But most of these were by no means political

reactionaries, either for their period or for later ones. Such was the

case with Radcliffe-Brown who was influenced by an important current of

revolutionary thought in the nineteenth century, going back to even

earlier times.

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born in Birmingham on 17 January

1881 of modest ‘yeoman’ stock. His father died when he was young leaving

his mother much worse off with three children to raise. He himself went

to various secondary schools and eventually won a scholarship in Moral

Sciences (Philosophy and Psychology) to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Reading psychology he came under the influence of the

psychologist-anthropologist, W.H.R. Rivers, who had accompanied Haddon’s

1898 expedition to the Torres Straits north of Australia, as the result

of which he became much attracted to anthropology. Radcliffe Brown, or

Brown as he was known at the time before he attached his mother’s maiden

name by deed poll in 1926, became Rivers’ first student in anthropology.

As a promising scholar, he obtained funds to do fieldwork in the Andaman

Islands in the Bay of Bengal (1906–1908), returning to Cambridge to

write up his research where he was awarded a Fellowship at Trinity.

During this time he was known as ‘Anarchy Brown’ since he was a

self-confessed anarchist and a follower of Kropotkin. Perhaps he came

across his works through his courses in philosophy, perhaps because the

writings of anarchists and socialists were much in the air at the turn

of the century when he was growing up and were likely to appeal to

someone who had made his way up from a poor background into the world of

the bourgeoisie. Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a

Russian geographer, author and revolutionary who like his father had had

a privileged education, reading especially the works of the French

Encyclopaedists and about French history. In Russia during the years

1857–1861 he came under the influence of liberal literature. But he was

made to enter the army, joined a Cossack regiment and was sent to the

Far East where he explored Manchuria. In 1867 he returned to St.

Petersburg and entered the University. There he decided it was important

to diffuse knowledge among the masses and joined the revolutionary party

with this in mind. In 1872 he left for Switzerland and became a member

of the International Workers Association in Geneva, but found its

socialism not sufficiently advanced for his tastes. So he studied the

programme of the more violent Jura association and became an anarchist.

On his return to Russia he took an active part in spreading nihilist

propaganda. In 1874 he was arrested and imprisoned but escaped two years

later and went to England. In 1877 he was in Paris to help with the

socialist movement; in Switzerland he edited a revolutionary newspaper,

Le Révolté, and published various pamphlets. After the assassination of

Tsar Alexander II in 1881 the activities of exiled revolutionaries came

under closer supervision and he was expelled from Switzerland, going

first to London, then to France where he was arrested, tried and

sentenced to five years imprisonment because of his membership of the

IWA under a special law passed on the fall of the Commune in 1871. As

the result of agitation on his behalf in the French Chamber he was later

released and returned to London. Because of this widespread activity,

his great influence on intellectual life in Western Europe is not

surprising. Most important in this was his best known work, Mutual Aid,

a Factor in Evolution (1902) but he also wrote Memoirs of a

Revolutionist (1900) as well as books on anarchism and the State. Mutual

Aid was from one point of view anti-Darwinian and directed against its

individualistic approach to society; instead of the survival of the

fittest, he stressed cooperation but of a libertarian kind. He was

equally against Marxism, like most anarchists. After the Revolution of

1917 he returned to Russia and was welcomed back. But his version of

‘anarchistic communism’ was quite at odds with the centralised state of

the Bolsheviks, whose coming he greeted with the words ‘This buries the

Revolution’.

What did anarchism mean at this time? Its aim was not chaos, as we often

assume in common parlance (though this may have been included among its

means), but life in a society ‘without government — harmony being

obtained not by submission to law, nor by obedience to any authority,

but by free agreements concluded between the various groups’. Anarchists

were socialists who rejected ‘State socialism’ as well as capitalist

individualism, seeing the State as maintaining monopolies and promoting

capitalism. Rejecting both the State and centralised parliamentary

systems, they opted for decentralisation and for ‘an interwoven network,

composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes

and degrees, local, regional, national and international — temporary or

more or less permanent — for all possible purposes: production,

consumption, and exchange, communications’ etc. (Kropotkin, 1910).

For models, anarchists looked back to earlier institutions such as the

clan, the village community, the guild, the free medieval city — by

means of which ‘the masses resisted the encroachment of the conquerors

and the power-seeking minorities’. Indeed such notions of opposition or

resistance to the state were almost a necessary by-product of

centralised power and much earlier had taken a written ‘philosophical’

form in the works of Aristippus (fl. c 430 BCE), one of the founders of

the Cyrenaic School, in the fragments of Zeno (342-c 367 BCE), founder

of the Stoic philosophy, and in ideas of various early Christian sects,

for example, in Armenia, among the early Hussites and Anabaptists, as

well as among the French Encyclopaedists (whom as we have seen Kropotkin

had studied) and among some of the participants in the French Revolution

who stressed the role of communes rather than of the centre privileged

by the Jacobins.

On the threshold of the nineteenth century anarchism received a

systematic treatment in England in William Godwin’s Enquiry concerning

Political Justice (1973) which advocated the abolition of the State and

its courts, favouring the establishment of small communities without

private property. Godwin (1756–1836), who was the husband of Mary

Woolstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791), and

father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818) and wife of the

poet, Percy Byshe Shelley, was trained as a Presbyterian clergyman but

had become a ‘complete unbeliever’ by 1787 and was greatly influenced by

the French Revolution. However, he was not the first to use the word

‘anarchism’ which was employed in 1840 by the French socialist, Proudhon

(1809–1865), to apply to the no-government state of society, although

the term had been earlier used in a different way. In fact Proudhon

himself described his own variety of this ideology as mutuellisme.

Similar ideas were developed in the USA but the major step forward in

the spread of anarchism in Europe was the formation of the International

Working Men’s Association in 1864 when some French mutuellistes met in

London with some English followers of Robert Owen (1771–1858), who had

set up Utopian communities in England, in New Harmony (USA) and in

Ireland. Their aim was to undertake a direct economic struggle against

capitalism without going through parliamentary agitation which had lost

credence with the failure of the uprising of Parisian working men in

1848. With the collapse of the Commune in 1871 the Association was

banned in France but it continued elsewhere, completely separate from

Marxist socialism.

Anarchism was particularly associated with Russian intellectuals, with

the political oppression they suffered and with their identification

with the downtrodden peasants. As a result of this oppression many

sought exile in western Europe, especially in Paris and London, where

they met and collaborated with the leading revolutionary thinkers.

The two most important of these exiles were Bakunin and Herzen. M.A.

Bakunin (1814–1876) was, together with Proudhon, the founder of the

anarchist movement in nineteenth-century Europe. He resigned from the

Russian artillery and in the course of his subsequent education went to

Berlin, met the Young Hegelians and in 1842 published his first

revolutionary credo, which included the aphorism, ‘The passion for

destruction is also a creative passion’. He settled in Paris and met

French and German socialists such as Proudhon, Herzen and Marx, as well

as engaging in direct revolutionary activity in Dresden in 1849 for

which he was imprisoned. When he was eventually released, he travelled

to London where he met Herzen again but quarrelled with him. He moved to

Italy and then to Geneva where he joined the First International from

which he was expelled by Marx in 1872. The breach split the whole

revolutionary movement throughout Europe. For Bakunin decried political

control and subordination to authority (making an unconscious exception

of his own role within the movement) and took as his revolutionary model

the Russian peasant.

A.I. Herzen (1812–1870) was another of the Romantic Exiles, as they were

called by E.H. Carr, the illegitimate son of a nobleman who received a

broad education and was associated with the Decembrists in their

struggle for Russian freedom. As a result he spent eight years in

virtual exile, became a left Hegelian and joined the Westernizers’ camp

in Russia. But he fell out with that group on embracing the anarchist

doctrines of Proudhon. When he inherited from his father, he went to

Paris but partly as the results of the Events of 1848 he lost faith in

Western socialism and turned back to concentrate his efforts on Russia.

In 1852 he moved to England, where he started the Free Russian Press in

London as well as other publishing ventures. With the advent of

Alexander II and the granting of freedom to the serfs, he took a more

reformist stance but lost a lot of his influence by trying to weave

between the two. Later he began to write his memoirs, producing the

remarkable My Past and Thoughts (1861–67) and other works.

What did Radcliffe-Brown learn from Kropotkin and the rest of this

tradition? He is often thought of as stressing law (he wrote the article

on primitive law for the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 1933) and

sanctions (in which he was influenced by Fauconnet and the Durkheimians

(also in the ESS, 1933). But in his approach to political and legal

systems the state played only a marginal part. Indeed his emphasis was

the same as Durkheim’s (another socialist) in the Division of Labour

where a major thrust had been to examine how people were able to live an

ordered life in societies that had no state. To this end he interested

himself in the whole range of social sanctions well beyond the

boundaries of ‘courts, codes and constables’, in Malinowski’s phrase.

For to Radcliffe-Brown it was the maintenance of order in the broadest

sense on which his attention centered. His major periods of fieldwork

were spent among stateless groups, among the Andaman Islanders in the

Bay of Bengal and the Australian aborigines. He was concerned to

demonstrate the variety of sanctions, positive in the shape of the feud,

revenge and verbal attack and negative in the form of the withdrawal of

reciprocity, avoidance etc., by which such societies governed

themselves. Hence too his interest in the lineage, a large kinship group

which applied sanctions within and engaged in war (or the feud) without,

and which was especially important in societies that had no central

regulators. These societies were, as the phrase goes, acephalous,

headless, without rulers (and for some, segmentary, borrowing a concept

from Durkheim).

It is true that in writing of ‘primitive law’, Radcliffe-Brown confined

himself to ‘organised legal sanctions’, unlike Malinowski who used the

term for the whole range of social sanctions. Nevertheless, like

Durkheim, he took a very ‘social’ view of the law. Talking of public (as

distinct from private) delicts, he saw such deeds as normally leading to

‘an organised and regular procedure by the whole community or by the

constituted representatives of social authority...’ The emphasis was on

communal reaction rather than authoritative command. For this procedure

of penal sanctions can be seen as ‘a reaction by the community against

an action of one of its members which offends some strong and definite

moral sentiment and this produces a condition of social euphoria’

(Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 212). In all this he has remarkably little to say

about ‘repressive sanctions’, especially those imposed on one group by

another. For him the most elementary developments of law were

‘intimately bound up with magic and religion’. He stresses this element

even in Asante law, although that state did impose ‘a rule of law’ on

other communities as well and ruled, in part at least, as the result of

military conquest. Austinian conceptions of authoritarian justice were

far removed from his communitarian view of the operation even of penal

sanctions in ‘primitive societies’.

Although this approach is compatible with the ideas of Kropotkin, it

derives more specifically from Durkheim. In the Division of Labour, the

great French sociologist takes as his polemical orientation Herbert

Spencer’s treatment of ‘the problem of order’ in society and argues

against what he sees as Spencer’s utilitarian reduction of the problem

one centering upon the development of contract (as in the works of the

legal historian, Henry Maine). Above all he was interested in the

relation of the individual to the social group. In undifferentiated

societies that relationship was ‘mechanical’ in that the components of

each of the segments (he referred to the Kabyle society of Algeria as

‘segmental’) reacted in similar ways and operated a repressive law under

the conscience collective. Differentiated societies were not, he argued,

purely dependent upon the development of individualistic contractual

relations, as Spencer and the laisser faire theorists had argued, but on

organic sanctions, each of the subgroups being part of a more or less

integrated whole (an organism) based upon the division of labour which

provided the ‘non-contractual elements in contract’ required to make the

system work. For this reason he too was critical of the individualistic

social order posited by the utilitarians.

In criticising the utilitarians Durkheim took the stance of what Talcott

Parsons has called ‘sociologistic positivism’ (Parsons 1937: 461). This

position he came to modify, later seeing social constraints as ‘a system

of sanctions attached to normative rules’, and emphasizing human agency

in a social world. The primary source of constraint lay in the moral

authority of a system of normative rules, which constituted his notion

of the social (as opposed to the individual) and rested upon ultimate

common value attitudes. Constraints are not simply sanctions in the

external sense but involve the voluntary adherence to a rule as a duty

(Parsons 1937: 383). The social is internalized within as well as

present outside the person. Men have an attitude of respect towards the

rule which partakes of the attitude to the sacred and these rules are

integrated with one another by common value orientations. Radcliffe

Brown’s discussion of sanctions and constraints is less subtle but more

clear cut than Durkheim’s. What is common in the present context is the

fact that both concentrate on constraints of the non-authoritarian kind.

As we have seen these authors directed much theoretical attention to

‘segmental’ rather than to ‘state’ societies, to ‘tribes’ rather than to

what Hobbes called the Leviathan, and into an enquiry into the source of

order in such systems. That was very much Evans-Pritchard’s problematic

in his study of the Nuer (1940), where he employed the Durkheimian

notions of solidarity, of moral density, of segmentation (though in a

more complex way than Durkheim, since he saw the segments not simply as

similar but as opposed as well as co-operating in their interests,

depending on the order of segmentation). His focus was expressed above

all in the notion of ‘ordered anarchy’, of an order that existed in the

absence of institutionalized authority figures, a notion of which

Kropotkin would have approved. Evans-Pritchard, like Radcliffe Brown,

was often anarchic in his attitude to authority, though that derived

more from the radical right than the radical left (Goody 1995). But at

the centre of the interest he developed with Fortes were segmentary,

acephalous societies, as we see from African Political Systems (1940) as

well as from the works on the Nuer which initially drew inspiration from

Maine but later owed more to Durkheim. Theoretically the contribution of

this book was in that area rather than in centralised states, in the

analysis of which anthropologists made little progress. Most of their

theoretical energies, as far as political systems were concerned, were

taken up with the arrangements of stateless societies, of systems where

the checks and balances were often more manifest than authority itself,

at least authority of a centralised kind, and which were marked instead

by ‘ordered anarchy’.

It will seem to some strange to think of Radcliffe-Brown as an

anarchist, as an anti-authoritarian figure because he represents for

many the archetypical ancestor of modern British social anthropology and

hence is automatically ‘an authority’. Only we who followed are the real

revolutionaries, the real anti-authority figures, for we really did

break away and establish a new tradition which had not yet become

dominant.

While such an attitude is understandable from the standpoint of the

developmental cycle of any one field of study, at least in the

humanities, from a more distant (‘objective’) stance it demands some

modification. For in terms of approach, Radcliffe-Brown’s displayed a

radical break with much of what went on before, although he established

his own line of ancestors outside the usual anthropological genealogy

(consisting of Montesquieu, Maine, Vinogradoff etc.) and switched his

allegiance to Durkheimian sociology, again in a very radical way, with

dramatic results for those who followed, especially for Evans-Pritchard

and Fortes. But while his work was revolutionary in this sense, it was

not at first sight anti-authoritarian. He was much concerned with social

sanctions (following Fauconnet and others), with law, with social

control more generally, and he looked at social institutions in a

structural-functional way in relation to their contribution. However,

while he remained totally influenced by the Marxist tradition, he was

affected by that other socialist trend deriving from anarchist thought,

for example, in such matters as ‘distributive justice’ as well as in his

treatment of social organization more generally.

Social anthropologists have often played the role of questioning the

current state of affairs in their society by pointing to alternative

arrangements, associated with an interest in social reform and in the

reversal of existing authorities. Durkheim was a socialist as well as a

sociologist, a militant in the Dreyfus affair. Later on there was the

strong Marxist tradition above all in French anthropology as well as the

determined opposition to the Vietnam War on the part of many American

colleagues. Among my professors in Britain, all academic offspring of

Radcliffe-Brown (and Malinowski), Evans-Pritchard often stood against

authority but from a right wing Catholic position. Others were more

inclined towards the left. It is often thought that those who worked

under colonial regimes were themselves ‘colonialist’. Not at all. They

were often at loggerheads with the authorities. Meyer Fortes, the great

friend of Evans-Pritchard, had great difficulties in gaining entry to

the Gold Coast (later Ghana), because he was a red and a Jew. People

from the London School of Economics were particularly suspect. Others,

like the German exile, Kirchhof, never made it to the field in a British

colony for political reasons. Another of their collaborators, Max

Gluckman, was excluded not only from his own country, South Africa, but

also from USA and New Guinea. These earlier anthropologists also

included representatives of the colonized peoples who were certainly

against the system. Some later became distinguished contributors to the

independence of their countries, Jomo Kenyatta (author of a book on the

Kikuyu) in Kenya, who worked with Malinowski, and in Ghana Kwame

Nkrumah, an occasional pupil of Daryll Forde and Kofi Busia, a pupil of

Meyer Fortes and author of a study of Asante. Like many other

anthropologists, these were motivated to become interested in the

‘peoples without history’ who were always in conflict with the colonial

authorities. They were themselves somewhat anti-authoritarian, even

anarchistic, and that has not proved to be a bad tradition to follow.

References

Avrich, P. 1967. The Russian Anarchists. Princeton.

Carr, E.H. 1933. The Romantic Exiles. London.

Durkheim, E. 1964. The Divisions of Labour in Society. London.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford.

Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. African Political Systems.

London.

Goody, J.R. 1995. The Expansive Moment. Cambridge.

Kropotkin, P.A. 1910. Anarchism. Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 11^(th)

edition. New York.

—, 1902. Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution. London.

—, 1962 [1899]. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. London.

Parsons, T. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society.

London.

Woodcock, G. and Avakumovic, I.1950. The Anarchist Prince. London.

Le Révolté

My Past and Thoughts (1861–67)