Thermidor of the Progressives: Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization
“Thermidor of the Progressives: Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization”
by Kevin Carson
“ ’Progressive’ intellectuals have become attached to the fortunes of the large bureaucratic organization in the same way that the politiques were attached to the court of the Sun King… This general affinity for large-scale organization and hierarchy, more recently, has been reflected in hostility to the new forms of networked organization permitted by the emerging technologies of the late twentieth century. The reaction to decentralized and networked organization, among conventional liberals, seems to be uniformly and viscerally negative. The professional vs. the do-it-yourself, the hierarchical vs. the networked, the managed vs. the ad hoc, the large and hierarchical vs. the small-scale—in every case, the antipathies are predictable to the point of stereotype.”
