Angelic Troublemakers Religion And Anarchism In America A Terrance Wiley by A. Terrance Wiley 9781623569952, 1623569958 instant download after payment.

Few political philosophies are as misunderstood as anarchism. The term conjures images of disorder for many, even though only a minority of anarchists has advocated the use of violence of any sort. At least three factors have affected how many imagine anarchism. First, anarchism has often been
reduced to the terrorist ethos that marked the political movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where anarchist labor activists turned to assassination as a method of social change. Second, many anarchists have been “militant atheists,” often hostile toward religion. And finally, some anarchists have been proponents of nihilism.
This book is about three anarchists of a different sort. The main interpretive chapters are devoted to analyzing the religious ethics, political philosophies, and social activism of Henry David Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin in terms of an anarchist conceptual scheme that promises to elucidate the implications of particular varieties of religious radicalism for the modern territorial state and our normative relation to it. By examining them, I hope to shed light on a highly influential strand of religious ethics and radical activist practice in the modern period, as well as on a variety of anarchism that does not conform to the negative stereotypes of the position.
None of the three religious radicals would condone terrorism. None of them is an atheist or a proponent of nihilism. The reasons they offer for anarchist suspicion of modern territorial states are, I will argue, largely religious in character. Analysis of the arguments for anarchism in the social thought of three religiously inclined, amateur intellectual, radical lay activists will facilitate the refinement of anarchist thought proper; and, employing anarchism as a conceptual scheme by which to consider their religious ethics and political philosophies provides a means by which to clarify critical aspects of their social and religious thought and practice
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