Social Theory
After arriving in Sydney in 1927 he associated with the Communist Party of Australia and contributed to their journals, sometimes under a nom de plume but, by about 1932 he began to believe that communism under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union was a dictatorship with no room for workers' control or participation. He then became aligned with the Trotskyist movement for a period of time. But "e could not put up any longer with dialectical materialism or with the servile state which he saw was being imposed by the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat".
At a time when Australia had few genuinely first-rate intellectuals, Anderson's influence in Sydney intellectual life was enormous. The failure of the Communist Party to build a significant influence at Sydney University during the 1930s and 1940s, compared with the Party's greater success at Melbourne University, is often attributed to the influence of "Andersonian individualism" among Sydney students. Anderson later abandoned authoritarian forms of socialism and became what would today be called a libertarian and pluralist—an opponent of all forms of authoritarianism. Sometimes he described himself as an anarchist but, after the 1930s, he gave up his earlier political utopianism.
Read more about this topic: John Anderson (philosopher)
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or theory:
“The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)