When you think of anarchism, what comes to mind?

Maybe you have some vague image of a punk rocker with the Circle-A symbol scratched into her jeans. Or some comic-book supervillain out to destroy the world that spurned him. Those are fun caricatures, but anarchism is actually a rich tradition of thought going back centuries, and it was at the center of utopian leftism until Marxism came along.

Today, though, Marxism and other lefty ideologies don’t have nearly the purchase they once did, and it’s not entirely clear what, if anything, has filled that void. That lack is all the more interesting given our current moment, when so many conventional ways of doing and thinking about politics are being challenged.

So, in that spirit, I invited Sophie Scott-Brown onto The Gray Area to talk about the history of anarchism and its relevance today. She’s a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews and the director of Gresham College in London. She’s also the author of a new book, Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy, which is a fascinating look at the potential of anarchist ideas through the work of the well-known British writer.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Sean Illing

We’re all familiar with the stereotypes, but as someone who thinks seriously about anarchism, what does the term mean to you?

Sophie Scott-Brown

Yeah, I completely accept the stereotypes. Before you can get to any sort of serious anarchist philosophy, you have to do quite a lot of work deconstructing that for people. So here’s a working definition that might help. Anarchism, if you just take the very word itself, all it entails is a commitment to a lack of permanent authority.

Now, what you then want to do imaginatively after that is wide open. Dare I say there’s a lot of propaganda out there suggesting there has to be chaos and disorder and violence and crime. But the concept itself simply says no permanent authority, and that’s about the one thing you can say that really connects up a lot of people who might use that term to describe their beliefs.

Sean Illing

I heard someone say once that anarchism is “democracy taken seriously.” I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I like it.

Sophie Scott-Brown

I think that’s precisely right. There’s a spectrum of anarchisms, so I’ll stress that before I get lots of complaints. However, I would actually argue, philosophically speaking, if you’re going to take that first notion that we started with — that anarchism is a commitment to an absence of permanent authority — that does refine your options a little bit more.

Sean Illing

Is there a particular species of anarchism that you identify with?

Sophie Scott-Brown

I mean, for me, if you want the philosophical roots of it, it comes very much from the Italian rhetorical tradition. So figures like Cicero going through to Vico, people who actually believed that the nuts and bolts of living together means communication, means dispute, means arguing, essentially, but arguing in such a way where the results are not catastrophic. So conflict, I think, is a feature of life. The challenge for us is to not make that conflict catastrophic.

So if you accept that conflict’s going to be a ubiquitous feature of life, you say to yourself, “Okay, well, how do I deal with conflict so that it’s not only not catastrophic, but actually........

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