| This dissertation, "Angelic Troublemakers: Religion and Anarchism in Henry D. Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin," investigates religious and philosophical sources of modern American anarchism, with the main interpretive chapters being devoted to exploring the normative conceptions of political authority and political obligation extant in the thought and practices of Henry Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin. Each of the three commends an attitude toward political authority that is consistent with the principles of anarchism, or one of its varieties, as it has come to be understood in recent decades among theorists and philosophers. I argue that Thoreau, Day, and Rustin present related yet distinct philosophical and religious doctrines of autonomy, theological conceptions of love and eschatology, and pragmatic-empirical reasons of various kinds that lend support to a single ethical-political practice that is recognizably anarchist in its unwillingness to attribute genuine authority to modern states. More specifically, with these three figures it is evident how compassion, an emphasis on moral responsibility (for oppression and social suffering), and an ethic of noncomplicity or noncooperation with unjust social practices can motivate an anarchist posture or attitude, which brings to the surface how anarchist theory can be connected with radical religiosity, radical pacifism, and the nonviolent direct action tradition. In general a major contribution of this dissertation is that the analysis of the explicit and implicit arguments for anarchism extant in the social thought of three religiously-inclined activists such as Thoreau, Day, and Rustin facilitates the refinement of anarchist thought proper; and, in turn, employing anarchism as a theoretic or conceptual scheme by which to consider the political philosophies of Thoreau, Day, and Rustin provides a means by which to clarify critical aspects of their thought. This clarification in turn makes clear that the category of anarchism is broader than is ordinarily assumed. |
