Stanley Hauerwas is an important thinker for me to muse upon as I continue to formulate my thoughts regarding the connections between philosophical anarchism and contemporary Christianity. His pacifist views are well known, but I think it is sometimes lost that these views are dependent on his ecclesiology. Or rather, the ecclesiology comes first. This gives the pacifist views much of their depth and substance. However, it is also possible to see Hauerwas as an anti-institutional thinker first, in the sense that certain historical anarchist formulations underly his ecclesiology.
To wit, one of the main points I am developing is the idea that anarchism is most useful as a standpoint of critique rather than as an explicit ideology or political action program. Its philosophical or political standpoint of critique is based on its view of "institutionalism" as a continual temptation towards worldliness (in the Christian sense) that only arises when people organize together to maintain certain ideas about religion, the economy, education, and government. For examples of each of the above, one could think of the Pharisees of the gospels, Wall Street, free-market universities, and the modern state. The "worldliness" of institutionalism lies in the tendency, or temptation, of institutions to implicitly place self-preservation above all other values, even its originating ones. In other words, whereas most institutions are created in order to perpetuate a certain ideal or pragmatic method, they often reorient themselves fairly quickly towards the assuaging of the collective anxieties arising out of institutionalization itself, and moreover, end up justifying certain forms of violence that would not be condoned on an individual level. All in the interest of maintaining the viability of the institution itself, not the originating ideals or practices. Thus, the state creates militaries not primarily to protect constituencies, but to more specifically protect the existence of the state apparatus itself (of which constituencies are the superficial raison d'etre).
I see Hauerwas as being extremely sensitive to how the Christian church in America gives in to the temptations of institutionalism, especially in regard to how the church sees itself allied to the institution of the state in ways that cause it to support the self-preservative violence of the state and call it patriotism. Hauerwas calls it paganism, and he is right to the extent that paganism has always been the irrationally superstitutious (i.e., anxious) response to threats imagined and real.
I obvously need to unpack and clarify these thoughts a bit more before I try to publish them in a longer form. However, I do not think I am wrong about claiming Hauerwas as a philosophical anarchist, at least in terms of his underlying spirit, if not in all the particulars of his writings.
