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MARTIN B. DUBERMAN
with Hartmann, Kris and others) has defined "natural" stages of devel–
opment each of which marks an advance of mixed loss and gain, but an
advance clearly preferable to the impairment which results when develop–
ment is interfered with by adverse environmental influences. And a
number of reputable psychologists, if less eminent and sophisticated than
Brown and Erikson, are employing rhetoric and drawing conclusions still
more directly reminiscent of the Anarchists' optimistic terminology:
[If] ... loving, understanding respect for [the child's] needs and
feelings are provided ... then the child gradually becomes socialized
of its own accord with a minimum of tyranny and discipline ...
hostility, violence, and cruelty of all sorts, including wars and self–
destructiveness, have their ultimate source in the minds of improperly
matured men; and they are prevented by proper childrearing.
The Anarchist belief in the harmonious possibilities of human develop–
ment-and the threat to that development posed by a hostile environ–
ment-is neither utopian nor outmoded; with some psychologists it finds
partial, with others almost total, confirmation.
Additional support can be found in certain practical experiments
undertaken in recent years. In the Scandinavian "adventure play–
grounds," where children are given materials with which to build but are
spared adult supervision, individual initiative and friendly cooperation
turn out to be mutually supportive rather than mutually exclusive. And
in
A.
S. Neall's Summerhill self-regulation does lead both to personal
independence and to a recognition of the inviolability of others; indeed
Summerhill is, in miniature, an Anarchist new world come to pass.
The Anarchists' distrust of the State as an instrument of oppression,
the tool by which the privileged and powerful maintained themselves, is
generally associated with nineteenth-century "classical" liberalism, with
John Stuart Mill and, in this country, with the Jeffersonians. But by the
end of the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth, liberals
began to regard the State as an ally rather than an enemy; only the
national government, it was felt, had the power and resources to accom–
plish regulation and reform, to prevent small groups of self-interested
men from exploiting their fellows.
Today the pendulum has begun to swing back again. In the liberal
-but more especially in the radical-camp, the federal government has
lost some of its appeal; veneration is giving way to distrust; from an
instrument of liberation, the central government is once more being
viewed as a bulwark of conservatism. This shift is the result of accumu–
lated disappointments. The regulatory agencies set up to supervise the
monopolists have been discovered to be operating in the interests of the
