Labels are often flashy conduits for hasty assumptions and partial truths. At the
time when I was writing Action and Existence: Anarchism for Business
Administration in the late 1970s, the term anarchism served as a handy synonym
for mess, chaos, and disorder. In this context the word cropped up in public
debates about the Baader-Meinhof terrorism in Germany in the aftermath of
Paris 68, for example. In putting my book together, I set out to explain what I
had learned through my own reading and discussion about this often shortchanged
term. In the research and writing process I discovered that the word
anarchism carried more concrete meaning than what I had first thought

Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre

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  the author(s) 2014 
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online) 
  ISSN 2052-1499 (Print) 
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volume 14(4): 973-979 
note | 973 
Terrorist/anarchist/artist: Why bother? 
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux 
Labels are often flashy conduits for hasty assumptions and partial truths.  At the 
time when I was writing Action and Existence: Anarchism for Business 
Administration in the late 1970s, the term anarchism served as a handy synonym 
for mess, chaos, and disorder. In this context the word cropped up in public 
debates about the Baader-Meinhof terrorism in Germany in the aftermath of 
Paris 68, for example. In putting my book together, I set out to explain what I 
had learned through my own reading and discussion about this often short-
changed term. In the research and writing process I discovered that the word 
anarchism carried more concrete meaning than what I had first thought.  
I did my investigation in West Berlin – then just a little island balancing on the 
Berlin wall between capitalism and communism – but the book was first 
published in Swedish.  The volume caught on and immediately thrust me into a 
strange world of ‘professional anarchists’: Daniel Guerin, the French friend of 
Buenaventura Durrutti, CNT1 hero of the Spanish Civil War, initiator of the gay 
anarchist movement, and author of books like Ni Dieu Ni Maitre on Marxist 
anarchism; and Augustin Souchy, the Austrian connected to German anarchists 
Gustaf Landauer and Erich Mühsam as well as to Emma Goldman. I invited 
Augustin to lecture to my students at the Royal Institute of Technology in 
Stockholm. As he had just returned from Cuba, the lecture turned into a heavy 
attack on Fidel Castro’s authoritarian perversion of the Revolution. My new world 
also included Nisse Lätt, the legendary Swedish veteran of the Spanish Civil War; 
Tönnis Tönnisson, the math teacher whose brilliant Swedish book Makt som 
hobby (Power as a hobby) unfortunately is not available in English; Gert Nilsson, a 
Swedish publisher who, in addition to writing on topics related to anarchy, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo 
ephemera: theory & politics in organization  14(4): 973-979 
974 | note 
launched his publishing house Korpen by publishing PhD dissertations refused 
by the university; and Roland Vila, son of refugees from the CNT in Spain. Vila 
navigated in Swedish anarchist circles and has colorfully documented his life in 
two booklets published by Bakhäll- Swedish for ‘ambush’ – Förlag in Lund, 
Sweden. Vila also introduced me to some small Swedish cliques nostalgically 
fueling on the CNT and FAI legends from the distant and mythical time of the 
Spanish Civil War in 1936-9. The FAI was made up of two cooperating Spanish 
anarcho-syndicalist unions: Confederation National del Trabajo and Federation 
Anarchista Iberica. These small coteries in Sweden circled around the syndicalist 
newspaper Arbetaren (The worker) and at the same time received exotic 
inspiration from recent actions taken in Quartier Latin in Paris or on Telegraph 
Avenue in Berkeley. I began hearing how anarchist syndicalism had been 
violently repressed by social democracy – the reigning political ideology in 
Sweden for almost 40 years – and how the Fascists and Soviet Communists, or 
more accurately, the Bolsheviks, had liquidated anarchists since the 1920s. The 
Spanish Civil War was the historical showcase of how the Spanish Fascists, 
supported by the German and Italian right wings and indirectly assisted by the 
Communist-Stalinists, had crushed the social revolution of the CNT and FAI 
anarchists in Catalonia. While anarchism provided mobilizing enthusiasm in the 
short run, in the long run both the right and the left wanted them out of the 
picture. To my new friends, anarchists were proletarian martyrs, the freedom 
fighters of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. 
Face it: US anarchism exists! 
After the English translation of Action and existence was released in 1991, I 
became more mindful of those seriously claiming to be anarchists. I met US-
based activists Murray Bookchin – in Venice of all places – and I video-
interviewed Leopold Kohr, author of the classic The breakdown of nations. Kohr 
had been befriended by George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War and got his 
book published thanks to UK anarchist Herbert Reed. I naively paid visits to US 
libertarians like Murray Rothbarth, who had been the chief US propagandist for 
Ludwig von Mises and paved the way for some of the Chicago-Hayek impact on 
concrete neo-liberal politics, and Israel Kirzner to discover how they were 
supplanting the ‘worker anarchist’ with the ‘entrepreneur-anarchist’. Their 
references were of course selectively American and ranged from Ayn Rand back 
to Henry David Thoreau; in their accounting, however, they systematically forgot 
American union activists like Sacco and Vanzetti. They were sanctifying Austrian 
economics and in the process kidnapping Habsburg liberals like Ludwig von 
Mises, who claimed theoretically that any kind of regulation that upset the 
natural balance of the free market would eventually snowball into a complete 
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux Terrorist/anarchist/artist: Why bother? 
note | 975 
police-state environment like Nazi Germany; and Friedrich Hayek, who turned 
Mises’ ‘slippery slope’ into a ‘road to serfdom’ and after WW II founded the 
Mont Pelerin Society, the intellectual cradle of neo-liberalism, and held them in 
their libertarian camp. Mises had launched the ‘slippery slope’ model for 
bureaucratic dictatorship for which Friedrich Hayek became the Nobel Prize-
winning custodian. James Buchanan sophisticated it into a ‘public choice theory’ 
that eventually made him Nobel-laureate as well.2  These were attempts to argue 
theoretically what anarchism intuitively believed; namely, that any minor 
compulsory local regulation will snowball into a totalized global police state. 
Anarchism postulated that all organizational processes lead to dictatorship in 
totalitarian states, whether the dictator is a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mussolini. To the 
US libertarians neither labor unions nor representative democracy could escape 
this universal law of anarchism obscured by vague morality and religious belief 
in organizational bliss. US anarchism actually slipped into libertarianism as the 
‘economic-man’ argument became a declaration of neo-liberal faith in ultimate 
salvation by the entrepreneurial market-maker. We know the rest of the story, 
and anarchists mostly dislike it! 
Independent anarchism?  
While anarchism did supply a cool vibe to both the left and right political 
movements, it also gave these powers cold feet. Anarchism provides a concrete 
criticism of capitalism but at the same time fuels fierce attacks on bureaucracy. 
Western industrial capitalism was a historical target but so was socialist 
bureaucracy! During the Cold War, Soviet Communists had paid alleged 
anarchists to mess things up in the West, and the West reciprocated by diffusing 
audio-visual rock-and-roll anarchists and artistic freedom fighters behind Iron 
Curtains and Chinese walls. Before the crumbling of the Berlin Wall this was a 
high-risk game since anarchists instinctively started blurring the two Cold War 
systems. The fall of the Berlin Wall, cementing the delineation between socialism 
and capitalism, blurred things even further, fusing anarchist capitalist-bashing 
with critique of organization.  
Herein lies the essential anarchist lesson for critical management: neither 
state nor market will solve the problems of capitalism, and the struggle 
never ends. Those who believe in a final solution in a steady state might !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2 Editors’ note: the ‘Nobel Prize for Economics’ is not among the Nobel Prizes 
established by Alfred Nobel but was founded and endowed by the Swedish National 
Bank and is not without controversy, being seen by some as biased towards 
mainstream and neo-liberal economics. 
ephemera: theory & politics in organization  14(4): 973-979 
976 | note 
find anarchism cool as an initial revolt, but eventually the anarchists will 
be silenced or tamed into useful idiots of the systems they dislike. This 
was the gloomy fate of the anarchist core of the Attack movement soon 
recuperated by the traditional left. Another case in point: the twin 
anarchists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari today rebranded by the Catho-
Mao-Marxist twins Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. 
Go for direct action! 
So what about management? I grew up in a Nordic welfare state with capitalist 
machinery lubricated for growth by banks working smoothly with the central 
social democratic labor union. Terms like  ‘planning’ and ‘systems’ were the core 
curriculum of business schools, where the issue of wages was unheard of 
primarily because salaries were fixed centrally by national unions. Finance was 
not even considered a discipline then. In such a world the only point to studying 
management or even attending business school was to be integrated into a large 
limited liability stock corporation. That was the expectation for all graduates not 
more than 50 years ago. In other words, business schools educated managers to 
be good capitalist bureaucrats.   
Managers were sleepwalkers in big welfare gearboxes. Management was their 
faith solidly rooted in functionalism and preached by the increasing number of 
organizational scholars who tinkered with logically sophisticated sciences of 
decision-making. So thick was the decision-making mist that one could not see 
her own hand in front of her face. Readings on anarchism reveal ‘decision 
theorizing’ as a modern mystification. Was management then simply a drug 
designed to make managers forget about action even in the form of concrete 
work and labor? Was anarchism an antidote to logical infections of business 
school scholasticism? 
This type of thinking appealed to many. In Sweden, Nils Brunson (1989) became 
indignant at the hypocritical gap between decision and action largely inspired by 
James G. March’s article on ‘the technology of foolishness’. Ingmar Arbnor and 
Björn Bjerke´s book on management methods (2008) rang an anarchist bell by 
focusing on what they called the actor-perspective, an anarchist trait of seeing 
organizing as using language from sweet-talk to pure bullshit to obscure what is 
or ought really to be done. Organizing could be the problem; I observed how big 
corporations began to crackle as ‘pyramids’ were scrapped, and operations were 
outsourced on scattered markets. Business could successfully be carried out by 
small firms, in cooperatives, and in communes that now reemerged on the 
radars of politicians and economists after having been long overlooked by the 
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux Terrorist/anarchist/artist: Why bother? 
note | 977 
corporate conventionalism reigning in mainstream business schools. In my book 
The moral philosophy of management (1993), I revisit this flora of ideas for 
economic action where much is directly linked to anarchism. Anarchism has 
always focused on action, and business-and-work is an important economic 
category of ‘direct action’ for robbing back surplus value from big organizations 
and state monopolies. Anarchist Jerry Rubin’s motto ‘Do it’ soon became the 
entrepreneurial slogan ‘Just do it’. Armed with an anarchistic mindset, many 
1968 student activists left politics to enter business.     
Until the 1970s, anarchism was looked upon as providing youthful energizing 
revolutionary enthusiasm to social democracy. Then in the 1980s liberals 
launched a libertarian counterrevolution, and the political ambiguity of 
anarchism became obvious. Not only could the left flatter itself with having 
theoreticians, but a vast archive of anarchist essays on liberty and economy in 
tune with neo-liberal ideas also existed. Just as Marx stood on shoulders of Hegel, 
well-known political economists were indebted to less well-known anarchist 
philosophers. Behind Leon Walras and Charles Gide was Charles Fourier, for 
example; behind John Maynard Keynes stood Silvio Gesell. John Stuart Mill 
eloquently praised the activism of the French cooperative movement of self-
management. No one with any knowledge of the Marx-Proudhon controversies 
can ignore the fact that economic action – doing business without the bosses – 
might be considered a ‘direct action’, an escape from the bottomless morass 
where bureaucratic middlemen constantly diffuse spontaneous ‘revolts’ by 
orchestrating ‘revolutions’ as everlasting power struggles. The controversy 
between Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is central to the study of 
anarchism and its complex relationship with both liberals and Marxists.  
Existence as art 
The anarchist position of focusing on ‘action’ instead of ‘decision’ implies 
downplaying argumentation and rationalization in favor of ‘spontaneity’, where 
humans act out and realize their nature. Noam Chomsky’s classic debate with 
Michel Foucault (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4) is worth 
watching again. This anarchist philosophy claims that human nature is ethically 
good, and our natural instinct for mutual aid and solidarity should not be 
distorted by moral or legal organization.  Minimize rules, norms, and maxims, 
and let people self-manage their cooperation. Norm does not go hand in hand 
with action! This optimistic scientific-ethics was, according to classical 
nineteenth-century anarchism, provable through careful observation of good 
human nature. Historically I do not doubt that anarchistic courage played an 
ephemera: theory & politics in organization  14(4): 973-979 
978 | note 
important role in making bold developments in social science and ethics 
possible.  
But for today’s critical management I see another philosophical facet of 
anarchism to be much more relevant, namely aesthetic anarchism. In the world 
of contemporary art we are able to see anarchist practices at work. Making art has 
become an unavoidable ideal type of direct action, and the art world provides a 
constantly growing multifaceted number of labs for experiments. Critical 
management is okay, but - to paraphrase Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto – 
critique is no longer enough. Art, free of the trappings of linguistic cliché and 
made real in venues, museums, biennales, and festivals is undoubtedly the most 
public manifestation of spontaneity today. At the same time, art is of course 
packaged by creative industries, and artists are constantly threatened to be 
reduced to a new creative class lumpen-proletariat. Art and artists must reinvent 
ways to avoid and also exploit the powers of both organizations and markets. In 
art worlds today we can discern concrete connections between anarchism and 
management. For example, at Art of Management conferences, such work has a 
forum. Philosophical reflections on art offer an articulate development of 
anarchism’s having a clear bearing on management; that indeed is why 
aesthetics offers a fruitful gateway to critical management. Much better than 
dusty moralism or obsolete materialist scientism! It is through aesthetics that we 
might approach an anarchist critical management, and art is to my mind the only 
vaccine against obsolete ideologies that make management into schooling for 
party-cadres to the right or left. That is why management scholars hungry for 
freedom reflect on Marcel Duchamp or Ai Wei Wei, and that is why I see the 
anarchist business as an art firm (2004). It is no coincidence that the Spanish 
Civil War had its most sustainable impact on art and literature from Orwell to 
Bunuel. To those interested in anarchism – performances, happenings, and 
installations offer activist showcases for gaining conceptual insight by concrete 
direct action. While early anarchists were primitive terrorists, contemporary 
activists call on a sophisticated arsenal of art to impact society. Today writers 
such as Jacques Ranciere teach how art and aesthetics spontaneously spark off 
social energy not yet tamed, disciplined, coded, or regulated in received 
paradigms or set theories. Read Ranciere for yourself, and you will recognize an 
updated version of anarchism in his politics of aesthetics; you will experience a 
real anarchist in the role of his ignorant schoolmaster. So go ahead and just do it! 
references 
Brunsson, N. (1989) The organization of hypocrisy: Talk, decisions and actions in 
organizations. London: John Wiley. 
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux Terrorist/anarchist/artist: Why bother? 
note | 979 
Ingeman, A. and B. Bjerke (2008) Methodology for creating business knowledge. London: 
Sage Publications. 
Monthoux, P. G. de (1991) Action and existence: Anarchism for business administration. 
Munich: Accedo Verlagsgesellschaft. 
Monthoux, P. G. de (2004) The art firm. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 
Ranciere, J. (1991) The ignorant schoolmaster. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 
Ranciere, J. (2004) The politics of aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. 
the author  
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux holds a professorship in Philosophy and Management at the 
department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, 
Denmark. He works currently on aesthetics as an ugly but liberating process and teaches 
courses on ‘Absolute Luxury’, ‘Marketing for Anarchists’ and ‘Guy Debord rediviva; 
introduction to story´s end’. He lives in Denmark, Sweden and France and has two young 
and brilliant twin-daughters he actually decided not to call Asset and Liability. Contact 
immediately if something fun’s up. 
Email: pgm.mpp@cbs.dk 
 
 
 


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