As Resisting Illegitimate Authority reveals, authoritarians attempt to marginalise anti-authoritarians, who are scorned, shunned, financially punished, psychopathologised, criminalised, and even assassinated. Profiling a diverse group of anti-authoritarians - including Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, Malcolm X, and Lenny Bruce - in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitimate Authority is the first self-help manual for anti-authoritarians. Resisting Illegitimate Authority is about bigotry, but not bigotry directed at race, religion, gender, or sexual preference. It is about bigotry directed at rebellious personalities and temperaments.
About the Author :
Bruce E. Levine is a regular contributor to CounterPunch, Truthout, Z Magazine, AlterNet, Salon, and the Huffington Post. He is a practicing clinical psychologist often at odds with the mainstream of his profession, and he is on the editorial advisory board of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry and on the scientific advisory board of the National Center for Youth Law. A longtime activist in the mental health treatment reform movement, he is a member of the International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry. His books include Get Up, Stand Up; Surviving America's Depression Epidemic; and Commonsense Rebellion.
Review :
"For a reader, there is no greater reward than to come upon a startlingly original book, one that prompts you to think anew about important aspects of the American character, past and present. Such is Bruce Levine's Resisting Illegitimate Authority. This is a book, written in wonderfully clear prose, that will stay with you, and one that you will eagerly recommend to others. The portraits of famous Americans, ranging from Thomas Paine to George Carlin, as seen through an "anti-authoritarian" lens, are particularly memorable and compelling."
--Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic
"Bound by the shackles of convention, many of us have become fearful of the outsider, the dissident and the anti-authoritarian--anyone who refuses to be ruled and regulated.... Bruce E. Levine has written an electric book charting the mechanics--political, economic and psychological--of our self-confinement. Yet, Levine's writing simmers with a kind of optimistic rage meant to prod and provoke us out of our paralytic compliance with faceless authority. Resisting Illegitimate Authority has arrived just at the moment when we need it's daring call for a new kind of human liberation the most."
--Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch and author of Bernie and the Sandernistas
