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Horrible Workers: Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and the Charles Manson Circle

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Emile Durkheim asserted that a crime free society is impossible. Crime alerts people to structural dangers within the normal world that require attention. For this crime is essential. The sociological category "deviance" has become a moral category including both crime and creativity. We are led astray and miss both the warnings and the solutions. Nielsen begins his account of tensions within the taken for granted world with this: "Anomic suicide and progress, egoistic suicide and autonomy, altruistic suicide and moral self-transcendence, fatalistic suicide and order: these are four pairs of virtues and vices, inextricably wedded to one another.(p. 3)" Nielsen develops the notion of fatalistic suicide, which takes on a pivotal role, from Durkheim's footnote. The voices of many including Erving Goffman, David Riesman, Max Weber and Johan Huizinga are brought to bear on the dynamics of our everyday world. Nielsen finds an essential tension in this world. On the one hand society becomes structurally and morally rigid. In his discussion of Stirner he observes that "The main aim is to make oneself 'audible.'"(p. 22) On the other hand people are in constant movement, what Nielsen refers to as "vagabondage." In the Rimbaud chapter there is this comment: "Nomadism, vagabondage and adventurism are some of the central expressions of our contemporary anomism."(p. 42) He demonstrates the historic roots of both tendencies. Nielsen finds Durkheim's four categories interacting at the center of the society. He comments that ". . .all express the restless movement which has become a common feature of life for everyone in advanced industrial society. . ."(p. 99).