Aging & Wisdom Quote by Todd Gitlin

An “old anarchist dream” is Gitlin’s double-edged way of granting the idea moral allure while hinting at its chronic naivete. “Dream” does quiet work here: it romanticizes self-rule as a human-scale aspiration, then immediately brackets it as something more wished-for than workable. Coming from a sociologist who watched mass movements up close, the line reads less like a jab at anarchism than a warning about how hard autonomy is once you zoom out from individual virtue to social systems.

The phrase “people can take care of their own lives” sounds modest, almost commonsensical, yet it smuggles in a huge claim: that coercive institutions are largely unnecessary, that solidarity and self-management can replace bureaucracies, markets, police, and the thousand small enforcers of modern life. Gitlin’s subtext is that the desire for self-determination keeps returning precisely because modernity keeps making people feel managed - by experts, by media, by the state, by organizations that promise efficiency and deliver dependency. The dream is a reaction to being administered.

Context matters: Gitlin emerged from the 1960s New Left, a world that flirted with participatory democracy and then collided with factionalism, burnout, surveillance, and the limits of spontaneity. The line carries the aftertaste of that collision. It admires the impulse to trust ordinary people, but it also remembers how quickly “taking care” can turn into free-riding, informal hierarchies, and charismatic domination. The cynicism isn’t that people are bad; it’s that power doesn’t disappear just because you stop naming it.