Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in cultural studies, sociology, law, justice, economics, political science, philosophy, and related subjects.

Bandits is a book by Eric Hobsbawm, a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism, and nationalism.

The book focuses on the concept of bandits in the mythology, folklore, and literature of Europe.

The history of banditry and organized crime and its relationship to class structures of agrarian societies are explored and analyzed.

Hobsbawm notes a specific form of crime that fits into what he defines as social banditry, including groups of landless farm workers and military deserters.

Social bandits are distinguished from other forms of organized crime by how most farm workers perceived them as rebels who opposed the unjust system of feudalism.

Bandits are robbers and outlaws raised to the status of avengers and champions of social justice.

Some, like Robin Hood, Rob Roy, Pancho Villa, and Jesse James, are internationally famous.

Some bandits remained criminals while others became revolutionaries.

Here are some thoughts about bandits by authors, many of whom are included in the TU Library collection:

What are kingdoms without justice? They’re just gangs of bandits.

• Saint Augustine

Take care! Kingdoms are destroyed by bandits, houses by rats, and widows by suitors.

• Ihara Saikaku

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

• Robert Burns

I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

• D. H. Lawrence

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

• Anton Chekhov

Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels…. They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.

• Anton Chekhov

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left…

• Jorge Luis Borges

There is no bandit so powerful as Nature.

The interaction of the positive and the negative principles, which produces the visible universe.

In the whole universe there is no escape from it.

• Zhuangzi

Young artists wish for inspired moments. And you find them; you take them; eager artists are bandits. Theatrical moments arrive, and…you grab. Good! You know it will draw attention to you. But you aim to be more than bandits, no? So, okay…now be Samurai.

• Jerzy Grotowski

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

• H.L. Mencken

The advantages of being a postman seemed more and more dubious. It is not a congenial profession for anyone who is at all sensitive, for people visit upon the postman all their first annoyance at receiving a couple of bills when they looked for a love-letter, and if a packet is insufficiently stamped they hand over the pennies as though to a despicable bandit, too outrageous to be denied, too groveling to be feared.

• Sylvia Townsend Warner

The enemies of the country and of freedom of the people have always denounced as bandits those who sacrifice themselves for the noble causes of the people.

• Emiliano Zapata

Politicians are just a bunch of local bandits, sent by their local voters to raid the public treasury.

• Will Rogers

The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be. The more laws are promulgated, the more thieves and bandits there will be.

• Laozi

Hermeneutics is a way of looking at Being as an inheritance that is never considered as ultimate data. Capitalism has always grown by considering, or forcing another to consider, as a ‘natural’ possession what is inherited. The great dominating families are really the inheritors of the strongest pirates, thieves, and bandits, and they consider themselves entitled to command through a divine or natural law, when they really are only the result of a forgotten ‘violence’.

• Gianni Vattimo

I’m the young city bandit, hold myself down singlehanded

For murder raps, I kick my thoughts alone, get remanded

Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown or throne

I’m deep by sound alone, caved inside in a thousand miles from home

• Nas

There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that’s a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography.

• Federico Fellini

He’d always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he’d also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn’t properly exist anymore.

• Terry Pratchett

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.

• Rebecca West

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

• Pramoedya Ananta Toer

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

• Osip Mandelstam

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)