anarchism

anarchism. Though mistrust of the state and a desire for cheap and limited government is a commonplace in the British political tradition, formal anarchism has received little support. Anarchist elements have been traced in the Commonwealth period, though they were more probably collective agrarianists, and the theory developed only after the French Revolution in the 1790s. Paine declared that government was, at best, a necessary evil: ‘a great part of what is called government is mere imposition.’ Spence and Godwin went further. Spence's vision of the future was of parish communities, with minimal powers reserved for the state, while Godwin insisted that government was a ‘brute engine’, which had caused all the vices of mankind. Neither had many disciples, though Shelley followed his father-in-law Godwin in calling government ‘a mighty calamity’. The Cato Street conspiracy to murder the cabinet in 1820, the work of some of Spence's supporters, gave anarchism a lurid image. The First International split in 1871 between the supporters of Marx, who wanted a proletarian state, and those of Bakunin who argued, with some prescience, that it might itself become an engine of despotism. The small British groups made little impact. Sheffield anarchists in 1891 produced a short-lived paper and a group of Walsall anarchists were convicted at Stafford assizes in 1892 of conspiring to manufacture bombs. An even more sensational episode was the siege of 100 Sidney Street, Stepney, in 1911, with two foreign anarchists holed up, while the home secretary, Winston Churchill, helped to supervise a shoot-out. Peter the Painter (otherwise Peter Piaktoff) escaped the flames and disappeared from history. There was some interest in anarchist theory among left-wing circles involved in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. But fear of anarchy, an important ingredient of the conservative tradition, was always in Britain more influential than anarchism itself.

J. A. Cannon