Anarchism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anarchism, like liberalism and democracy, carries more than a single connotation. This is because it has produced both a body of theoretical literature and a series of activist parties, the two only remotely related. The anarchism of Godwin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin, known to the scholarly community, stands at a far remove from the images of the Haymarket rioters, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Spanish Civil War, familiar to the popular mind. Yet if relationships must be established, it may be said that both the literary and the activist traditions share a common view of man, society, and the state.

Any definition of anarchism must be derived more from its literature than from its record of political action. Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley, and the Andalusian peasants who fought against Franco were probably stirred by the same impulses as were Godwin and Kropotkin. But the latter figures articulated their beliefs, and it is on the written work that we must rely. The major tenets of anarchist doctrine may be summarized under five major heads. Emphases may differ with different proponents, but most of the elements are at least implicit in all serious anarchist writings.

(1) Man is essentially a benign creature. He was born good, or with a potentiality for goodness, but has been corrupted by the habits and institutions of authority. Religion, education, politics, and economic life have all served to warp the natural goodness that inheres in mankind.

(2) Man is a social animal, and men reach their fulfillment when voluntarily and spontaneously cooperating with one another. Society is natural, the state is not; and the quest for the communal life is instinctive to all men.

(3) Prevailing institutions of society—particularly private property and the state—are artificial agencies through which men exploit and corrupt each other. Authority in any form, even democratic government or a socialist economy, stultifies the individual.

(4) Social change must be spontaneous, direct, and mass-based. Political parties, trade unions—indeed, all organized movements—are themselves creatures of authority. While pursuing reform or even revolution, they are so constituted as ultimately to replace one evil with another of a similar sort. Significant change, then, must express the natural sentiments of a mass of autonomous individuals acting without outside direction.

(5) Industrial civilization, no matter what the form of ownership of the means of production, warps the human spirit. Machines master men, narrowing their personalities and blocking creativity. Any society built on an industrial structure is bound to debase the motives and impulses of those who live in it.

The literature of anarchism. While elements of anarchist doctrine can be found as far back as the Stoics, the first meaningful exposition could not come until the advent of the industrial revolution. William Godwin’s Political Justice (1793), appearing in the first and grimmest generation of that revolution, attacked the exploitation of man by man resulting from tyrannical government and unequal ownership of property. It is interesting to note that Godwin did not exhort men to revolutionary action, but hoped rather that people would educate themselves to a realization that justice would be secured only if they replaced the state with a network of voluntary arrangements.

Far more widely read was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, whose What Is Property? (1840) gave the notorious reply that “property is theft.” Proudhon emphasized that society is a natural organism and the individual is a social creature. He, too, did not advocate revolutionary violence, but his call for the abolition of the state and the prevailing economic system implied that a forceful overturn was bound to come. Throughout his writings he elaborated many plans for setting up independent associations, decentralizing authority, and circumscribing the power of the state. The theoretical clash between anarchist and communist doctrine can be seen most vividly in Marx’s attack on Proudhon, one of those rare cases where Marx displayed respect for the arguments of an antagonist.

Perhaps the most attractive of anarchist authors was P’etr Kropotkin, whose Mutual Aid (1890–1896) sought to rebut social Darwinism. Nature does not live under laws that permit only the fittest to survive, Kropotkin argued; not only in primitive societies, but also in the animal world, the basis of organization is mutual cooperation and help. With this “scientific” underpinning he proceeded to call for a thoroughgoing communist society, based on communes and devoid of either a division of labor or a money economy. He was explicit in advocating removal of the state by revolutionary means, but he was a “pure” anarchist in that he rejected any organized movement or party as the vehicle of change.

Of the major anarchist writers, Georges Sorel seemed least concerned with the goodness of man or the question of individual freedom. His Reflections on Violence (1908) is closest to the popular image of an anarchist handbook, detailing the various methods by which the working class can undermine and overthrow the capitalist state. The chief weapon is the “general strike,” a rising of the proletariat that brings the wheels of the old order to a precipitous halt. Sorel was prepared to use existing trade unions as the vehicle for revolution, giving rise to the term “anarchosyndicalism.” In making such a concession, he was, unlike Kropotkin, willing to use at least one institutional mechanism of the old regime to bridge the gap to the new society.

Anarchism as utopianism. It is easy enough to see how anarchism has remained a sectarian doctrine. Its tenets, taken singly, have much in common with those of other ideologies. Anarchism shares with liberalism an exaltation of the individual, a rejection of authority, and assumes a natural harmony of interests in society. Like both socialism and communism, it abjures private property and a state that supports the capitalist system; its stress on the need for revolutionary change clearly parallels the communist prescription. Anarchism has a democratic strand in its emphasis on human equality, and it is also in the classical conservative tradition in its suspicion of industrial society. Yet anarchism is the sum of its several parts, and the whole recipe is too rich a mixture for most. Those who rebel against authority may be attracted by parts of the anarchist creed; however, all but a handful balk when they learn that the entire doctrine must be regarded as an interlocking edifice.

Quite plainly, anarchists wish to have it all ways at once. If foremost priority is apparently accorded to the free and uncoerced individual, equal value is assigned to the harmonious social organism. Revolutionary violence is advocated, or at least implied, but unlike the communist variety it is to come to pass without benefit of a hierarchical party or leaders who impose their will on an organized movement. And the society of the postrevolutionary epoch, unlike any the modern world has ever known, will exist without law, state, or authority and will witness the flowering of hitherto unknown human potentialities.

Anarchism must be understood as a variety of utopianism—although differing from other Utopian thought in that it considers not only ends but also means to the achievement of those ends. Like all utopianism, it is at least partly an attitude of mind rather than a rigorous theory. There is no difficulty in finding instances of ingenuousness in anarchist doctrine. It is easy enough to point out that coercion, real or threatened, is a necessary element in human relations; that revolutionary action can lead to dictatorial tyranny no less than to the promised land; that man has a propensity for evil as well as for good; that the anarchist Utopia will be a monotonous plateau. But none of these objections, all based on common sense, attack the basic impulse that gives rise to the anarchist protest.

Anarchism, like any Utopian doctrine, is first a critique of existing social arrangements, and second a blueprint for a problemless future. The principle that man is naturally good, for example, cannot be undermined by allusion to the evil behavior that has recurred throughout human history. For the reply is simply that man has never been given the chance to realize his potential, that his benign nature has heretofore been corrupted by institutional authority. Nor, by the same token, can the drabness of an equalitarian and conflictless society be used as a stick with which to beat Utopian projections. To say that we, the corrupted products of an immoral era, would be bored is a myopic judgment on the conditions of society best conducive to the highest development of the human spirit. If anarchism is Utopian, if its analysis and prescriptions seem unsophisticated, it nevertheless represents one of the fundamental expressions of dissatisfaction with the way men have chosen to order their lives up to the present.

Anarchism in the modern world. It is tempting to say that there is a little of the anarchist in everyone. Most individuals are sufficiently unquestioning to accept authority, at least as a necessary evil. But there is hardly a person who has not, perhaps in one moment of his life, stopped to wonder what he might have made of himself if agencies of coercion had not restricted his behavior at every turn. The businessman objecting to government intervention in his affairs, the factory worker resentful of the discipline imposed by management, the citizen who feels powerless in the face of party machines, even the adolescent chafing under regulations laid down by school authorities—all yearn for the freedom to be and to become themselves. To be sure, much of what sometimes passes as the spirit of anarchism is simply rationalization for a style of life an individual or group wishes to attain or preserve.

A good deal of the renewed interest in “alienation,” “anomie,” and personal “identity” stems from the assumption that men seek to be free of restrictions and are thwarted in their quest by the impersonal rules and personal relationships arising in the modern world. Critiques of corporations, trade unions, political parties, and even suburban life seem at first glance to reflect the anarchist temper. But in the final analysis it would be a grave error to confuse this social criticism with the anarchist tradition. For above all else the anarchist stands outside his society. He has no vested interests in it, and he is prepared to witness its destruction. The businessman, the politician, the intellectual, all of these may want the world shaped somewhat differently, but they still wish to preserve what are for them critical elements of that world. Few are so dedicated to freedom that they reject out of hand all organized forms of action and wait instead for the day when spontaneous and leaderless uprisings overthrow the social structure.

There may be concern with the kinds of problems that constitute anarchist doctrine, but there is a shortage of actual anarchists. This has been the case throughout history. Dedicated believers arise from time to time to assassinate princes and presidents, to encourage labor unrest, and to man a barricade in a civil war. But if states and economies have been overturned by revolutionary means, it has been by other movements acting under other inspirations.

Andrew Hacker

[See alsoSocialism; Syndicalism; Utopianism. Other relevant material may be found in the biographiesKropotkin; Proudhon; Sorel.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fleisher, David 1951 William Godwin: A Study in Liberalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Godwin, William (1793) 1946 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. 3 vols., 3d rev. ed. Univ. of Toronto Press.

Horowitz, Irving L. 1961 Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel. London: Routledge; New York: Humanities.

Kropotkin, P’etr (1890–1896) 1955 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Boston: Extending Horizons. → Thomas Huxley’s “The Struggle for Existence” is included in this book.

Lubac, Henri de (1945) 1948 The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon. New York: Sheed & Ward. → First published in French.

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1840) 1876 What Is Property? An Inquiry Into the Principle of Right and of Government. Princeton, Mass.: Tucker. → First published in French.

Sorel, Georges (1908) 1950 Reflections on Violence. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. → First published in French as Réflexions sur la violence. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier.

Woodcock, George 1962 Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. New York: Meridian.

Woodcock, George; and Avakumovic, Ivan 1950 The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. New York: Boardman.

ANARCHISM

The theory espousing a societal state in which there is no structured government or law or in which there is resistance to all current forms of government.

Anarchists promote the absence of rules, which leads to the absence of any identifiable social structure beyond that of personal autonomy. When anarchy becomes defined by one anarchist, other anarchists may feel bound to change it.

Anarchism thus means different things to different believers. Anarchists do not hold common views on subjects such as desirable levels of community cooperation and the role of large industry in society. Another matter of continuing debate is whether anarchy is an end unto itself or simply the best means to a better government. To all anarchists, though, anarchy is the best refuge from political dogma and authority. Moreover, many anarchists agree that anarchism begins with the notion that people are inherently good, or even perfect, and that external authority—laws, governments, institutions, and so forth—limits human potential. External authority, they suggest, brings a corruption of the innocent human spirit and a ceiling on achievement.

Commentators on anarchism differentiate between "classical" theories of anarchy and more modern movements. Classical anarchists focused more heavily on the opposition to state control and capitalist society. Their strongest opposition was directed at government and the church. Many of the early anarchists were essentially socialists, and anarchist theories played a significant part in the socialist movements during the early twentieth century.

Beginning in about the 1960s, anarchism shifted its focus to a more general opposition to public and private hierarchy and domination of the working class. Modern anarchists tend to focus upon such issues as those related to patriarchy, racism, nature, and technology, and the effects these concepts have on society. One camp of anarchist theorists advocates a theory of anarcho-syndicalism, and those that subscribe to this theory promote a massive, leaderless movement of the working class intended to take control from those with public and private authority.

Modern anarchists directed their opposition against such pro-capitalist and quasi-governmental entities as the World Trade Organization, the world bank, and the international monetary fund. Anarchists became the focus of national attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they staged massive protests against World Trade Organization meetings in such U.S. cities as Seattle, Washington, and Eugene, Oregon. Although anarchists claim these protests were peaceful until law enforcement officers disrupted them, others consider these anarchists to be violent and unruly revolutionaries.

William Godwin (1756–1836) is widely regarded as the first to give anarchy a comprehensive intellectual foundation. Godwin, the son of a Calvinist minister, argued that the state and its laws were enslaving people instead of freeing them. According to Godwin, government was necessary only to prevent injustice and external invasion. With every person educated in sincerity, independence, self-restraint, and seriousness, any more governmental activity would be unnecessary.

Godwin opposed the rise of liberal democracy in the late 1700s. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, he observed, "electioneering is a trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moral and mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mind capable of the dirty drudgery of such vice." Godwin's observations and proposals were largely ignored during his lifetime, but they informed anarchists several decades later, when the brutal working conditions and "wage slavery" of industrialism began to present new reasons for revolt.

Two well-known anarchists, emma goldman (1869–1940) and Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), gained recognition in the 1890s. Goldman, the daughter of Jewish merchants, immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1885 at the age of 16. In Rochester, New York, Goldman worked in a sweat shop—a large, unsafe factory that paid low wages and demanded long hours. The experience radicalized Goldman, and with her natural flair for public speaking, she soon became a spokes-woman for anarchism. Goldman worked extensively for the industrial workers of the world (IWW), an organization dedicated to anarcho-syndicalism, which seeks to use the industrial union as the basis for a reorganization of society. Goldman's cross-country lecture tours, in which she addressed a broad range of social topics in German and English, earned her a reputation as a witty speaker and provocative thinker. A voracious reader and a magazine publisher, Goldman gave voice to ideas on sexuality, free love, birth control, and family structures that shocked members of her generation, including fellow anarchists.

Like many devout anarchists, Goldman had trouble with the law. She was imprisoned for a year for allegedly inciting a riot during a New York City hunger demonstration in 1893. Goldman also served a two-week sentence for distributing illegal birth control information. She was jailed on suspicion of complicity in the assassination of President william mckinley, in 1901. In 1917, she was arrested with Berkman for participating in antiwar protests, and both were charged with violating the Selective Service Act of 1917 (40 Stat. 76) by inducing young men to resist the draft. Goldman and Berkman were convicted, and, despite appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, both served prison terms. Upon release in 1919, they were deported to Russia.

Berkman, Goldman's ally, shared Goldman's passion for breaking social barriers and inspiring creative thought. He also possessed a violent streak. In 1892, he was arrested for attempting to assassinate steel magnate Henry Clay Frick during a steel strike. After serving a 14-year prison sentence, Berkman devoted the rest of his life to freeing imprisoned political radicals and promoting

workers' rights. He remained a close companion of Goldman until his death in 1936.

Goldman and Berkman cut dashing figures as romantic, intellectual anarchists, and they played no small part in a modest rise of anarchism in the early 1900s. Although anarchism still gains followers in colleges and universities and among self-styled intellectuals, it has been mostly dormant as a social force since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Many anarchists have suffered the bemusing fate of being convicted for breaking laws in which they do not believe. However, the justice system does occasionally protect the anarchist. In Fiske v. Kansas, 274 U.S. 380, 47 S. Ct. 655, 71L. Ed. 1108 (1927), Harold B. Fiske was charged in Rice County, Kansas, with violating the Kansas Criminal Syndicalism Act (Laws Sp. Sess. 1920, c. 37). Fiske had been arrested for promoting the Workers' Industrial Union (WIU), an organization devoted in part to establishing worker control of industry and the abolition of the wage system.

Under the syndicalism statute in Kansas, any person advocating "the duty, necessity, propriety or expediency of crime, criminal syndicalism, or sabotage … is guilty of a felony" (1920 Kan. Sess. Laws ch. 37, § 3). Criminal syndicalism was defined as the advocation of crime, physical violence, or destruction of property "as a means of effecting industrial or political revolution, or for profit" (§ 1). Kansas authorities charged Fiske with criminal syndicalism, citing only the preamble to the constitution of the IWW, the parent organization of Fiske's WIU. This preamble stated, in part, that "a struggle must go on until the workers of the World organize as a class, take possession of the earth, and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system" (Fiske).

The U.S. Supreme Court found insufficient evidence against Fiske to warrant conviction of criminal syndicalism. According to the Court, there was no suggestion that "getting possession of the machinery of production and abolishing the wage system, was to be accomplished by other than lawful means." The Court confirmed that a state may enact legislation to protect its government from insurrection, but it may not be arbitrary or unreasonable in policing its citizens who advocate changes in the social order.

further readings

Brailsford, Henry N. 1931. Shelley, Godwin, and their Circle. London Press.

Goldman, Emma. 1982. Living My Life. Reprint, Salt Lake City: G.M. Smith.

Joll, James. 1964 The Anarchists. Boston: Little, Brown.

Nozick, Robert. 1975. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

Sonn, Richard D. 1992. Anarchism. New York: Twayne.

cross-references

Chicago Eight; Freedom of Speech; Goldman, Emma; Industrial Workers of the World; Rousseau, Jean Jacques.

Anarchism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anarchism is a theory and way of life rooted in the belief that the individual should be free to pursue his or her own interests without coercion, especially by the state and its laws and institutions. The term is derived from the ancient Greek word anarkhia, meaning “no ruler,” and originally was used to denote a disruption of the normal civic order that often implied a condition of civil war. As with democracy and democrat, the words anarchy and anarchist were typically used as terms of abuse until the nineteenth century, when with the rise of commercial society and the decline of feudalism the idea of self-rule by “the people” became increasingly accepted.

The political theory of anarchism properly begins only with William Godwin (1756-1836) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), though important elements of anarchist thought can be found in the ancient Greeks, among them Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435–c. 360 BCE) and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium (c. 334-262 BCE). Strains of anarchist thought can also be found in the medieval era, in the Anabaptists of the Reformation, and in the Diggers of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. However, Godwin is the first exponent of the philosophic doctrine of anarchism, though he does not use the term anarchist to describe himself; it is Proudhon who first calls himself an anarchist. In Proudhon’s What Is Property? (1840) he lays out a vision of socialism in which the individual is liberated from the shackles of capitalist property relations, and is instead free to reap the benefits of his labor under a form of communal production. Anarchism became increasingly relevant to the political world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first through the writings of Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), who opposed the overly centralized socialism of Karl Marx (1818-1883), and later through Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) and Emma Goldman (1869-1940).

Anarchist thought is extremely diverse, but is generally characterized by opposition to the state, capitalism, and religion. Rather than seeing the legal apparatus of the state as a means of protecting individual freedom, anarchists contend that the state and its laws merely represent the self-serving interests of powerful groups in society. In this view, law is a means of oppressing the vast majority of the people, and the best way to eliminate this oppression is to do away with the institutions that create and reinforce it—especially the state and private property. Private property is a particular concern for anarchists, in that it corrupts the democratic process by controlling the inputs and outputs to the political system, and also because it directs people to think merely about their own self-interest rather than about how to cooperate with their fellow citizens. Because private property uses the state to benefit the members of the ruling class or elite, anarchists are not in favor of representative democracy as it is currently practiced.

Anarchists promote their goals by multiple means, including sometimes violent revolution, but also through democratic evolution and the creation of independent communal societies that function outside the domain of the state. In the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists (linked industrial worker-councils) formed an important element in the opposition to Francisco Franco’s fascist coup, and shared governmental authority with a socialist coalition, particularly in Barcelona. This experiment, though short-lived, provided an example of anarchist “government” in practice, and was characterized by the liquidation of the landed estates and the parceling of the land into agricultural cooperatives, the establishment of a federation of worker-controlled factories, and the elimination of the social indications of class status that had marked Bourbon Spain. Although defeated in the war, Spanish anarchism continues to be a model for other nations, because it is here that one of the largest worker-run cooperatives in the world, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, has been functioning for more than fifty years.

Among anarchists in the early part of the twenty-first century there are several prominent trends, some of which are substantially in tension with one another. Libertarian anarchists such as Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) defend capitalism, arguing that the protection of private property under capitalism provides the surest foundation for promoting individual liberty. Unlike most libertarians, Rothbard claims that even the most minimal state is an unnecessary evil, but this is almost the only thing that unites him with anarchist-socialists such as the protesters at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and G8 meetings in Seattle in 1999 and Geneva in 2001. Though not united by a systematic program, these protesters represented groups that are dissatisfied with the current system of neoliberal trade promoted by the WTO, which to them represents an extension of the rule of private property over the globe.

Anarchism is not highly visible in most developed western nations, but it remains a powerful underground current that both the Left and the Right continue to find useful as a stimulant to political thought and political action. Anarchism will continue to be relevant as long as the meaning of the terms democracy, property, and freedom is not self-evident.

SEE ALSO Austrian Economics; Capitalism; Democracy; Fascism; Franco, Francisco; Freedom; Harris, Abram L., Jr.; Liberty; Mill, John Stuart; Political Theory; Politics; Property, Private; Religion; Socialism; Spanish Civil War; State, The; Syndicalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakunin, Mikhail. 1990. Statism and Anarchy, ed. Marshall Shatz. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Guerin, Daniel. 1970. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Kropotkin, Peter. [1970] 2002. Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings, ed. Roger Baldwin. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Orwell, George. [1938] 1969. Homage to Catalonia. San Diego: Harvest Books.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. [1840] 1994. What Is Property? eds. Donald Kelley and Bonnie Smith. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Wolff, Robert Paul. [1970] 1998. In Defense of Anarchism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stefan Dolgert

anarchism An array of philosophical and political positions arguing that human societies function best without government or authority, and which suggest that the natural state of people is one of living together harmoniously and freely, without such intervention. Anarchy is said not to lead to chaos but to ‘spontaneous order’. The philosophy takes many forms and covers the whole political spectrum from extreme right to extreme left, the former seeking to diminish the influence of the state in order that free-market principles might prevail, the latter arguing that the state will wither away under true communism. Proponents of voluntary associations and mutual aid fall somewhere between. Good overviews of the theory of anarchism can be found in texts of that name by David Miller (1984) and Alan Ritter (1980).

In modern times, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic claim that we are born free but then everywhere found in chains is one of the first statements of anarchism, whilst the first person to evolve a systematic theory of anarchism was the English rationalist William Godwin. During the nineteenth century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (influenced in part by Godwin) developed a theory of anarchism that provided much of the basis for French syndicalism, arguing for the ideal of an ordered society of small units, functioning without central government, and organized instead on the federal principle of ‘mutualism’—or equitable exchange between self-governing associations of producers. Proudhon's disciple Mikhail Bakunin, in dispute with Karl Marx, favoured the destruction of state power and advocated violence to achieve this end. He too insists that the reconstruction of society has to be achieved from the bottom upwards by free associations or federations of workers. Like Proudhon, Bakunin maintained that all political parties were ‘varieties of absolutism’, and so was opposed to organized political action by a revolutionary vanguard on behalf of the proletariat. The extent to which anarchism challenges other political philosophies on the right and left alike is evident in Peter Kropotkin's observation that ‘Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian and the libertarian tradition’ (Modern Science and Anarchism, 1912). Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat, was himself an advocate of a ‘communist anarchism’ which was opposed to centralized mass production, and favoured instead an ideal of small communities in which industry and agriculture would be combined, and an education allowing each individual to develop to his or her full potential would be integral to the production process. Like most anarchists he tends to idealize primitive communities in his writings.

Anarchist influences are often evident in contemporary discussions of communes and communalism, ‘direct action’, workers' control, decentralization, and federalism. Anarchist philosophy and practice has also played a role (usually a minor one) in the trade-union movement, the Spanish Civil War, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the events of May 1968 in France, in Gandhian techniques of non-violent protest, and in much latter-day terrorism.

An interesting link with social ecology is made in the writings of the Canadian anarchist Murray Bookchin. After thirty years of political activism, beginning with the Spanish Civil War, Bookchin emerged in the 1960s as a distinctive voice within the radical ecological movement. His theories, usually described as part of the communitarian anarchist tradition, have been developed in twenty or so books, including Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971), Towards an Ecological Society (1980), The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1984), The Modern Crisis (2nd edn., 1987) and The Philosophy of Social Ecology (1990). Bookchin has also directed the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, and been influential in the world-wide Green movement. His originality lies in his sweeping unification of radical politics with history, philosophy, and ecology.

Sociologists have largely ignored or been critical of anarchist philosophy, yet it harbours a whole tradition of social organization, and a systematic theory of how societies work. Although rarely acknowledged as such many of the writings of Michel Foucault, and even the theories of post-structuralism and post-modernism, might be seen as latter-day heir apparent to anarchist thought. Likewise, the work of many symbolic interactionists is largely compatible with the anarchist vision, since it harbours a view of society as spontaneous order.

Anarchism. Anarchist rejection of centralized government and preference for direct democracy and voluntary associations is deeply rooted in American historical experience. Idealization of nature as an alternative to the depravity of modern civilization runs equally deep, as in the work of Henry David Thoreau, for example.

Most native‐born, individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century shared the Jeffersonian preference for artisans and small farmers over an industrial economy. Some tried to supplant the state with utopian communities. Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939), whose journal Liberty (1881–1908) espoused total individual sovereignty, illustrates this tradition. Also an anarchist, Tucker rejected violence and favored education to spread his ideas.

The Haymarket affair of 1886 was a watershed event marking the shift from individualist to European‐inspired collectivist and revolutionary anarchism associated with such figures as the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). The Haymarket affair, in which eight men (mostly German immigrants) were condemned on little evidence for complicity in the throwing of a bomb at an anarchist‐sponsored labor rally that killed seven Chicago policemen, galvanized the anarchist movement. The Russian‐Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman, editor of Mother Earth (1906–1917), dated her conversion to the cause from this event. The execution of labor organizer Joe Hill in 1915 and of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 furnished further martyrs for the movement. At the same time, these events, as well as Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of Carnegie Steel executive Henry Clay Frick during the 1892 Homestead lockout and the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, linked anarchism with terrorism in most Americans' minds. In 1903, Congress barred “persons opposed to all organized governments” from entering the United States.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, was part of a trend away from terrorism and toward organizing anarchist unions. The IWW enjoyed some success organizing miners and textile workers, but government repression during and after World War I took its toll. IWW leader Bill Haywood was imprisoned and in 1921 fled to Bolshevik Russia, following Goldman, Berkman, and other radicals already deported as radicals.

The counterculture of the 1960s showed the persistence of many anarchist values: direct democracy, back‐to‐nature communalism, alternative education, sexual liberation, and opposition to war and the draft. After the 1960s, radical environmentalists such as Earth First! demonstrated anarchists' preference for direct action, and anarcha‐feminists exposed the patriarchal nature of power.
See also Sacco and Vanzetti Case; Sixties, The; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

David De Leon , The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism, 1978.
Paul Avrich , The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States, 1980.
Paul Avrich , Anarchist Portraits, 1988.

Richard D. Sonn

anarchism [Gr.,=having no government], theory that equality and justice are to be sought through the abolition of the state and the substitution of free agreements between individuals. Central to anarchist thought is the belief that society is natural and that people are good but are corrupted by artificial institutions. Also central in anarchism are the belief in individual freedom and the denial of any authority, particularly that of the state, that hinders human development. Since the Industrial Revolution, anarchists have also opposed the concentration of economic power in business corporations.

Zeno of Citium , founder of Stoic philosophy, is regarded as the father of anarchism. In the Middle Ages the anarchist tradition was closely linked to utopian, millenarian religious movements such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit of the 13th cent. and the Anabaptists of the 16th cent. The philosophy of modern political anarchism was outlined in the 18th and 19th cent. by William Godwin , P. J. Proudhon , and others.

Mikhail Bakunin attempted to orient the First International toward anarchism but was defeated by Karl Marx . Bakunin gave modern anarchism a collectivist and violent tone that has persisted despite the revisionary efforts of Piotr Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy . Political anarchism in Russia was suppressed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution.

Anarchism's only real mass following was in Latin countries, where its doctrines were often combined with those of syndicalism , especially in Spain. In the United States, early anarchists such as Josiah Warren were associated with cooperatives and with utopian colonies. After the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886 and the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 a law was passed forbidding anarchists to enter the country, and Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were among those deported. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case attests to the fear of anarchism in the United States.

As an organized movement, anarchism is largely dead, but it retains importance as a philosophical attitude and a political tendency, and to lesser degree as a source of social protest. In recent years they have mounted highly visible, sometimes violent or destructive public protests at international conferences attended by representives of the governments and corporations of major industrialized nations, such as meetings of the Group of Seven, the World Trade Organization, and the World Economic Forum.

Bibliography: See R. Kedward, The Anarchists (1971); G. Runkle, Anarchism, Old and New (1972); M. Nettlau, History of Anarchism (3 vol., 1978).

ANARCHISM

Anarchism, derived from the Greek word meaning "without rule," rose to prominence in the nineteenth century and reached well into the twentieth century as a significant political force in Europe and Russia. Anarchists sought the overthrow of all forms of political rule in the name of a new society of voluntary federations of cooperative associations or syndicates. Anarchism also fought Marxism for revolutionary leadership.

Russian anarchism, in particular, inspired anarchist movements in Russia and Europe. Three Russians were progenitors of modern anarchism: Mikhail Alexsandrovich Bakunin (1814–1876), Petr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921), and Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910). The three, however, were contrasting personalities, each taking different slants on anarchist doctrine. Bakunin was ever the firebrand of revolutionary violence in word and deed; Kropotkin the philosophical and scientific propounder of a society based on cooperation and mutual aid; and Tolstoy the proponent of a Christ-inspired anarchism of nonviolence and nonresistance to evil in the sense of not answering another's evil with evil.

Despite the wide intellectual influence of Kropotkin and Tolstoy, Bakunin epitomized the strategy of violence to end all political power. Bakunin put the brand on anarchism as a doctrine of violence.

Kropotkin's followers objected to anarchist factions in Russia that turned to violence and terrorism as their characteristic mode of operation. Among the names they assumed were the Black Banner Bearers, Anarchist Underground, Syndicalists, Makhayevists (followers of Makhaysky), and the Makhnovists (followers of Makhno in the Ukraine).

In the wake of the 1917 revolution, Kropotkin returned to Russia from exile in Europe with high hopes for an anarchist future. Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks soon dashed them. His funeral in 1921 was the last occasion in which the black flag of anarchism was raised in public in Sovietized Russia. The new regime executed anarchist leaders and destroyed their organizations.

See also: bakunin, mikhail alexandrovich; kropotkin, petr alexeyevich; tolstoy, leo nikolayevich

bibliography

Avrich, Paul. (1967). The Russian Anarchists. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press.

Carl A. Linden

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

anarchism The belief that government and law should be abolished and society organized by voluntary means without resort to force or compulsion. The French social theorist Pierre Joseph PROUDHON first expounded the theory that equality and justice should be achieved through the abolition of the state and the substitution of free agreements between individuals. Other anarchist visions of the society of the future include the economic individualism, outlined in the American writer Benjamin Tucker's Instead of a Book (1893) and the communism envisaged by the Russian émigré Peter Kropotkin's work The Conquest of Bread (1906).

Groups of anarchists tried to find popular support in many European states in the 1860s and 1870s. They were hostile to MARXISM on the grounds that a seizure of state-power by the workers would only perpetuate oppression. The Russian anarchist Mikhail BAKUNIN founded a Social Democratic Alliance (1868), which attempted to wrest control of the workers International from MARX. Anarchists switched between strategies of spontaneous mutual association and violent acts against representatives of the state. The Presidents of France and Italy, the King of Italy, and the Empress of Austria were killed by anarchists between 1894 and 1901. Subsequently they tried to mobilize mass working-class support behind the Russian General Strike, which was a central feature of the RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS of 1905 and 1917. Their influence in Europe declined after the rise of totalitarian states elsewhere. They were active in the SPANISH CIVIL WAR, and in the latter half of the 20th century anarchism attracted urban terrorists.

anarchism Though mistrust of the state 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. Paine declared that government was, at best, a necessary evil: ‘a great part of what is called government is mere imposition.’ Spence went further. His vision of the future was of parish communities, with minimal powers reserved for the state. 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. A sensational episode was the siege of 100 Sidney Street, Stepney, in 1911, with two foreign anarchists holed up. 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.

anarchism Developed into a consistent, individualistic theory by Pierre Joseph Proudhon (b. 1809, d. 1865), it started as a movement which rejected large-scale property and the state, supported decentralized, local/communal forms of authority, and promoted the self-help of workers. In a change of emphasis, at the turn of the century many anarchists focused on the revolutionary ideas of Bakunin to create a new social order through violent action and terrorism. This led to the assassinations of the Austrian Empress Elizabeth (1898), the Italian King Umberto I (1900), and the US President McKinley (1901). In the early twentieth century, anarchists achieved some influence through syndicalism in France, despite their repression by the French government following the murder of the President, Sadi Carnot, in 1894. In Spain, anarchists participated in the government from November 1936 until May 1937. Anarchism disappeared after the fall of the Spanish Republic, and in Italy after the rise of Mussolini. In the USSR, most anarchists turned into Communists after the Russian Revolution.

collectivism

anarchism (Gk. ‘no government’) Political theory that regards the abolition of the state as a prerequisite for equality and social justice. In place of government, anarchy is a social form based upon voluntary cooperation between individuals. Zeno of Citium, leader of the Stoics, is regarded as the architect of anarchism. Millenarian movements of the Reformation, such as the Anabaptists, espoused a form of anarchism. As a modern political philosophy, anarchism dates from mid-19th century, and writers such as P. J. Proudhon. Often in conflict with emerging communism, Mikhail Bakunin's brand of violent, revolutionary anarchism led to his expulsion from the First International (1872). Anarchism has been a popular political force only in conjunction with syndicalism. Its support of civil disobedience and sometimes political violence has led to its marginalization. Following the assassination (1901) of President William McKinley, the USA has barred anarchists from its shores. The Sacco and Vanzetti Case (1920) led to further hysteria over the threat of anarchism.

an·ar·chism / ˈanərˌkizəm/ • n. belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion. ∎  anarchists as a political force or movement: socialism and anarchism emerged to offer organized protest against the injustices of Spanish society.

an·ar·chist / ˈanərkist/ • n. a person who believes in or tries to bring about anarchy. • adj. relating to or supporting anarchy or anarchists: an anarchist newspaper. DERIVATIVES: an·ar·chis·tic / ˌanərˈkistik/ adj.

anarchist •pacifist • sophist •calligraphist, epigraphist •monographist • theosophist •unsurfaced • druggist • collagist •Falangist, phalangist •ageist • elegist • imagist • strategist •theurgist •genealogist, metallurgist, mineralogist •apologist, biologist, ecologist, geologist, ideologist, oncologist, ontologist, pedologist, sexologist, theologist, zoologist •eulogist • suffragist • liturgist •thaumaturgist • catechist • stockist •Yorkist • anarchist • monarchist •masochist, sadomasochist