Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction

Foreword

Anarchism is a social and political ideology which, despite a history of defeat, continually reemerges in a new guise or in a new country, so that another chapter has to be added to its chronology, or another dimension to its scope. In 1962 George Woodcock wrote a 470-page book, Anarchism, which, continually reprinted as a Penguin Book and translated into many languages, became probably the most widely read book on the subject in the world. Woodcock wrote a series of updating postscripts until his death in 1995. In 1992 Peter Marshall wrote a book of more than 700 pages called Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (HarperCollins) which seems likely to overtake the earlier book in global sales. Woodcock was greatly rel... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 1 : Definitions and Ancestors

The word ‘anarchy’ comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political and social ideology. Proudhon argued that organization without government was both possible and desirable. In the evolution of political ideas, anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these. Historically, anarchism arose not only as an explanation of the gulf between the rich and the poor in any community, and of the reason why the poor have been obliged to fig... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 2 : Revolutionary Movements

In the course of the revolutionary outbreaks that spread across Europe in 1848 the Prefect of Police in Paris is said to have remarked of the anarchist Michael Bakunin, ‘What a man! On the first day of the revolution he is a perfect treasure; but on the next day he ought to be shot.’ His observation epitomizes both the role and the ultimate fate of the anarchists and their precursors in a long series of European popular uprisings. Chroniclers of all political movements invariably discover antecedents from the past, and the anarchists found ancestors in the slave revolts of the Roman Empire and in all subsequent revolutionary upheavals of the downtrodden. They have similarly identified precursors in such risings as the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3 : States, Societies, and the Col...

There is a vital distinction, stressed by anarchists, between society and the state. It has been obvious for centuries, and although many political thinkers have ignored this distinction, it was as clear, for example, to such 20th-century academics as Isaiah Berlin or G. D. H. Cole as it was in the 18th century to Thomas Paine, cited in the previous chapter. However, accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Empire there has been a rediscovery by political enquirers of ‘civil society’. The philosopher Martin Buber was the friend and executor of the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, whose observation about the nature of the state as a mode of human behavior is discussed in Chapter 1. In his capacity as a professor of soc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4 : Deflating Nationalism and Fund...

The anarchists claim that popular self-organization could provide those new forms of social organization which, as Kropotkin put it in an observation I have cited earlier, would undertake ‘those social functions that the state fulfills through the bureaucracy’. However, these are not the only issues that are raised when skeptics dismiss anarchism as a primitive ideology that is simply not relevant to the modern world. They have a different reason, as they observe the modern nation state and the intense hostilities and rivalries arising between the government of any major state and others. Or, indeed, the lethal hatreds visible among different factions within one territory that has been designated as a state, and the fr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 5 : Containing Deviancy and Libera...

From the fall of the Bastille in 1789, which actually released only seven prisoners, to the death of Stalin in 1953, which slowly liberated millions, the anarchists, through personal experience, provided an impressive literature on the defects of the penal system. Kropotkin’s first book was his account of his experiences In Russian and French Prisons (1887), and Alexander Berkman’s was his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). It was Kropotkin who first used the phrase ‘prisons are the universities of crime’, and his observation remains true in the sense that the first imprisonment of any offender becomes a guarantee that he, like the people with whom he shares a cell, will learn in jail a long series of ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6 : Freedom in Education

The editors of a well-known anthology of anarchist writings remark that, from the school prospectus issued by William Godwin in 1783 to Paul Goodman’s book of 1964 on Compulsory Miseducation, ‘no other movement whatever has assigned to educational principles, concepts, experiments and practices a more significant place in its writings and activities’. Godwin’s tract was published as An Account of the Seminary that will be Opened on Monday the Fourth Day of August, at Epsom in Surrey, for the Instruction of Twelve Pupils. It failed to convince enough parents, and the school never opened. In this pamphlet he declared that modern education not only corrupts the heart of our youth, by the rigid slavery ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7 : The Individualist Response

For a century, anarchists have used the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist’, both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1895. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers – David Friedman, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Paul Wolff – so it is necessary to examine the modern individualist ‘libertarian’ response from the standpoint of the anarchist tradition. In approaching this theme, one obstacle to circumnavigate is the German advocate of ‘conscious egoism’, Max Stirner. He was born Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806–56) and his book, publi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8 : Quiet Revolutions

The gulf between anarchist aspirations and the actual history of the 20th century could be seen as an indication of the folly of impossible hopes, but for the concurrent failure of other political ideologies of the Left. Which of us was not profoundly relieved by the collapse of Soviet communism, even though we have had little reason to rejoice in subsequent regimes? As the penal settlements slowly emptied of their survivors, the true believers were obliged to question their assumptions. Many years ago, the American journalist Dwight Macdonald wrote an article on ‘Politics Past’ which included a long footnote that he later told me was the most-quoted paragraph he had ever written. His footnote said: The revolut... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9 : The Federalist Agenda

A frequent criticism of anarchism is that it is an ideology that fits a world of isolated villages, small enough to be self-governing entities, but not the global, multi-national society that we all inhabit in real life. But in fact the major anarchist thinkers of the past: Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, had a federalist agenda that was a foretaste of modern debates on European unity. That minority of children in any European country who were given the opportunity of studying the history of Europe as well as that of their own nations learned that there were two great events in the 19th century: the unification of Germany, achieved by Bismarck and the Emperor Wilhelm I; and the unification of Italy, won by Cavour, Mazzini, Gari... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

References

References Chapter 1 Peter Marshall (ed.), The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin (London: Freedom Press, 1986) Stewart Edwards (ed.), Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: Macmillan, 1969) K. J. Kenafick (ed.), Marxism, Freedom and the State (London: Freedom Press, 1984) Paul Avrich (ed.), The Conquest of Bread (London: Allen Lane, 1972 [1892]) Colin Ward (ed.), Fields, Factories and Workshops (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974; London: Freedom Press, 1985 [1899]) John Hewetson (ed.), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Freedom Press, 1987 [1902]) The passage quoted from Landauer is from Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949). F. G. Notehelfer, Kotuku Shusui: Portrait o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction

By Colin Ward (2004)

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Author : Colin Ward

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