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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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
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.)
