Anarchism calls for the abolition of all government, instead envisaging a society devoid of any coercive force and arranged around principles of voluntary cooperation.
Anarchists – the word itself is derived from the Greek for ‘without ruler’ – reject the idea that any government or ruler can have moral legitimacy, so argue that no individual should be obliged to conform to a government’s demands. In its emphasis on the individual’s right to act independently, anarchy may be regarded as an extreme expression of liberalism, although certain branches of anarchist thought have more in common with socialism in their call for voluntary collectivism.
Several texts of antiquity may be read as expounding proto-anarchic ideas. The Tao Te Ching, a 6th-century Taoist text, for instance, rejects Confucian ideas of governance in favour of living in natural and spontaneous harmony. In ancient Greece, meanwhile, Zeno of Citium was among those who proffered the notion of a government-free society. As the great Russian anarchist philosopher, Peter Kropotkin, observed:
The best exponent of anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece was Zeno . . . who distinctly opposed his conception of a free community without government to the state-Utopia of Plato. He repudiated the omnipotence of the State, its intervention and regimentation, and proclaimed the sovereignty of the moral law of the individual . . .
The era of modern philosophical anarchism is generally thought to have begun with English philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836). In his 1793 work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he depicted government as a corrupting force that keeps the population reliant upon it by perpetuating ignorance. However, he predicted that with the spread of knowledge, politics would give way to personal morality, bringing with it an end to social conventions such as law, marriage and private property.
All property is theft
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) in France was the first to identify himself as an anarchist, arguing that all property is theft and urging a new system that structures itself without a central authority or its attendant social institutions. ‘To be governed is to be watched over,’ he said, ‘inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.’
By the late 19th century, there had been a synthesis of Marxist and anarchist ideas by the likes of Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), who argued that collective action and organization was necessary to preserve the rights of the individual. Sure enough, a great many anarchists played active roles in, for instance, the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Yet the anarchist view necessarily requires the goodwill of individuals in order that society may function – an assumption too far for some observers. In 1946, George Orwell commented: ‘In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.’