Anarchism (from Greek ἀν (without) + ἄρχειν (to rule) + ισμός (from stem -ιζειν), "without archons," "without rulers")[1] is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which reject compulsory government[2] (the state) and support its elimination,[3][4] often due to a wider rejection of involuntary or permanent authority.[5] Anarchism is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics as "a cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary."[6]
^Anarchism. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service. 29 August2006
^Anarchism. The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005. P. 14 "Anarchism is the view that a society without the state, or government, is both possible and desirable."
^ Bakunin, Mikhail, God and the State, pt. 2.; Tucker, Benjamin, State Socialism and Anarchism.; Kropotkin, Piotr, Anarchism: its Philosophy and Ideal; Malatesta, Errico, Towards Anarchism; Bookchin, Murray, Anarchism: Past and Present, pt. 4; An Introduction to Anarchism by Liz A. Highleyman[1]
^ Carl Slevin "anarchism" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan. Oxford University Press, 2003.
^ Kropotkine, Petr Alekseevich. Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings, Courier Dover Publications, 2002, p.5
^ R.B. Fowler (1972). "The Anarchist Tradition of Political Thought". Western Political Quarterly25 (4): 738-752. doi:10.2307/446800.
^ Sylvan, Richard. Anarchism. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, editors Goodwin, Robert E. and Pettit, Philip. Blackwell Publishing, 1995, p.231
^ Anarchism. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 31
^ "Usually considered to be an extreme left-wing ideology, anarchism has always included a significant strain of radical individualism, from the hyperrationalism of Godwin, to the egoism of Stirner, to the libertarians and anarcho-capitalists of today." Brooks, Frank H. 1994. The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty (1881-1908). Transaction Publishers. p. xi
^ Carl Slevin "anarchism" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan. Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.
^ Godwin himself attributed the first anarchist writing to Edmund Burke's Vindication of Natural Society. "Most of the above arguments may be found much more at large in Burke's Vindication of Natural Society; a treatise in which the evils of the existing political institutions are displayed with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence…" - footnote, Ch. 2 Political Justice by William Godwin.
^ Godwin said: "…however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behoves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe whether, in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished." in "An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice"
^ Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).
^ Proudhon, Solution to the Social Problem, ed. H. Cohen (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927), p.45.
^ Proudon, Pierre-Joseph. The Federal Principle. "The notion of anarchy in politics is just as rational and positive as any other. It means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions alone produce the social order."
^ "A member of a community," The Mutualist; this 1826 series criticized Owen's proposals, and has been attributed to Josiah Warren or another dissident Owenite in the same circles; Wilbur, Shawn, 2006, "More from the 1826 "Mutualist"?"
Under the mutual system, each individual will receive the just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount; and so much as the individual laborer will then get over and above what he has earned will come to him as his share in the general prosperity of the community of which he is an individual member.
– "Communism versus Mutualism", Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments. (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875), William Batchelder Greene
^ Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton University Press 1996 , p.6
Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, Blackwell Publishing 1991 , p.11
^ Greene, William B. "Communism — Capitalism — Socialism", Equality (1849)[4], p. 59.
^ Warren published the periodical The Peaceful Revolutionist in 1833, seven years before Proudhon's "What is Property."
^ "While more learned men lost faith in utopias and in human nature when the New Harmony experiment failed, Warren became more trusting than before in man's intelligence and perfectibility." - Native American Anarchism, pg. 94, Eunice Schuster
^ Tucker, Benjamin R., "On Picket Duty", Liberty (Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order) (1881-1908); 5 January1889; 6, 10; APS Online pg. 1
^ Morris, Christopher W. 1998. An Essay on the Modern State. Cambridge University Press. p 50. The collectivist category is also sometimes known as social, socialist, or communitarian anarchism category.
^ Avrich, Paul. 2006. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. AK Press. p. 5
When… production comes to outstrip consumption… [e]veryone will draw what he needs from the abundant social reserve of commodities, without fear of depletion; and the moral sentiment which will be more highly developed among free and equal workers will prevent, or greatly reduce, abuse and waste.
They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship — their dictatorship, of course — can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.
^ Ward, Colin. Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 2
^ Heywood, Andrew, Key Concepts in Politics, Palgrave, , 2000, p. 46
^ Freeden, Micheal. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford University Press. . pp. 314
^ Johnson, Ellwood. The Goodly Word: The Puritan Influence in America Literature, Clements Publishing, 2005, p. 138: "…a political theory that has usually been named 'anarchist individualism'…The theory, however, does not advocate anarchism in the sense, for example, of the destruction of institutions; its purpose is only description. Emersonian and Thoreauavian anarchism does not call for any specifiable program of rebellion or destruction of social institutions, but merely asserts one abiding truth…" Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Alvin Saunders Johnson, 1937, p. 12: "The noblest and most eloquent statement of this essentially anarchist individualism came a generation later in Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience" Bool, Henry, Henry Bool's Apology for His Jeffersonian Anarchism, 1901: "I am a believer in the doctrines of the individualistic school of Anarchists, to which Garrison, Emerson, Proudhon, Thoreau, Spooner, Andrews, Warren and Tucker belong."
^ Woodcock, George. 2004. Anarchism: A History Of Libertarian Ideas And Movements. Broadview Press. p. 20
^ Miller, David. "anarchism." 1987. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought. Blackwell Publishing. p 11
^ Heider, Ulrike. Anarchism: Left, Right and Green, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994, pp. 95-96
^ "What my might reaches is my property; and let me claim as property everything I feel myself strong enough to attain, and let me extend my actual property as fas as I entitle, that is, empower myself to take…" In Ossar, Michael. 1980. Anarchism in the Dramas of Ernst Toller. SUNY Press. p. 27
^ Woodcock. George. 2004. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Broadview Press. p 20
^ "Anarchism is a word without meaning, unless it includes the liberty of the individual to control his product or whatever his product has brought him through exchange in a free market - that is, private property. Whoever denies private property is of necessity an Archist." "ANARCHISM AND PROPERTY", by Benjamin Tucker in "The New Freewoman", November 15, 1913
^Benjamin Tucker, "defense is a service like any other service; that it is labor both useful and desired, and therefore an economic commodity subject to the law of supply and demand; that in a free market this commodity would be furnished at the cost of production; that, competition prevailing, patronage would go to those who furnished the best article at the lowest price; that the production and sale of this commodity are now monopolized by the State; and that the State, like almost all monopolists, charges exorbitant prices" "Instead of a Book" (1893)
"Anarchism does not exclude prisons, officials, military, or other symbols of force. It merely demands that non-invasive men shall not be made the victims of such force. Anarchism is not the reign of love, but the reign of justice. It does not signify the abolition of force-symbols but the application of force to real invaders." Tucker, Benjamin. LibertyOctober 19, 1891.
^ Tucker, Benjamin. Labor and Its Pay, from Individual Liberty: Selections from the Writings of Benjamin T. Tucker
^ Schwartzman, Jack. Ingalls, Hanson, and Tucker: Nineteenth-Century American Anarchists. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 62, No. 5 (November, 2003). p. 325
^ Schwartzman, Jack. Ingalls, Hanson, and Tucker: Nineteenth-Century American Anarchists. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 62, No. 5 (November, 2003). p. 325
^ "[t]he landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source" – Kropotkin, "The Conquest of Bread" op cit
^ Kropotkin, Peter. 1907. The Conquest of Bread. Putnam. p. 202
^ Yarros, Victor S. A Princely Paradox, Liberty, Vol 4. No. 19, Saturday, April 9, 1887, Whole Number 97; Tucker, Benjamin. Labor and Its Pay; Appleton, Henry. Anarchism, True and False, Liberty 2.24, no. 50, 6 September 1884, p. 4; Swartz, Clarence Lee. What is Mutualism?; Rothbard, Murray. The Death Wish of the Anarcho-Communists
^ "This volume honors the foremost contemporary exponent of free-market anarchism. One contributor describes Murray Rothbard as 'the most ideologically committed zero-State academic economist on earth'." Review by Lawrence H. White of Man, Economy, and liberty: Essays in honor of Murray N. Rothbard, published in Journal of Economic Literature, Vol XXVIII, June 1990, page 664
^ DeLeon, David. The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, p. 127 and Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, 1987, , p. 290: "A student and disciple of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard combined the laissez-faire economics of his teacher with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state he had absorbed from studying the individualist American anarchists of the nineteenth century such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. (Rothbard himself is on the anarchist wing of the movement.)"
^ Adams, Ian. 2002. Political Ideology Today. p. 135. Manchester University Press; Ostergaard, Geoffrey. 2003. Anarchism. In W. Outwaite (Ed.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. p. 14. Blackwell Publishing
^ Konkin, Samuel Edward. New Libertarian Manifesto. KoPubCo year = 2006. . (online version)
^ Nocella, Anthony. Best, Stephen. 'Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth' AK Press (2006) pg.23
^ Esenwein, George Richard "Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898" [p. 135]
^ Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 6
^ "The best thing ordinary workingmen or women could do was to organise their industry to get rid of money altogether…Let them produce together, co-operatively rather than as employer and employed; let them fraternise group by group, let each use what he needs of his own product, and deposit the rest in the storage-houses, and let those others who need goods have them as occasion arises." Voltairine De Cleyre, "Why I Am an Anarchist"
^ "There is nothing un-Anarchistic about any of [these systems] until the element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic arrangements they do not agree to."
^ quoted by Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism [p. 198-9]
^ "I have no prefix or adjective for my anarchism. I think syndicalism can work, as can free-market anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, even anarcho-hermits, depending on the situation. But I do have a strong individualist streak.
– From an interview with Fred Woodworth in Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in American by Paul Avrich (2006). Page 475
^ Vernor Vinge, James Frankel. True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (2001), Tor Books, p.44
^ "the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one's vision at the point of a gun."Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-first Century by David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic
^Bakunin, Mikhail [1873] (1991). Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge University Press. .
^ Graham, Robert ''Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books 2005)
^ Resolutions from the St. Imier Congress, in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1, p.100 [6]
^ Carley, Mark "Trade union membership 1993-2003" (International:SPIRE Associates 2004)
^ "You can see quite well that behind all the democratic and socialistic phrases and promises in Marx’s program for the State lies all that constitutes the true despotic and brutal nature of all states, regardless of their form of government." Bakunin, Mikhail (1872) "On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" (Bakunin on Anarchy, translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff, 1971)[7]
Anarchism, George Woodcock (Penguin Books, 1962) (For many years the classic introduction, until in part superseded by Harper's Anarchy: A Graphic Guide)
Anarchy: A Graphic Guide, Clifford Harper (Camden Press, 1987) (An excellent overview, updating Woodcock's classic, and beautifully illustrated throughout by Harper's woodcut-style artwork)
The Anarchist Reader, George Woodcock (Ed.) (Fontana/Collins 1977) (An anthology of writings from anarchist thinkers and activists including Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Bookchin, Goldman, and many others.)
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