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The term anarchy derives from ancient Greek where it originally meant “absence of a leader.” In current usage we can distinguish between two main meanings: anarchy in the strict sense means absence of a chief or a government, while in the broader sense it denotes a condition of disorder and chaos.

The Definition: Absence Of Government Or Disorder?

Although the two meanings of the term anarchy are often inter mingled in common language, it is important to distinguish between them at the conceptual level. In technical usage, it would be better to limit the usage to the strict meaning. While the term anarchy in the sense of disorder is superfluous (other possible words for it being chaos, mess, and disarray), the strict meaning is necessary because we otherwise lack a single word to denote the third possibility between the existence of a government and pure chaos. In other words, anarchy is needed to denote the fact that order is possible even in absence of anorderer.

This definition has three main corollaries. First, most scholars agree that anarchy does not mean lack of organization, although disputes may arise as to the degree of centralization that is compatible with anarchy (e.g., for some a noncoercive form of government is compatible with anarchy). This is very clear in primitive acephalous (literally, “headless”) societies and in the case of the society of sovereign states: In both cases, we have anarchical societies that display a high degree of organization even in the absence of a common government.

Second, anarchy does not only mean absence of the state. Anarchy means absence of coercive and centralized governments, of which the state is only one of the possible forms (other examples being empires or hierarchically ordered tribes). The reason why anarchy came to mean hostility to the state is that, since its rise, the modern sovereign state appeared as the culminating point of political life, the alternative to it being anarchy. This is clear in social contract theories that counterpoise the civil society to a hypothetical anarchical state of nature, thus supporting the passage from the denotation of absence of government to its frequent connotation of disorder. Such an opposition is however more a normative and therefore disputable model of social order than a description of the actual origins of the state.

Third, anarchy is both a descriptive and a prescriptive concept. In the first sense, it denotes a state of things, such as the condition of the acephalous societies mentioned above, while, in the second, it means an ideal that must be pursued. The anarchic ideal is characterized by the central emphasis it puts on the concept of freedom, so much so that some have claimed that this word summarizes the sense of the entire anarchic doctrine.

Forms Of Anarchy: The Anarchic Ideal

Although the anarchic ideal is recurrent in different cultures and epochs, it is in the nineteenth and twentieth century when a number of revolutionary movements emerged in many Western countries that Western anarchism as a distinct political doctrine emerged. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is usually recognized as the first to have defined himself as an anarchist, which led many to consider him the father of modern anarchism.

Anarchists are united by their refusal of coercive forms of authority, be they political or religious, and their plea for voluntary and spontaneous forms of organizations that follow a bottom-up logic. Yet, many different and variegated forms of anarchism exist, and they can be grouped according to the different ends and means of their political proposals. With regards to the ends, there is a broad distinction between individualist and social approaches. The usual example of a strict individualist credo is the theory of the German philosopher Max Stirner, who argued that freedom can have no other principle and end than the self and its egoism. Individualist anarchism developed mainly in the United States, where anarchism has often been coupled with the free market (an example being the so-called anarcho-capitalism).

On the opposite side stand those approaches that see the realization of the self as possible only within and through the society. Distinct approaches among these are communists, such as the Russian Peter Kropotkin, and collectivists, such as Michael Bakunin, who favored a form of communism of production but recognized some space for the individual enjoyment of the fruits of labor. Behind the different forms of anarchism stand radically different conceptions of freedom: The idea that freedom is to be realized individually (Stirner) or that it can only be achieved in common because, as Bakunin observed, one cannot be free in a society of slaves because their slavery prevents the full realization of one’s own freedom.

With regards to the means through which anarchy is to be realized, most anarchists agree that they must be homogenous to the ends: If the aim is freedom, it can only be realized through free means. Differences emerge as to the way in which they must be conceived: (1) Some favored forms of rebellion or revolution, (2) others valued more nonviolent means such as education, while (3) others, taking an intermediate route, looked for an alliance with workers’ organizations such as trade unions, which can both educate the masses and provide the infrastructures for the reorganization of society (see in particular the French and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism).

Among the first, there must be a further distinction between those who trust the spontaneity of revolution and others who believe in the “propaganda by the deeds”; that is, either local rebellions that could stimulate masses elsewhere toward a general revolution or single individual acts of violence, like assassination of political leaders. While the recourse to violence is very much controversial among anarchists, most of them agree on the importance of education for the creation of an anarchical society. Among those who emphasized education are antiviolence writers such as the Russian Leo Tolstoy or contemporary pacifist and ecological movements.

In the decades surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century, political and technological transformations have lead to a resurgence of interest in anarchism. On the one hand, the decline in popularity of Marxism in the 1990s created a sort of vacuum in the radical left. This is linked also to the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the anarchists were right in their critique of Marxists: a workers’ state cannot but reproduce the same logic of every state, where a minority of state bureaucrats rule over the majority of people. Nevertheless, the main reason for the resurgence of interest in anarchism is linked to the technological developments of the past few decades, which are usually referred to as globalization. The rise of network forms of social, economic, and political organizations, in particular through the World Wide Web and associated technologies, have somehow proved what modernpolitical theory has always been reluctant to recognize: order is possible without an orderer.

Bibliography:

Bakunin, Mikhail. Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism. New York:Vintage, 1972.
Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan, 1977.
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Crowder, George. Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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Kropotkin, Pyotr. The Essential Kropotkin. London: Macmillan, 1976.
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Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.