ANARCHY. - Etymologically it means "absence of government" and therefore, by extension, "disorder, confusion."
This etymological concept, however, does not explain the various forms of anarchy professed by philosophers and pseudo-philosophers and by politicians and pseudo-politicians, but it serves above all to grasp the subversive aspect of the ideology that underlies anarchy.
Historically, anarchy was first identified in the communistic utopias that are easy to find as singular manifestations even in the history of the most ancient civilized countries. Followers of communistic sects are also traced, and essentially anarchic traits are abundantly noted in famous philosophers, such as Plato himself. For this reason Aristophanes satirized them and had some character in his comedies say that "all will have a right to everything," a phrase very close to the one that later became familiar among anarchists: "Property is theft," with which it was intended to maintain that the abolition of property would abolish every privilege.
In the Middle Ages, utopias and anarchic traits are also very frequent.
But it is in the 18th and 19th centuries that we have a characteristic flowering of partially or totally anarchic doctrines, and they allow us to reconstruct the content of anarchy; Rousseau begins to launch his attacks on property because he knows that it is the surest basis of society and ends up proposing in the Social Contract the alienation of the individual's rights in favor of the collectivity. These economic utopias are those that would later develop in the French Revolution, finding in Babeuf the man who wanted to realize them with clamorous insurrectionary manifestos.
A stronger theorist of anarchy certainly appears to be the French writer P. J. Proudhon (d. 1865). He holds that anarchy can become a very great good since, with the disappearance of every authority, it would transform society into a mass of men associated in their efforts to overcome the various obstacles of life. In the economic field, like the other anarchists, he demands the abolition of every right of property. But it is the German Stirner (d. 1856) who pushes to an extreme and complete form of anarchy by appealing to an individualism possessing every good ("My power is my property") in which he deludes himself into annulling every social necessity.
Among the Russians Bakunin (d. 1876) and Prince Kropotkin (d. 1921) can be considered active theorists and propagandists of anarchy: "against God, against the fatherland, against the government, against the bourgeoisie," this was their theory and their practice. The Italians have no authoritative exponents of the anarchist movement.
Through the thought of the writers cited, the theoretical program of anarchy can therefore easily be defined as a clamorous attempt to eliminate authority under its three aspects: political, social and religious. In the dissolution of government into the natural organism, in the contract substituted for sovereignty and judicial power, in labor no longer organized by an extraneous force but organizing itself, in citizens who contract freely not with the government but among themselves, the fullness of anarchism would be realized, a manifestation of a liberty that would in this way reach its fullness. Economic aims would also obtain full satisfaction, inasmuch as men in a society without any form determined by laws and property would find themselves naturally happy.
It is therefore proper to anarchic doctrine to completely deny the principle of authority and hierarchy, which is replaced by a form of liberty whose limits are incomprehensible and which lead to the annihilation of society. It appears manifest that a social conception of this kind is entirely utopian and in clear antithesis with every religion, especially with Catholicism, in which God is conceived as a spiritual, transcendent, infinite and eternal reality, from whom man proceeds by creation and to whom he is ordered as to his ultimate end; whereas on the ground of concreteness, with every religious principle eliminated and the State and any social authority abolished, it is not clear what substitute element anarchic doctrines can introduce to keep the social fabric standing. There is a whole destructive aspect of anarchy, to which no constructive element of possible forms of coexistence is opposed in real substance.
Even from the strictly economic point of view, a constructive doctrine is lacking to replace the violent destructions of property and the general leveling demanded. Indeed, the affirmation of an extreme individualism itself posits a demand for inequality, including economic inequality, among individuals and thus approaches a form of economic liberalism.
In fact, the inconsistency of the economic aspect of anarchy gradually distinguished anarchists from the supporters of socialist and communist doctrines, with which they were able for a certain time to easily mingle on the basis of revolutionary demands for the abolition of all property and all privilege.
The latter doctrines, on the other hand, had a concrete program to oppose, in the development of industrialization and capitalism, in defense of the working classes.
If we wish to indicate the period of time in which an intense development of anarchism occurred, we can agree in referring it to the second half of the last century. We will add that anarchist propaganda brought about in many cases political assassination and regicide. At the beginning of our century anarchism began to diminish, and today the phenomenon is very limited and perhaps only sporadic. This is undoubtedly due, besides to the absurdity of the theory, to the fact that revolutionaries are by now in firm possession of the extremist parties that exist in the various countries.
From the social point of view, the State has felt the need to protect itself against crimes that could be the expression of an anarchic will. Thus in Italy toward the end of the last century various laws were published that struck at the apology of crime, incitement to delinquency, crimes committed with explosive materials, etc.: forms of criminal hypotheses that are still provided for today even in other countries by the penal code.
Bibliography6 works
Salvatore Zingale