ANARCHY. — Etymologically it means “lack of government” and, by extension, “disorder, confusion.”
This etymological concept, however, does not explain the various forms of anarchism professed by philosophers and pseudo-philosophers, and by politicians and pseudo-politicians; rather, it serves chiefly to grasp the subversive aspect of the ideology that underlies anarchism.
Historically, anarchism first manifested itself in communist utopias, which can easily be found even in the history of the most ancient civilizations. Traces of communist sects are likewise to be found, and essentially anarchic elements are noted in celebrated philosophers such as Plato himself. For this reason Aristophanes satirized them and made one of his comic characters say that “all shall have the right to everything,” a phrase that closely resembles the one that later became familiar among anarchists: “Property is theft,” by which they sought to argue that the abolition of property would abolish every privilege.
In the Middle Ages, utopias and anarchic elements are also very frequent.
But it is in the 18th and 19th centuries that we see a characteristic flourishing of partially or totally anarchic doctrines, and these enable us to reconstruct the content of anarchism. Rousseau begins to launch his attacks on property because he knows it is the surest foundation of society, and in *The Social Contract* he ends by proposing the alienation of individual rights in favor of the collectivity. These economic utopias are the ones that later developed during the French Revolution, finding in Babeuf the man who sought to realize them through sensational insurrectionary manifestos.
A more prominent theorist of anarchism is certainly the French writer P. J. Proudhon (d. 1865). He believes that anarchism can become a 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 sphere, like the other anarchists, he demands the abolition of every right of property. But it is the German Stirner (d. 1856) who pushes anarchism to an extreme and complete form by appealing to an individualism that possesses every good (“My power is my property”), in which he deludes himself into thinking he can annul every social necessity.
Among the Russians, Bakunin (d. 1876) and Prince Kropotkin (d. 1921) may be considered active theoreticians and propagandists of anarchism: “against God, against the fatherland, against the government, against the bourgeoisie,” such is their theory and practice. The Italians have no authoritative exponents of the anarchist movement.
Through the thought of the writers cited, the theoretical program of anarchism can therefore easily be defined as a sensational attempt to eliminate authority in 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 external force but organizing itself, in citizens who freely contend not with the government but among themselves, the fullness of anarchism would be realized, a manifestation of a freedom that would thus attain its plenitude. Economic aims would likewise achieve complete 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 anarchist doctrine to deny completely the principle of authority and hierarchy, which is replaced by a form of freedom whose limits are incomprehensible and lead to the annihilation of society. It is clear that a social conception of this kind is entirely utopian and in clear antithesis to every religion, especially to Catholicism, in which God is conceived as a spiritual, transcendent, infinite, and eternal reality, from which man proceeds by creation and to which he is ordered as to his ultimate end. When, on the concrete plane, every religious principle is eliminated and the State and every social authority are abolished, it is impossible to see what substitute element anarchist doctrines could introduce to maintain society intact. There is an entirely destructive aspect to anarchism, to which no constructive element of possible forms of coexistence is opposed in any real substance.
Even from the strictly economic point of view, there is no constructive doctrine to replace the violent destruction of property and the general leveling demanded. Indeed, the affirmation of extreme individualism contains within itself an instance of economic inequality among individuals and thus approaches a form of economic liberalism.
In fact, the inconsistency of the economic aspect of anarchism gradually led anarchists to be distinguished from supporters of socialist and communist doctrines, with which they could for a certain time easily mingle on the basis of revolutionary demands for the abolition of all property and all privilege.
The latter doctrines, however, 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 in which anarchism experienced intense development, we may agree in placing it in the second half of the last century. We may add that anarchist propaganda often resulted in political assassination and regicide. At the beginning of our century anarchism began to wane, and today the phenomenon is very limited and perhaps only sporadic. This is undoubtedly due, in addition to the absurdity of the theory, to the fact that revolutionary movements are now firmly in the hands of extremist parties that exist in various countries.
From the social point of view, the State has felt the need to protect itself against crimes that might be expressions of anarchist will. Thus, in Italy at the end of the last century, various laws were published that punished the advocacy of crime, incitement to commit crimes, crimes committed with explosives, etc.; forms of criminal hypotheses that are still today provided for in the penal codes of other countries.