ANARCHIA. – Etymologically, it means “lack of government” and hence, by extension, “disorder, confusion.”
This etymological concept does not, however, explain the various forms of a. professed by philosophers and pseudo-philosophers and by politicians and pseudo-politicians, but serves above all to grasp the disruptive aspect of the ideology underlying a.
Historically, a. first took shape in communistic utopias, which are easily found as singular manifestations even in the history of countries of the most ancient civilization. Followers of communistic sects can likewise be traced, and essentially anarchic ideas are abundantly apparent in celebrated philosophers, such as Plato himself. For this reason Aristophanes satirized them and had one of the characters in his comedies say that “everyone will have a right to everything,” a phrase very close to one that later became familiar among anarchists: “Property is theft,” by which it was intended to maintain that the abolition of property would abolish every privilege.
In the Middle Ages, utopias and anarchic ideas were also very frequent.
But it is in the 18th and 19th centuries that we find a characteristic flowering of partially or wholly anarchic doctrines, and these enable us to reconstruct the content of a.; Rousseau begins to launch his attacks on property because he knows that it is the surest foundation of society, and ends by proposing in the Contrat social the alienation of the rights of the individual in favor of the community. These economic utopias are those that would later develop in the French Revolution, finding in Babeuf the man who wished to realize them through sensational insurrectionary manifestos.
A more powerful theorist of a. was certainly the French writer P. J. Proudhon (d. 1865). He held that a. could 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 sphere, like the other anarchists, he called for the abolition of every property right. But it was the German Stirner (d. 1856) who advanced to an extreme and complete form of a., appealing to an individualism possessing every good (“My power is my property”), in which he imagined that he could nullify every social necessity.
Among the Russians, Bakunin (d. 1876) and Prince Kropotkin (d. 1921) may be regarded as active theorists and propagandists of a.: “against God, against the fatherland, against the government, against the bourgeois,” this was their theory and their practice. The Italians have no authoritative representatives of the anarchist movement.
Through the thought of the writers cited, the theoretical program of a. can therefore easily be defined as a sensational attempt to eliminate authority in its three political, social, and religious aspects. 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 freely contracting not with the government but among themselves, the fullness of anarchism would be realized, a manifestation of a freedom that would thereby attain its fulfillment. Economic aims would likewise obtain complete satisfaction, since men in a society without any form determined by laws and property would naturally find themselves happy.
The complete denial of the principle of authority and hierarchy is therefore proper to anarchist doctrine; this principle is replaced by a form of freedom whose limits are incomprehensible and lead to the nullification of society. It is evident that a social conception of this kind is entirely utopian and in clear antithesis to every religion, especially Catholicism, in which God is conceived as a spiritual, transcendent, infinite, and eternal reality, from whom man proceeds through creation and to whom he is ordered as
to his last end; while, in the concrete sphere, once every religious principle has been eliminated and the State and every social authority abolished, it is impossible to understand what substitute the anarchist doctrines could introduce in order to keep the social structure standing. There is an entire destructive aspect to a., to which, in actual substance, no constructive element of possible forms of communal life is opposed.
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 an extreme individualism in itself posits a demand for economic inequality among individuals and therefore approaches a form of economic liberalism.
In fact, the inconsistency of the economic aspect of a. gradually led to a distinction between anarchists and supporters of the socialist and communist doctrines, with whom they were able for a certain time to mingle easily on the basis of revolutionary demands for the abolition of all property and every privilege.
The latter doctrines, however, had a concrete program to set against them, in the development of industrialization and capitalism, in defense of the working classes.
If one wishes to indicate the period in which an intense development of anarchism took place, there can be general agreement in assigning it to the second half of the last century. We should add that anarchist propaganda in many cases 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 merely sporadic. This is undoubtedly due, in addition to the absurdity of the theory, to the fact that revolutionaries are by now firmly in the possession of the extremist parties that exist in the various countries.
From the social point of view, the State felt the need to protect itself against crimes that could express an anarchist will. Thus, in Italy, toward the end of the last century, various laws were enacted penalizing the advocacy of crime, incitement to commit crimes, offenses committed with explosive materials, etc.—forms of criminal offenses that are still provided for today in other countries as well by the penal code.