Anarchism

Anarchism as an Ideology

When not used as a term connoting chaos and violence, anarchism is often narrowed to mean only the rejection of government. Insofar as the Greek word archos[Page 45](“ruler”) suggests a monarch or a parliament and the prefix an means “no,” the definition of anarchism as repudiation only of government makes sense. But for anarchists from the nineteenth century onward, denunciation of government has been a mere subsection of their proposition that no institution and no collectivity can have an inherent right to power and command over any other—even if it be the will of the entire human race, save one, against that single one. The temporary power to restrain a particular wrongdoer is another matter, but that must not be confused with assigning the restrainer an inalienable authority to control. For instance, the domination that the white majority in the United States has exercised over its black minority, especially in the days of slavery, is as repulsive to the anarchist ethos as is rule by a czar. Nothing less than a civil war brought the white majority to end slavery, nearly ninety years after proclaiming an ideology of freedom. So in rejecting the majority as a guarantor of liberty, anarchists show good judgment.

Of all the institutions that anarchists have opposed, probably the most encompassing is not the state but property. Property (defined and supported by the state, to be sure) is deeply embedded in the popular mind—especially in majority-run republics—as possessing some sort of right of its own. The power of property to impose its will on the powerless—the power of landowners, for example, to set the terms on which they will allow tenants to work, or of corporations to determine where their employees will invest their future—is far greater than the petty authority of monarchs, parliaments, and armies. It is a further complication of the anarchist ideal that some anarchists have supported private property in moderate amounts as enhancing the independence of the individual, and collective property (in, for instance, a factory) as vital to the self-direction of the people who are to be its owners.

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