Anarchism

Anarchism first emerged as a political movement in mid nineteenth-century Europe, within the socialist tradition. From this starting point, it has developed both geographically and ideologically. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anarchism extended across the Americas and to Japan, China, and Australia, and as socialism came to be identified with Marxism and/or social democracy, the collectivist, communist, and liberal and individualist strands of thought from which anarchists drew their inspiration began to assume an increasingly distinctive quality, supporting the rise of a number of anarchist schools.

The significance of anarchism is often said to lie in the revolutionary movements it has inspired: most famously the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and May 1968. Today, anarchism is associated with the alter-globalization movement. In addition, anarchism has had an important influence in the arts and, in particular, on avant garde artists, modernist movements, and literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and Aldous Huxley.

Anarchism, like many ideologies, is an umbrella movement, and it describes both a set of ideas and an attitude. Yet, it is perhaps more slippery than other political positions not only because anarchists eschew party political structures and the ideological and tactical discipline that these tend to impose, but also because they contest the possibility of defining a proper relationship between ideas and attitudes and they disagree about the extent to which one might or should be balanced against the other. Analyses of anarchism in political theory tend to fall into one of two categories: Historians of ideas have traced the main currents of anarchist thought, looking at the work of selected thinkers; and political philosophers have examined anarchism through the analysis of key concepts. Similar approaches have also been adopted by writers working from within the anarchist tradition, but since the 1960s, new trends in anarchist theory have emerged, inspired by surrealist, situationist, postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas, on the one hand, and movement activism on the other. This entry begins with a review of the original anarchist thinkers, looks at the linkages between anarchism, the state, and utopianism, and discusses current expressions of this perspective.