Does Anarchism mean Lack of Government Control and Chaos

Anarchism is a political philosophy which holds that societies can and should exist without rulers. Anarchists believe that this will not as is commonly supposed, lead to chaos – “anarchy” in the popular sense – but on the contrary to an increase in social order. Anarchists see the state as the decisive source of corruption and disorder in the body politics. They point to many examples where people freely cooperate, without coercion, to achieve common purposes. Among traditional societies they find much to interest them in the ordered anarchists of certain African tribes such as the “Nuer”, as well as in the working of autonomous peasant communities such as the Russian “mir” and the self governing cities of medieval Europe.

In modern times the anarchists have hailed the experiments of the German Anabaptists of 18^th century. Munster, the Diggers and Fifth Monarchists of the English civil war; the popular clubs and societies of the French Revolution; the Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian Soviets of 1905 and 1917; and the anarchist ventures in the Catalonia and Andalusia during the Spanish civil war.

Tolstoy

Kropotkn

Jesus Christ and Buddha have been claimed among the earlier anarchists and there were many social movements in both medieval Europe and medieval China which drew a fundamentally anarchist inspiration from Christianity and Buddhism. Religious anarchism continued into modern times with “Tolstoy” and “Gandhi”. But the modern phase of anarchism proper opens with the 18^th century Enlightenment, and can be traced equally from “Rousseau’s romanticism” and “William Godwin’s” rationalism. An early exponent was Godwin’s son-in-law, the poet “Shelly”. Later advocates included the French socialists Proudhon, the German philosopher of egoism “Max Striner”, the American individualist “Thoreau” and the Russian aristocratic rebels “Michael Bakunin” and “Peter Kroporkin”. Anarchism was a strong current during the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath, the suppression of the “Kronstadt” rising in 1921 and emasculation of the Soviets signaled its defeat. But the ideas lived on, to surface not only in Spain in 1930s but in Hungary in 1956 and in Paris in 1968 where the student radicals achieved a dazzling blend of anarchism and surrealism.