the New Pantagruel

Anarchism

by Bill Kauffman

This is an excerpt from American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, forthcoming from ISI Books in January 2006.

ERHAPS no political term is quite so misunderstood as “anarchy.” In the popular press, it is a synonym for disorder and chaos, not to mention looting and pillage: countries like Haiti are always being “plunged into anarchy.” The anarchist, meanwhile, is frozen into a late-nineteenth-century caricature: he is furtive, hirsute, beady-eyed, given to gesticulation, gibberish, and, most of all, pointless acts of violence. Yet anarchy, according to most of its proponents through the years, is peaceable, wholly voluntary, and perhaps a bit utopian. The word means “without a ruler”; anarchy is defined as the absence of a state and its attendant coercive powers. It implies nothing about social arrangements, family and sexual life, or religion; and in fact the most persuasive anarchists, from Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, have been Christians.

Under anarchy, wrote its advocate Prince Peter Kropotkin in The Encyclopedia Britannica (1910), “the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.” From alms to arms, “an anarchist is a voluntarist,” explained Karl Hess, the speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who chucked it all to live as a husband, neighbor, and welder in rural West Virginia. Anarchists would separate state from church, state from education, state from welfare, even state from justice. (Murray N. Rothbard and David Friedman, among others, have explored how courts and policing might work in a stateless society.)

The word anarchism was not popularized until 1840 (by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), but its practice predates its philosophical defenders. In many ways, the American settlers and citizens of the early republic were, in their daily deeds, living anarchism. As Ralph Waldo Emerson explained, “Massachusetts, in its heroic day, had no government—was an anarchy. Every man stood on his own feet, was his own governor; and there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mount Hoosac.” “The new race is stiff, heady, and rebellious” said Emerson of his confreres in the 1830s, the heyday of American anarchism. “They are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws.” Emerson’s handyman, Henry David Thoreau, expressed his anarchism aphoristically, altering the maxim of Thomas Jefferson to read “that government is best which governs not at all.”

The abolitionist ranks included a number of anarchists, among them the wealthy New York Congressman Gerrit Smith, who made an exception to his antistatism by advocating the prohibition of alcohol. Smith might appear a hypocrite, but with a nod to Emerson’s counsel about hobgoblins and little minds, the inconsistency of American anarchists has been one of their charms. Systematic anarchists weaving their elaborate schemes have usually been bores, men just as trapped in webs of abstraction as the statists against whom they rail. Their influence within the broader culture has been nil. American anarchism has been more a tendency than a philosophy; the most appealing anarchists have been literary men deeply dyed in the American grain.

Anarchists acquired the twin taints of violence and alienness in the late nineteenth century. Although a handful of “individualist anarchists,” most prominently Benjamin Tucker, editor of the publication Liberty, have attracted scholarly attention, the “anarchist-communists” of the era were far more visible, vocal, and execrated. While most American anarchists have agreed with Dorothy Day that “property is proper to man,” the anarchist-communists generally sought collective ownership of property, including land. As the Russian-born Emma Goldman, America’s most noted anarchist-communist, explained her ideal: “Voluntary economic cooperation of all toward the needs of each.” (Despite her collectivism, Goldman was a fierce critic of the Soviet Union’s denial of individual liberties.) The anarchist-communists, largely foreign-born, acting outside any local or even identifiably American context, were persecuted by the Wilson administration for their opposition to the First World War and disappeared, leaving few traces.

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