ETYM Cf. French anarchisme.
A political theory favoring the abolition of governments.
Political belief that society should have no government, laws, police, or other authority, but should be a free association of all its members. It does not mean “without order”; most theories of anarchism imply an order of a very strict and symmetrical kind, but they maintain that such order can be achieved by cooperation. Anarchism must not be confused with nihilism (a purely negative and destructive activity directed against society); anarchism is essentially a pacifist movement.
Religious anarchism, claimed by many anarchists to be exemplified in the early organization of the Christian church, has found expression in the social philosophy of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi. The growth of political anarchism may be traced through British Romantic writers William Godwin and P B Shelley to the 1848 revolutionaries P J Proudhon in France and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, who had a strong following in Europe.
The theory of anarchism is expressed for example in the works of Russian revolutionary Peter Kropotkin. Perhaps the most influential anarchist of the 20th century has been US linguist Noam Chomsky.
Russian-born Emma Goldman and German-born Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958) were internationally influential anarchist activists. At the start of the Spanish Civil War 1936, the anarchists played a crucial role, but were later betrayed by the communists. Later anarchists have often embraced environmental issues; US writer and activist Murray Bookchin (1921–) was in the 1950s the first to incorporate ecology in his view of a free, nonhierarchical society.