Anarchism and Authority by McLaughlin Paul

Author:McLaughlin, Paul.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2007-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

PART 2

Anarchism and the History of Ideas

Chapter 5

The Historical Foundations of Anarchism

There is a tendency among scholars of anarchism to trace its origins back to the earliest libertarian sentiments expressed by Greek or Chinese philosophers, especially Zeno of Citium and Lao-Tzu. (Peter Kropotkin’s famous Encyclopædia Britannica1article probably set this trend.) Indeed, recent histories of anarchism have drawn on so many sources that they risk becoming more confusing than informative.2 The greatest historian of anarchism, Max Nettlau, states that such pre-anarchist ideas should be ‘considered merely the earliest intellectual and moral attempts of humanity to advance without tutelary gods and constricting chains’, and notes that:

historical research will teach us to be modest in our expectations. It would be quite easy to come across glowing paeans to freedom, to the heroism of tyrannicides and other rebels, and so on, but very difficult to find an understanding of the evil inherent in authoritarianism and a complete faith in liberty.3

We might question Nettlau’s exact definition of anarchism here, but his point about the distinction between the libertarian outlook and temperament (arguably underpinned by the libertarian ethic of freedom in itself), on the one hand, and the self-conscious anarchist position (arguably underpinned by the anarchist ethic of integral justice), on the other, is well made. It is a point that is powerfully reiterated by David Miller, who deserves to be quoted at length:

We may trace the origins of anarchism to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Although it is possible, by searching diligently enough, to find precursors of anarchism as far back as the ancient Greeks – and perhaps even the Chinese – this shows only that there have always been men willing to challenge authority on philosophical or political grounds. This might be described as the primitive anarchist attitude: but for anarchism to develop beyond a stance of defiance into a social and political theory that challenged the existing order and proposed an alternative, such wholesale reconstruction needed to become thinkable. This reorientation of thought was the work largely of the Revolution, which, by challenging the old regime in France on the grounds of basic principle, opened the way for similar challenges to other states and other social institutions. Henceforth all institutions were vulnerable to the demand that they should be justified from first principles – whether of natural right, social utility, human self-realization, or whatever. From this source sprang the major ideologies – conservatism, liberalism, and socialism as well as anarchism – in recognizably their modern form. It is therefore appropriate that the first major work which indubitably belongs to the anarchist tradition – Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice – should have been produced in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution (in 1793) and with that event as its direct inspiration.4

Miller is essentially correct, but more needs to be said. George Crowder notes that it was not just the ‘practical example of the Revolution’, but also ‘the background beliefs of the intellectual climate from which it sprang’ that gave rise to

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