Anarchism (Gr. an, 'not,' and archē, 'rule') properly means the negation of government, and has quite a distinct meaning from Anarchy in the usual acceptance of the word. In its ordinary sense, anarchy is a state of society without any regular government, when social and political confusion prevails in its midst. Anarchism, on the other hand, is the name adopted by a phase of revolutionary socialism. The acknowledged father of anarchism, as a form of recent and contemporary socialism, is Proudhon. Proudhon was an eccentric and paradoxical thinker, with a passionate and exaggerated love of individual freedom. Government of man by man he considered to be oppression, an interference with freedom. He therefore regarded a form of society without government, in which every man should be a law to himself, as the goal of human evolution. Since Proudhon, the most prominent expounder of the anarchist theory has been the Russian Bakunin (q.v.), who, in various writings, and by an active propaganda, diffused it in most of the Romance countries. His ideas may be traced in the Paris Commune, in Spain during the risings of 1873, in Italy, and in French Switzerland. The best-known representatives of it are the Russian scientist, Prince Kropotkine, and the distinguished French geographer, Elisée Reclus. At the anarchist trial at Lyons, in 1883, the accused, including Kropotkine, drew up a declaration which may be regarded as the most important statement of their position.
It is not easy to define the anarchist views, but the following are undoubtedly the leading points: They desire complete liberty for all men. They object to all authority, whether monarchical or republican, whether based on divine right or universal suffrage, for history teaches that all government tends to privilege and oppression. In all human relations their ideal is one of free contract, perpetually subject to revision and cancelment. But such an ideal of freedom cannot be realised in a society where land and capital are the monopoly of a class. Land and capital must therefore be the common property of society, at the disposal of every one. They wish equality, equality of fact, as a corollary, or rather fundamental condition, of liberty; that all men may have daily bread, knowledge and work, independence and justice. As the essential means for bringing about this new evolution of society, they insist on the uni- versal diffusion of knowledge. When natural laws shall have been understood, and the knowledge of them universally diffused among men, there will be no need for external authority. Natural laws being recognised by every man for himself, he cannot but obey them, for they are the laws also of his own nature; and the need for political organisation and administration will at once disappear. With reference to the old system of society which stands in the way of the new era, Bakunin recommends a most unsparing policy of destruction. As the theory of anarchism is unlimited freedom and the negation of government, it is difficult to realise how society in its wider aspects can be carried on in consistency with it. Anarchists, however, seem to agree in believing that the free commune or free association will be the fundamental form of society; and there will be a free federation of free associations, leading to the universal and international solidarity of the workers of all countries, and transcending all the limits and obstacles raised by so-called patriotism and national jealousy. Society will be a free grouping of peoples in accordance with natural needs freely realised. But the future form of society is the work of coming generations, and will proceed out of the movement and life of the people. The work of the present is the removal of the old, and the universal diffusion of true science among the masses. It will be seen that anarchism has two aspects: it has a political theory, the negation of government or of external authority; and it has an economic theory as to land and capital, which is common to it with other forms of socialism. It has also come to have another aspect—that with which it is now usually identified—war on human society as at present constituted, hatred of the bourgeois and propertied classes as such, and a systematic effort to establish, especially by means of explosives, a terrorism such as was formerly associated with extreme Russian Nihilism (q.v.), and the Irish dynamiters' attempts. Notable outbreaks have been those at Chicago (q.v.) in 1886; in Spain and in France in 1892 (especially those for which Ravachol was responsible); the outrage in the Barcelona theatre in 1893; the explosion in the French Chamber of Deputies (Vaillant, 1893); the explosion in a Parisian café (Henri, 1894); Bourdin destroyed by his own petard at Greenwich (1894). In 1892 four anarchists were tried at Walsall for having explosives unlawfully in their possession with evil intent, and condemned to varying terms of penal servitude; and in 1893–94 numerous arrests were made by the London police. Anarchist daggers cut short the lives of President Carnot (1894) and the Empress of Austria (1898). On 29th July 1900 King Humbert I. of Italy was shot by an anarchist.
See SOCIALISM and various works there quoted, DYNAMITE, INFERNAL MACHINES, INTERNATIONAL (The), NIHILISM; several works by Kropotkine; American books by Schaack, Parsons, Lum, and Mackay (1889–94); Felix Dubois, Le Pêril Anarchiste (1893; trans. 1894); Zenker, Der Anarchismus (1895; trans. 1898).