9 The French Renaissance and Enlightenment
PART THREE: Great Libertarians
PART FOUR: Classic Anarchist Thinkers
15 William Godwin: The Lover of Order
16 Max Stirner: The Conscious Egoist
17 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: The Philosopher of Poverty
18 Michael Bakunin: The Fanatic of Freedom
19 Peter Kropotkin: The Revolutionary Evolutionist
20 Elisée Reclus: The Geographer of Liberty
21 Errico Malatesta: The Electrician of Revolution
22 Leo Tolstoy: The Count of Peace
23 American Individualists and Communists
24 Emma Goldman: The Most Dangerous Woman
26 Mohandas Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary
PART FIVE: Anarchism in Action
35 The New Left and the Counter-culture
36 The New Right and Anarcho-capitalism
39 Murray Bookchin and the Ecology of Freedom
PART SEVEN: The Legacy of Anarchism
ANARCHY IS TERROR, the creed of bomb-throwing desperadoes wishing to pull down civilization. Anarchy is chaos, when law and order collapse and the destructive passions of man run riot. Anarchy is nihilism, the abandonment of all moral values and the twilight of reason. This is the spectre of anarchy that haunts the judge’s bench and the government cabinet. In the popular imagination, in our everyday language, anarchy is associated with destruction and disobedience but also with relaxation and freedom. The anarchist finds good company, it seems, with the vandal, iconoclast, savage, brute, ruffian, hornet, viper, ogre, ghoul, wild beast, fiend, harpy and siren.1 He has been immortalized for posterity in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907) as a fanatic intent on bringing down governments and civilized society.
Not surprisingly, anarchism has had a bad press. It is usual to dismiss its ideal of pure liberty at best as utopian, at worst, as a dangerous chimera. Anarchists are dismissed as subversive madmen, inflexible extremists, dangerous terrorists on the one hand, or as naive dreamers and gentle saints on the other. President Theodore Roosevelt declared at the end of the last century: ‘Anarchism is a crime against the whole human race and all mankind should band against anarchists.’2
In fact, only a tiny minority of anarchists have practised terror as a revolutionary strategy, and then chiefly in the 1890s when there was a spate of spectacular bombings and political assassinations during a period of complete despair. Although often associated with violence, historically anarchism has been far less violent than other political creeds, and appears as a feeble youth pushed out of the way by the marching hordes of fascists and authoritarian communists. It has no monopoly on