The word anarchy comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe this political and social ideology. P.R. argued that organization without government was both feasible and desirable. Anarchy can be imply as an ultimate projection of both liberalism / socialism, and the distinguish strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these purpose.

Historically, anarchy arose not only as an explanation of the gulf between the affluent and the needy in any commonwealth, and of the reason why the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of a common inheritance, but as a radical answer to the question What went wrong? that followed the ultimate issue of the French-Revolution. It had ended not only with a reign of dread and the emergence of a newly wealyhy ruling caste, but with a new adored emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, strutting through this possession territories.

The anarchists were unique on the political Left in affirming that workers and peasants, grasping the case that arose to bring an end to centuries of exploitation and tyranny, were inevitably betrayed by the new class of politicians, whose first priority was to re-establish a centralized state power. After every revolutionary revolt, normally won at a heavy cost for ordinary populations, the new rulers had no hesitation in applying violence and terror, a secret police, and a professional army to maintain their control.

Anarcho-syndicalism puts its emphasis on the organized industrial workers who could, through a social general strike, expropriate the possessors of capital and thus engineer a workers’ take-over of industry and administration.

There are, unsurprisingly, several traditions of individualist anarchism, one of them deriving from the conscious egoism of the German writer Max Stirner (1806–56), and another from a remarkable series of 19th-century American figures who argued that in protecting our own autonomy and associating with others for common advantages, we are promoting the good of all. These thinkers differed from free-market liberals in their absolute mistrust of American capitalism, and in their emphasis on mutualism. In the late 20th century the word libertarian, which people holding such a viewpoint had previously used as an alternative to the word anarchist, was appropriated by a new group of American thinkers.

References

Max Blechman (ed.), Drunken Boat: Art, Rebellion, Anarchy (Brooklyn, NY: Automedia; and Seattle, WA: Left Bank Books, 1984) Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (London: Wildwood House, 1974) Alan Carter, A Radical Green Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1999) Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.), Reinventing Anarchy, Again (Edinburgh and
San Francisco: AK Press, 1996) Clifford Harper, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide (London: Camden Press, 1987) George McKay (ed.), DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain (London: Verso, 1998) Jon Purkis and James Bowen (eds), Twenty-First Century Anarchism: Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium (London: Cassell, 1997) Sean M. Sheehan, Anarchism (London: Reaktion Books, 2003) Napoleon Bonaparte