A Bit About Anarchism

Symbol of Anarchy

Every time I heard about anarchy or anarchism, the first picture that came to mind was people throwing rocks to the police in some kind of riot. In my ignorance, anarchy and anarchism were something of a retarded-violent-childish mind. So when I read somewhere that the character V from the novel ‘V for Vendetta’ was actually an anarchist, rather than a romantic freedom fighter, it intrigued me. The character was described as educated and civilized. What an educated-civilized person would have to do with anarchy?

I finally decided to look it up (sadly, in Wikipedia for the time), and this is a bit of what I came up.

Anarchy means absence of any form of political authority. It also means a stateless society.

Anarchy is a desired condition in anarchism. Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful.

Anarchism has a deep root in history, but the modern one came from the secular or religious thought of the Enlightenment, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s arguments for the moral centrality of freedom.

The first expression of modern anarchist thought was developed by William Goodwin.

Goodwin stated that the State lacked moral legitimacy, that there was no individual obligation or duty to obey the State, and that the State had no right to command individuals.

However, Goodwin did not advocate revolution to eliminate the state. He opposed revolutionary action and saw a minimal state as a present “necessary evil” that would become increasingly irrelevant and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge.

Since then, the thought of anarchism has continued to develop. By now, there are so many diverse thoughts of anarchism, they hardly share a common idea. The only thing that unites them is the belief that the government is both harmful and unnecessary. In practice, the thoughts are divided into two large categories, individual and social anarchism.

From the above paragraphs, we see that contrary to popular belief (at least for the first thought), anarchism believes in Man.
It sees individuals as supreme beings, capable to decide what’s wrong and right for them.
The state is just a non-existent body, something that does not have a reality or fundamental value on its own.
Those are the reasons why there is no obligation to obey it.
However, it is realized that such condition requires an ideal society, in which each constituent has achieved his/her deepest actualization; something of a utopia, if I may say. That’s why it considers the state as a necessary lesser evil, a temporary mean until Man has reached its full potentials.

It turns out much better than the image of people throwing rocks, doesn’t it? Let’s just hope it is able to maintain its pure form. Such ideas in unprepared minds will only result in chaos. Just like handling nuclear weapons to monkeys.