Content area
Full Text
Robert Graham, ed., Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939) (Montreal: Black Rose Books 2005)
ANARCHISM, as an anti-authoritarian political philosophy and revolutionary practice, has a long and rich history. Rather than being a unified doctrine, anarchism is a heterogeneous series of ideas and theories which arose in different historical periods and cultural contexts. Its sheer breadth and diversity is shown in the eclectic series of writings that Graham gathers together in the first volume of his anthology of anarchist thought. From the writings of early 4th-century Daoist philosophers through to the revolutionists and Communards of the 19th century and the anarcho-syndicalists of the Spanish Civil War in the 193Os, Graham presents a panoramic array of anarchist thinkers and activists, and, in doing so, explores an elaborate genealogy of anti-authoritarian thought.
While Graham is right to point out in his Preface that anarchism as a conscious political philosophy only emerged in the 19th century - Proudhon was the first to call himself an "anarchist" - libertarian and anti-authoritarian ideas have been around for much longer. Without wanting to adopt a naturalist terminology, we might say that there has always been an anti-authoritarian 'impulse' that has arisen at different historical moments and in different social contexts. This 'impulse' is not so much an essential dimension of the species being, as Bakunin believed, but rather a kind of radical emancipative imaginary, and an ethics that continues to raise the problem of authority, unmasking its claims to legitimacy, rationality, and inevitability. It is an ethics that says, despite the claims made by the apologists for sovereignty like Hobbes and Locke - that there need not be a State or centralized forms of political and social authority based on coercion and violence; that there need not be hierarchy and inequality; that the domination of institutions over individuals, of capitalists over workers, of men over women is neither natural...