Anarchist
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
one who professes to believe that rulers, and indeed all forms of government, are an unnecessary evil. The word is from the Greek, meaning without rule. Socialists would have the government do more than it does now; but the anarchists would abolish government and let each person enjoy the utmost freedom. The anarchist goes further. He holds that it is the inalienable right of each to rule himself without constraint from others. The anarchist looks upon government, not as a form of protection, but as a legalized scheme whereby the strong may plunder the weak. Under cover of law and government, so the anarchist claims, special privileges are granted to a few to the injury of the many. Two grievances may be given as illustrative of the wide range of complaint. By law a man may hold land he has no use for. By law a man may be compelled to go home or to a police station at eleven o'clock, when, as a matter of fact, he wants to stay all night in a saloon. Under the first law the rich man is protected unduly. Under the second law the poor man is harassed and oppressed unduly. For the policeman and the tax gatherer the anarchist would substitute utter freedom from control. In a discussion of the topic it is important to distinguish between philosophical anarchists, who hold to the theory of no government, and violent anarchists, who would overthrow government by throwing dynamite. If all were minded to do the right thing it might be quite possible to do away with the police side of government; but there are so many enterprises, such as road making, supplying water, and transporting goods, that people can carry out to better advantage by working together, that there is still the need of cooperation, that is to say, of government. Our present form of government with its confessed inequalities and injustice is far better than no law save mob rule. Civilized people are giving attention to the problem of improving government, not of abolishing it. See Socialism ; Nihilism; Utopia
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 it had to warn readers apart the "philosophical anarchists" from the "violent anarchists, who would overthrow government by throwing dynamite" — a distinction that mattered because McKinley had been shot by the self-described anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901. That bombing-and-assassination phase was largely finished within a decade or two: the American movement was broken by the wartime prosecutions and the 1919–20 deportation raids that put Emma Goldman on a ship to Russia, and anarchism's last mass following was the Spanish CNT, destroyed with the Republic in 1939. What revived from the 1960s onward looks little like the entry's saloon-closing-time grievances: an intellectual current associated with figures such as Noam Chomsky and David Graeber, the consensus-run protest camps of the anti-globalisation years and Occupy in 2011, and, at the opposite pole, the "anarcho-capitalism" argued for by Murray Rothbard, which wants the market to replace the state rather than mutual aid. Aiton's confident closing line — that civilised people are concerned with improving government, not abolishing it — has held up as a description of mainstream politics, though the word "anarchist" no longer carries the automatic smell of dynamite it did in 1910.
Written for this edition, 2026.