Anarchy

MP3 Audio CD. Anarchy

Anarchy is a word which comes from the Greek, and signifies,
strictly speaking, without government: the state of a people
without any constituted authority, that is, without government.

Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible
and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken
as the aim of a party (which party has now become one of the
most important factors in modern social warfare), the word Anarchy
was taken universally in the sense of disorder and confusion;
and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by
adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

We shall not enter into philological discussions; for the question
is not philological but historical. The common meaning of the word
does not misconceive its true etymological signification, but is
derived from this meaning, owing to the prejudice that government
must be a necessity of the organization of social life; and that
consequently a society without government must be given up to
disorder, and oscillate between the unbridled dominion of some and
the blind vengeance of others.

The existence of this prejudice, and its influence on the meaning
which the public has given the word, is easily explained.

Man, like all living beings, adapts and habituates himself to
the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance
his acquired habits. Thus being born and having lived in bondage,
being the descendant of a long line of slaves, man, when he began to
think, believed that slavery was an essential condition of life; and
liberty seemed to him an impossible thing. In like manner, the
workman, forced for centuries, and thus habituated, to depend upon
the good will of his employer for work, that is, for bread, and
accustomed to see his own life