ANARCHY
BY
Errico Malatesta
Published by the Free Society Library in 1900
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.