The leading principles of anarchism are marked by great clearness and simplicity, and may be summed up as the rejection of all external authority and of all private appropriation of land and capital. All human relations will depend on the free action and assent of the individuals concerned. Free associations will be formed for industrial and other purposes, and these associations will with a like freedom enter into federal and other relations with each other. The process of social reconstruction is, in short, the free federation of free associations.
Considered as an historic socialist movement, anarchism may therefore be set forth under these three heads: (1) Economically it is collectivism; (2) it is a theory of revolutionary action, which is certainly its characteristic feature; (3) it is a theory of the relation of the individual to law or government.
As regards the first point, its collectivism is common to it with the prevalent socialism, and therefore need not detain us here. Nor need much be said in the way of criticism of the details of the ultra-revolutionary programme of the anarchists. In our chapter on Marx we have already indicated that the materialism which is common to both schools cannot now be regarded as a tenable or admissible theory of the world. The materialism of both schools sprang from the Hegelian left. It should now be considered as dead, and should in all fairness be set aside in discussion for or against socialism. With regard to religion and marriage, it is hardly necessary to state that progress lies not in the abolition, but in the purification and elevation of those great factors of human life. Bakunin’s criticism of religion is simply a tissue of confusion and misconception. Marriage is a fundamental institution, on the purity and soundness of which social health and social progress must above all things depend: in this matter, more than almost any other, society must and should insist on the maintenance of due safeguards and regulations. Free love is a specious and delusive theory, which would tend to bring back social chaos. It would certainly establish a new slavery of women, whose needs and rights would be sacrificed in the name of a hollow and disastrous freedom.
With regard to the third leading principle above mentioned, the negation of government and external authority, the anarchy of Bakunin is essentially the same as that of Proudhon. But in Proudhon the principle was set forth in paradox, whereas Bakunin expounds it with perfect frankness and directness, and with a revolutionary energy which has seldom been equalled in history. What they both contemplate is a condition of human enlightenment and self-control in which the individual shall be a law to himself, and in which all external authority shall be abolished as a despotic interference with personal freedom. It is an ideal to which the highest religion and philosophy look forward as the goal of man, not as one, however, which can be forthwith reached through the wholesale destruction of the present framework of society, but through a long process of ethical and social improvement. The error of the anarchists consists in their impatient insistence on this proclamation of absolute freedom in the present debased condition of the great mass of the people in every class. They insist on taking the last step in social development before they have quite taken the first.
Like its collectivism, the theory of freedom is not a special feature of anarchism. Collectivism is simply the economic side of the prevalent socialism generally. Its theory of freedom is a very old theory, which has no necessary connection whatever with a revolutionary programme, and we should not misunderstand it because of the strange company in which we here find it. It is a high and long-cherished ideal of the best and greatest minds. The good man does his duty, not from fear of the police or the magistrate, but because it is his duty. And we must regard it as the high-water mark of his probity and goodness that the right is so wrought into the texture of his conscience and intelligence that the doing of it has become as natural to him as breathing or locomotion.
It is an ideal, also, which we must cherish for society and for the human race. And not in vain; for there is an ever-widening circle of human action, in which good and reasonable men do the right without pressure or stimulus from without, either from law or government. We are therefore to regard a well-ordered, intelligent, and ethical freedom as the goal of the social development of the human race.
But it is an ideal which must obviously depend for its realisation on the moral and rational development of men. It cannot come till men and the times are ripe for it. No doubt the realisation of it may be hindered by evil institutions and reactionary Governments; yet these, too, are merely the outcome of such human nature as was once prevalent in the countries where we now find them. They have outlived their time. We are certainly right to get rid of them, as of other evil habits and conditions of the past, but it is best done when done wisely and reasonably. And it cannot be done in any wise or effectual manner except through a wide organic change in the human beings concerned.
A moral and rational freedom is therefore the goal of the social development of the world, and it is a goal towards which we must strive even now. But it is a goal that lies far ahead of us. For the present, and in the future with which we have any practical concern, society cannot be maintained without adequate laws, sanctioned and enforced by a regular Government. The elimination of the baser elements from human character and human society proceeds with most regrettable slowness. In the meantime, therefore, we must hold them in check by the best available methods. We may improve our laws, our police, and magistrates, but we cannot do without them.
It is an interesting fact that socialism has taken its most aggressive form in that European country whose civilisation is most recent. The revolutionary opinions of Russia are not the growth of the soil, and are not the natural and normal outcome of its own social development: they have been imported from abroad. Falling on youthful and enthusiastic temperaments which had not previously been inoculated with the principle of innovation, the new ideas have broken forth with an irrepressible and uncompromising vigour which has astonished the older nations of Europe. Another peculiarity of the situation is that the Government is an autocracy served or controlled by a camarilla which has often been largely foreign both in origin and sympathy. In this case, then, we have a revolutionary party inspired by the socialism of Western Europe fighting against a Government which is also in many ways an exotic, and is not rooted in the mass of the people.