The first person to call himself an anarchist meant it as praise
For centuries anarchy in English meant chaos, and French revolutionaries hurled anarchist at enemies as an insult. Then in the nineteenth century Pierre-Joseph Proudhon adopted the label proudly, turning a slur into the name of a movement that wanted societies run by voluntary cooperation instead of states.
The word comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning without a ruler. It appears in English as anarchy from 1539 and anarchism from 1642, both with a sense of disorder. Thinkers such as William Godwin and Wilhelm Weitling shaped the ideas but never used the term for themselves. Proudhon, who lived from 1809 to 1865, was the first to do so approvingly, and historians date the birth of the movement to somewhere between his work and the Saint-Imier Congress of 1872.
The goal is to dismantle institutions built on coercion and hierarchy, above all the state, capitalism and organised religion, and replace them with horizontal networks of free association. Scholars place it on the libertarian wing of socialism, and many deny that anarcho-capitalism belongs in the family at all. Echoes appear far back: Laozi and Zhuang Zhou questioned the legitimacy of the state in ancient China, Greek tragedians used Antigone to set conscience against law, and in Sasanian Persia a reformer named Mazdak called for equality and an end to monarchy.
The classical era ran from the late nineteenth century to the Spanish Civil War. Mikhail Bakunin developed collectivist anarchism and joined the First International alongside Karl Marx, until his followers were expelled at the Hague Congress of 1872 after bitter arguments over state socialism. A minority turned to violent attacks called propaganda of the deed, which blackened the movement's name and helped prompt the American Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903.
By 1900 that wave had faded in favour of anarchist communism and syndicalism, which spread worldwide. Anarcho-syndicalism became Argentina's leading left-wing current, students carried anarchist ideas to China, and anarchists fought in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. They also joined the Russian Revolution against the Whites before the Bolsheviks suppressed them. From the late twentieth century the movement revived within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation campaigns.
Source: Anarchism
