1530s, "absence of government," from French anarchie or directly from Medieval Latin anarchia, from Greek anarkhia "lack of a leader, the state of people without a government" (in Athens, used of the Year of Thirty Tyrants, 404 B.C., when there was no archon), abstract noun from anarkhos "rulerless," from an- "without" (see an- (1)) + arkhos "leader[.]"
There was no archon in most of 404 BC, but there was a government: it was imposed upon Athens by Sparta after they executed their archon Cleophon and accepted what became known as the Thirty Tyrants (including Charmides). It was not the case that there was no government, let alone that there was anything intentional going on with regard to what Athens wanted to accomplish that year: there was the collapse at the loss of a punishing war.
I was thinking of this while reading Jeffrey Carter's post this morning about Democratic leaders in places like Chicago "needing anarchy." He doesn't mean anything like anarchism, and certainly not the absence of government.
When there is no law, and there is no will to enforce the law, or there is only a selective will to enforce some laws, anarchy will reign. Totalitarians love anarchy. It’s what Lenin brought to Russia to take control. It is the playbook of Saul Alinsky. Anarchy begets totalitarianism.
The other commonality in all this is that it seems consistent that career politicians favor anarchy. Career politicians are a bane on the existence of our country. I had a conversation with a VC in SF about this once. His research backed it up. Term limits and getting people out of government and into the private sector are a great thing for freedom...
Career politicians are terrible in any form in any party. They hold and concentrate power. Our government is structured to be decentralized. Career politicians are terrible if they are fully developed... Terrible if they are young and using various offices as stepping stones to a higher office, like they are climbing some corporate ladder....
Every single thing a Democratic politician does today is designed to concentrate power, eliminate competition, and create anarchy so they can grab more power and continue to centralize.
Emphasis added. So that kind of 'anarchy' is built around not only the existence of government, but the stability and long-term continuance of the same government by the same governors. It's not about an absence of powerful leaders, but the concentration of power among existing leaders. It's a kind of failure of government, but not one that leads to the absence of government, the kind that leads to the corruption of government.
Lenin obviously wasn't trying to usher in any sort of anarchism either; in fact, the anarchists who were deported by the US to Russia, as well as the ones native to Russia, ended up in gulags and graveyards. The last thing the Soviets wanted was a leaderless society without the possibility of coercive force being deployed by the government against citizens. If what he is talking about 'begats totalitarianism,' it's increased and unceasing government rather than the absence of rulers.
When I see people on the right talking this way -- people who do want things like term limits and to "get people out of government and into the private sector" or to oppose "concentrated power" -- I wonder what they're intending by the term. Obviously Chicago is not an anarchy: it has a government that is deeply embedded, impenetrable to outsiders not approved by its power structurer, and consequently wickedly corrupt. Getting rid of the Chicago archons would be a significant step forward.
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My initial guess would be that they are using anarchy as an intensified synonym for disorder rather than the more poli sci meaning of no government. It's clear that Chicago government is strategically choosing when and where to deploy law enforcement assets, and that the choices are not being made by what would effectively promote general civic order and a reduction in crime. A populace terrorized by the feeling that crime is happening widely and randomly is likely to accept extreme methods to restore order, whether that takes the form of paying the Danegeld or using harsh measures against criminals. In either case, the people in charge in implementing those measures have opportunities for graft, and they have more opportunities the more entrenched they are in that position.
I suppose the real question is "is anarchy even achievable in reality, or is it, like communism, always subverted by human nature?". This video makes a somewhat interesting argument about the political spectrum that it's really reducible to only two forms of government- Republic or Oligarchy because the other commonly referred to options never really happen in reality in anything like a pure form and end up better being described by Oligarchy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygEEL57AcZs
The John Birch Society? That's a blast from the past. Charlie Daniels was singing about them in the early 70s. "I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birch/ and I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church/ and I ain't even got a garage,/ you can call home and ask my wife!"
The video plays some rhetorical games to dismiss some of the forms of government. It's actually important, for example, whether there is a philosophical argument for a monarchy -- usually that God has designated this individual to lead, and thus that his orders through the government are legitimate and binding. An oligarchy doesn't have a good argument for itself; but an alternative 'government of the few,' aristocracy, can point to the proven virtue of particular families who have long served the common interest of a group as their warrant.
I think anarchism is possible, at least to a greater degree than currently. My evidence for the proposition is the fire service, where ~70% of American governance is done on an unpaid voluntary basis without coercive authority over their fellow citizens (unneeded, as generally people willingly cooperate with the fire service as they clearly appreciate the good being done by them). I think we could expand that model at least, creating lower taxes and fewer laws and less need for coercion.
Can it be done exclusively that way? I don't know, but I also don't know that it can't.
(In the John Birch criticism of anarchy, the voiceover claims you can't travel because you have to stay and protect your property all the time. That's not obviously true; you could ask neighbors and friends to look after it for you while you were away, as was normally done on the frontier where there wasn't any government to speak of. And of course pastoral groups carry their property with them, as do (say) pirate ships.)
Ha! I did not realize it was an old John Birch production- that's wild.
No king functions without loyal lieutenants and counselors. I think it's not unfair to describe a monarchy as a small group oligarchy.
What you're talking about re: volunteer fire departments is, to me, hardly anarchism. It's a more distributed government in the manner I think the founders intended, but it's operating within a framework of government that makes it possible. All that equipment and training comes from tax dollars even if the firemen are unpaid volunteers (and my understanding is many are receiving some compensation, but not full pay). It's akin to people professing pacifism as they live in a society protected by a military and police. That said, I am all for more of this, and a retraction from big government as we've gotten way too used to.
I have to question also your descriptions of pastoral groups and pirates as somehow examples of anarchism (that's really an overstatement of what you said there, but I'm going to do it for the sake of argument anyway). You've famously educated us on the pirate code- a perfectly valid form of government for a small group, hardly anarchism. Also with pastoral groups, beyond the size of a single family, they will all similarly have some basic form of tribal governance (probably akin to an oligarchy or aristocracy), again not really anarchism. So I think the critique that it's not really achievable in reality remains viable.
Pirates might or might not count depending on how strictly you interpret 'no rulers.' They have officers they elect and can replace at will. Anarchy doesn't mean 'no rules,' so the existence of a code of mutually agreed-to obligations isn't a strike against it.
Pastoral groups like Bedouin tribes do count, however, at least on the Greek terms we've been discussing. They have natural authority -- fathers and uncles and so forth, with their wives and sisters and such -- but not 'rulers' in the sense of having a polity that has artificially (i.e. by human design rather than by nature) elevated some over others. Families are pre-political, per Aristotle's Politics; he agrees with you that humanity is naturally fitted for politics, but politics itself is an artifice that perfects (in his view) what nature provides but leaves unfinished. It's good enough for families working among themselves, but when multiple families come together he thinks a politics is necessary. Otherwise families will not treat each other fairly, i.e. 'as equals' in one of the many sense of 'equality' we've been discussing in the EN reading.
So could you do without politics? Maybe if you had a strong enough code ('no rulers' not 'no rules' after all). Maybe if people held together honestly enough to resist the bad people outside the community who exist in the world. Maybe if they'd as readily contribute what was needed as they obey the orders of fire department volunteers who have no real legal authority to command them. (And they might, if we didn't have a government that was already taxing everyone so heavily... it's hard to ask people to contribute enough to fund fire apparatus while they're already taxed on their income, then on everything they buy or successfully invest, while living in a home they paid taxes on when they bought it but still have to pony up taxes for every year...)
As I said, "I think anarchism is possible, at least to a greater degree than currently." If we don't get all the way there, every step along the way is an improvement.
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