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Title: The Precursors of Anarchism
Author: Émile Armand
Language: en
Topics: history, proto-anarchism
Source: Retrieved on July 8, 2021 from https://anarquia.info/the-precursors-of-anarchism-emile-armand/
Notes: Émile Armand, pseudonym of Ernest-Lucien Juin (1872–1962) was a French individualist anarchist writer and activist. He wrote for anarchist magazines such as L’Ère nouvelle, L’anarchie, L’EnDehors1 and L’Unique. Original source https://finimondo.org/node/2248][finimondo.org]] and then translated by [[https://anarquia.info/

Émile Armand

The Precursors of Anarchism

ANTIQUITY

Certainly, it is not easy to know exactly, and what documents could tell

us? – when the governmental or state authority began. No few

explanations have been given as to the foundation and establishment of

authority. Are we to believe that groups of men, as they became more and

more numerous, were compelled to entrust the administration of their

affairs and the settlement of their disputes to the more intelligent or

the more feared: the sorcerers or the priests? Or that the primitive

groupings, showing themselves in general more and more hostile to each

other, were obliged to concentrate the defense of the place and of

things in the hands of the bravest or most skilled warriors – or women

warriors -? Be that as it may, everything tends to show that authority

is prior to individual property. It is evident that authority was

established when goods, things and, in some cases, children and women,

were already the property of the social organization. Fatally, the

regime of individual property (i.e., the possibility for one member of

the community to hoard more land than he needed for his and his family’s

subsistence and to exploit the surplus for others) only complicated,

perfected and made authority, whether theocratic or military, more

tyrannical.

Were there, at that time, beings who rebelled against the authority,

however rudimentary, that prevailed in their primitive groupings? Were

there objectors and disobedients in those distant times when

meteorological phenomena were attributed to dark and superior forces,

now good and now evil, and when the creation of man was considered the

work of a superior organism? If we want to believe in some of the myths

that have been handed down to us, we must convince ourselves that man

has not always passively accepted to be a plaything in the hands of

divinity or the slave of its representatives: the myths of Satan and

Prometheus, of the rebellious angels and the Titans, are proof of this.

Even later, when governmental or ecclesiastical authority was firmly

established, there were manifestations which, although confined within a

peaceful framework, nevertheless showed that there was a spirit of

rebellion in the air. Among these we may classify the satirical scenes

and comedies, the Roman saturnal feasts, the Christian carnival and

various others. And not a few tales circulated among the people, who

always listened to them with almost puerile joy, and whose theme was

almost always the same: the victory of the weak, the oppressed and the

poor, over the tyrant and the rich.

When we come to Greek antiquity, with Gorgias he denied all dogmas; with

Pythagoras he made man the measure of all things; with Aristippus he

gave life to the hedonistic school (for whom there is no other good than

pleasure, and immediate pleasure wherever it arises): with Antisthenes,

Diogenes and Cratylus of Thebes he created the Cynics; with Zeno,

Chrysippus and their successors he brought the Stoics: a group of

extraordinary men who criticized and denied the values hitherto accepted

and recognized. Continuing their marvelous ascent, the Cynics, from the

negation of the values of Hellenic culture, came to the negation of its

institutions: marriage, homeland, property, the State. It is certain

that behind the barrel and lantern of Diogenes, there was more than mere

mockery and words of wit. Diogenes pierced, with his biting sarcasms,

the strongest and most feared among those who were already disputing the

spoils of spirited Athens. And Plato, scandalized by the more than

popular form of his preaching, had dubbed him «a Socrates in delirium».

Yet the Cynics, by equating manual labor with intellectual labor, by

denouncing useless work, by declaring themselves citizens of the world,

by regarding the generals as «donkey drivers,» by ridiculing popular

superstitions down to the demon of Socrates, and by reducing the purpose

of life to the exercise and development of the moral person, could well

be considered, like their teacher, physicians of the soul, heralds of

freedom and truth. From the social point of view they were advocates of

community, and extended this principle not only to things but to

persons, a conception dear to many philosophers of antiquity.

The Cynics, and especially Diogenes, have been reproached for their

pride in their isolation, for posing as models, and for exaggerating a

way of life that was the negation of any organized society. Diogenes had

earlier replied: «I am like the choirmasters, who force the tone to lead

their pupils.»

The first teaching of Zeno – the leader of the Stoics – was very similar

to that of the Cynics. In his Treatise on the Republic, he rejected

customs, laws, sciences and arts, while claiming, like Plato, the

community of goods. The essence or substance of the Stoic system is

this: that the good of man is freedom, and that freedom is only gained

by freedom. The wise man, according to the Stoics, is synonymous with

the free man: he owes his good only to himself, and his happiness

depends only on himself. Sheltered from the blows of fate, insensible to

everything, master of himself, with no other need than himself, he finds

in himself a serenity, a freedom and a happiness that has no limits. He

is no longer a simple man: he is a god and more than a god, for the

happiness of the gods is the privilege of their nature, while the

happiness of the wise man is the conquest of his own freedom. Zeno

logically denied the omnipotence, protection and control of the State;

for man must serve exclusively himself, and it is from individual

harmony that collective harmony must arise. Hedonism, Cynicism and

Stoicism are opposed to the artificial right which makes the individual

an instrument in the hands of the State, the natural right which gives

the individual the right to dispose of himself as he wishes. Zeno used

this theory, as the Cynics had already done, to combat the exaggerated

nationalism of the Greeks and to admit an instinct of society, a natural

instinct which impels man to associate with other men. Undoubtedly, the

Cynics and the Stoics can be considered the first internationalists.

THE MIDDLE AGE

We shall see how this idea of natural law, of the law of nature, of

natural religion, will be followed and taken up by various philosophers.

And we will also see how the triumph of Christianity was not as complete

as its supporters claimed. In fact, there were not a few heretics of the

time who thought it prudent to cover themselves with the mask of

religion in order to carry out their propaganda with some security.

Here is, for example, the Gnostic Carpocrates of Alexandria, founder of

the Carpocratic sect, whose son Epiphanes collected the whole doctrine

in his work On Justice. Divine justice for this author is found in the

community and in the equality of this community. He says: similar to the

sun that is not measured to anyone, it must be the same for all other

things, for any pleasure. If God has given us desire, it is so that we

and all other living beings can satisfy it completely, and not because

we put limits on it.

Apparently, the Carpocratians were exterminated. However, still around

the 6^(th) century, inscriptions indicating Carpocratic tendencies were

found both in Cyrenaica and North Africa.

In any case, whether destroyed or not, the Carpocratians had successors.

We do not know whether the initiates of the sects that embraced their

conceptions or analogous ideas, had suppressed within their groups all

forms of authority: whether they had not «organized» in the present way.

What we know is that the political system then in force found in them

irreconcilable adversaries. They formed international secret societies,

interrelated, whose itinerant members were fraternally welcomed by the

corresponding associations. They taught clandestinely: the numerous

trials of those who were discovered and fell victim to their propaganda

sufficiently demonstrate this. Unfortunately, all too often, we do not

know their true opinions. We are only told about their crimes (?) and

deviations (?).

Let us mention others. In 1022, the synod of Orleans condemned to the

stake eleven Cathars (Albigensians) accused of having practiced free

love. In 1030, at Monforte, near Turin, heretics were accused of having

declared themselves against religious ceremonies and rites, marriage,

the slaughter of animals and in favor of the community of goods. In

1052, in Goslar, several heretics were burned for having pronounced

themselves against the killing of any living being: that is, against

war, against murder and against the killing of animals. In 1213, the

Waldenses were burned in Strasbourg for preaching free love and

community of goods. They were not men of letters or scholars, as was

often the case at that time, but simple craftsmen: weavers, shoemakers,

masons, carpenters, etc.

It was at this time that many «sectarians», basing themselves on the

passage of St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians – «If you are led by the

spirit, you are no longer under the law» – placed the human being, the

personality, above the law. Men and women shared ideas very close to

those of the carpocrats, which in practice led to a kind of libertarian

communism: they lived as best they could in more or less clandestine

colonies, under the threat of implacable repression if they were

discovered.

In the twelfth century Amaury or Amalric de Bène, from the area around

Chartres, professed these ideas at the Sorbonne. He had more energetic

disciples than himself, among them Ortlieb of Strasbourg, who made known

his anarcho-pantheistic doctrine in Germany, where they found

enthusiastic and convinced supporters acting under the name of Bruder

und Schwestern des freien Geistes (Brothers and Sisters of a Free

Spirit). Max Beer, in his History of Socialism, treats these «brothers»

as individualistic anarchists, who had placed themselves outside of

society, its laws, its usages and customs, and whom society organized in

reciprocity fought mercilessly.

And besides, how could it have been otherwise? It can be imagined that

for Amalric de Bène and his followers, God was as much in Jesus as in

the pagan thinkers and poets; he spoke through the mouth of Ovid as

through that of St. Augustine. Were such men worthy of living?

Among the different species of known heresies, it is necessary to make

certain distinctions. We must distinguish, for example, between

Amalekian pantheism-anarchism – whose followers considered themselves

particles of the Holy Spirit, rejecting all forms of asceticism, all

moral coercion and placing themselves, so to speak, beyond good and evil

– and the heirs of Manichaean Gnosticism, with the Albigensian ascetics

whose aspiration tended to overcome matter. Of the rest, despite

efforts, it is not always easy to make an exact distinction. The

Catholic historian Doellinger, who has studied the history of all these

sects in depth, does not hesitate to affirm that if they had won –

speaking especially of the Waldenses and the Albigenses – «there would

have been a general convulsion, a complete return to barbarism and pagan

indiscipline».

In the first pantheist-anarchist group we will gather the heresy of

Tanchelin of Antwerp, that of the Kloefer of Flanders, that of the

Hommes de l’l’lntelligence, that of the Turlupins, that of the Picardl

or Adamites (who had affiliates as far as Bohemia), that of the Loist,

also of Antwerp. Everywhere men or associations had arisen who wanted to

react against the dominant system, represented especially by

Catholicism, whose high dignitaries led a most scandalous existence,

maintaining prostitution, exploiting pleasure and gambling houses,

bearing arms and fighting as professional warriors.

In conclusion, I will say that I personally fully share Max Nettlau’s

opinion, namely, that in the last years of the Middle Ages, southern

France, the Albigensian countries, a part of Germany extending as far as

Bohemia, the bordering regions of the Lower Rhine, as far as Holland and

Flanders, as well as parts of England, Italy and Catalonia, constituted

a breeding ground for sects fighting against marriage, the family and

property, drawing down upon them terrible repression.

And it was not only in Europe that anti-authoritarian movements

developed. In Tschamtschiang’s History of Armenia (Venice 1795), there

is mention of a Persian heretic, such a de Mdusik, who denied «all law

and all authority». And in the literary supplement of the Temps Nouveaux

(Paris, vol. II, pp. 556–557) there is an article entitled «An anarchic

precursor», in which the Turkish physician Abdullah Djevdet presents a

Syrian poet of the 15^(th) century: Ebr-Ala-el Muari.

THE RENAISSANCE

Arriving at the Renaissance, we must surrender to the starkest evidence:

the Catholics, aided by the secular state, succeeded in destroying or

reducing to impotence the pantheistic-anarchist heretics. Even the

Protestants were not much more tender with the Anabaptists: a kind of

authoritarian communists referring back to the Old Testament. John of

Leiden’s dictatorship in Münster passed like a thunderbolt. The old

world was forced to bow its head under the omnipotence of the State, now

more strongly served and centralized than in the Middle Ages.

That is why the discovery of America inflames the spirit of thinkers and

original beings, whose mentality has not been completely crushed by the

mill of political organization. There is talk of happy islands, of

Eldorados, of Arcadie. Sebastian Münster described, in his Kosmographey

(1544), the life of the new islands: «where one lives free of all

authority, where neither good nor evil is known, where wrongdoers are

not punished and where parents do not dominate their children. No law:

absolute freedom of sexual relations. No trace of a God, no baptism, no

cult».

It is probable, however, that his aspirations towards freedom were but a

derivation of the emergence of Freemasonry and the various orders of the

illuminati.

One of the most brilliant geniuses of the Renaissance, François

Rabelais, with the creation of the Abbey of Thélème (Gargantua) can also

be considered as a precursor of anarchism. Elisée Reclus called him «our

great ancestor». It is true; in describing his environment of freedom,

he took little account of the economic factor, but it is not at all

improbable that he was much more attached to his century than he himself

doubted. Yet he has painted for us his refined mansion in the same

spirit with which Thomas More painted idealized England in his Utopia,

and with which Campanella painted his theocratic Italian republic in the

City of the Sun. Or how the author of Royaume d’Antangil (the first

French Utopia, 1516) depicted his Protestant constitutional monarchy.

This did not prevent Rabelais from describing the life of the abbey free

from any form of authority.

It will be recalled that Gargantua did not want «walls around». «Look,»

approved the monk, «and not without reason: for where there are walls in

front and behind, there are necessarily murmurings, envy and silent

conspiracies. The two sexes, living side by side, did not look sidelong

at each other….» «Such was the sympathy between men and women, that

every day they dressed alike.» «Their system of life was subject neither

to laws, nor statutes, nor rules: it was guided only by their own will

and free will.» They got up when they felt like it; they drank, ate,

worked and slept when they felt like it. No one woke them up, no one

forced them to drink or eat or do anything. So had Gargantua decreed.

His rule consisted in the clause Do what thou wilt, for free people,

well born, well educated, conversing in honest company, have by nature

an instinct and an incentive which impels them always to virtuous

actions, far from vice, which they call honor. For those who, by vile

compulsion or intimidation, fall into a state of complete depression and

subjection, abandon the noble idea of freeing themselves from the yoke

of servitude to which they tended by natural virtue; for by nature we

always tend to undertake forbidden things, and to aspire to what we are

denied…. This great liberty created in them the laudable emulation of

doing whatever was agreeable to one. Thus, if someone said: ‘let us

drink’, everybody drank; if he said: ‘let us play’, everybody played; if

he said: ‘let us go and have fun in the country’, everybody went there».

Rabelais, as we see, is naturally quite utopian.

Another precursor – and a famous one at that – is, without fear of

contradiction, La Boétie. Etienne de La Boétie, in his major work,

Contr’uno or Of Voluntary Servitude (1577) bases the central idea on the

refusal to oppose the service of the tyrant, whose power finds its

source in the voluntary servitude of men. «The fire that arises from a

small spark grows stronger and spreads burning all the wood it finds and

reaches. Without water being poured on it to extinguish it, it is enough

if no more wood is thrown on it, for having nothing more to burn it

consumes itself, becomes formless and is no longer fire. It is the same

with tyrants: the more they plunder, the more they demand, the more they

ruin and destroy, the more they are given the more they are served, and

the more they are strengthened the more they can impose themselves and

destroy everything. Now, if we give them nothing, if we no longer obey

them and if we no longer fight for them, they remain naked and undone,

reducing themselves to nothingness, like the root which, having no more

sap and nourishment, becomes a dry and dead branch…. Resolve not to

serve and you will be free.»

La Boétie does not foresee any definite social organization. However, he

speaks of nature having made men in the same way and, one would say, in

the same way «she has not sent the strongest and the most cunning as

brigands…», to mistreat «the weakest: rather it is to be believed that,

making of some the larger parts and of others the smaller, she has

wished to make room for a fraternal affection, giving this the

opportunity to manifest itself, some having more opportunity to offer

help and others to receive it…». «If, then, this good mother has given

to all a figure more or less similar; if she has granted to all, without

any distinction, this great gift of the voice and of the word to allow

us to relate more fraternally, and so that by habit and the mutual

exchange of our thoughts we make communion of our wills; If he has

endeavored by every means to make the knots of our common covenant in

society tighter and tighter; if he has shown in everything that he

wishes to make us all united and all equal at the same time; if this is

so, there is no doubt that we are not all companions, and no one can

think that nature has placed anyone in servitude, since she has placed

us all in company.»

As we see, from this we can extract a whole social system.

MODERN TIMES

The monarchy was becoming more and more absolute. Louis XIV had reduced

half of the intelligentsia to the state of beggary, forcing the other

half to resort to Dutch printers. In Les soupirs de la France esclave

qui aspire à la liberté (1689–1690) and in other works of the same type

appearing in Amsterdam, no trace of anarchism is to be found. One has to

wait for Diderot to hear the enunciation of this sentence which alone

contains all anarchism: «I neither want to give nor receive laws.» In

the conversation of a father with his children (Collected Works, vol.

V., p. 131) Diderot had given priority to the man of nature over that of

the legislator. Everyone remembers the phrase of the Marshal, in

Colloquy of a Philosopher with the Marshal: «Evil is simply that which

brings more disadvantages than advantages, as opposed to good which

brings more advantages than disadvantages.» And that of the farewell to

the old man, in Supplément du voyage de Bougainville: «You are two

children of nature: what rights do you have over him that he does not

have over you?» Stirner, later, will say no better.

In the Revue Socialiste of September 1888, Benoît Malon devoted about

ten pages to Don Deschamps, a Benedictine of the thirteenth century,

precursor of Hegelism, transformism and anarchic communism.

And here we come to Sylvain Maréchal, poet, man of letters, librarian

(1750–1803), who was the first to openly manifest anarchist ideas,

albeit slightly tainted with Arcadianism. Sylvain Maréchal was a

polygraph who dealt with all subjects. He began with Bergeries (1770)

and Chansons anacréontique (1779). In 1781 he found a way to bring to

light his fragments of a Poème morale sur Dieu, le Pibrac moderne.

In 1782 he published L’âge d’or, a collection of pastoral tales; in 1784

the Livre échappé au déluge ou Psaumes nouvellement découverts. In 1788,

while librarian of the library of Mazarine, he published his Almanach

des honnêtes gens, in which he substituted the names of saints for those

of famous men and women, and in which he placed Jesus Christ in the

middle of Epicurus and Ninon de Lenclos. So the almanac is condemned to

be burned at the hands of the executioner, and its author sent to Saint

Lazare to serve four months in prison. In 1788 his Apologues modernes à

l’usage du dauphin was also published.

It is here, in this book, that we find the story of the king who, after

a cataclysm, sends all his subjects back to their homes, ordering that

from now on each father of a family should be king in his own house. And

it is also here that the principle of the Grève génèrale (general

strike) is expounded as a means of establishing a society in which the

Earth will be the common property of all inhabitants, and where «liberty

and equality, peace and innocence» will reign. In his other work, Le

Tyran triomphateur, he imagines a struggling people who abandon the city

to the soldiers and take refuge in the mountains where, divided into

families, they live with no master but nature and no king but their

patriarchs, renouncing forever to return to the cities they have so

painstakingly built, whose stones are all wet with their tears and

stained with their blood. The soldiers, sent to take these men back to

their urban agglomerations, turn to freedom, stay with those whom they

were to lead back to servitude, send their uniforms back to the tyrant,

who dies of rage and hunger devouring himself. The idea is undoubtedly

reminiscent of La Boétie’s Voluntary Servitude. He then published the

Almanach des honnêtes femmes in 1790, adorned with a satirical

illustration of the Duchess de Polignac. As a continuation of the

Almanach des honnêtes femmes which he had published two years earlier

and which, as we have said, had cost him more than four months in

prison, here he replaces each saint with a well-known woman. These

celebrated women are divided into twelve classes, according to their

«gender» (one in each class: January, Fricatrices; February,

Tractatrices, and so on: Fellatrices, Lesbiennes, Corinthiennes,

Samiennes, Phoeniciennes, Siphnassiennes, Phicidisseuses, Chaldisseuses,

Tribades, Hircinnes).

This almanac, today very rare, is only found in the Inferno of the

Bibliothèque Nationale.

Sylvain Maréchal, a curious character, only accepted the revolution of

1789 with reservations. The first anarchist newspaper to appear in

France, L’Humanitaire (1841), affirmed that as long as there were

masters and slaves, poor and rich, there would be neither liberty nor

equality. Maréchal continued his publications: in 1791, Dame nature à la

barre de l’Assemblée Nationale; in the year II, the Jugement dernier des

rois; in 1794, La fête de la raison. He collaborated in the Révolutions

de Paris, in l’Ami de la Révolution and in the Bulletin des amis de la

Vérité. His friend, the Hebertist Chaumette, was a victim of the Terror,

but escaped from Robespierre, just as he managed to escape Thermidor’s

reaction and the persecutions of the Directory, even though, as we are

assured, he had collaborated in the Manifesto of the Equals.

Once the revolutionary whirlwind had passed, Maréchal took up his pen

again. In 1798 appeared his Culte et voix d’une societé d’hommes sans

Dieu. In 1799, Les voyages de Pythagore, in 6 volumes. In 1800, his

great work, Dictionnaire des athées anciens et modernes, for which the

astronomer Jérôme Lalande wrote the supplement. Finally, in 1807, De la

Virtu… a posthumous work, which was probably printed but never appeared

in public, and which Lalande used for his second supplement to the

«Dictionnaire des athées». Moreover, Napoleon did not allow the

distinguished astronomer to write on atheism for a long time.

In England, Winstanley and his Levellers can be regarded to some extent

as precursors of anarchism. However, John Lilburne, one of them,

denounced authority «in all its forms and aspects»: his fines and prison

sentences no longer counted. He was exiled to Holland. On three

different occasions, the jury acquitted him, the last time in 1613 for

violation of an expulsion decree. Cromwell held him in captivity «for

the good of the country»; and in 1656, having become a Quaker, he was

released. Which did not prevent him from dying a year later of galloping

etiology. He was only 39 years old.

Around 1650, he had Roger William (who had begun his career as governor

of the territory that later formed the State of Rhode Island, in the

United States), and more than him, one of his supporters, William

Harris, thundered against the immorality of all earthly powers, and

against the crime of all punishment. Was he a mystical visionary or an

isolated anarchist?

There is no doubt that among the perfect opponents of the State can be

counted the early Quakers.

Also in Northern Europe, the Dutchman Peter Cornelius Hockboy (1658),

the Englishman John Bellers (1695) and the Scotsman Robert Wallace

(1761) spoke in favor of voluntary and cooperative socialism. In his

Perspectives, Robert Wallace speaks of a humanity composed of multiple

communes. The protest against governmental abuses, against the excesses

of authority, is manifest in all his pamphlets, satires of all kinds,

written with an eagerness and a frankness of which we have now

completely lost the example. The names of Thomas Hobbes, John Toland,

John Wilkes, Jonathan Swift, and William De Foe, I think it is

sufficient to mention.

Thus we come to the Irishman Edmond Burke and his Vindication of Natural

Society (1756), whose dominant idea is this: whatever form of government

there is no one better than another: «The different kinds of governments

have vied with each other in the absurdity of their constitutions and in

the oppressions they have made their subjects suffer….. Even the freest

governments, with respect to their greatness and duration, have known

more confusion and committed more acts of flagrant tyranny than the most

despotic governments known to history.»

Edmond Burke, unfortunately, later disavowed everything he had written;

when he wrote his Reflections, he rose up against the French Revolution.

An American, Thomas Paine, a deputy to the convention, answered him with

The Rights of Man, 1791–92. But Paine himself, refusing to vote for the

death of Louis XVI, was imprisoned and narrowly escaped the guillotine.

He took advantage of his imprisonment to write The Age of Reason (The

Age of Reason, 1795): «In all its different degrees, society is always

an advantage, while government, even under its best aspects, is a

necessary evil: under its worst, an intolerable evil….. The business of

governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and most

rascally individuals that mankind has ever known.»

In 1796 a pamphlet appeared in Oxford entitled: The inherent Evils of

all State Government demonstrated. This pamphlet attributed to A.C.

Cuddon is strongly impregnated with individualistic anarchism, and

Benjamin R. Tucker made a new edition in 1885, in Boston.

In London, under the influence of the French Revolution, a group called

the Pantisocracy had arisen. Its animator had been the young poet

Southey, who later, following Burke’s example, completely repudiated his

youthful dreams. According to Sylvain Maréchal – also confirmed in part

by Lord Byron – it seems that this epicurean group intended to create an

Abbey of Thélème by putting all things in common among its members,

including sexual pleasures. And – still according to Maréchal – the

great artists, the most renowned men of letters and the most celebrated

men of England would have been part of this group, which was eventually

dissolved by a special bill of Parliament (Dictionary of Atheists, in

the entry: Thélème).

Manuel Devaldes, for his part, in his Figures d’Ingleterre, presents La

Pantisocratie as a colony project that would be carried out in America

among the illinoisans: a colony project, based on economic equality and

where two hours of daily work would be enough to ensure food and other

needs of the colonists. According to him, it seems that, after Southey’s

defection and the death of the two main initiators, the Pantisocracy had

died before it was born.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Schiller wrote the Brigantes, in which the

protagonist rises against conventions and laws that never created a

great man, while freedom created giants and extraordinary beings.

Fichte, for his part, affirms that if humanity had been morally perfect,

there would have been no need for States; Wilhelm de Humboldt, in 1792,

defends the thesis of the reduction of the State to its minimum

function; Vittorio Alfieri, in Italy, writes Della Tirannide.

Everywhere authority, in one form or another, is struck in the breach.

Spinoza, Comenius, Vico, Voltaire, Lessing, Herder, Condorcet, on some

sides and some forms of their activity were libertarians. Spee,

Thomasius, Beccaria, Sonnenfelds, John Howard, Mary Wollstonecrait,

Rousseau, Pestalozzi, La Mettrie, d’Holbac, fighting against the

tortures inflicted on sorcerers, against the severity of punishments,

against slavery, for the liberation of women, for a better education of

children, against all superstitions and materialism, contributed to

undermine the columns of authority. It would take a large volume to

record the names of all those who, in different ways, contributed to

shake faith in Church and State.

So we will stop at William Godwin, whose Survey of Political Justice and

its Influence on Virtue and General Happiness (1793) seems to us the

first doctrinal work of anarchism worthy of the name. It is true that

Godwin is an anarchist communist, but we think that his denial of law

and the State fits perfectly with any tendency of anarchism.