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Title: Anarchy Author: SĂ©bastien Faure Date: 1934 Language: en Topics: anarchy, Anarchist Encyclopedia, Libertarian Labyrinth, introductory Source: Retrieved on 2020-06-11 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/anarchy-from-the-anarchist-encyclopedia-1934-excerpt/ Notes: [Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]
ANARCHY n. (from the Greek: a privative and archè, command, power,
authority)
Preliminary observation. The object of this Anarchist Encyclopedia being
to make known the full range of conceptions—political, economic,
philosophical, moral, etc.—that arise from the anarchist idea or lead
there, it is in the course of this work and in the very place that each
of them must occupy within it, that the multiples theses contained in
the exact and complete study of this subject will be explained. So it is
only by drawing and joining together, methodically and with continuity,
the various parts of this Encyclopedia that it will be possible for the
reader to achieve the complete understanding of Anarchy, Anarchism and
the Anarchists.
Consequently, I will show here only in its outlines, in a narrow and
synthetic fashion, what constitutes the very essence of Anarchy and
Anarchism. For the details—and it is appropriate to note that none have
a great importance—the reader should consult the various words to which
this text will ask them to refer.
Etymologically, the word “Anarchy” (which should be spelled An-Archy)
signifies: the state of a people and, more precisely still, of a social
milieu without government.
As a social ideal and in its actual fulfillment, Anarchy answers to a
modus vivendi in which, stripped of all legal and collective restraint
having the public force at its service, the individual would have no
obligations but those imposed on them by their own conscience. They
would possess the ability to give themselves up to rational inspirations
of their individual initiative; they would enjoy the right to attempt
all the experiments that appear desirable or fruitful to them; they
would freely commit themselves to contracts of all sorts—always
temporary, and revocable or revisable—that would link them to their
fellows and, not wishing to subject anyone to their authority, they
would refuse to submit to the authority of anyone. Thus, sovereign
master of themselves, of the direction that it pleases them to give
their life, of the use that they will make of their faculties, of their
knowledge, of their productive activity, of their relations of sympathy,
friendship and love, the individual will organize their existence as it
seems good to them: radiating in every sense, blossoming as they please,
enjoying, in all things, a full and complete liberty, without any limits
but those that would be allocated to them by the liberty—also full and
complete—of other individuals.
This modus vivendi implies a social regime from which would be banished,
in right and in fact, any idea of employer and employed, of capitalist
and proletarian, of master and servant, of governor and governed.
You will see that, thus defined, the world “Anarchy” has been
insidiously and over time distorted from its precise meaning, that it
has been taken, little by little, in the sense of “disorder” and that,
in the majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias, it is only mentioned
in that sense: chaos, upheaval, confusion, waste, disarray, disorder.
Apart from the Anarchists, all the philosophers, all the moralists, all
the sociologists—including the democratic theorists and the doctrinaire
socialists—maintain that, in the absence of a Government, of a
legislation and a repression that assures respect for the law and cracks
down on every infraction of it, there is and can only be disorder and
criminality.
And yet!… Don’t the moralists and philosophers, men of State and
sociologists perceive the frightful disorder that reigns, despite the
Authority that governs and the Law that represses, in all domains? Are
they so deprived of critical sense and the spirit of observation, that
they are unaware that the more regulation increases, the more the more
the web of legislation tightens, the more the field of repression
extends, and the more immorality, disgrace, offenses and crimes
increase?
It is impossible that these theorists of “Order” and these professors of
“Morals” think, seriously and honestly, of confounding with what they
call “Order” the atrocities, horrors, and monstrosities, the revolting
spectacle of which observation places before our eyes.
And—if there are degrees of impossibility—it is still more impossible
that, in order to diminish and a fortiori to make these infamies
disappear, these learned doctors count on the virtue of Authority and
the force of Law.
That pretention would be pure insanity.
The law has only a single aim: to first justify and then sanction all
the usurpations and iniquities on which rest what the profiteers of
these iniquities and usurpations call “the Social Order.” The holders of
wealth have crystallized in the Law the original legitimacy of their
fortune; the holders of Power have raised to the level of an immutable
and sacred principle the respect owed by the crowds to the privileged,
the to power and majesty with which they are invested. We can search, to
the bottom or even deeper, all of the monuments to hypocrisy and
violence that are the Codes, all the Codes, but we will never find a
disposition that is not in favor of these two facts—facts of a
historical and circumstantial order, which we tend to convert into facts
of a natural and inevitable order—Property and Authority. I abandon to
the official tartuffes and to the professionals of bourgeois
charlatanism all that which, in the Legislation, deals with “Morals,” as
that is, and can only be, in a social state based on Authority and
Property, only the humble servant and brazen accomplice of those things.