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Title: Anarchy
Author: Arthur Ranc
Date: 1871
Language: en
Topics: French, France, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Source: Retrieved on November 10, 2012 from http://michaelshreve.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/arthur-ranc/
Notes: Arthur Ranc, “Anarchy”, in L’Encyclopédie générale, 1871. (translated from the French by Michael Shreve)

Arthur Ranc

Anarchy

D’Alembert, after defining anarchy as “a disorder in the State that has

no one with enough authority to command and make the laws respected and

consequently the people do as they want, without subordination and

without police,” concludes thus: “We can be assured that every

government generally tends to either despotism or anarchy.”

At first glance this thought, which seems to place political societies

between two equally pitiful alternatives, is basically, on closer

examination, just a careless conception of the theory formulated by

Proudhon thus: “The first term of the governmental series being

Absolutism and the final term, inevitably, is Anarchy.”

Alembert’s apparent error comes from the fact that he conceived

Authority as a principle of order whereas in modern societies order can

only result from the successive and carefully thought out elimination of

Authority. “Anarchy, or the absence of masters and sovereigns,” Proudhon

says, “such is the form of government that we are approaching every day

and that an inveterate habit of mind makes us see as the height of

disorder and the expression of chaos.” Thus Proudhon expresses himself

in his first On Property. Later, developing his thought and formulating

it with his customary rigor, he affirmed that the goal of the Revolution

was the very suppression of Authority, that is of government.

Anarchy, therefore, is understood in two not only different but

absolutely contradictory senses. On the one hand it is the absence of

government, authority, principle, rule, and consequently it is disorder

in thoughts and deeds. On the other hand it is the elimination of

authority in its three political, social and religious aspects; it is

the dissolution of the government in the natural organism; it is the

contract substituted for sovereignty, arbitration for judicial power; it

is labor not organized by an outside power but organizing itself; it is

religion disappearing as a social function and becoming appropriate to

the individual manifestations of free conscience; it is citizens

entering freely into contracts not with the government but between

themselves; it is, finally, freedom; it is order.

Proudhon said elsewhere, “Freedom that is adequate and identical with

order, that is all that is real in power and politics.”

The problem is not to know how we will be better governed, but how we

will most free.

We can see now that the theory of d’Alembert was perfectly just. Yes,

every government must necessarily end up in despotism or anarchy, either

in the common sense of the word or in the philosophical meaning. Between

absolutism and freedom there is no possible reconciliation, no middle

ground, such is the conclusion we are forced to accept through theory

and practice, through philosophy and history. Disorder is an act of

rulers; trouble in society, turmoil in the State comes from the unjust

resistance that the two-pronged temporal and spiritual power oppose,

with the help and support of the privileged, to the legitimate demands

of the citizens, of free thinkers and the proletariat.

For the idle, for the exploiters, for the privileged, for the gluttons,

every idea of justice is an idea of disorder; every attempt against

their privilege is an anarchist act. Just the thought of escaping

exploitation is a guilty thought. The idle and the privileged want to

enjoy their peace and quiet. The best government is the one that

guarantees the most security for their pleasures. Speculators, golden

boys, dandies, friends of order, business sharks—this is the cursed race

that for almost eighty years has surrendered to despotism, a race of

prostitutes that needs pimps. The ideal Paris for them is a city of

pleasures, a huge Corinth, with very expensive girls, since they have a

lot of money, and an obedient police force. They are the ones who after

9 Thermidor [27 July 1794] whipped the women and clubbed the

patriots—ten against one—on the public square. They are the ones who in

June after the battle shot the vanquished in the broken streets. They

are the true anarchists, if by anarchists you mean creators of disorder.

They are the ones who, to satisfy their base passions in peace, to

wallow carefree in the orgy of revelers, terrifying the common

interests, inflaming the bourgeois with fear, organizing panic and

finally dragging with them the unconscious masses and prostrating

themselves before the absolute power.

Now, Despotism is powerless even to guarantee the security of common

interests. What did we see during the first Empire? A few months of

prosperity that we paid dearly for and then the tyranny fell silent, the

despotism became cunning; the police were the absolute masters over the

lives and freedoms of the citizens; the survivors of the revolutionary

ideal were hunted down by an implacable hatred; the ancient regime was

reestablished; France was given over to the clergy; the aristocracy

reconstructed; patriotic customs destroyed in the army; the republican

cohorts sent to [the colony of] Saint Domingue as if to their death;

“lettres de cachet” [royal orders] resumed; State prisons filled up;

three million men turned into cannon fodder; commerce destroyed;

agriculture ruined; the countryside surrendering its last man; and after

all this to crown it all off, the invasion!

Yes, if by anarchy we understand disorder pushed to its limits,

despotism and anarchy are the same thing because despotism cuts off the

best part of human nature, stops social development, sacrifices

everything to the material order, creates a conflict of interests and

keeps society in a state of latent war.

Is there not, for example, disorder and anarchy in a country where the

civil servants are set outside the common law and cannot be brought to

trial, where the principle of equality before the law is unrecognized,

where the judicial and executive power are mixed up? Is there not

anarchy when the legislative power, reduced to a advisory body, does not

have the ability to introduce laws and can only amend those that have

been drawn up by a council whose members have been nominated by the

executive power? When the Constitution can only be modified with the

consent of the executive, which alone has the right to appeal to the

nation while the nation has no legal or constitutional means to make

their will known ex tempore without being asked by the executive? When

the principle of executive responsibility has no sanction and when no

procedure exists whereby action for damages can be constitutionally

introduced?

Is there not anarchy, trouble and disorder when the electoral body is

organized so that the urban groups are divided into sections, each of

which is arbitrarily united to a larger group of voters in the

countryside, when through this system their votes are canceled out and

the cities and countryside are violently opposed to each other?

Therefore, absolutism is synonymous with disorder and also synonymous

with anarchy in the common sense of the word.

Likewise, freedom and order are two correlative terms that transform

into a third more general term, that of anarchy, such as Proudhon

defined it, that is in the radical elimination of the principle of

authority in all its forms.