Anarchist history

Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies often defined as self-governed voluntary institutions, but that several authors have defined as more specific institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations. Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful. While anti-statism is central, anarchism entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the conduct of human relations, including, but not limited to, the state system.

Modern anarchism sprang from the secular or religious thought of the Enlightenment. The central tendency of anarchism as a mass social movement has been represented by anarcho-communism and national-anarchism, with individualist anarchism being primarily a literary phenomenon (which did nevertheless affect the bigger currents, including the participation of individualists in large anarchist organizations).

Most contemporary anthropologists, as well as anarcho-primitivists agree that, for the longest period before recorded history, human society was without a separate class of established authority or formal political institutions. According to Harold Barclay, long before anarchism emerged as a distinct perspective, human beings lived for thousands of years in self-governing societies without a special ruling or political class. It was only after the rise of hierarchical societies that anarchist ideas were formulated as a critical response to and rejection of coercive political institutions and hierarchical social relationships.

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