arrange things so that, without the existence of power, men should not return to the savage state of coarse violence towards each other?
All anarchists—as the preachers of this teaching are called—quite uniformly answer the first question by recognising that if this power is to be really abolished it must be abolished not by force but by men's consciousness of its uselessness and evil. To the second question, as to how society should be organized without power, anarchists answer variously.
The Englishman Godwin, who lived at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, and the Frenchman Proudhon, who wrote in the middle of the last century, answer the first question by saying that for the abolition of power the consciousness of men is sufficient, that the general welfare (Godwin) and justice (Proudhon) are transgressed by power, and that if the conviction were dissseminated amongst the people that general welfare and justice can be realised only in the absence of power, then power would of itself disappear.
As to the second question, by what means will the order of a new society be ensured without power, both Godwin and Proudhon answer that people who are led by the consciousness of general welfare (according to Godwin) and of justice (according to Proudhon) will instinctively find the most universally rational and just forms of life.
Whereas other anarchists, such as Bakounine and Kropotkin, although they also recognise the consciousness in the masses of the harmfulness of power and its incompatibility with human progress, nevertheless as a means for its abolition regard revolution as possible, and even as necessary, for which revolution they recommend men to prepare. The second question they answer by the assertion that as soon as State organisation and property shall be abolished men will naturally combine in rational, free, and advantageous conditions of life.
To the question as to the means of abolishing power, the German Max Stirner and the American Tucker answer almost in the same way as the others. Both of them believe
