primitive clan, the village community, the mediaeval guild (neighbours' guilds, arts and crafts' guilds, traders', hunters', and so on}, and finally in the free mediaeval city, such institutions as enabled them to resist the encroachments upon their life and fortunes both of those strangers who conquered them, and those clansmen of their own who endeavoured to establish their personal authority. The same popular tendency was self-evident in the religious movements of the masses in Europe during the earlier portions of the Reform movement and its Hussite and Anabaptist forerunners. At a much later period, namely, in 1793, the same current of thought and of action found its expression in the strikingly independent, freely federated activity of the "Sections" of Paris and all great cities and many small "Communes" during the French Revolution.[1] And later still, the Labour combinations which developed in England and France, notwithstanding Draconic laws, as soon as the factory system began to grow up, were an outcome of the same popular resistance to the growing power of the few—the capitalists in this case.
These were the main popular Anarchist currents which we know of in history, and it is self-evident that these movements could not but find their expression in literature. So they did, beginning with Lao-tse in China, and some of the earliest Greek philosophers (Aristippus and the Cynics; Zeno and some of the Stoics). However, being born in the masses, and not in any centres of learning, these popular movements, both when they were revolutionary and when they were deeply constructive, found little sympathy among the learned men—far less than the authoritarian hierarchical tendencies.
The Greek Stoic, Zeno, already advocated a free community, without any government, which he opposed to the State Utopia of Plato. He already brought into evidence the instinct of sociability, which Nature had developed in opposition to the egotism of the self-preservation instinct. He foresaw a time when men would unite across the frontiers and constitute the Cosmos, and would have no need of laws, law-courts, or temples—and no need either of money for their exchanges of mutual services. His very wording seems to have been strikingly similar to that now in use amongst Anarchists.[2]
The Bishop of Alba, Marco Girolamo Vida, developed, in
- ↑ See "The Great French Revolution" (London: Heinemann, 1909).
- ↑ See article, "Anarchism," in the forthcoming (eleventh) edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica."
