Abstract
The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century were crucial years for the development of anarchist theory and practice. Anarchist ideology would draw on key ideas from the Enlightenment. The French Revolution would provide a revolutionary model of direct action driven by revolutionary minorities in the cause of liberation and an early form of socialism. It would also be during this period that the term anarchist would enter the political lexicon in a prominent way, and the first anarchist texts would be published. During the French Revolution, the roots of anarchist political theory and revolutionary practice would be laid. Later anarchists would embrace the Revolution’s spontaneous revolutionary violence, as well as the role played by revolutionary minorities and the proto-socialist ideas they would promote. Additionally, the direct democracy practised by the Sections and Commune of Paris would provide a model of revolutionary political governance. Also during the Revolution, the term anarchist would enter the political discourse of revolutionaries.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt argue in Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland, Edinburg: AK Press, 2009) that anarchism as a coherent political tradition can only be understood as a response of modern capitalism, beginning with Bakunin. Thus they preclude not only the Enlightenment, but also Stirner and Proudhon whom they do view as insufficiently anti-capitalist. Paul McLaughlin though makes a compelling contemporary case for Enlightenment roots of anarchism in his Anarchism and Authority: a Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Ashgate: Burlington, 2007).
- 2.
Marvin Perry, et al., Sources of the Western Tradition, Volume II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 56–57.
- 3.
Jean Mesilier, ‘Testament of Jean Meslier’, in The Great Anger: Ultra-Revolutionary Writing in France from the Atheist Priest to the Bonnot Gang, ed. and trans. Mitchell Abidor (Pacifica, CA: Marxists Internet Archive Publications, 2013), 995–999, Kindle Edition.
- 4.
Meslier, ‘On the Great Good at Advantage for Men if They all lived Peaceably, Enjoying in Common the Goods and Conveniences of Life’, in The Great Anger, 1001–1092.
- 5.
Abidor, The Great Anger, 230–236.
- 6.
C. Alexander McKinley, Illegitimate Children, of the Enlightenment: Anarchists and the French Revolution, 1880–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 87–90.
- 7.
Max Pearson Cushing, Baron d’Holbach, a Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (Lancaster: The New Era Printing Company, 1914), 65–68.
- 8.
Michael LeBuffe, ‘Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) d’Holbach’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/holbach/.
- 9.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. and trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1993), 181.
- 10.
See Stephen Ellenburg, Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: an Interpretation from Within (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976) and Robert Graham, ‘Anarchy and Democracy’. Anarcho – Syndicalist Review, 69 (Winter 2017), 18–20, 35. https://proxy.sau.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1858084701?accountid=28567.
- 11.
McKinley, Illegitimate Children of the Enlightenment, 107–110.
- 12.
James Joll, The Anarchists (London: Eye and Spottiswoode, 1964), 31.
- 13.
Jared McGeough, “‘So Variable and Inconstant a System’: Rereading the Anarchism of Godwin’s Political Justice,” Studies in Romanticism, 52:2 (Summer 2013), 276. See also Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1984), 96.
- 14.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 1985), 312–313, 551–552, 593–603, 610.
- 15.
John P. Clark, The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 191–194.
- 16.
As quoted in Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 7–8.
- 17.
William Godwin, Caleb Williams (London, 1794), II, 30.
- 18.
Godwin, Enquiry, 710, 744.
- 19.
Ibid., 251–252, 262, 294.
- 20.
Peter Kropotkin, Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, ‘Anarchism’ (Cambridge: University Press, 1911), Vol. 1, 915.
- 21.
Kropotkin’sThe Great French Revolution, 1789–1793 is the most through anarchist history of the Revolution. Murray Bookchin echoed a great many of his ideas a century later in his history of the Revolution. See Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793, trans. N. F. Dryhurst (New York: Schocken Books, 1971) and Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Cassels, 1998), Vol. 1.
- 22.
McKinley, Illegitimate Children of the Enlightenment, 13–36.
- 23.
See Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, 180–188; Bookchin, The Third Revolution, 312–327; Graham, “Anarchy and Democracy.”
- 24.
Anonymous, Vous foutez-vous de nous. Paris, l’Imprimerie des Sans-Culottes, 1792. Trans. Mitchell Abidor, last modified 2007, accessed 12 July 2017, https://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/1792/sans-culottes.htm.
- 25.
Bookchin sees Jean Varlet as the key figure in the drive for sectional direct democracy and social revolution. See Bookchin, The Third Revolution, 326.
- 26.
See McKinley, Illegitimate Children of the Enlightenment, 13–82.
- 27.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? An Inquiry in the Principle and Right of Government, trans. J. A. Langlois (2015), 72–80, 91–92, 115. Kindle.
- 28.
Ibid., 38.
- 29.
Ibid., 102.
- 30.
Ibid., 53, 86.
- 31.
Ibid., 157. See also Robert Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: the Political and Social Thought of P.J. Proudhon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).
- 32.
Proudhon, What is Property?, 210–223, 227–228.
- 33.
Ibid., 237.
- 34.
Ibid., 243–246.
- 35.
Ibid., 246.
- 36.
Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice.
- 37.
Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. and trans. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 90–91, 96, 105.
- 38.
Ibid., 230.
- 39.
Ibid., 209.
- 40.
Ibid., 227.
- 41.
Ibid., 107, 228, 280.
- 42.
Ibid., 161.
- 43.
R. W. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (London, New York Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971).
- 44.
Andrew Koch, “Max Stirner: the Last Hegelian or the First Poststructuralist?”, Anarchist Studies, 5:2 (1997), 95–107.
- 45.
Iain McKay, “Individualism Versus Egoism”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, 68 (Fall, 2016), 31–34. https://proxy.sau.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1826428559?accountid=28567.
- 46.
See George Woodcock, A Hundred Years of Revolution: 1848 and After (London: Porcupine Press, 1948), 18.
- 47.
Edward Berensen, ‘Organization and “modernization” in the Revolutions of 1848’, in Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform, ed. Dieter Down, Heinz-Gerhardt Haupt, Dieter Langeweische and Jonathan Sperber, trans. David Higgins (New York: Bergen Books, 2001), 563.
- 48.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Confessions of a Revolutionary, to Serve as a History of the February Revolution, last accessed 31 July 2017 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Confessions_of_a_Revolutionary/3.
- 49.
Proudhon, Confessions of a Revolutionary, last accessed 31 July 2017 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Confessions_of_a_Revolutionary/12.
- 50.
Michael Bakunin, “The Reaction in Germany”, in Bakunin on Anarchy, Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 56–57.
- 51.
Michael Bakunin, “The Reaction in Germany”, in Bakunin on Anarchy, 68.
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McKinley, C.A. (2019). The French Revolution and 1848. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_18
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