What is anarchy? To most, the word brings about ideas about lawlessness and chaos. Indeed, this is how anarchy has been portrayed since before there was anarchism. But in its objective sense, anarchy refers to a condition where there are no rulers, anarchy meaning literally “without a ruler” just as monarchy means “one ruler.” On its own, anarchy is no more a statement of consequences than is oligarchy, “few rulers,” which may be styled as a benevolent or malevolent oligarchy, much as is the same with a monarchy. Just the same, there may be said to be two styles of anarchy. We are interested in what may be styled benevolent anarchy.
Benevolent anarchy itself comes in two forms, which I have previously called anarchy de facto and anarchy de jure. Anarchy de facto refers to an anarchy by fact, which has not been codified in any kind of way. This is the anarchy of the acephalous hunter-gatherer, the society of the Stone Age, which typically lacked political authority, having functional headmen, having no power of compulsion, only when found beneficial for all. This is an anarchy not because there is lawlessness or chaos, but because there is no archon, no head of state or government.
The anarchy of the hunter-gatherer was replaced by councils of elders, warriors, and priests during the late Neolithic and especially the Copper and Bronze Ages. It is conceiveable that the benevolent anarchy of the hunter-gatherer had first devolved into a malevolent one, but such a dichotomy has more to do with rhetorical styling than with observed facts. Yet, one might still imagine that such an egalitarian arrangement as was had by the hunter-gatherers could go stale in terms of evolution. This would become particularly problematic, perhaps, as particular individuals came to recognize that they had superior instincts or intellect to their fellows, whom they could not persuade to collaborate (owing perhaps to their atavistic makeup), something that anarchists even today find to be a hurdle. In such a case, it may be that evolution allows for such a superman to transcend the lowest common denominator imposed by anarchy, and to become an archon. This would be, as it were, a filling in of a niche of nature, though such a niche, to be filled, need not be partial, so as to concern itself with the capacity of the individual, serving as a vacuum to be filled instead by whoever would do so.
And filled it would be, giving way to a succession of archons, beginning with primitive oligarchy and concentrating into monarchy before shifting back toward oligarchy in modern republics. Anarchy de facto was displaced by de jure systems.
Political authority now established, it came to be understood that anarchy was a time of the past that was transcended to allow for the ways of life under the state, which had induced involuntary cooperation where it was otherwise neglected. But this was anarchy de facto. Eventually a peasant would come to theorize another kind of anarchy, an anarchy de jure, one resulting from justice under the law and by way of mutual contract. This would be an evolved anarchy that transcends the state by learning to cooperatively self-manage those collaborative functions that it had imposed, at least those that had brought about functional gains and not just luxurious surpluses that were a bane to society. An anarchy de jure would be one where anarchy results from the mutual guarantee of the application of the law, such that no archon can develop, archons always relying on desecration of the law and on its transgression to establish themselves.
In an anarchy de jure, there is no ruling class, not because it has not evolved yet, as in anarchy de facto, nor because it has devolved back to such a condition, but because society has evolved to such a point that its level of rational thinking and conscientiousness and its pursuit of justice has filled the niche for order-creation without need for the superman, society, by self-development, having caught up with a general equilibrium that is on relative par thereto. There is no ruling class because a ruling class would be a devolution, much like a transition from a ruling class to an anarchy de facto would be. An anarchy de jure, at least so far as me may assume a benevolent styling, or in its golden age, would be a highly-ordered, well-structured, and efficiently organized society.
Of course, anarchy on its own doesn’t tell us much, except that there is no ruler. This is because there are as many conceptual modes of anarchy as there are of archy, or rulership. Conceptually, anarchy comes in many forms and styles, from the green, to the red, to the yellow, and even the brown. This subjective spread, of course, tells us nothing of objective anarchy (typically considered orange), just as oligarchy and monarchy tell us nothing of objective archy.
For the conditions of anarchy to be objectively met, there must be no ruler, no individual who rules others. This does not mean that natural laws are not in force, nor that there are no rules at all. It simply means that anyone may exercise their natural rights without hindrance and that existing rules are subscribed to voluntarily without duress. In order to ensure that duress is not at play, along with every individual being able to do anything that does not limit the like freedom of others to do the same, a negative right, every individual must have equal access to land. Without freedom to do as one wills, nor a location on which to do it, an individual falls under duress.
There is only one form of anarchy that is a genuine, natural form, and that is the form of mutualism. There are early offbranches that rhetorically meet the conditions, but they are impracticable in the real world, and so must be treated as errors rather than natural facts. Then there are those forms that are intentionally meant to deceive.
Genuine anarchist thinking developed from out of the Radical Enlightenment, which had itself developed from out of the Scientific Revolution following the Renaissance and the Radical Reformation. After the Moderate Enlightenment republican revolutions, the Radical Enlightenment developed into modernism, which supported the continuation of Enlightenment ideals and especially sociological-evolutionary as opposed to political changes. This is where anarchism comes from.
Throughout, there were counter-movements that would respond to their radical opponents, such as the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which corresponded roughly to the Scientific Revolution, the Counter-Enlightenment, which opposed the Enlightenment overall, and Romanticism or the Theosophical Enlightenment, which functioned largely as a continuation of the Renaissance and served as a sort of Counter-Modernism (though later would co-opt the name for itself).
From out of Romanticism and the Theosophical Enlightenment developed the social milieu known as the fin de siecle, or “End of the Century,” a loose collection of antiquarians, mythologists, magicians, philosophers, sophists, philologists, artists, poets, and hucksters whose movements in the art would take forms such as Symbolism and Decadence. One of the core features of these movements was idiosyncracy, the mismatching of things in an aesthetically pleasant fashion, as by placing items from different time periods, or places on the Earth, that may have some harmonic quality nonetheless, juxtaposed together. In this, these movements place symbolic meaning and mood over accuracy with regard to realism or naturalism.
The fin de siecle priority for feeling over fact would eventually come to co-opt the anarchist movement, starting perhaps with anarcho-naturism, which centered on emotions and libertinism, and which began to treat anarchism as an aesthetic, one that even what is today referred to as the Bohemian bourgeoisie-- which had its start or found its predecessor in the fin de siecle-- could participate in simply by transgressing against established cultural norms, such as by becoming a nudist, vegetarian, atheist, or polyamorist.
As the fin de siecle developed into postmodernism, naturist anarchism developed into postmodern or neo-anarchism, with the idiosyncracies juxtaposed along the way. Neo-anarchism would itself have many flavors, but would not satisfy the objective definition of anarchism, tending more and more to subjectivize it. In place of the principled values of the classical anarchists, the neo-anarchists, taking their cues from the fin de siecle and its anticipant Max Stirner, adopted the aesthetic mood and a theatric look of anarchism, and idiosyncratically paired it with Counter-Enlightenment values, such as the absurd notion that there is an equality to be had between the greater and the lesser, even against the wishes of God or Nature. This idiosyncracy and degeneration recalls the art movements of Symbolism and Decadence, which juxtapose absurd combinations and savor degeneracy.
Neo-anarchism increasingly developed the anarchist as an aesthetician of libertinism and equality of outcome as opposed to an ideologist of equal freedom and necessity, with the aesthetic neo-anarchist representing no longer a practical opponent of the ruling class (landlords, bosses, bankers, politicians), or at least not on rational grounds. Instead of class, the neo-anarchist focuses their efforts on environmentalism, state policy, intergovernmental politics, and identarianism of transgressive, emotionalist, factitious, and evolutionarily adolescent groups, such as queers, women, Jews, and blacks. It has itself become an artful and theatric opponent of various identity groups (primarily WASPs) designated as distasteful and untouchable for practices that infringe on the neo-anarchist mood or aesthetic. These groups the neo-anarchists would attempt, in league with the other synarchists of which they are a mere exoteric expression, to silence.
By this time, the fin de siecle, which had developed a synarchist political tendency, had been wed with Chinese synarchism, which had been mixed with Marxism by way of Maoism, largely by way of the Frankfurt School of cultural (as opposed to economic) Marxists. From out of this has developed an effort to establish struggle sessions, or efforts to make one’s cultural opponent suffer extreme social harm for their beliefs, as well as a new grandstanding that amounted to a revived noblesse oblige, which took the form of criticizing white, straight, gender confident, men especially of a Christian or rationalist persuasion (and most especially WASPs), and an appropriation and bastardization of the word privilege to be applied to such an individual.
Anarchism, as was becoming sensationalized, ceased to be about workers, tenants, debtors, and tax-slaves, unless they towed the party line. Neo-anarchism, rather than opposing class stratification, became a means of establishing a new nobility with an anarchist face. By criticizing Poor Whites for their working class culture and worldview, especially, the new college-educated, elitist neo-anarchists, some of them even of a WASP background, led primarily by Jewish figureheads, could grandstand their way into a higher social standing. In this, they were also building report, especially with bleeding hearts and powerful minority groups such as Jews, groups who established the feminist pornocracy and perverted kakistocracy that would themselves largely displace the old money WASPs (whose children became yuppies instead of old money power-elites, becoming working professionals) in the advancing struggle sessions (in which they were deemed, like the poor whites they themselves attacked and by their own children, to be racists, “homophobes,” sexists, and tyranically puritanical). In this way, identity politics managed to turn yuppie, Bobo WASP son against old money WASP father, ultimately serving the interests of the new Jewish elite who now spearheaded the ruling class after wielding factitious claims about the Holocaust and imposing the interracial enmeshment tactics of Semitism to inflict white guilt onto hippie and yuppie WASPs.
Classical anarchism was much different from what developed from out of the fin de siecle and postmodernism. Rather than aesthetic grandstanding and the establishment of an intellectual noble class with the exclusive right to be heard on a platform, as exists today as a result of the neo-anarchist iconography, the classical anarchists were modernists who theoretically upheld the values of freedom of speech, universally, for all people, regardless of social standing or purity of thought. The classical anarchists, rather than trying to control who gets to speak, would recognize such controls as an effort to maintain a ruling class, a class of those who have influence over others. In particular, the classical anarchists believed that freedom of speech would serve the interests of the abiding class, the workers, tenants, debtors, and tax-slaves, rather than those of the ruling class, the bosses, landlords, bankers, and governments, and that matters of taste, aesthetic, and identity came after a universalist pursuit of freedom for everyone regardless of such things.
Many of the classical anarchists held to views that now, under postmodernity, would be considered to be conservative. Proudhon and Courbet were critical of Jews. Herbert Spencer was a social Darwinist (before Darwin, actually, but retroactively labeled as such). Dyer Lum opposed Chinese immigration. You get the idea. Today, these thinkers would be deplatformed by the neo-anarchists for their rationalist, conscientious modernist beliefs and progressive evolutionism. They simply do not fit into the symbolic aesthetic of neo-anarchism, its decadent mood and naturist passions. They placed fact over feelings, and that has no place on the altar of symbolic impressions, in the degeneration of decadence, or the libertinism of naturism.