Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism is really more if an encyclopedia than an account, covering the broadest possible spread of history and cultures. But it does prove that anarchists give a good quote:
Lao Tzu:
The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
…The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
(p.57)
For the Greek Stoic Zeno: “Natural man is an individual and social being. Although the Stoic doctrine headed towards self-sufficiency, they believed that man is ‘naturally made for society and action’. Zeno believed that together with the instinct for self-preservation which leads to egoism, there is also a social instinct which makes us hoin others and co-operate for the common good. While pleasure and freedom from pain might be ab advantage it is not a good, for Zeno asserted the official Stoic doctrine that virtue is the only desirable good.” (p. 70)
Bakunin: “The idea of God implies the abdication of reason and of justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liverty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” (p. 81)
From a form of medieval mysticism with parallels to the Sufis, the Heresy of the Free Spirit: “Marguerite Porete, who was tried and burned in Paris in 1311m has left us Mirouer des simples ames, the only complete work by a medieval adept to survive. She taught that at the seventh stage of illumination the soil becomes united with God and by his grace is liberated from sin. It needs no Church, no priesthood and no sacraments. … [they] should ‘do nothing but what pleases them; or if they do, they deprive themselves of peace, freedom and nobility'” (p. 88)
Fourier went far beyond the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity put forward by the lawyers of the French Revolution. He recognized that social liberty without a degree of economic equality is meaningless. The philosophes of the 18th century were right to vaunt liberty – ‘it is the foremost desire of all creatures’ – but they forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth: ‘When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundation. “(p. 150)
William Godwin, An Account of the Seminary (1783): “The state of society is incontestably artificial; the power of one man over another must be always deived from convention or from conquest: by nature we are equal.” (p. 194)
… “His starting point is that since human beings are oartakers of a common nature, it follows on the principle of impartial justice that the ‘good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.'” (p. 210)
Proudhon : “The sovereignty of reason having been substituted for that of revelation: the notion of contract succeeding to that of compulsion; economic critique revealing that political institutions must now be absorbed into the industrial organisam: we fearlessly conclude that the revolutionary formula can no longer be direct government or any kind of government, but must be: no more goverment.” (p. 247)
Emma Goldman at her trial in 1893:
Do you believe in the Supreme Being, Miss Goldman?
No sir, I do not.
Is there any government on earth whose laws you approve?
No, sir, for they are all against the people.
Why don’t you leave this country if you don’t like its laws?
Where shall I go? Everywhere on earth the laws are against the poor, and they tell me I cannot go to heaven, nor do I want to go there.” (p. 398)
In February 1970 the Kabouters [whose ‘principal theoretical spirit’ was Roel van Duyn) set up the ‘Orange Free State’ … with a social philosophy not “the socialism any more of the clenched fist, but of the interlaced fingers, of the erect penis, of the flying butterfly, of the moved glance, of the Holy Cat. It is anarchism.’ (p. 555)
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