Анархический манифест (1850)

Anarchist Manifesto

*** Anarchy is Order ***

If I were to heed the meaning vulgarly attributed to certain words then, since vulgar error has taken „anarchy‟ to be synonymous with „civil war‟, I should be horrified by the title with which I have headed this publication, in that I have a horror of civil strife.

At the same time I account it a pleasure and an honour that I have never been party to a band of conspirators nor any revolutionary battalion; a pleasure and an honour because it furnishes the basis upon which I can establish, for one thing, that I have been enough of an honest man not to pull the wool over the people's eyes, and, for another, that I have been astute enough not to let the wool be pulled over my own eyes by the ambitious. I have watched - I cannot claim unmoved but at any rate with the utmost serenity - the passage of fanatics and charlatans, moved to pity for some and to utter contempt for the rest. And when, in the wake of these bloody struggles - having forced my enthusiasm not to overstep the narrow confines of syllogism - I have sought to draw up a balance-sheet of the benefits that each corpse has bought, the sum has added up to zero, and zero means nothing. That nothing horrifies me; civil war horrifies me also.

Consequently, if I have inscribed ANARCHY on the mast-head of this newspaper, it cannot have been because I take that word in the sense attributed to it - much mistakenly, as I shall be explaining anon - by the governmentalist factions, but rather to ensure that it receives the etymological rights it deserves in a democracy. Anarchy is the negation of governments. Governments, whose pupils we are, have naturally found nothing better to devise than to school us in fear and horror of their destruction. But as governments in turn are the negations of individuals or of the people, it is reasonable that the latter, waking up to essential truths, should gradually come to feel a greater horror at its own annihilation than that of its masters.