دانلود کتاب آنارشیسم – مقدمه ای بسیار کوتاه

Anarchism is a social and political ideology which, despite a history of defeat, continually re-emerges in a new guise or in a new country, so that another chapter has to be added to its chronology, or another dimension to its scope. In 1962 George Woodcock wrote a 470-page book, Anarchism, which, continually reprinted as a Penguin Book and translated into many languages, became probably the most widely read book on the subject in the world. Woodcock wrote a series of updating postscripts until his death in 1995. In 1992 Peter Marshall wrote a book of more than 700 pages called Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (HarperCollins) which seems likely to overtake the earlier book in global sales. Woodcock was greatly relieved: ‘I now have a book,’ he wrote, ‘to which I can direct readers when they ask me how soon I intend to bring my Anarchism up to date.’ Like all his other readers, I have been very grateful for Peter Marshall’s capacity for summarizing complex ideas and for exploring the by-ways of anarchist history. For decades, when in search of a fact or an opinion, I would telephone Nicolas Walter, who died in the year 2000. I greatly value his neat little pamphlet About Anarchism, which is part of the global treasury of anarchist literature stocked by the Freedom Press Bookshop in London.

The word ‘anarchy’ comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political and social ideology. Proudhon argued that organization without government was both possible and desirable. In the evolution of political ideas, anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these. Historically, anarchism arose not only as an explanation of the gulf between the rich and the poor in any community, and of the reason why the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of a common inheritance, but as a radical answer to the question ‘What went wrong?’ that followed the ultimate outcome of the French Revolution. It had ended not only with a reign of terror and the emergence of a newly rich ruling caste, but with a new adored emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, strutting through his conquered territories.