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Definition
Political creed advocating the elimination of governmental authority in favor of the voluntary association of individuals or groups. This sense of the term originated in the mid-1800s, first coined by the French political philosopher Pierre Proudhon. Earlier the term had been used, as it is still used today, to characterize groups who promote social chaos by terrorism or other violent means. In fact, anarchism has assumed a variety of forms that include nonviolent, pacifist groups as well as the more aggressive forms that involved anarchist communism and anarchosyndicalism, the alliance of anarchism and the trade union movement in France. Among literary figures associated with anarchism, the outstanding figure is Leo Tolstoy, who advocated a Christian-based form of nonviolent resistance to the state. As for the more aggressive terrorist form of anarchism, the best-known writer to examine it is Joseph Conrad. In two penetrating, powerful novels, The Secret Agent (1907) and particularly Under Western Eyes (1911), he explores the impenetrable conflict of revolutionary violence and authoritarian despotism. Conrad's repudiation of anarchism is based on a profound belief in a natural order, always threatened, in his eyes, by the anarchist impulse.According to the critic David Kadlec, the common association of anarchism with leftist movements has led to the failure to see the important impact of anarchist principles, on literary modernism and American pragmatism. Kadlec maintains that, despite their political differences, anarchists and pragmatists were as one in rejecting the notion of "foundations," the idea of a bedrock, underlying truth that supports social existence, creating an atmosphere on both sides of the Atlantic that had a powerful impact on modern writers. Ezra Pound and James Joyce , for example, saw in the anarchist rejection of "first principles" a political and philosophical context for the radical new poetic and narrative forms that distinguish their work. In America, on the other hand, the links between anarchism and creative writers were the philosophical pragmatists William James and John Dewey, who shared a common bond with "anarchism of the good kind." The poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, for example, struggled against the debasement of language, which they saw as the inevitable social result of an outmoded economic system, causing them to "make it new" in Pound's phrase, to break with traditional poetic forms. Kadlec also invokes the figure of Zora Neale Hurston, whose training as a cultural anthropologist enabled her to see through the artificial categories of "race." As Janie Crawford, the heroine of Hurston's novel Their Eyes Are Watching God, puts it, "We're uh mingled people," thus pointing to the cultural, not "natural," basis of racial identity.
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