Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1977

Keywords

Anarchism, Anarchists, 19th century

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

W. Warren Wagar

Second Advisor

Charles E. Freedeman

Third Advisor

Melvin C. Shefftz

Abstract

A comparative study of the historical philosophies of five anarchists, with a special emphasis on their attitudes regarding the role of social traditions in the process of historical change. The five men so studied are William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael [Mikhail] Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Gustav Landauer. These five represent the major tendencies of nineteenth century European anarchism, while also providing a broad geographical and chronological cross section.

Their perspectives on historical change are shown to be an essential determinant of their anarchist philosophies, particularly their thoughts on mass organization, leadership, revolution, and social order. The central thesis is that these five anarchists endeavored to find some method of implementing radical social change while, at the same time, they recognized the power and resistance of social custom to such change. Their philosophies of history and, ultimately, their anarchist ideologies were attempts to understand and to explain the role of tradition in social transformation. In the end, their intellectual labors were efforts to harness social habit for their cause of libertarian social change. This study documents their search.

Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia serves as a methodological foundation for this discourse in the history of ideas. His theories regarding the sociology of knowledge and the development of transformationist ideologies are employed in evaluating the ideas of the five anarchists. Mannheim’s concept of Chiliasm, a primitive level of ideological evolution which he states is characteristic of revolutionary anarchism, is applied to the particular ideological development of these anarchists. Chiliasm is redefined in the course of this study, especially as it relates to the historical and ethical outlook of the utopian ideologue. Mannheim’s stress on the ahistorical character of the Chiliast is found to be misleading in analyzing anarchism. Kropotkin, who has the most developed historical philosophy among the five, especially in terms of the recognition of the constancy of change and of the diversity of society, still produced an ideological structure similar to that of the Chiliast.

The central tenet of any anarchist philosophy of history is that man has the ability to shape the future. Thus, of course, anarchists reject the determinist implications of Marxism. The search for a libertarian historical philosophy led the anarchists to two approaches. One, taken by Godwin, Kropotkin, and Landauer, sought to prove the future of anarchism by viewing it as the end-point of the “tendencies” of historical development. From such a perspective, the coming anarchist society is seen as the product of past evolution extended into the future. For Landauer, these tendencies had to be rejected because they did not lead in the right direction. For the other two, history as progress was the dominant theme. Only Kropotkin recognized the passive nature of this view of history. Bakunin and Proudhon, however, recognized this weakness and built their philosophy accordingly. They realized that no revolution could ever be made if it ignored the past; but they did not wish to passively accept history’s tendencies. It was Proudhon who first put forth a method that would incorporate history into a libertarian perspective. His concepts of collective force, freedom, conscience, and antinomy are part of this effort to find an anarchist middle way. Bakunin built upon this methodology and applied it to the problem of leadership. Their approach, this study concludes, was similar to that suggested by Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia.

Download

Share

COinS