ARGUMENTS
611
one reads of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Peter Kropotkin and the more
one learns of the way the movement differed from country to country
and from period to period, the less confidently one speaks of
the
Anar–
chist tradition. Its internal variations were pronounced. The peasant
Anarchists, especially in Spain, were fiercely anti-industrial and anti–
urban and wished to withdraw entirely from the State to live in separate
communities based on mutual aid. The anarcho-syndicalists of France
put special emphasis on the value of a general strike and looked to the
trade unions as the future units of a new society. Bakunin advocated
violence, Tolstoy abhorred it; Proudhon believed in retaining individual
ownership of certain forms of property, Errico Malatesta called for its
abolition in every form; Max Stirner's ideal was the egotist engaged in
"the war of each against all," Kropotkin's was human solidarity, a society
based on the union of voluntary communes.
These are only some of the divisions of strategy, personality and
geography which characterized the Anarchist movement. What bound
these disparate elements together-what makes plausible the term
"Anarchism" in reference to all of them- is their hostility to authority,
especially that embodied in the State, but including any form of rule
by man over man, whether it be by parent, teacher, lawyer or priest.
The Anarchists were against authority, they said, because they were for
Iife--not life as most men had ever lived it, but life as it might
be
lived. Anarchists argued, in a manner reminiscent of Rousseau, that
human aggression and cruelty were the products of imposed restraints;
the "good" infant was ruined by "bad" institutions. They insisted that
the authoritarian upbringing most children were subjected to stifled spon–
taneity, curiosity, initiative, individuality-in other words, prevented pos–
session of themselves.
If
they could be raised "free"--economically freed
from the struggle for existence, intellectually -freed from the tyranny
of custom, emotionally freed from the need to revenge their own mutila–
tion by harming others-they could express those "natural" feelings of
fraternity and mutual assistance which are innate to the human species.
Since Freud's return to Calvin, we are far less certain than the
Anarchists about the infinite goodness of the "unspoiled" child. Aggres–
sion, conflict and frustration may be maximized by our culture, but
those qualities do not seem wholly cultural in origin. Yet if advances in
psychological understanding have made the Anarchist view of human
nature appear too uncomplicated in its optimism, they have, in a more
circumscribed way, given that view certain new supports. Norman
o.
Brown's reading of the Freudian legacy has reinforced Anarchist emphasis
on the destructive influence of imposed restraints. Erik Erikson (along
