World: ANARCHY REVISITED

THE black flag that flew last week above the tumultuous student disorders of Paris stood for a philosophy that the modern world has all but forgotten: anarchy. Few of the students who riot in France, Germany or Italy —or in many another country—would profess outright allegiance to anarchy, but its basic tenets inspire many of their leaders. Germany's "Red Rudi" Dutschke and France's "Red Danny" Cohn-Bendit openly espouse anarchy. "In theory," says West German Political Scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, "the students are a species of Marxists, but in practice they are anarchists." Not since the anarchist surge in the Spanish Civil War has the Western world seen a movement so enthusiastically devoted to the destruction of law, order and society in the name of unlimited individual freedom.

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U.S. Historian Max Nomad believes that anarchists follow a "daydream of desperate romantics." Man's urge to do away with the apparatus that governs him is obviously almost as old as government itself. It is, perhaps, the ultimate Utopia—the idea of a community totally without constraint. Zeno, founder of the ancient Greek school of Stoic thought and anarchism's earliest forerunner, opposed Plato's ideal of state communism in favor of his own vision of a free community without government. Medieval Christianity was full of individualist sects that held that man's laws necessarily interfere with God's. One, the Nicolites, believing themselves blessed with the innocence of Paradise, refused to wear clothes; many lived in small, ungoverned communes, preaching love and sharing their goods and wives. These medieval children of love helped implant the seeds of Christianity's Protestant Reformation and set an example for today's hippie communes (not that these are much given to the study of history, medieval or otherwise).

The same strain of anti-authoritarianism ran through the writing of Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, eventually leading to a fresh, secular cult among the Romantics, notably in Rousseau, whose "natural man" was supposed to be superior to artificial government. One of the cries of the French Revolution, along with "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!", was "Anarchy!" A man who regarded himself as "the most complete expression of the Revolution," a self-educated French printer named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, became anarchism's most articulate spokesman. With the Revolution ringing in his ears, and using Rousseau's "natural society" for his lamplight, Proudhon wrote in passionate paradoxes. Authority, he said, fosters not order but disorder; laws create injustice; government leads to slavery. To his most famous question, framed in a book called What Is Property?, Proudhon answered in a single word: "Theft." Thus defining man's social institutions in terms of their abuses, he found the new ideal: anarchy, or ungoverned natural order. It was well before Darwin and Freud had drastically changed the sentimental view of nature.