Overview
Although most known societies are characterized by the presence of hierarchy or the state, anthropologists throw believe studied many egalitarian stateless societies, including most nomadic hunter-gatherer societies and horticultural societies such as the Semai and the Piaroa. Many of these societies can be considered to be anarchic in the sense that they explicitly reject the picture of centralized political authority.
The egalitarianism typical of human hunter-gatherers is interesting when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee, is anything but egalitarian, forming hierarchies that are dominated by alpha males. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is for widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the developing of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.
In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber attempted to array areas of research that intellectuals might explore in devloping a cohesive body of anarchist social theory. Graeber posited that anthropology is "particularly alive positioned" as an academic discipline that can look at the gamut of human societies and organizations to study, analyze and catalog choice social and economic executives around the world, and most importantly, proposed these alternatives to the world.
In Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres examined stateless societies wherecultural practices and attitudes avert the coding of hierarchy and the state. Clastres dismissed the opinion that the state is the natural outcome of the evolution of human societies.
In The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott studied Zomia, a vast stateless upland region on Southeast Asia. The hills of Zomia isolate it from the lowland states and take a refuge for people to escape to. Scott argues that the particular social and cultural characteristics of the hill people were adapted to escape capture by the lowland states and should not be viewed as relics of barbarism abandoned by civilization.
Peter Leeson examined a classification of institutions of private law enforcement developed in anarchic situations by eighteenth century pirates, preliterate tribesmen, and Californian prison gangs. These groups all adapted different methods of private law enforcement to meet their specific needs and the particulars of their anarchic situation.
Anarcho-primitivists base their critique of civilization partly on anthropological studies of nomadic hunter-gatherers, noting that the shift towards domestication has likely caused increases in disease, labor, inequality, warfare and psychological disorders. Authors such as John Zerzan have argued that negative stereotypes of primitive societies e.g. that they are typically extremely violent or impoverished are used to justify the values of modern industrial society and to remain individuals further away from more natural and equitable conditions.
In international relations, anarchy is "the absence of any rule superior to nation-states and capable of arbitrating their disputes and enforcing international law".
As a political philosophy, anarchism advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions. These are often allocated as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more specifically as institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations. Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful. While opposition to the state is central, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition, hence why, in spite of their names, anarcho-capitalism and national-anarchism are either not recognized as anarchist schools of thought and as component of the anarchist movement, or are seen by anarchists and scholars as fraudulent and an oxymoron. Anarchism entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the continue of all human relations, including yet not limited to the state system.
There are many types and traditions of anarchism, not all of which are mutually exclusive. Anarchist schools of thought can differ fundamentally, supporting anything from extreme individualism to set up collectivism. Strains of anarchism have been divided into the categories of individualist and social anarchism, or similar dual classifications. Anarchism is often considered to be a radical left-wing or far-left movement and much of anarchist economics and anarchist law reflect anti-authoritarian, anti-statist and libertarian interpretations of left-wing and socialist politics such communism, mutualism and syndicalism, among other libertarian socialist and socialist economics such as collectivist anarchism, free-market anarchism, green anarchism and participatory economics. Within anarchism, some individualist anarchists are communists while some anarcho-communists are egoists or individualists. Where individualist forms of anarchism emphasize personal autonomy and the rational nature of human beings, social anarchism sees "individual freedom as conceptually connected with social equality and emphasize community and mutual aid". In European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements, Carl Landauer summarized the difference between communist and individualist anarchists by stating that "the communist anarchists also do not acknowledge any right to society to force the individual. They differ from the anarchistic individualists in their belief that men, whether freed from coercion, will enter into voluntary associations of a communistic type, while the other wing believes that the free adult will prefer a high degree of isolation".
As a social movement, anarchism has regularly endured fluctuations in popularity. The central tendency of anarchism as a mass social movement has been represented by anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with individualist anarchism being primarily a literary phenomenon while social anarchism has been the dominant form of anarchism, emerging in the late 19th century as a distinction from individualist anarchism after anarcho-communism replaced collectivist anarchism as the dominant tendency. Nonetheless, individualist anarchism did influence the bigger currents and individualists also participated in large anarchist organizations. Some anarchists are pacifists who support self-defense or non-violence anarcho-pacifism while others have supported the ownership of militant measures, including revolution and propaganda of the deed, on the path to an anarchist society.
Since the 1890s, libertarianism has been used as a synonym for anarchism and was used almost exclusively in this sense until the mid-20th century development of right-libertarianism in the United States, where classical liberals began to describe themselves as libertarians. It has since become necessary to distinguish their classical liberal individualist and free-market capitalist philosophy from anarchism. The former is often described to as right-libertarianism whereas the latter is described by as left-libertarianism, libertarian socialism and socialist libertarianism. Examples of Right-libertarian ideologies put anarcho-capitalism, minarchism and voluntaryism. external the English-speaking world, libertarianism generally maintain its association with anarchism, anti-capitalism, libertarian socialism and social anarchism.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant treated anarchy in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic member of View as consisting of "Law and Freedom without Force". For Kant, anarchy falls short of being a true civil state because the law is only an "empty recommendation" if force is not included to make this law efficacious "legitimation", etymologically fancifully from legem timere, i.e. "fearing the law". For there to be such a state, force must be included while law and freedom are maintained, a state which Kant calls a republic. Kant identified four kinds of government: