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predispositions, but on a society that scorned or toyed with their initial pleas for justice.
    In turning to the anarchist movement, I think we can see between it and the new turn taken by SNCC and CORE (or, more comprehensively still, by much of the New Left) significant affinities of style and thought. These are largely unconscious and unexplored; I’ve seen almost no overt references to them either in the movement’s official literature or in its unofficial pronouncements. Yet the affinities seem to me important.
    But first I should make clear that in speaking of anarchism as if it were a unified tradition, I’m necessarily oversimplifying. The anarchist movement contained a variety of contending factions, disparate personalities, and differing national patterns. The peasant anarchists, especially in Spain, were fiercely anti-industrialand antiurban 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. Michael Bakunin advocated violence; Leo Tolstoy abhorred it. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon believed in retaining individual ownership of certain forms of property; Enrico Malatesta called for its abolition in every form. Max Stirner’s ideal was the egotist engaged in the war of “each against all”; Prince Peter 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 that 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 parent, teacher, lawyer, or priest. The anarchists were against authority, they said, because they were for life—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. They insisted that the authoritarian upbringing most children were subjected to stifled spontaneity, curiosity, initiative, individuality—in other words, prevented possession of themselves. If they could be raised free—freed economically from the struggle for existence, intellectually freed from the tyranny of custom, emotionally freed from the need to revenge their own mutilation by harming others—they could express those “natural” feelings of fraternity and mutual assistance innate to the human species.
    The anarchists’ distrust of the state as an instrument of oppression, as the tool by which the privileged and powerful maintained themselves, is generally associated with nineteenth-century classical liberalism, with John Stuart Mill and, in this country, with the Jeffersonians. But by the end of the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth, liberals began to regard the state as an allyrather than an enemy; only the national government, it was felt, had the power to accomplish regulation and reform, to prevent small groups of self-interested men from exploiting their fellows.
    Today the pendulum has begun to swing back again. In the liberal—but more especially in the radical—camp, the federal government has lost some of its appeal; veneration is giving way to distrust; from an instrument of liberation, the central government is once more being viewed as a threat to individuality. This shift is the result of accumulated disappointments. The regulatory agencies set up to supervise the monopolists have been discovered to be operating in the interests of the monopolists; farm-subsidy programs have been exposed as benefiting the richer operators while dispossessing