SOURCE: “Three Sources of Anarchism,” in Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 6-38.

In the following essay, Crowder illuminates three major sources of anarchist thought: the concept of the moral and rational perfectibility of man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of civilization, and the optimism of Enlightenment science.

The history of Western political thought contains many anti-authoritarian currents. The vision of a golden age without government is a favourite theme from Ovid to Rousseau, and those writers who have advocated release from the authority of Church and State are too numerous to mention.¹ Only in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, however, does anarchism (along with the other great modern ideologies: liberalism, socialism, conservatism) emerge as a systematic political theory. As David Miller puts it, for inchoate defiance to crystallize into a reasoned challenge to the existing order and...