ABSTRACT
From its historical beginnings, a linguistic ambiguity resides in the term anarchism. Anarchist negation is embodied by an event, or an agency of events, such as the group that rejects external pressures in the form of adjustment to a context of prevailing norms of superimposed rules. This ambiguity in anarchism has as its theoretical underpinning an idealization of natural man in contrast and in opposition to civilized man. The classical anarchists, Bakunin, Malatesta, Sorel and Kropotkin, share a concept of anarchism as a "way of life" rather than as a "view of the future". What is offered is a belief in "natural man" as more fundamental than and historically prior to "political man". The political doctrines of anarchism are totalistic. The utilitarian anarchism even of a Saint-Simon was not so much a form of rational consciousness as it was a form of embarrassment in search of guilt alleviation.
