Without Rulers
A history of anarchism from its 19th century origins to the movements reshaping the world today
Origins
The world comes from the ancient Greek word anarchos, meaning “without a rule.” It is one of those words that has been used so frequently as an insult, so reliably deployed to conjure images of chaos and destruction, that its actual meaning has become almost invisible beneath the weight of its misrepresentation.
Anarchism is not chaos. It is, at its core, a political philosophy built on a single, clarifying premise: the hierarchical authority. The state, coercive institutions, systems of domination in all their forms. is neither natural nor inevitable. That human beings are capable of organizing themselves, freely, and cooperatively, without being governed from above.
The modern form of that idea crystallized in the 19th century, though its roots run deeper. Traces of anarchist thought appear throughout history, from ancient Greece and China to Christian heretical movements of medieval Europe. But it was in 1840 that the philosophy found its first self-declared name. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French philosopher and economist, became the first political thinker to call himself an anarchist and invest the word with a positive meaning. His famous question, “What is property?” and his answer “Property is theft” announced a movement that would reshape political thought for the next two centuries.
The 19th Century: Building a Philosophy
Anarchism's 19th-century standard bearers were a beguiling, motley troop of globe-trotting intellectuals. Among them was Mikhail Bakunin, a russian thinker who developed the idea of collectivist anarchism: workers banded together as equals, wholly controlling the fruits of their labor. Bakunin also presciently warned against Karl Marx’s aspiration for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” writing in 1868 that “socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
Then came Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince turned revolutionary geographer whose most enduring contribution was the concept of mutual aid as a critique of social Darwinism and as an alternative to competing ideologies dominant in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. His argument was simple and radical: cooperation, not competition, was the deeper truth of how human societies survived and thrived. His 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, remains one of the most relevant to our current moment.
1871. The Paris Commune — a brief, radical experiment in worker self-governance that held the French capital for 72 days — became the defining event of the 19th-century anarchist imagination. Though it ended in brutal suppression, it proved that another way of organizing society was not merely theoretical. It had happened. It could happen again.
The 20th Century: From Revolution to Resistance
Alongside Marxism, anarchism was a significant part of the workers’ movement at hte ned of the 19th century. Modernism, industrialization, reaction to capitalism, and mass migration helped anarchism flourish and spread around the globe. The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s represented its most ambitious real-world experiment. Anarchist-led collectives in Catalonia briefly ran farms, factories, and schools on cooperative principles before being crushed by Franco’s fascist forces.
The mid-20th century brought a quieter period for anarchism as a formal movement, but its ideas never disappeared. They surfaced in the civil rights movement, in feminist organizing, in the anti-war protests of the 1960s and 70s. Anarchist groups and individuals became involved in a wide range of social and political movements, including the civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements. The Philosophy was less visible as a named ideology than as an animating spirit. The impulse toward horizontal organizing, direct action, and building outside broken systems.
Anarchism has never been one thing. It has been a current running beneath movements that didn’t always call themselves anarchist. Carrying the insistence that another world is possible, and that we don’t have to wait for permission to start building it.
THE 21ST CENTURY: MUTUAL AID REBORN
The modern resurgence of anarchist practice is less about manifestos and more about action. When the World Trade Organization met in Seattle in 1999, anarchists were at the forefront of organizing the mobilization against corporate globalization — a wide-scale anarchist renaissance that brought anarchist ideas and practices to large numbers of people. Networks of street medics, legal collectives, and direct action groups grew from those protests and have never fully disbanded.
Then came COVID-19 — and mutual aid networks proliferated across the country almost overnight. Neighbors organized grocery delivery for the immunocompromised. Community fridges appeared on street corners. Decentralized care networks emerged where official systems failed or never existed. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid has received increasing scholarly attention as a form of prefigurative politics. What Kropotkin described in 1902 was alive and visible in 2020 in a way that made the philosophy newly legible to millions of people who had never considered themselves anarchists.
Today, anarchism as a living tradition shows up in tenant organizing, prison abolition movements, decentralized mutual aid networks, and community care infrastructures built by and for people whom the state has consistently failed — including, prominently, trans and queer communities building their own health networks, housing cooperatives, and care systems in the face of targeted legislative attacks.
WHY IT STILL MATTERS
Anarchism has outlasted every prediction of its irrelevance because the problem it names — coercive hierarchy and the human suffering it produces — has not gone away. If anything, in 2026, it has sharpened.
The philosophy is not a blueprint. It does not offer a five-step plan or a party platform. What it offers instead is a way of seeing — a lens that asks, consistently and without apology: who does this system serve? Who built it? And what might we build instead, if we started from the premise that people are capable of caring for each other without being forced to?
That question, first asked seriously in the 1840s, has never been more worth sitting with than right now.
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