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anarchist rejections of the state 55
ought not to remain any longer under the present institutions,
which favour the development of slavishness. 26
In recent years Kropotkin’s critique has been revived by social
anarchists – amongst others – interested in stimulating grassroots,
community initiatives designed to bypass the authority of the state.
However, many anarchists – particularly modern anarchists – are as
exercised with the issue of expression as they are the problem of
dependency. From this perspective authority is linked to the
inculcation of moral values and behavioural norms. It is said to
inhibit individuals from exploring their uniqueness and to mould
them in ways that make them more likely to conform to the state’s
commands. This understanding of authority draws on a number of
sources, notably Stirner, Nietzsche (notwithstanding Nietzsche’s
dismissal of anarchism as a moralizing creed) and the Situationist
International (SI). For example, Daniel Guérin turned to Stirner to
appeal against conformity with family values and, more specifically,
to resist the homophobic and repressive sexual morality of
bourgeois rule. The feminist Dora Marsden also drew on Stirner’s
work to assert her continuous rebellion against all standards of
thought and behaviour. By authority she understood the desire to
categorize thought and purpose through the imposition of abstract
ideas – ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘property’, even ‘anarchy’. Her antiauthoritarian
creative urge was a refusal to sacrifice her individual
rebelliousness to any of the common causes these categories
expressed. Consequently, Marsden distinguished the ‘phenomenal
advance’ that individual women had made in liberating themselves
from categories like ‘woman’ from the ‘stationaryness and …
stagnation’ of the ‘Woman Movement’. The first was driven forward
by the energy of separate egos. The latter by an authority that sapped
those ‘streams of living energy’. In her view, the important lesson
taught by anarchism was that ‘individual soul’s development’ was
‘the supreme concern of its possessor’. 27
Anarchist Nietzscheans include writers as different as Emma
Goldman and Herbert Read. Goldman’s account of the battle against
authority was that it was a battle against ‘uniformity’ and public
opinion, not just oppression or persecution. For Read, Nietzsche
had importantly defined the individual as ‘a world in himself, selfcontained
and self-creative’, a ‘freely giving and freely receiving,
but essentially a free spirit’. 28 Though Read believed that Nietzsche
had not clearly understood how individuals could live together