Anarchy means without rule, authority, or sovereignty (from the Greek αναρχος, anarchos). Some international relations theorists, generally known as “realists,” claim that the world is “anarchic,” meaning it is disorderly. This term is thus used in a technical but not literal sense, because, of course, the world is not literally without (any) order. Philosophically and historically, political anarchy, or anarchism, is a broad umbrella term containing many conceptions, forms, schools, and movements, some of which are compatible with others, some which stand in contradiction to others. The one unifying principle of anarchism is the view that there should be no coercive state, nor other coercive forms of authority. Anarchism can be seen to have a long genealogy, stretching back to antiquity in the east and west (for whenever anyone speaks against collective coercive authority, he or she has spoken the anarchist doctrine).
Anarchism began to be theorized and argued, however, in modernity,...
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Minch, M. (2011). Anarchy. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_112
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