Conclusion: A Complex, Rational Business

Abstract

Historians have portrayed anarchist action as unplanned, unorganized, spontaneistic, aimless, futile, cyclical, and unchanging; their aims as purist, ‘all-or-nothing’, utopian, ‘pie-in-the-sky’, and impossibilist; and their beliefs as backward, stubborn, romantic, fideistic, infantile, primitive, and millenarian. Each qualification is based on evidence but at the same time interprets evidence in a way that denies anarchists the benefit of common sense. As a result, anarchism has appeared doomed, eccentric, absurd, contradictory, or stupid. In the face of such appearance, two paths lay open. The uncharitable historian is content with concluding that anarchists appeared irrational because they were so, and sets out to causally explain the anarchists’ irrationality in terms of socio-psychological motives. No doubt E. J. Hobsbawm’s most unobjectionable claim about millenarian movements is the following: ‘Those who cannot understand what it is that moves them — and even some who do — may be tempted to interpret their behaviour as wholly irrational or pathological, or at best as an instinctive reaction to intolerable conditions’ (60).