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born 1759 , died 1797

Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" in 1792. She influenced Shelley to write and how she shaped her writing. She wanted to live by her mothers principles.

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Mary Wollstonecraft (, ; 27 April 1759 - 10 September 1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.

During her brief career she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. She died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who became an accomplished writer and the author of Frankenstein.

Wollstonecraft's widower published a (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important.

Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London. She was the second of the seven children of Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft. Although her family had a comfortable income when she was a child, her father gradually squandered it on speculative projects. Consequently, the family became financially unstable and they were frequently forced to move during Wollstonecraft's youth. The family's financial situation eventually became so dire that Wollstonecraft's father compelled her to turn over money that she would have inherited at her maturity. Moreover, he was apparently a violent man who would beat his wife in drunken rages. As a teenager, Wollstonecraft used to lie outside the door of her mother's bedroom to protect her. Wollstonecraft played a similar maternal role for her sisters, Everina and Eliza, throughout her life. In a defining moment in 1784, she persuaded Eliza, who was suffering from what was probably postpartum depression, to leave her husband and infant; Wollstonecraft made all of the arrangements for Eliza to flee, demonstrating her willingness to challenge social norms. The human costs, however, were severe: her sister suffered social condemnation and, because she could not remarry, was doomed to a life of poverty and hard work.

Two friendships shaped Wollstonecraft's early life. The first was with Jane Arden in Beverley. The two frequently read books together and attended lectures presented by Arden's father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist. Wollstonecraft revelled in the intellectual atmosphere of the Arden household and valued her friendship with Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of being emotionally possessive. Wollstonecraft wrote to her: "I have formed romantic notions of friendship ... I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none." In some of Wollstonecraft's letters to Arden, she reveals the volatile and depressive emotions that would haunt her throughout her life. The second and more important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, introduced to Wollstonecraft by the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became parental figures to her; Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her mind.

Unhappy with her home life, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. However, Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an experience she drew on when describing the drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787). In 1780 she returned home upon being called back to care for her dying mother. Rather than return to Dawson's employ after the death of her mother, Wollstonecraft moved in with the Bloods. She realised during the two years she spent with the family that she had idealised Blood, who was more invested in traditional feminine values than was Wollstonecraft. But Wollstonecraft remained dedicated to Fanny and her family throughout her life, frequently giving pecuniary assistance to Blood's brother.

Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they made plans to rent rooms together and support each other emotionally and financially, but this dream collapsed under economic realities. In order to make a living, Wollstonecraft, her sisters and Blood set up a school together in Newington Green, a Dissenting community. Blood soon became engaged and, after her marriage, moved to Lisbon, Portugal with her husband, Hugh Skeys, in hopes that it would improve her health which had always been precarious. Despite the change of surroundings Blood's health further deteriorated when she became pregnant, and in 1785 Wollstonecraft left the school and followed Blood to nurse her, but to no avail. Moreover, her abandonment of the school led to its failure. Blood's death devastated Wollstonecraft and was part of the inspiration for her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788).

"The first of a new genus"

Wollstonecraft in 1790-91, by John Opie

Frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life engraved by William Blake

After Blood's death in 1785, Wollstonecraft's friends helped her obtain a position as governess to the daughters of the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland. Although she could not get along with Lady Kingsborough, the children found her an inspiring instructor; one of the daughters, Margaret King, would later say she "had freed her mind from all superstitions". Some of Wollstonecraft's experiences during this year would make their way into her only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788).

Frustrated by the limited career options open to respectable yet poor women-an impediment which Wollstonecraft eloquently describes in the chapter of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters entitled "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune"-she decided, after only a year as a governess, to embark upon a career as an author. This was a radical choice, since, at the time, few women could support themselves by writing. As she wrote to her sister Everina in 1787, she was trying to become "the first of a new genus". She moved to London and, assisted by the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, found a place to live and work to support herself. She learned French and German and translated texts, most notably Of the Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker and Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. She also wrote reviews, primarily of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft's intellectual universe expanded during this time, not only from the reading that she did for her reviews but also from the company she kept: she attended Johnson's famous dinners and met the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other. Godwin had come to hear Paine, but Wollstonecraft assailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on nearly every subject. Johnson himself, however, became much more than a friend; she described him in her letters as a father and a brother.

In London, Wollstonecraft lived on Dolben Street, in Southwark; an up-and-coming area following the opening of the first Blackfriars Bridge in 1769. While in London, she formed connections with members of the Blue Stockings Society and pursued a relationship with the artist Henry Fuseli, even though he was already married. She was, she wrote, enraptured by his genius, "the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy". She proposed a platonic living arrangement with Fuseli and his wife, but Fuseli's wife was appalled, and he broke off the relationship with Wollstonecraft. After Fuseli's rejection, Wollstonecraft decided to travel to France to escape the humiliation of the incident, and to participate in the revolutionary events that she had just celebrated in her recent Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). She had written the Rights of Men in response to the Whig MP Edmund Burke's politically conservative critique of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and it made her famous overnight. Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790, and so angered Wollstonecraft that she spent the rest of the month writing her rebuttal. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke was published on 29 November 1790, initially anonymously; the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published on 18 December, and this time the publisher revealed Wollstonecraft as the author.

Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a "glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe". Against Burke's dismissal of the Third Estate as men of no account, Wollstonecraft wrote, "Time may show, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy". About the events of 5-6 October 1789, when the royal family was marched from Versailles to Paris by a group of angry housewives, Burke praised Queen Marie Antoinette as a symbol of the refined elegance of the ancien régime, who was surrounded by "furies from hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women". Wollstonecraft by contrast wrote of the same event: "Probably you [Burke] mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education".

Wollstonecraft was compared with such leading lights as the theologian and controversialist Joseph Priestley and Paine, whose Rights of Man (1791) would prove to be the most popular of the responses to Burke. She pursued the ideas she had outlined in Rights of Men in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most famous and influential work. Wollstonecraft's fame extended across the English channel, for when the French statesmen Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London in 1792, he visited her, during which she asked that French girls be given the same right to an education that French boys were being offered by the new regime in France.

10 August attack on the Tuileries Palace; French revolutionary violence spreads

Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 and arrived about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined. Britain and France were on the brink of war when she left for Paris, and many advised her not to go. France was in turmoil. She sought out other British visitors such as Helen Maria Williams and joined the circle of expatriates then in the city. During her time in Paris, Wollstonecraft associated mostly with the moderate Girondins rather than the more radical Jacobins. It was indicative that when Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the United Irishman, encountered her in the city in 1794 it was at a post-Terror festival in honour of the moderate revolutionary leader Mirabeau, who had been a great hero for Irish and English radicals before his death (from natural causes) in April 1791.

On 26 December 1792, Wollstonecraft saw the former king, Louis XVI, being taken to be tried before the National Assembly, and much to her own surprise, found "the tears flow[ing] insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed".

France declared war on Britain in February 1793. Wollstonecraft tried to leave France for Switzerland but was denied permission. In March, the Jacobin-dominated Committee of Public Safety came to power, instituting a totalitarian regime meant to mobilise France for the first " total war".

Life became very difficult for foreigners in France. At first, they were put under police surveillance and, to get a residency permit, had to produce six written statements from Frenchmen testifying to their loyalty to the republic. Then, on 12 April 1793, all foreigners were forbidden to leave France. Despite her sympathy for the revolution, life for Wollstonecraft become very uncomfortable, all the more so as the Girondins had lost out to the Jacobins. Some of Wollstonecraft's French friends lost their heads to the guillotine as the Jacobins set out to annihilate their enemies.

Gilbert Imlay, the Reign of Terror, and her first child

Having just written the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was determined to put her ideas to the test, and in the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French Revolution, she attempted her most experimental romantic attachment yet: she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer. Wollstonecraft put her own principles in practice by sleeping with Imlay even though they were not married, which was unacceptable behaviour from a "respectable" British woman. Whether or not she was interested in marriage, he was not, and she appears to have fallen in love with an idealisation of the man. Despite her rejection of the sexual component of relationships in the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft discovered that Imlay awakened her interest in sex.

Wollstonecraft was to a certain extent disillusioned by what she saw in France, writing that the people under the republic still behaved slavishly to those who held power while the government remained "venal" and "brutal". Despite her disenchantment, Wollstonecraft wrote:

I cannot yet give up the hope, that a fairer day is dawning on Europe, though I must hesitatingly observe, that little is to be expected from the narrow principle of commerce, which seems everywhere to be shoving aside the point of honour of the noblesse [nobility]. For the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible; with this aggravation, that, fearing to return to obscurity, after having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero, or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavors to make hay while the sun shines.

Wollstonecraft was offended by the Jacobins' treatment of women. They refused to grant women equal rights, denounced " Amazons", and made it clear that women were supposed to conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal of helpers to men. On 16 October 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined; among her charges and convictions, she was found guilty of committing incest with her son. Though Wollstonecraft disliked the former queen, she was troubled that the Jacobins would make Marie Antoinette's alleged perverse sexual acts one of the central reasons for the French people to hate her.

As the daily arrests and executions of the Reign of Terror began, Wollstonecraft came under suspicion. She was, after all, a British citizen known to be a friend of leading Girondins. On 31 October 1793, most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted. By this time, Imlay was taking advantage of the British blockade of France, which had caused shortages and worsened ever-growing inflation, by chartering ships to bring food and soap from America and dodge the British Royal Navy, goods that he could sell at a premium to Frenchmen who still had money. Imlay's blockade-running gained the respect and support of some Jacobins, ensuring, as he had hoped, his freedom during the Terror. To protect Wollstonecraft from arrest, Imlay made a false statement to the U.S. embassy in Paris that he had married her, automatically making her an American citizen. Some of her friends were not so lucky; many, like Thomas Paine, were arrested, and some were even guillotined. Her sisters believed she had been imprisoned.[citation needed ]

Wollstonecraft called life under the Jacobins "nightmarish". There were gigantic daytime parades requiring everyone to show themselves and lustily cheer lest they be suspected of inadequate commitment to the republic, as well as nighttime police raids to arrest 'enemies of the republic'. In a March 1794 letter to her sister Everina, Wollstonecraft wrote:

It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind ... death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country-I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.

Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on 14 May 1794 she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, naming her after perhaps her closest friend. Wollstonecraft was overjoyed; she wrote to a friend, "My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Woman" (emphasis hers). She continued to write avidly, despite not only her pregnancy and the burdens of being a new mother alone in a foreign country, but also the growing tumult of the French Revolution. While at Le Havre in northern France, she wrote a history of the early revolution, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which was published in London in December 1794. Imlay, unhappy with the domestic-minded and maternal Wollstonecraft, eventually left her. He promised that he would return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but his delays in writing to her and his long absences convinced Wollstonecraft that he had found another woman. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, which most critics explain as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman, while others say they resulted from her circumstances-a foreign woman alone with an infant in the middle of a revolution that had seen good friends imprisoned or executed.

The fall of the Jacobins and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution

In July 1794, Wollstonecraft welcomed the fall of the Jacobins, predicting it would be followed with a restoration of freedom of the press in France, which led her to return to Paris. In August 1794, Imlay departed for London and promised to return soon. In 1793, the British government had begun a crackdown on radicals, suspending civil liberties, imposing drastic censorship, and trying for treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolution, which led Wollstonecraft to fear she would be imprisoned if she returned.

The winter of 1794-95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances. The river Seine froze that winter, which made it impossible for ships to bring food and coal to Paris, leading to widespread starvation and deaths from the cold in the city. Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, declaring she still had faith in the revolution and did not wish to return to Britain. After she left France on 7 April 1795, she continued to refer to herself as "Mrs. Imlay", even to her sisters, in order to bestow legitimacy upon her child.

The British historian Tom Furniss called An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's books. It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989. Later generations were more interested in her feminist writings than in her account of the French Revolution, which Furniss has called her "best work". Wollstonecraft was not trained as a historian, but she used all sorts of journals, letters and documents recounting how ordinary people in France reacted to the revolution. She was trying to counteract what Furniss called the "hysterical" anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolution as due to the entire French nation's going mad. Wollstonecraft argued instead that the revolution arose from a set of social, economic and political conditions that left no other way out of the crisis that gripped France in 1789.

An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was a difficult balancing act for Wollstonecraft. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793-94. Edmund Burke had ended his Reflections on the Revolution in France with reference to the events of 5-6 October 1789, when a group of women from Paris forced the French royal family from the Palace of Versailles to Paris. Burke called the women "furies from hell", while Wollstonecraft defended them as ordinary housewives angry about the lack of bread to feed their families. Against Burke's idealised portrait of Marie Antoinette as a noble victim of a mob, Wollstonecraft portrayed the queen as a femme fatale, a seductive, scheming and dangerous woman. Wollstonecraft argued that the values of the aristocracy corrupted women in a monarchy because women's main purpose in such a society was to bear sons to continue a dynasty, which essentially reduced a woman's value to only her womb. Moreover, Wollstonecraft pointed out that unless a queen was a queen regnant, most queens were queen consorts, which meant a woman had to exercise influence via her husband or son, encouraging her to become more and more manipulative. Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, by emphasising a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, making the queen into a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien régime.

In Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (1799) the historian John Adolphus, F.S.A., condemned Wollstonecraft's work as a "rhapsody of libellous declamations" and took particular offense at her depiction of Louis XVI.

England and William Godwin

Seeking Imlay, Wollstonecraft returned to London in April 1795, but he rejected her. In May 1795 she attempted to commit suicide, probably with laudanum, but Imlay saved her life (although it is unclear how). In a last attempt to win back Imlay, she embarked upon some business negotiations for him in Scandinavia, trying to locate a Norwegian captain who had absconded with silver that Imlay was trying to get past the British blockade of France. Wollstonecraft undertook this hazardous trip with only her young daughter and Marguerite, her maid. She recounted her travels and thoughts in letters to Imlay, many of which were eventually published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796. When she returned to England and came to the full realisation that her relationship with Imlay was over, she attempted suicide for the second time, leaving a note for Imlay:

Let my wrongs sleep with me! Soon, very soon, shall I be at peace. When you receive this, my burning head will be cold ... I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek. God bless you! May you never know by experience what you have made me endure. Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.

Portrait of William Godwin by James Northcote, oil on canvas, 1802

She then went out on a rainy night and "to make her clothes heavy with water, she walked up and down about half an hour" before jumping into the River Thames, but a stranger saw her jump and rescued her. Wollstonecraft considered her suicide attempt deeply rational, writing after her rescue,

I have only to lament, that, when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back to life and misery. But a fixed determination is not to be baffled by disappointment; nor will I allow that to be a frantic attempt, which was one of the calmest acts of reason. In this respect, I am only accountable to myself. Did I care for what is termed reputation, it is by other circumstances that I should be dishonoured.

Gradually, Wollstonecraft returned to her literary life, becoming involved with Joseph Johnson's circle again, in particular with Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons through William Godwin. Godwin and Wollstonecraft's unique courtship began slowly, but it eventually became a passionate love affair. Godwin had read her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and later wrote that "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration." Once Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they decided to marry so that their child would be legitimate. Their marriage revealed the fact that Wollstonecraft had never been married to Imlay, and as a result she and Godwin lost many friends. Godwin was further criticised because he had advocated the abolition of marriage in his philosophical treatise Political Justice. After their marriage on 29 March 1797, Godwin and Wollstonecraft moved to 29 The Polygon, Somers Town. Godwin rented an apartment 20 doors away at 17 Evesham Buildings in Chalton Street as a study, so that they could both still retain their independence; they often communicated by letter. By all accounts, theirs was a happy and stable, though brief, relationship.

Birth of Mary, death

Title page for Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)

On 30 August 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary. Although the delivery seemed to go well initially, the placenta broke apart during the birth and became infected; childbed fever (post-partum infection) was a common and often fatal occurrence in the 18th century. After several days of agony, Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on 10 September. Godwin was devastated: he wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft, "I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again." She was buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her tombstone reads "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born 27 April 1759: Died 10 September 1797."

Posthumous, Godwin's Memoirs

In January 1798 Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Although Godwin felt that he was portraying his wife with love, compassion, and sincerity, many readers were shocked that he would reveal Wollstonecraft's illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts. The Romantic poet Robert Southey accused him of "the want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked" and vicious satires such as The Unsex'd Females were published. Godwin's Memoirs portrays Wollstonecraft as a woman deeply invested in feeling who was balanced by his reason and as more of a religious sceptic than her own writings suggest. Godwin's views of Wollstonecraft were perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century and resulted in poems such as "Wollstonecraft and Fuseli" by British poet Robert Browning and that by William Roscoe which includes the lines:

Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life
As daughter, sister, mother, friend, and wife;
But harder still, thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourn'd by Godwin with a heart of stone.

In 1851, Wollstonecraft's remains were moved by her grandson Sir Percy Shelley, 3rd Baronet, to his family tomb in St Peter's Church, Bournemouth.

Green plaque on Newington Green Primary School, near the site of a school that Wollstonecraft, her sisters (Everina and Eliza), and Fanny Blood set up; the plaque was unveiled in 2011.

Blue plaque at 45 Dolben Street, Southwark, where she lived from 1788; unveiled in 2004 by Claire Tomalin[77]

Plaque on Oakshott Court, near the site of her final home, The Polygon, Somers Town, London

Wollstonecraft has what scholar Cora Kaplan labelled in 2002 a 'curious' legacy that has evolved over time: "for an author-activist adept in many genres ... up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft's life has been read much more closely than her writing". After the devastating effect of Godwin's Memoirs, Wollstonecraft's reputation lay in tatters for nearly a century; she was pilloried by such writers as Maria Edgeworth, who patterned the "freakish" Harriet Freke in (1801) after her. Other novelists such as Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, and Jane West created similar figures, all to teach a "moral lesson" to their readers. (Hays had been a close friend, and helped nurse her in her dying days.)

In contrast, there was one writer of the generation after Wollstonecraft who apparently did not share the judgmental views of her contemporaries. Jane Austen never mentioned the earlier woman by name, but several of her novels contain positive allusions to Wollstonecraft's work. The American literary scholar Anne K. Mellor notes several examples. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Wickham seems to be based upon the sort of man Wollstonecraft claimed that standing armies produce, while the sarcastic remarks of protagonist Elizabeth Bennet about "female accomplishments" closely echo Wollstonecraft's condemnation of these activities. The balance a woman must strike between feelings and reason in Sense and Sensibility follows what Wollstonecraft recommended in her novel Mary, while the moral equivalence Austen drew in Mansfield Park between slavery and the treatment of women in society back home tracks one of Wollstonecraft's favourite arguments. In Persuasion, Austen's characterisation of Anne Eliot (as well as her late mother before her) as better qualified than her father to manage the family estate also echoes a Wollstonecraft thesis.

Scholar Virginia Sapiro states that few read Wollstonecraft's works during the nineteenth century as "her attackers implied or stated that no self-respecting woman would read her work". (Still, as Craciun points out, new editions of Rights of Woman appeared in the UK in the 1840s and in the US in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.) If readers were few, then many were inspired; one such reader was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at age 12 and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education. Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Americans who met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, discovered they both had read Wollstonecraft, and they agreed upon the need for (what became) the Seneca Falls Convention, an influential women's rights meeting held in 1848. Another woman who read Wollstonecraft was George Eliot, a prolific writer of reviews, articles, novels, and translations. In 1855, she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women, comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights activist who, like Wollstonecraft, had travelled to the Continent and had been involved in the struggle for reform (in this case the 1849 Roman Republic)-and she had a child by a man without marrying him. Wollstonecraft's children's tales were adapted by Charlotte Mary Yonge in 1870.

Wollstonecraft's work was exhumed with the rise of the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. First was an attempt at rehabilitation in 1879 with the publication of Wollstonecraft's Letters to Imlay, with prefatory memoir by Charles Kegan Paul. Then followed the first full-length biography, which was by Elizabeth Robins Pennell; it appeared in 1884 as part of a series by the Roberts Brothers on famous women. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a suffragist and later president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, wrote the introduction to the centenary edition (i.e. 1892) of the Rights of Woman; it cleansed the memory of Wollstonecraft and claimed her as the foremother of the struggle for the vote. By 1898, Wollstonecraft was the subject of a first doctoral thesis and its resulting book.

With the advent of the modern feminist movement, women as politically dissimilar from each other as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman embraced Wollstonecraft's life story. By 1929 Woolf described Wollstonecraft-her writing, arguments, and "experiments in living"-as immortal: "she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living". Others, however, continued to decry Wollstonecraft's lifestyle. A biography published in 1932 refers to recent reprints of her works, incorporating new research, and to a "study" in 1911, a play in 1922, and another biography in 1924. Interest in her never completely died, with full-length biographies in 1937 and 1951.

A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, London

With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence. Their fortunes reflected that of the second wave of the North American feminist movement itself; for example, in the early 1970s, six major biographies of Wollstonecraft were published that presented her "passionate life in apposition to [her] radical and rationalist agenda". The feminist artwork The Dinner Party, first exhibited in 1979, features a place setting for Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft's work has also had an effect on feminism outside academia. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political writer and former Muslim who is critical of Islam in general and its dictates regarding women in particular, cited the Rights of Woman in her autobiography and wrote that she was "inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights". British writer Caitlin Moran, author of the best-selling How to Be a Woman, described herself as "half Wollstonecraft" to the New Yorker. She has also inspired more widely. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and philosopher who first identified the missing women of Asia, draws repeatedly on Wollstonecraft as a political philosopher in The Idea of Justice.

In 2009, Wollstonecraft was selected by the Royal Mail for their "Eminent Britons" commemorative postage stamp issue. Several plaques have been erected to honour Wollstonecraft. A commemorative sculpture, A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft by Maggi Hambling, was unveiled on 10 November 2020; it was criticised for its symbolic depiction rather than a lifelike representation of Wollstonecraft, which commentators felt represented stereotypical notions of beauty and the diminishing of women. In November 2020, it was announced that Trinity College Dublin, whose library had previously held forty busts, all of them of men, was commissioning four new busts of women, one of whom would be Wollstonecraft.

Major works

Educational works

First page of the first edition of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)

The majority of Wollstonecraft's early productions are about education; she assembled an anthology of literary extracts "for the improvement of young women" entitled The Female Reader and she translated two children's works, Maria Geertruida van de Werken de Cambon's Young Grandison and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of Morality. Her own writings also addressed the topic. In both her conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and her children's book Original Stories from Real Life (1788), Wollstonecraft advocates educating children into the emerging middle-class ethos: self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and social contentment. Both books also emphasise the importance of teaching children to reason, revealing Wollstonecraft's intellectual debt to the educational views of seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. However, the prominence she affords religious faith and innate feeling distinguishes her work from his and links it to the discourse of sensibility popular at the end of the eighteenth century. Both texts also advocate the education of women, a controversial topic at the time and one which she would return to throughout her career, most notably in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft argues that well-educated women will be good wives and mothers and ultimately contribute positively to the nation.

Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

Published in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was a defence of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England, and an attack on Wollstonecraft's friend, the Rev. Richard Price at the Newington Green Unitarian Church, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. Hers was the first response in a pamphlet war that subsequently became known as the Revolution Controversy, in which Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1792) became the rallying cry for reformers and radicals.[failed verification ]

Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it. In a famous passage in the Reflections, Burke had lamented: "I had thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her [ Marie Antoinette] with insult.-But the age of chivalry is gone." Most of Burke's detractors deplored what they viewed as theatrical pity for the French queen-a pity they felt was at the expense of the people. Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language. By redefining the sublime and the beautiful, terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), she undermined his rhetoric as well as his argument. Burke had associated the beautiful with weakness and femininity and the sublime with strength and masculinity; Wollstonecraft turns these definitions against him, arguing that his theatrical tableaux turn Burke's readers-the citizens-into weak women who are swayed by show. In her first unabashedly feminist critique, which Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia L. Johnson argues remains unsurpassed in its argumentative force, Wollstonecraft indicts Burke's defence of an unequal society founded on the passivity of women.[need quotation to verify ]

In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft invokes an emerging middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, she believed in progress and derides Burke for relying on tradition and custom. She argues for rationality, pointing out that Burke's system would lead to the continuation of slavery, simply because it had been an ancestral tradition. She describes an idyllic country life in which each family can have a farm that will just suit its needs. Wollstonecraft contrasts her utopian picture of society, drawn with what she says is genuine feeling, to Burke's false feeling.

The Rights of Men was Wollstonecraft's first overtly political work, as well as her first feminist work; as Johnson contends, "it seems that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights of Men she discovered the subject that would preoccupy her for the rest of her career." It was this text that made her a well-known writer.

Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society and then proceeds to redefine that position, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men. Large sections of the Rights of Woman respond vitriolically to conduct book writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory and educational philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wanted to deny women an education. (Rousseau famously argues in (1762) that women should be educated for the pleasure of men.)

Title page from the first American edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Wollstonecraft states that currently many women are silly and superficial (she refers to them, for example, as "spaniels" and "toys"), but argues that this is not because of an innate deficiency of mind but rather because men have denied them access to education. Wollstonecraft is intent on illustrating the limitations that women's deficient educations have placed on them; she writes: "Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." She implies that, without the encouragement young women receive from an early age to focus their attention on beauty and outward accomplishments, women could achieve much more.

While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, such as morality, she does not explicitly state that men and women are equal. What she does claim is that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. However, such claims of equality stand in contrast to her statements respecting the superiority of masculine strength and valour. Wollstonecraft famously and ambiguously writes: "Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequently, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God." Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the sexes have since made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern feminist, particularly since the word did not come into existence until the 1890s.

One of Wollstonecraft's most scathing critiques in the Rights of Woman is of false and excessive sensibility, particularly in women. She argues that women who succumb to sensibility are "blown about by every momentary gust of feeling" and because they are "the prey of their senses" they cannot think rationally. In fact, she claims, they do harm not only to themselves but to the entire civilisation: these are not women who can help refine a civilisation-a popular eighteenth-century idea-but women who will destroy it. Wollstonecraft does not argue that reason and feeling should act independently of each other; rather, she believes that they should inform each other.

In addition to her larger philosophical arguments, Wollstonecraft also lays out a specific educational plan. In the twelfth chapter of the Rights of Woman, "On National Education", she argues that all children should be sent to a "country day school" as well as given some education at home "to inspire a love of home and domestic pleasures." She also maintains that schooling should be co-educational, arguing that men and women, whose marriages are "the cement of society", should be "educated after the same model."

Wollstonecraft addresses her text to the middle-class, which she describes as the "most natural state", and in many ways the Rights of Woman is inflected by a bourgeois view of the world. It encourages modesty and industry in its readers and attacks the uselessness of the aristocracy. But Wollstonecraft is not necessarily a friend to the poor; for example, in her national plan for education, she suggests that, after the age of nine, the poor, except for those who are brilliant, should be separated from the rich and taught in another school.

Otto Scholderer's Young Girl Reading (1883); in both Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft criticises women who imagine themselves as sentimental heroines.

Both of Wollstonecraft's novels criticise what she viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage and its deleterious effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), the eponymous heroine is forced into a loveless marriage for economic reasons; she fulfils her desire for love and affection outside marriage with two passionate romantic friendships, one with a woman and one with a man. Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), an unfinished novel published posthumously and often considered Wollstonecraft's most radical feminist work, revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband; like Mary, Maria also finds fulfilment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate and a friendship with one of her keepers. Neither of Wollstonecraft's novels depict successful marriages, although she posits such relationships in the Rights of Woman. At the end of Mary, the heroine believes she is going "to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage", presumably a positive state of affairs.

Both of Wollstonecraft's novels also critique the discourse of sensibility, a moral philosophy and aesthetic that had become popular at the end of the eighteenth century. Mary is itself a novel of sensibility and Wollstonecraft attempts to use the tropes of that genre to undermine sentimentalism itself, a philosophy she believed was damaging to women because it encouraged them to rely overmuch on their emotions. In The Wrongs of Woman the heroine's indulgence on romantic fantasies fostered by novels themselves is depicted as particularly detrimental.

Female friendships are central to both of Wollstonecraft's novels, but it is the friendship between Maria and Jemima, the servant charged with watching over her in the insane asylum, that is the most historically significant. This friendship, based on a sympathetic bond of motherhood, between an upper-class woman and a lower-class woman is one of the first moments in the history of feminist literature that hints at a cross-class argument, that is, that women of different economic positions have the same interests because they are women.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a deeply personal travel narrative. The 25 letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity to musings on her relationship with Imlay (although he is not referred to by name in the text). Using the rhetoric of the sublime, Wollstonecraft explores the relationship between the self and society. Reflecting the strong influence of Rousseau, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark shares the themes of the French philosopher's Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782): "the search for the source of human happiness, the stoic rejection of material goods, the ecstatic embrace of nature, and the essential role of sentiment in understanding". While Rousseau ultimately rejects society, however, Wollstonecraft celebrates domestic scenes and industrial progress in her text.

The Icebergs (1861) by Frederic Edwin Church demonstrates the aesthetic of the sublime.

Wollstonecraft promotes subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature, exploring the connections between the sublime and sensibility. Many of the letters describe the breathtaking scenery of Scandinavia and Wollstonecraft's desire to create an emotional connection to that natural world. In so doing, she gives greater value to the imagination than she had in previous works. As in her previous writings, she champions the liberation and education of women. In a change from her earlier works, however, she illustrates the detrimental effects of commerce on society, contrasting the imaginative connection to the world with a commercial and mercenary one, an attitude she associates with Imlay.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s. It sold well and was reviewed positively by most critics. Godwin wrote "if ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book." It influenced Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on its themes and its aesthetic.

List of works

This is a complete list of Mary Wollstonecraft's works; all works are the first edition unless otherwise noted.

Authored by Wollstonecraft

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. London: Joseph Johnson, 1787.

Mary: A Fiction. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.

Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.

The Female Reader: Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse; selected from the best writers, and disposed under proper heads; for the improvement of young women. By Mr. Cresswick, teacher of elocution [Mary Wollstonecraft]. To which is prefixed a preface, containing some hints on female education. London: Joseph Johnson, 1789.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects. London: Joseph Johnson, 1792.

"On the Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character in Women, with Strictures on Dr. Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters". New Annual Register (1792): 457-466. [From Rights of Woman]

An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has produced in Europe. London: Joseph Johnson, 1794.

Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. London: Joseph Johnson, 1796.

"On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature". Monthly Magazine (April 1797).

The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; unfinished]

"The Cave of Fancy". Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; fragment written in 1787]

"Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation". Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; written in 1793]

"Fragment of Letters on the Management of Infants". Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; unfinished]

"Lessons". Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; unfinished]

"Hints". Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. [Published posthumously; notes on the second volume of Rights of Woman, never written]

Contributions to the Analytical Review (1788-1797) [published anonymously]

Translated by Wollstonecraft

Necker, Jacques. Of the Importance of Religious Opinions. Trans. Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.

de Cambon, Maria Geertruida van de Werken. Young Grandison. A Series of Letters from Young Persons to Their Friends. Trans. Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790.

Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf. Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an introductory address to parents. Trans. Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790.

Bibliography

Primary works

Wollstonecraft, Mary (2005), "On the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society", in Cudd, Ann E.; Andreasen, Robin O. (eds.), Feminist theory: a philosophical anthology, Oxford, UK; Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 11-16, ISBN 978-1-4051-1661-9.

Biographies

Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1798. Eds. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker. Peterborough: Broadview Press Ltd., 2001. ISBN 978-1-55111-259-6.

Gordon, Charlotte. Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Great Britain: Random House, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8129-9651-7. The book's website.

Hays, Mary. "Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft". Annual Necrology (1797-98): 411-460.

Paul, Charles Kegan. Letters to Imlay, with prefatory memoir by C. Kegan Paul. London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879. Full text

Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884). Full text

Wardle, Ralph M. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951.

Other secondary works

Callender, Michelle "The grand theatre of political changes ": Marie Antoinette, the republic, and the politics of spectacle in Mary Wollstonecraft's An historical and moral view of the French revolution", pp. 375-392 from European Romantic Review, Volume 11, Issue 4, Fall 2000.

Detre, Jean. A most extraordinary pair: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Garden City : Doubleday, 1975

Janes, R. M. "On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293-302.

Jones, Chris. "Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications and Their Political Tradition". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-78952-3.

McElroy, Wendy (2008). "Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Cato Institute. pp. 545-546. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n331. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

Mellor, Anne K. "Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Women Writers of Her Day." In The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Claudia L. Johnson, 141-159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521783437.009.

Myers, Mitzi. "Impeccable Governess, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children's Books". Children's Literature 14 (1986):31-59.

-. "Wollstonecraft's Letters Written ... in Sweden: Towards Romantic Autobiography". Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 165-185.

Orr, Clarissa Campbell, ed. Wollstonecraft's daughters: womanhood in England and France, 1780-1920. Manchester: Manchester University Press ND, 1996.

Rossi, Alice. The Feminist papers: from Adams to de Beauvoir. Northeastern, 1988.

Wolfson, Susan J. On Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: The First of a New Genus. Columbia University Press, 2023.

External links

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Mary Wollstonecraft (, ; 27 April 1759 - 10 September 1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing.

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This was made in 1798. In the book a bird is helping people on a boat and then a mariner needlessly killed the albatross, which made all aboard the boat suffer. Then it shows the punishment that the mariner faced, due to his actions. Coleridge was inspired by a conversation with fellow poet William Wordsworth.

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Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was first published in 1798 and is one of the most famous poems in the English language.
I fear thee ancient Mariner I fear thy skinny hand And thou art long and lank and brown
As is the ribbed sea-sand.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells of the misfortunes of a seaman who shoots an albatross, which spells disaster for his ship and fellow sailors. The seaman, who is the ancient mariner of the title, then roams the world retelling the tale of his cursed journey.

Was the 'ancient mariner' real?

The ancient mariner didn't exist but it's likely that Coleridge was inspired by a conversation with fellow poet William Wordsworth, who had recently read George Shelvocke's A Voyage Round the World. Shelvocke writes of an incident when his second in command shot an albatross, which had been following the ship for several days. The ship, called the Speedwell, was later lost at Juan Fernandez Island.

Others say the poem was inspired by a dream that Coleridge's friend, George Cruikshank had after reading Thomas James's Strange and Dangerous Voyage. This account refers to an old man who had been shipwrecked and survives thanks to angels piloting the ship.

There's also a theory that the old man who speaks at the start of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner may have been Fletcher Christian who led the mutiny onboard the HMS Bounty in 1789. Coleridge would have been aware of the rumours that Christian had faked his own death and returned to England - therefore the old man of the poem could well have been inspired by Christian.

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Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was first published in 1798 and is one of the most famous poems in the English language.

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William Godwin is often regarded as the founder of philosophical anarchism. His philosophy states that society should exist without a government as it is corrupt. He believes the government should not influence the thoughts and actions of its citizens. His writing often surrounded these beliefs and other political ideas. Godwin's dedication to his writing impacted Shelley to the point where her book "Frankenstein" is originally dedicated to her father.

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1. Varieties of Anarchism

There are various forms of anarchism. Uniting this variety is the general critique of centralized, hierarchical power and authority. Given that authority, centralization, and hierarchy show up in various ways and in different discourses, institutions, and practices, it is not surprising that the anarchist critique has been applied in diverse ways.

1.1 Political Anarchism

Anarchism is primarily understood as a skeptical theory of political legitimation. The term anarchism is derived from the negation of the Greek term arché, which means first principle, foundation, or ruling power. Anarchy is thus rule by no one or non-rule. Some argue that non-ruling occurs when there is rule by all-with consensus or unanimity providing an optimistic goal (see Depuis-Déri 2010).

Political anarchists focus their critique on state power, viewing centralized, monopolistic coercive power as illegitimate. Anarchists thus criticize "the state". Bakunin provides a paradigm historical example, saying:

If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable-and this is why we are the enemies of the State. (Bakunin 1873 [1990: 178])

A more recent example comes from Gerard Casey who writes, "states are criminal organizations. All states, not just the obviously totalitarian or repressive ones" (Casey 2012: 1).

Such sweeping generalizations are difficult to support. Thus anarchism as political philosophy faces the challenge of specificity. States have been organized in various ways. Political power is not monolithic. Sovereignty is a complicated matter that includes divisions and distributions of power (see Fiala 2015). Moreover, the historical and ideological context of a given anarchist's critique makes a difference in the content of the political anarchist's critique. Bakunin was responding primarily to a Marxist and Hegelian view of the state, offering his critique from within the global socialist movement; Casey is writing in the Twenty-First Century in the era of liberalism and globalization, offering his critique from within the movement of contemporary libertarianism. Some anarchists engage in broad generalizations, aiming for a total critique of political power. Others will present a localized critique of a given political entity. An ongoing challenge for those who would seek to understand anarchism is to realize how historically and ideologically diverse approaches fit under the general anarchist umbrella. We look at political anarchism in detail below.

1.2 Religious Anarchism

The anarchist critique has been extended toward the rejection of non-political centralization and authority. Bakunin extended his critique to include religion, arguing against both God and the State. Bakunin rejected God as the absolute master, saying famously, "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him" (Bakunin 1882 [1970: 28]).

There are, however, religious versions of anarchism, which critique political authority from a standpoint that takes religion seriously. Rapp (2012) has shown how anarchism can be found in Taoism. And Ramnath (2011) has identified anarchist threads in Islamic Sufism, in Hindu bhakti movements, in Sikhism's anti-caste efforts, and in Buddhism. We consider anarchism in connection with Gandhi below. But we focus here on Christian anarchism.

Christian anarchist theology views the kingdom of God as lying beyond any human principle of structure or order. Christian anarchists offer an anti-clerical critique of ecclesiastical and political power. Tolstoy provides an influential example. Tolstoy claims that Christians have a duty not to obey political power and to refuse to swear allegiance to political authority (see Tolstoy 1894). Tolstoy was also a pacifist. Christian anarcho-pacifism views the state as immoral and unsupportable because of its connection with military power (see Christoyannopoulos 2011). But there are also non-pacifist Christian anarchists. Berdyaev, for example, builds upon Tolstoy and in his own interpretation of Christian theology. Berdyaev concludes: "The Kingdom of God is anarchy" (Berdyaev 1940 [1944: 148]).

Christian anarchists have gone so far as to found separatist communities where they live apart from the structures of the state. Notable examples include New England transcendentalists such as William Garrison and Adin Ballou. These transcendentalists had an influence on Tolstoy (see Perry 1973 [1995]).

Other notable Christians with anarchist sympathies include Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. In more recent years, Christian anarchism has been defended by Jacques Ellul who links Christian anarchism to a broad social critique. In addition to being pacifistic, Ellul says, Christian anarchism should also be "antinationalist, anticapitalist, moral, and antidemocratic" (Ellul 1988 [1991: 13]). The Christian anarchist ought to be committed to "a true overturning of authorities of all kinds" (Ellul 1988 [1991: 14]). When asked whether a Christian anarchist should vote, Ellul says no. He states, "anarchy first implies conscientious objection" (Ellul 1988 [1991: 15]).

1.3 Theoretical Anarchism

Anarchist rejection of authority has application in epistemology and in philosophical and literary theory. One significant usage of the term shows up in American pragmatism. William James described his pragmatist philosophical theory as a kind of anarchism: "A radical pragmatist is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature" (James 1907 [1981: 116]). James had anarchist sympathies, connected to a general critique of systematic philosophy (see Fiala 2013b). Pragmatism, like other anti-systematic and post-Hegelian philosophies, gives up on the search for an arché or foundation.

Anarchism thus shows up as a general critique of prevailing methods. An influential example is found in the work of Paul Feyerabend, whose Against Method provides an example of "theoretical anarchism" in epistemology and philosophy of science (Feyerabend 1975 [1993]). Feyerabend explains:

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives. (Feyerabend 1975 [1993: 9])

His point is that science ought not be constrained by hierarchically imposed principles and strict rule following.

Post-structuralism and trends in post-modernism and Continental philosophy can also be anarchistic (see May 1994). So-called "post-anarchism" is a decentered and free-flowing discourse that deconstructs power, questions essentialism, and undermines systems of authority. Following upon the deconstructive and critical work of authors such as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and others, this critique of the arché goes all the way down. If there is no arché or foundation, then we are left with a proliferation of possibilities. Emerging trends in globalization, cyber-space, and post-humanism make the anarchist critique of "the state" more complicated, since anarchism's traditional celebration of liberty and autonomy can be critically scrutinized and deconstructed (see Newman 2016).

Traditional anarchists were primarily interested in sustained and focused political activism that led toward the abolition of the state. The difference between free-flowing post-anarchism and traditional anarchism can be seen in the realm of morality. Anarchism has traditionally been critical of centralized moral authority-but this critique was often based upon fundamental principles and traditional values, such as autonomy or liberty. But post-structuralism-along with critiques articulated by some feminists, critical race theorists, and critics of Eurocentrism-calls these values and principles into question.

1.4 Applied Anarchism

The broad critical framework provided by the anarchist critique of authority provides a useful theory or methodology for social critique. In more recent iterations, anarchism has been used to critique gender hierarchies, racial hierarchies, and the like-also including a critique of human domination over nature. Thus anarchism also includes, to name a few varieties: anarcha-feminism or feminist anarchism (see Kornegger 1975), queer anarchism or anarchist queer theory (see Daring et al. 2010), green anarchism or eco-anarchism also associated with anarchist social ecology (see Bookchin 1971 [1986]), Black and indigenous anarchisms and other anarchist critiques of white supremacy and Eurocentrism (to be discussed below); and even anarcho-veganism or "veganarchism" (see Nocella, White, & Cudworth 2015). In the anarcho-vegan literature we find the following description of a broad and inclusive anarchism:

Anarchism is a socio-political theory which opposes all systems of domination and oppression such as racism, ableism, sexism, anti-LGBTTQIA, ageism, sizeism, government, competition, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and punitive justice, and promotes direct democracy, collaboration, interdependence, mutual aid, diversity, peace, transformative justice and equity. (Nocella et al. 2015: 7)

A thorough-going anarchism would thus offer a critique of anything and everything that smacks of hierarchy, domination, centralization, and unjustified authority.

Anarchists who share these various commitments often act upon their critique of authority by engaging in nonconformist practices (free love, nudism, gender disruption, and so on) or by forming intentional communities that live "off the grid" and outside of the norms of mainstream culture. In extreme forms this becomes anarcho-primitivism or anti-civilizational anarchism (see Zerzan 2008, 2010; Jensen 2006). Alternative anarchist societies have existed in religious communes in post-Reformation Europe and in the early United States, in Nineteenth Century American utopian communities, the hippy communes of the Twentieth Century, anarchist squats, temporary autonomous zones (see Bey 1985), and occasional gatherings of like-minded people.

Given this sort of antinomianism and non-conformism it is easy to see that anarchism also often includes a radical critique of traditional ethical norms and principles. Thus radical ethical anarchism can be contrasted with what we might call bourgeois anarchism (with radical anarchism seeking to disrupt traditional social norms and bourgeois anarchism seeking freedom from the state that does not seek such disruption). And although some argue that anarchists are deeply ethical-committed to liberty and solidarity-others will argue that anarchists are moral nihilists who reject morality entirely or who at least reject the idea that there could be a single source of moral authority (see essays in Franks & Wilson 2010).

In more recent explorations and applications of anarchist thought, the anarchist critique has been related and connected to a variety of emerging theoretical issues and applied concerns. Hilary Lazar (2018) for example, explores how anarchism connects to intersectionality and issues related to multiculturalism. And Sky Croeser (2019) explores how anarchism is connected to the emerging technologies including the Internet. And there are anarchist elements in the development of shared technological and information, as for example in the development of cryptocurrencies, which create economies that outside of traditional state-based economic systems.

1.5 Black, Indigenous, and Decolonizing Anarchism

As mentioned above, among the varieties of applied anarchism we find anarchism associated with various liberation movements and critiques of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, and colonialism. This could be connected with feminist anarchism, women's liberation movements, and an anarchist critique of patriarchy. We'll focus here on the anarchist critique found in Black and indigenous liberation movements. Gandhi's movement in India could be included here (as discussed below).

One focal point here is a claim about anarchist characteristics thought to be found in the social structures of indigenous peoples. Sometimes this is a romantic projection of anti-civilizational anarchists such as John Zerzan, who echoes Rousseau's naive and ill-informed ideal of the "noble savage." One must be careful to avoid essentializing claims made about indigenous cultures and political societies. The Inca and the Aztec empires were obviously not utopian anarchist collectives. Nonetheless, scholars of indigeneity affirm the anarchist critique of dominant hegemonies as part of the effort of liberation that would allow indigenous people a degree of self-determination (see Johnson and Ferguson 2019).

Black and indigenous anarchisms provide a radical critique, which holds that the global history of genocide, slavery, colonization, and exploitation rest upon the assumption of white supremacy. White supremacy is thus understood, from this point of view, as a presupposition of statism, centralization, hierarchy, and authority. The anarchist critique of white supremacy is thus linked to a critique of social and political systems that evolved out of the history of slavery and native genocide to include apartheid, inequality, caste/racial hierarchies, and other forms of structural racism. Some defenders of Black anarchism go so far as to suggest that when "Blackness" is defined in opposition to structures of white supremacy, there is a kind of anarchism woven into the concept. Anderson and Samudzi write,

While bound to the laws of the land, Black America can be understood as an extra-state entity because of Black exclusion from the liberal social contract. Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. (Anderson and Samudzi 2017: no page numbers)

This implies that the experience of Black people unfolds in a social and political world that its defined by its exclusion from power. A similar implication holds for indigenous people, who have been subjugated and dominated by colonial power. Liberation movements thus spring from a social experience that is in a sense anarchic (i.e., developed in exclusion from and opposition to structures of power). It is not surprising, then, that some liberatory activists espouse and affirm anarchism. The American activist Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, for example, affirms anarchism in pursuit of Black liberation (Ervin 1997 [2016]). He explains that Black anarchism is different from what he describes as the more authoritarian hierarchy of the Black Panther party. He also argues against the authoritarian structure of religiously oriented Black liberation movements, such as that led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

A significant issue in Black and indigenous anarchisms is the effort to decolonize anarchism itself. Many of the key figures in the anarchist tradition are white, male, and European. The concerns of anarchists such as Kropotkin or Bakunin may be different from the concerns of African Americans or from the concerns of indigenous people in Latin America or elsewhere around the globe. One solution to this problem is to retrieve forgotten voices from within the tradition. In this regard, we might consider Lucy Parsons (also known as Lucy Gonzalez), a former slave who espoused anarchism. Parsons explained that she affirmed anarchism because the political status quo produced nothing but misery and starvation for the masses of humanity. To resolve this an anarchist revolution was needed. Parsons said,

Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty. (Parsons 1905 [2010])

2. Anarchism in Political Philosophy

Anarchism in political philosophy maintains that there is no legitimate political or governmental authority. In political philosophy anarchy is an important topic for consideration-even for those who are not anarchists-as the a-political background condition against which various forms of political organization are arrayed, compared, and justified. Anarchy is often viewed by non-anarchists as the unhappy or unstable condition in which there is no legitimate authority. Anarchism as a philosophical idea is not necessarily connected to practical activism. There are political anarchists who take action in order to destroy what they see as illegitimate states. The popular imagination often views anarchists as bomb-throwing nihilists. But philosophical anarchism is a theoretical standpoint. In order to decide who (and whether) one should act upon anarchist insight, we require a further theory of political action, obligation, and obedience grounded in further ethical reflection. Simmons explains that philosophical anarchists "do not take the illegitimacy of states to entail a strong moral imperative to oppose or eliminate states" (Simmons 2001: 104). Some anarchists remain obedient to ruling authorities; others revolt or resist in various ways. The question of action depends upon a theory of what sort of political obligation follows from our philosophical, moral, political, religious, and aesthetic commitments.

2.1 Anarchism in the History of Political Philosophy

There is a long history of political anarchism. In the ancient world, anarchism of a sort can be found in the ideas of the Epicureans and Cynics. Kropotkin makes this point in his 1910 encyclopedia article. Although they did not employ the term anarchism, the Epicureans and Cynics avoided political activity, advising retreat from political life in pursuit of tranquility ( ataraxia) and self-control ( autarkeai). The Cynics are also known for advocating cosmopolitanism: living without allegiance to any particular state or legal system, while associating with human beings based upon moral principle outside of traditional state structures. Diogenes the Cynic had little respect for political or religious authority. One of his guiding ideas was to "deface the currency". This meant not only devaluing or destroying monetary currency but also a general rejection of the norms of civilized society (see Marshall 2010: 69). Diogenes often mocked political authorities and failed to offer signs of respect. While Diogenes actively disrespected established norms, Epicurus counseled retreat. He advised living unnoticed and avoiding political life (under the phrase me politeuesthai -which can be understood as an anti-political admonition).

The assumption that anarchy would be unhappy or unstable leads to justifications of political power. In Hobbes' famous phrase, in the stateless-anarchic-condition of "the state nature" human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Hobbes' social contract-as well as other versions of the social contract theory as found for example in Locke or Rousseau-are attempts to explain how and why the political state emerges from out of the anarchic state of nature.

Anarchists respond by claiming that the state tends to produce its own sort of unhappiness: as oppressive, violent, corrupt, and inimical to liberty. Discussions about the social contract thus revolve around the question of whether the state is better than anarchy-or whether states and state-like entities naturally and inevitably emerge from out of the original condition of anarchy. One version of this argument about the inevitable emergence of states (by way of something like an "invisible hand") is found in Nozick's influential Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974). While Nozick and other political philosophers take anarchy seriously as a starting point, anarchists will argue that invisible hand arguments of this sort ignore the historical actuality of states, which develop out of a long history of domination, inequality, and oppression. Murray Rothbard has argued against Nozick and social contract theory, saying, "no existing state has been immaculately conceived" (Rothbard 1977: 46). Different versions of the social contract theory, such as we find in John Rawls's work, view the contract situation as a heuristic device allowing us to consider justice from under "the veil of ignorance". But anarchists will argue that the idea of the original position does not necessarily lead to the justification of the state-especially given background knowledge about the tendency of states to be oppressive. Crispin Sartwell concludes:

Even accepting more or less all of the assumptions Rawls packs into the original position, it is not clear that the contractors would not choose anarchy. (Sartwell 2008: 83)

The author of the present essay has described anarchism that results from a critique of the social contract tradition as "liberal social contract anarchism" (Fiala 2013a).

An important historical touchstone is William Godwin. Unlike Locke and Hobbes who turned to the social contract to lead us out of the anarchic state of nature, Godwin argued that the resulting governmental power was not necessarily better than anarchy. Locke, of course, allows for revolution when the state becomes despotic. Godwin builds upon that insight. He explained, "we must not hastily conclude that the mischiefs of anarchy are worse than those which government is qualified to produce" (Godwin 1793: bk VII, chap. V, p. 736). He claimed,

It is earnestly to be desired that each man should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is that we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society will permit. (Godwin 1793: bk III, chap. VII, p. 185-6)

Like Rousseau, who praised the noble savage, who was free from social chains until forced into society, Godwin imagined original anarchy developing into the political state, which tended on his view to become despotic. Once the state comes into being, Godwin suggests that despotism is the primary problem since "despotism is as perennial as anarchy is transitory" (Godwin 1793: bk VII, chap. V, p. 736).

Anarchism is often taken to mean that individuals ought to be left alone without any unifying principle or governing power. In some cases anarchism is related to libertarianism (or what is sometimes called "anarcho-capitalism"). But non-rule may also occur when there is unanimity or consensus-and hence no need for external authority or a governing structure of command and obedience. If there were unanimity among individuals, there would be no need for "ruling", authority, or government. The ideas of unanimity and consensus are associated with the positive conception of anarchism as a voluntary association of autonomous human beings, which promotes communal values. One version of the anarchist ideal imagines the devolution of centralized political authority, leaving us with communes whose organizational structure is open-ended and consensual.

Given this emphasis on communal organization it is not surprising that political anarchism has a close historical association with communism, despite the connection mentioned above with free market capitalism. Authors such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Goldman developed their anarchism as a response to Marx and Marxism. One of the first authors to explicitly affirm anarchism, Pierre Proudhon, defended a kind of "communism", which he understood as being grounded in decentralized associations, communes, and mutual-aid societies. Proudhon thought that private property created despotism. He argued that liberty required anarchy, concluding,

The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy. (Proudhon 1840 [1876: 286])

Following Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and the other so-called "classical anarchists", anarchism comes to be seen as a focal point for political philosophy and activism.

Let's turn to a conceptual analysis of different arguments made in defense of anarchism.

2.2 Absolute, Deontological, and a priori Anarchism

Anarchists often make categorical claims to the effect that no state is legitimate or that there can no such thing as a justifiable political state. As an absolute or a priori claim, anarchism holds that all states always and everywhere are illegitimate and unjust. The term " a priori anarchism" is found in Simmons 2001; but it is employed already by Kropotkin in his influential 1910 article on anarchism, where he claims that anarchists are not utopians who argue against the state in a priori fashion (Kropotkin 1927 [2002: 285]). Despite Kropotkin's claim, some anarchists do offer a priori arguments against the state. This sort of claim rests upon an account of the justification of authority that is usually grounded in some form of deontological moral claim about the importance of individual liberty and a logical claim about the nature of state authority.

One typical and well-known example of this argument is found in the work of Robert Paul Wolff. Wolff indicates that legitimate authority rests upon a claim about the right to command obedience (Wolff 1970). Correlative to this is a duty to obey: one has a duty to obey legitimate authority. As Wolff explains, by appealing to ideas found in Kant and Rousseau, the duty to obey is linked to notions about autonomy, responsibility, and rationality. But for Wolff and other anarchists, the problem is that the state does not have legitimate authority. As Wolff says of the anarchist, "he will never view the commands of the state as legitimate, as having a binding moral force" (Wolff 1970: 16). The categorical nature of this claim indicates a version of absolute anarchism. If the state's commands are never legitimate and create no moral duty of obedience, then there can never be a legitimate state. Wolff imagines that there could be a legitimate state grounded in "unanimous direct democracy"-but he indicates that unanimous direct democracy would be "so restricted in its application that it offers no serious hope of ever being embodied in an actual state" (Wolff 1970: 55). Wolff concludes:

If all men have a continuing obligation to achieve the highest degree of autonomy possible, then there would appear to be no state whose subjects have a moral obligation to obey its commands. Hence, the concept of a de jure legitimate state would appear to be vacuous, and philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man. (Wolff 1970: 17)

As Wolff puts it here, there appears to be "no state" that is legitimate. This claim is stated in absolute and a priori fashion, a point made by Reiman in his critique of Wolff (Reiman 1972). Wolff does not deny, by the way, that there are de facto legitimate states: governments often do have the approval and support of the people they govern. But this approval and support is merely conventional and not grounded in a moral duty; and approval and support are manufactured and manipulated by the coercive power and propaganda and ideology of the state.

We noted here that Wolff's anarchism is connected to Kant. But Kant is no anarchist: he defended the idea of enlightened republican government in which autonomy would be preserved. Rousseau may be closer to espousing anarchism in some of his remarks-although these are far from systematic (see McLaughlin 2007). Some authors view Rousseau as espousing something close to " a posteriori philosophical anarchism" (see Bertram 2010 [2017])-which we will define in the next section. Among classical political philosophers, we might also consider Locke in connection with "libertarian anarchism" (see Varden 2015) or Locke as offering a theory "on the edge of anarchism", as Simmons has put it (Simmons 1993). But despite his strong defense of individual rights, the stringent way he describes voluntary consent, and his advocacy of revolution, Locke believes that states can be defended based upon the social contract theory.

Leaving the canonical authors of Western political philosophy aside, the most likely place to find deontological and a priori anarchism is among the Christian anarchists. Of course, most Christians are not anarchists. But those Christians who espouse anarchism usually do so with the absolute, deontological, and a priori claims of the sort made by Tolstoy, Berdyaev, and Ellul-as noted above.

2.3 Contingent, Consequentialist, and a posteriori Anarchism

A less stringent form of anarchism will argue that states could be justified in theory-even though, in practice, no state or very few states are actually legitimate. Contingent anarchism will hold that states in the present configuration of things fail to live up to the standards of their own justification. This is an a posteriori argument (see Simmons 2001) based both in a theoretical account of the justification of the state (for example, the social contract theory of liberal-democratic theory) and in an empirical account of how and why concrete states fail to be justified based upon this theory. The author of the present article has offered a version of this argument based upon the social contract theory, holding that the liberal-democratic social contract theory provides the best theory of the justification of the state, while arguing that very few states actually live up to the promise of the social contract theory (Fiala 2013a).

One version of the contingent anarchist argument focuses on the question of the burden of proof for accounts that would justify political authority. This approach has been articulated by Noam Chomsky, who explains:

[This] is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. Sometimes the burden can be met. (Chomsky 2005: 178)

Chomsky accepts legitimate authority based in ordinary experience: for example, when a grandfather prevents a child from darting out into the street. But state authority is a much more complicated affair. Political relationships are attenuated; there is the likelihood of corruption and self-interest infecting political reality; there are levels and degrees of mediation, which alienate us from the source of political authority; and the rational autonomy of adults is important and fundamental. By focusing on the burden of proof, Chomsky acknowledges that there may be ways to meet the burden of proof for the justification of the state. But he points out that there is a prima facie argument against the state-which is based in a complex historical and empirical account of the role of power, economics, and historical inertia in creating political institutions. He explains:

Such institutions face a heavy burden of proof: it must be shown that under existing conditions, perhaps because of some overriding consideration of deprivation or threat, some form of authority, hierarchy, and domination is justified, despite the prima facie case against it-a burden that can rarely be met. (Chomsky 2005: 174)

Chomsky does not deny that the burden of proof could be met. Rather, his point is that there is a prima facie case against the state, since the burden of proof for the justification of the state is rarely met.

Contingent anarchism is based in consequentialist reasoning, focused on details of historical actuality. Consequentialist anarchism will appeal to utilitarian considerations, arguing that states generally fail to deliver in terms of promoting the happiness of the greater number of people-and more strongly that state power tends to produce unhappiness. The actuality of inequality, classism, elitism, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression can be used to support an anarchist argument, holding that even though a few people benefit from state power, a larger majority suffers under it.

There is a significant difference between anarchism that is offered in pursuit of utilitarianism's greater happiness ideal and anarchism that is offered in defense of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. As we shall see in the next section, individualist anarchists are primarily concerned with the tendency of utilitarian politics to sacrifice the rights of individuals in the name of the greater good.

Before turning to that conception of anarchism, let's note two classical authors who offer insight into utilitarian anarchism. Godwin articulated a form of anarchism that is connected to a utilitarian concern. Godwin's general moral thought is utilitarian in basic conception, even though he also argues based upon fundamental principles such as the importance of liberty. But Godwin's arguments are a posteriori, based upon generalizations from history and with an eye toward the future development of happiness and liberty. He writes:

Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present. (Godwin 1793: bk V, ch. I, p. 380)

This claim is similar to Chomsky's insofar as it recognizes the complicated nature of the historical dialectic. The goal of political development should be in a direction that goes beyond the state (and toward the development of individual reason and morality). But in our present condition, some form of government may be "a necessary evil", which we ought to strive to overcome. The point here is that our judgments about the justification of the state are contingent: they depend upon present circumstances and our current form of development. And while states may be necessary features of the current human world, as human beings develop further, it is possible that the state might outlive its usefulness.

We should note that utilitarian arguments are often used to support state structures in the name of the greater good. Utilitarian anarchists will argue that states fail to do this. But utilitarian conclusions are not usually based upon a fundamental appeal to moral principles such as liberty or the rights of the individual. Thus Bentham described claims about human rights as "anarchical fallacies" because they tended to lead toward anarchy, which he rejected. Bentham described the difference between a moderate utilitarian effort at reform and the anarchist's revolutionary doctrine of human rights, saying that

the anarchist setting up his will and fancy for a law before which all mankind are called upon to bow down at the first word-the anarchist, trampling on truth and decency, denies the validity of the law in question,-denies the existence of it in the character of a law, and calls upon all mankind to rise up in a mass, and resist the execution of it. (Bentham 1843: 498)

More principled deontological anarchism will maintain that states violate fundamental rights and so are not justified. But utilitarian anarchism will not primarily be worried about the violation of a few people's rights (although that is obviously a relevant consideration). Rather, the complaint for a utilitarian anarchist is that state structures tend to produce disadvantages for the greater number of people. Furthermore what Oren Ben-Dor calls "utilitarian-based anarchism" is based upon the idea that there is no a priori justification of the state (Ben-Dor 2000: 101-2). For the utilitarian, this all depends upon the circumstances and conditions. Ben-Dor calls this anarchism because it rejects any a priori notion of state justification. In other words, the utilitarian anarchist does not presume that states are justifiable; rather a utilitarian anarchist will hold that the burden of proof rests upon the defender of states to show that state authority is justifiable on utilitarian grounds, by bringing in historical and empirical data about human nature, human flourishing, and successful social organization.

2.4 Individualism, Libertarianism, and Socialist Anarchism

Forms of anarchism also differ in terms of the content of the theory, the focal point of the anarchist critique, and the imagined practical impact of anarchism. Socialist forms of anarchism include communist anarchism associated with Kropotkin and communitarian anarchism (see Clark 2013). The socialist approach focuses on the development of social and communal groups, which are supposed to thrive outside of hierarchical and centralized political structures. Individualist forms of anarchism include some forms of libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism as well as egoistically oriented antinomianism and non-conformism. The individualistic focus rejects group identity and ideas about social/communal good, while remaining firmly rooted in moral claims about the autonomy of the individual (see Casey 2012).

Individualistic anarchism is historically associated with ideas found in Stirner who said, "every state is a despotism" (Stirner 1844 [1995: 175]). He argued that there was no duty to obey the state and the law because the law and the state impair self-development and self-will. The state seeks to tame our desires and along with the church it undermines self-enjoyment and the development of unique individuality. Stirner is even critical of social organizations and political parties. While not denying that an individual could affiliate with such organizations, he maintains that the individual retains rights and identity against the party or social organization: he embraces the party; but he ought not allow himself to be "embraced and taken up by the party" (Stirner 1844 [1995: 211]). Individualist anarchism has often been attributed to a variety of thinkers including Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and Thoreau.

Individualist anarchism also seems to have something in common with egoism of the sort associated with Ayn Rand. But Rand dismissed anarchism as "a naïve floating abstraction" that could not exist in reality; and she argued that governments properly existed to defend people's rights (Rand 1964). A more robust sort of pro-capitalist anarchism has been defended by Murray Rothbard, who rejects "left-wing anarchism" of the sort he associates with communism, while applauding the individualist anarchism of Tucker (Rothbard 2008). Rothbard continues to explain that since anarchism has usually been considered as being primarily a left-wing communist phenomenon, libertarianism should be distinguished from anarchism by calling it "non-archism" (Rothbard 2008). A related term has been employed in the literature, "min-archism", which has been used to describe the minimal state that libertarians allow (see Machan 2002). Libertarians are still individualists, who emphasize the importance of individual liberty, even though they disagree with full-blown anarchists about the degree to which state power can be justified.

It is worth considering here, the complexity of the notion of liberty under consideration by appealing to Isaiah Berlin's well-known distinction between negative and positive liberty (Berlin 1969). Some individualist anarchists appear to focus on negative liberty, i.e., freedom from constraint, authority, and domination. But anarchism has also been concerned with community and the social good. In this sense, anarchists are focused on something like positive liberty and concerned with creating and sustaining the social conditions necessary for actualizing human flourishing. In this regard, anarchists have also offered theories of institutional rules and social structures that are non-authoritarian. This may sound paradoxical (i.e., that anarchists espouse rules and structures at all). But Prichard has argued that anarchists are also interested in "freedom within" institutions and social structures. According to Prichard rather than focusing on state-authority, anarchist institutions will be be open-ended processes that are complex and non-linear (Prichard 2018).

We see then, that individualist anarchism that focuses only on negative liberty is often rejected by anarchists who are interested in reconceiving community and restructuring society along more egalitarian lines. Indeed, individualistic anarchism has been criticized as merely a matter of "lifestyle" (criticized in Bookchin 1995), which focuses on dress, behavior, and other individualistic choices and preferences. Bookchin and other critics of lifestyle individualism will argue that mere non-conformism does very little to change the status quo and overturn structures of domination and authority. Nor does non-conformism and lifestyle anarchism work to create and sustain systems that affirm liberty and equality. But defenders of lifestyle non-conformism will argue that there is value in opting out of cultural norms and demonstrating contempt for conformity through individual lifestyle choices.

A more robust form of individualist anarchism will focus on key values such as autonomy and self-determination, asserting the primacy of the individual over and against social groups as a matter of rights. Individualist anarchists can admit that collective action is important and that voluntary cooperation among individuals can result in beneficial and autonomy preserving community. Remaining disputes will consider whether what results from individual cooperation is a form of capitalism or a form of social sharing or communism. Libertarian anarchists or anarcho-capitalists will defend free market ideas based upon individual choices in trading and producing goods for market.

On the other hand, socialist or communistically oriented anarchism will focus more on a sharing economy. This could be a large form of mutualism or something local and concrete like the sharing of family life or the traditional potlatch. But these ideas remain anarchist to the extent that they want to avoid centralized control and the development of hierarchical structures of domination. Unlike state-centered communism of the sort developed by Marxists, anarchist communism advocates decentralization. The motto of this approach comes from Kropotkin: "all for all". In The Conquest of Bread (1892) Kropotkin criticizes monopolistic centralization that prevents people from gaining access to socially generated wealth. The solution is "all for all": "What we proclaim is the Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!" (Kropotkin 1892 [1995: 20]). The communist idea that all humans should enjoy the fruits of the collective human product shares something with the Marxist idea of "to each according to his need" (Marx 1875). But Kropotkin argues for the need to evolve beyond centralized communist control-what he criticizes as mere "collectivism"-and toward anarchist communism:

Anarchy leads to communism, and communism to anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality. (Kropotkin 1892 [1995: 31])

Kropotkin argues that the communal impulse already exists and that the advances in social wealth made possible by the development of individualistic capitalism make it likely that we will develop in the direction of communal sharing. He argues that the tendency of history is away from centralized power and toward equality and liberty-and toward the abolition of the state. Kropotkin's communist anarchism is based upon some historical and empirical claims: about whether things can actually be arranged more satisfactorily without state intervention; and about whether states really do personify injustice and oppression. Libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism also think that the free market will work to adequately maximize human well-being and help individuals to realize their own autonomy. But for the socialist and communist anarchists, the question of individual self-realization is less important than the idea of social development. Kropotkin's "all for all" indicates a moral and ontological focus that is different from what we find among the individualists.

Socialist and communally focused forms of anarchism emphasize the importance of social groups. For example, families can be viewed as anarchic structures of social cooperation and solidarity. A social anarchist would be critical of hierarchical and domineering forms of family organization (for example, patriarchal family structure). But social anarchists will emphasize the point that human identity and flourishing occur within extended social structures-so long as it remains a free and self-determining community.

The tension between individualist and socialist anarchism comes to a head when considering the question of the degree to which an individual ought to be subordinated to the community. One problem for so-called "communitarian" theories of social and political life is that they can result in the submergence of individuals into the communal identity. Individualists will want to struggle against this assault upon autonomy and individual identity. Communalists may respond, as Clark does, by claiming that the ideal of a genuine community of autonomous individuals remains a hoped for dream of an "impossible community" (Clark 2013). On the other hand communally focused theorists will point out that individual human beings cannot exist outside of communal structures: we are social animals who flourish and survive in communities. Thus radical individualism also remains a dream-and as more politically oriented anarchists will point out, individualism undermines the possibility of organized political action, which implies that individualist anarchists will be unable to successfully resist political structures of domination.

3. Anarchism and Political Activity

Anarchism forces us to re-evaluate political activity. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato held that human beings flourished within just political communities and that there was a virtue in serving the polis. Modern political philosophy tended to hold, as well, that political action-including obedience to the law and the ideal of a rule of law-was noble and enlightened. In Hegelian political philosophy, these ideas combine in a way that celebrates citizenship and service to the state. And in contemporary liberal political philosophy, it is often presumed that obedience to the law is required as a prima facie duty (see Reiman 1972; Gans 1992). Anarchists, of course, call this all into question.

The crucial question for anarchists is thus whether one ought to disengage from political life, whether one ought to submit to political authority and obey the law, or whether one ought to engage in active efforts to actively abolish the state. Those who opt to work actively for the abolition of the state often understand this as a form of "direct action" or "propaganda of the deed". The idea of direct action is often viewed as typical of anarchists, who believe that something ought to be done to actively abolish the state including: graffiti, street theater, organized occupations, boycotts, and even violence. There are disputes among anarchists about what ought to be done, with an important dividing line occurring with regard to the question of violence and criminal behavior.

Before turning to that discussion, let's note one further important theoretical distinction with regard to the question of taking action, connected to the typology offered above: whether action should be justified in consequentialist or non-consequentialist terms. Franks has argued that anarchist direct action ought to exemplify a unity of means and ends (Franks 2003). On this view, if liberation and autonomy are what anarchists are pursuing, then the methods used to obtain these goods must be liberationist and celebrate autonomy-and embody this within direct action. Franks argues that the idea that "the end justifies the means" is more typical of state-centered movements, such as Bolshevism-and of right-wing movements. While some may think that anarchists are willing to engage in action "by any means necessary", that phraseology and the crass consequentialism underlying it is more typical of radical movements which are not anarchist. Coercive imposition of the anarchist ideal re-inscribes the problem of domination, hierarchy, centralization, and monopolistic power that the anarchist was originally opposed to.

3.1 Nonviolence, Violence, and Criminality

One significant philosophical and ethical problem for politically engaged anarchists is the question of how to avoid ongoing cycles of power and violence that are likely to erupt in the absence of centralized political power. One suggestion, mentioned above, is that anarchists will often want to emphasize the unity of means and ends. This idea shows why there is some substantial overlap and conjunction between anarchism and pacifism. Pacifist typically emphasize the unity of means and ends. But not all pacifists are anarchists. However, we mentioned above that there is a connection between anarchism and Christian pacifism, as found in Tolstoy, for example. Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy and the anarchists. Although Gandhi is better known as an anti-colonial activist, Marshall includes Gandhi among the anarchists (Marshall 2010: chapter 26). It is possible to reconstruct anti-colonial movements and arguments about self-determination and home rule as a kind of anarchism (aimed at destroying colonial power and imperial states). Gandhi noted that there were many anarchists working in India in his time. In saying this, Gandhi uses the term anarchism to characterize bomb-throwing advocates of violence. He says: "I myself am an anarchist, but of another type" (Gandhi 1916 [1956: 134]). Gandhian anarchism, if there is such a thing, embraces nonviolence. In general nonviolent resistance as developed in the Tolstoy-Gandhi-King tradition fits with an approach that turns away from political power and views the state as a purveyor of war and an impediment to equality and human development.

Objecting to this anarcho-pacifist approach are more militant activists who advocate direct action that can include sabotage and other forms of political violence including terrorism. Emma Goldman explains, for example, that anti-capitalist sabotage undermines the idea of private possession. While the legal system considers this to be criminal, Goldman contends it is not. She explains,

it is ethical in the best sense, since it helps society to get rid of its worst foe, the most detrimental factor of social life. Sabotage is mainly concerned with obstructing, by every possible method, the regular process of production, thereby demonstrating the determination of the workers to give according to what they receive, and no more. (Goldman 1913 [1998: 94])

Goldman struggled with the question of violence through the course of her career. Early on she was a more vocal proponent of revolutionary violence. She began to rethink this later. Nonetheless, like other anarchists of her generation, she attributed violence to the state, which she opposed. She writes:

I believe that Anarchism is the only philosophy of peace, the only theory of the social relationship that values human life above everything else. I know that some Anarchists have committed acts of violence, but it is the terrible economic inequality and great political injustice that prompt such acts, not Anarchism. Every institution today rests on violence; our very atmosphere is saturated with it. (Goldman 1913 [1998: 59])

Goldman views anarchist violence as merely reactive. In response to state violence, the anarchists often argued that they were merely using violence in self-defense. Another defender of violence is Malatesta who wrote that the revolution against the violence of the ruling class must be violent. He explained:

I think that a regime which is born of violence and which continues to exist by violence cannot be overthrown except by a corresponding and proportionate violence. (Malatesta 1925 [2015: 48])

Like Goldman, Malatesta warned against violence becoming an end in itself and giving way to brutality and ferocity for its own sake. He also described anarchists as preachers of love and advocates of peace. He said,

what distinguishes the anarchists from all others is in fact their horror of violence, their desire and intention to eliminate physical violence from human relations. (Malatesta 1924 [2015: 46])

But despite this rejection of violence, Malatesta advocates violence as a necessary evil.

Anarchist violence appears as the violence of an individual against the state. It is easy to see why such violence would be characterized as terroristic and criminal. For an individual to declare war against the state and take action to disrupt the state is criminal. And thus anarchists have also been interested in a critique of crime and criminality-arguing that it is the law and the legal system that creates and produces crime and criminality. This critique was advanced by Kropotkin as early as the 1870s, when he called prisons "schools for crime". Similar ideas are found in Foucault and in more recent criticisms of mass incarceration. Contemporary anarchists will argue that mass incarceration is an example of state power run amok.

3.2 Disobedience, Revolution, and Reform

The question of violence leads us to a further issue: the question of obedience, disobedience, resistance, and political obligation. Much could be said here about the nature of political obligation and obedience: including whether obedience is merely pragmatic and strategic or based upon notions about loyalty and claims about identification with the nation and its laws. But it is clear that anarchists have no principled reason for political obedience. If the anarchist views the state as illegitimate, then obedience and participation are merely a matter of choice, preference, and pragmatism-and not a matter of loyalty or duty.

Christian anarchists will look, for example, to the case of Jesus and his idea of rendering unto Caesar what is due to Caesar (Matthew 22:15-22). The anarchist interpretation of this passage claims that this is an indication both of Jesus's disaffection with the state and with his grudging acquiescence to political authority. Christoyannopoulos argues, "Jesus' political subversion is carried out through submission rather than revolt" (Christoyannopoulos 2010: 156). The crucifixion, on this interpretation, is a subversive event, which "unmasks" political power as "demonic" and illegitimate. Jesus does not recognize the ultimate moral and religious authority of Caesar or Pilate. But he goes along with the political regime. Thus some anarchists may simply be compliant and submissive.

But politically motivated anarchists encourage resistance to state power, including strategic and principled disobedience. Such disobedience could involve symbolic actions-graffiti and the like-or acts of civil resistance, protests, tax resistance and so on-up to, and possibly including, sabotage, property crime, and outright violence. Again, there is overlap with the discussion of violence here, but let's set that question aside and focus on the notion of civil disobedience.

One important example is found in Thoreau, who famously explained his act of disobedience by tax resistance as follows:

In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases. (Thoreau 1849 [1937: 687])

Thoreau's disobedience is principled. He recognizes that a declaration of war against the state is a criminal act. He willingly goes to jail. But he also admits that he will cooperate with the state in other cases-since there is something advantageous about cooperation. This indicates the complexity of the question of cooperation, protest, and disobedience. Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience" (1849), is often viewed as an anarchist manifesto. Kropotkin discussed him as an anarchist (Kropotkin 1927 [2002]). And Tolstoy admired his act of civil disobedience-as did Gandhi.

Anarchists continue to discuss strategies and tactics of disobedience. One problem throughout this discussion is the degree to which disobedience is effective. If there were to be successful anarchist campaigns of disobedience they would have to be organized and widespread. Whether such campaigns would actually work to disassemble the state apparatus remains an open question.

Until their dreamed-of revolution comes, anarchist must consider the degree to which cooperation with the state involves "selling out" to the political status quo. Perhaps there are reforms and short-term gains that can be obtained through traditional political means: voting, lobbying legislators, etc. But anarchists have often held to an all-or-nothing kind of approach to political participation. We noted above that the Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul has said that he does not vote because anarchy implies conscientious objection. But herein lies a strategic conundrum. If progressively minded anarchists opt out of the political system, this means that less enlightened policies will prevail. By not voting or otherwise engaging in ordinary politics, the anarchist ends up with a system that he or she will be even less happy with than if he or she had actively participated in the system.

This is, really, a problem of revolution versus reform. The revolutionary wants revolution now, believing that it will occur by way of direct action of various sorts. Perhaps the revolutionary is also thinking that the psychological, cultural, and spiritual evolution toward revolutionary consciousness can only occur when direct action is taken: in order for anarchism to emerge, the anarchist may think, one ought to behave and think like an anarchist. But without a concerted and nation-wide revolution, revolutionary action begins to look like mere selfishness, Epicurean opting out, or what Bookchin criticized as "lifestyle anarchism". Meanwhile those reform-minded folks who work within the system of political power and legality can end up supporting a system that they have doubts about. This philosophical problem of reform vs. revolution exists for all radical political agendas. But the problem is especially acute for anarchists, since anarchism is often an all-or-none proposition: if the state is justified then gradualism and reformism make sense; but if no state can be justified, then what is sometimes called "reformist anarchism" is a non-starter (see L. Davis 2012).

3.3. Utopian Communities and Non-Revolutionary Anarchism

Many anarchists are revolutionaries who want change to be created through direct action. But given our preceding discussion of violence, disobedience, and the potential for success of revolutionary activity, the question arises about opting-out of political life. The Epicureans and Cynics pointed in this direction. The history of anarchism is replete with efforts to construct anarchist communes that are independent and separated from the rest of state centered political life.

We might pick up the history here with the Christian anarchists and pacifists of the Reformation: the Mennonites, for example; or the Quakers who refused to doff their hats for political authorities and who sought a refuge in Pennsylvania. Indeed, there is an anarchist thread to the colonization of North America, as those who were disgruntled with European political and religious hierarchy left for the "new world" or were forced out by the European authorities. In the Seventeenth Century, Anne Hutchinson was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and forced to found a new community, when she concluded that the idea of government was flawed. Hutchinson is considered as one of the first anarchists of North America (see Stringham 2007). Separatist communities were founded by the New England abolitionists and transcendentalists, by Josiah Warren, and by others.

Anarchist communes were formed in Europe during the Nineteenth Century and in Spain during the 1930s. There have been ongoing movements and organizations of indigenous peoples and others who inhabit the margins of mainstream political life. In the 1960s and 70s, anarchist separatism was reiterated in the Hippy communes and attempts to live off the grid and get back to nature. Alternative communes, squats, and spontaneous gatherings continue to occur.

Separatist communities have to consider: the degree to which they give up on anarchist direct action against dominant political forces, the extent to which they have to accommodate themselves to political reality, and the risk that customary hierarchies will be reinstated within the commune. For the revolutionary anarchist, separatism is a strategy of avoidance that impedes political action. Separatist communes must often obey the rules of the dominant political organization in order to trade and get connected to the rest of the world. Finally, a complaint made about separatist communes is that they can end up being structured by sexist, classist, and other hierarchical organizing principles. One might argue that until the dominant culture is revolutionized, separatism will only be a pale reflection of the anarchist ideal. And yet, on the other hand, advocates of separatism will argue that the best way for anarchist ideals to take hold is to demonstrate that they work and to provide an inspiration and experimental proving ground for anarchism.

If revolutionary activity is taken off the table, then anarchists are left with various forms of gradualism and reformism. One way this might occur is through the creation of "temporary autonomous zones" such as those described by Bey. Along these lines David Graeber provides a description of the cultural and spiritual work that would be required in order to prepare the way for anarchist revolution. Graeber says that this would require "liberation in the imaginary", by which he means that through activism, utopian communities, and the like there can be a gradual change in the way political power is imagined and understood (Graeber 2004). Revolutionary anarchists will respond to this by arguing that liberation in the imaginary is simply imaginary liberation: without actual change in the status quo, oppression and inequality continue to be a problem.

4. Objections and Replies

Let's conclude by considering some standard objections to anarchism and typical replies.

4.1 Anarchism is Nihilistic and Destructive

Objection: This objection holds that anarchism is merely another name for chaos and for a rejection of order. This objection holds that anarchists are violent and destructive and that they are intent on destroying everything, including morality itself.

Reply: This objection does not seem to recognize that anarchists come in many varieties. Many anarchists are also pacifists-and so do not advocate violent revolution. Many other anarchists are firmly committed to moral principles such as autonomy, liberty, solidarity, and equality. Some anarchists do take their critique of arché in a nihilistic direction that denies ethical principles. But one can be committed to anarchism, while advocating for caring communities. Indeed, many of the main authors in the anarchist tradition believed that the state and the other hierarchical and authoritarian structures of contemporary society prevented human flourishing.

4.2 Anarchy Will Always Evolve Back into the State

Objection: This objection holds that anarchism is inherently unstable. Hobbes and other early modern social contract theories maintain that the state emerges as a necessary response to natural anarchy which keeps order and protects our interests. A different theory comes from Nozick, who argues that the "night-watchman state" would emerge out of anarchy by an invisible hand process: as people will exercise their liberty and purchase protection from a protection agency, which would eventually evolve into something like a minimal state.

Reply: Anarchists may argue that the state of nature is simply not a state of war and so that Hobbes's description is false. Some anarcho-primitivists will argue that things were much better for human beings in the original state of nature in small communities living close to the land. Other anarchists might argue that the disadvantages of state organizations-the creation of hierarchies, monopolies, inequalities, and the like-simply outweigh the benefits of state structures; and that rational agents would choose to remain in anarchy rather than allow the state to evolve. Some anarchists may argue that each time a state emerges, it would have to be destroyed. But others will argue that education and human development (including technological development) would prevent the reemergence of the state.

4.3 Anarchism is Utopian

Objection: This objection holds that there simply is no way to destroy or deconstruct the state. So exercises in anarchist political theory are fruitless. It would be better, from this point of view to focus on critiques of hierarchy, inequality, and threats to liberty from within liberal or libertarian political theory-and to engage in reforms that occur within the status quo and mainstream political organization.

Reply: Ideal theory is always in opposition to non-ideal theory. But utopian speculation can be useful for clarifying values. Thus philosophical anarchism may be a useful exercise that helps us understand our values and commitment, even though political anarchism has no hope of succeeding. Furthermore, there are examples of successful anarchist communities on a small local scale (for example, in the separatist communities discussed above). These concrete examples can be viewed as experiments in anarchist theory and practice.

4.4 Anarchism is Incoherent

Objection: This objection holds that a political theory that abolishes political structures makes no sense. A related concern arises when anarchism is taken to be a critique of authority in every case and in all senses. If anarchists deny then that there can be any arché whatsoever, then the claim contradicts itself: we would have a ruling theory that states that there is no ruling theory. This sort of criticism is related to standard criticisms of relativism and nihilism. Related to this is a more concrete and mundane objection that holds that there can be no anarchist movement or collective action, since anarchism is constitutionally opposed to the idea of a movement or collective (since under anarchism there can be no authoritative ruler or set of rules).

Reply: This objection only holds if anarchism is taken to be an all-or-nothing theory of the absolutist variety. Political anarchists do not necessarily agree with the skeptical post-foundationalist critique which holds that there can be no ruling principle or authority whatsoever. Rather, political anarchists hold that there are legitimate authorities but that political power quickly loses its authoritativeness and legitimacy. Furthermore, anarchists tend to advocate for a principle and procedure for organization based upon voluntarism and mutual aid, as well as unanimity and/or consensus. From this point of view anarchist communities can work very well, provided that they avoid coercive authority. To support this point anarchists will point to historical examples of successful anarchist communes. They will also point to ordinary human relations-in families and civil society relationship-which operate quite well apart form coercive and hierarchical political authority

4.5 Philosophical Anarchism is "Toothless"

Objection: One objection to philosophical anarchism of the sort discussed throughout this essay is that it remains merely theoretical. Some political anarchists have little patience for abstract discourses that do not engage in direct action. One worry about philosophical anarchism is that in failing to act-and in failing to take responsibility for the actions that ought to follow from thought-philosophical anarchism remains a bourgeois convenience that actually serves the status quo. Thus when philosophical anarchists remain uncommitted in terms of the concrete questions raised by anarchism-whether they should obey the law, whether they should vote, and so on-they tend to support the interests of defenders of the status quo.

Reply: In response to this objection, one might defend the importance of philosophical reflection. It is important to be clear about principles and ideas before taking action. And with anarchism the stakes are quite high. The puzzles created by philosophical anarchism are profound. They lead us to question traditional notions of sovereignty, political obligation, and so on. They lead us to wonder about cultural and ethical conventions, including also our first principles regarding the theory and organization of social life. Given the difficulty of resolving many of these questions, the philosophical anarchist may hold that caution is in order. Moreover, the philosophical anarchist might also defend the importance of wonder. The anarchist critique gives us reason to wonder about much that we take for granted. Wonder may not change the world in immediate ways or lead to direct action. But wonder is an important step in the direction of thoughtful, ethical action.

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There are various forms of anarchism. Uniting this variety is the general critique of centralized, hierarchical power and authority. Given that authority, centralization, and hierarchy show up in various ways and in different discourses, institutions, and practices, it is not surprising that the anarchist critique has been applied in diverse ways.

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Mary Shelley mother inspired her to write and her mother radical philosophy shaped Shelly as a writer. Her determination to be just as amazing as her mother helped her create her own amazing writings-Janice 

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Mary Shelley mother inspired her to write and her mother radical philosophy shaped Shelly as a writer. Her determination to be just as amazing as her mother helped her create her own amazing writings-Janice 

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In the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The cycle of sin, penance, and absolution of the mariner. When The Mariner tries to pray, he realizes he cannot because he committed a sin by killing the innocent albatross, he then gets separated from God to such an extent that he cannot pray anymore. His penance then takes two forms.

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Frankenstein has sinned against his own creator (God) by creating a living monster with raw materials and human body parts, and as punishment, Frankenstein loses his paradise, just as Adam in Paradise Lost is expelled from the Garden of Eden for defying God's word.

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It is inspired by the classical Prometheia, a trilogy of plays attributed to Aeschylus. Shelley's play concerns Prometheus' release from captivity, but unlike Aeschylus' version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Jupiter (Zeus).

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time period was 1820 and inspired by the classical prometheia

summary: the poem is about prometheus´s liberation from oth Jupiter and his own rage

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time period: 1820

influences: inspired by the classical prometheia

summary: the poem is about prometheus's liberation from oth Jupiter and his own rage

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times period 1820

influence: inspired by the classical prometheia

summary the poem is about prometheus liberation from oth jupiter and his own rage

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Look up the literary work---Wikipedia will do. Look for

Time period

Summary

Influences

POST the date and share briefly what you learned about this piece of work.

Post the link from where you obtained your information.

For Shelley's parents, please focus on the nature of their writing when you research and how they influenced Mary Shelley.