This was originally part of the email essay on socialism.
bkMarcus
Where did Anarchism originate?
At least one group claims that Anarchism originated in ancient China, 6 centuries before the Common Era -- that Confucianism is Chinese authoritarianism, whereas Taoism rejected interference in general and government in particular.
Another precursor of modern anarchism is the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium (336-264 B.C.E.), which held that wise men could and should evolve away from civil courts, government and rulers, acting eventually only by the universal law of reason and in accord with the universal brotherhood among human beings.
The modern western tradition of anarchism began as an individualist philosophy in England, France, and America, and conflicted with the collectivist and revolutionary anarchism that would later come out of Germany and Russia.
The first modern, western thinker to explicitly develop and publish an anarchist philosophy was Englishman William Godwin, who espoused an evolutionary anarchism reminiscent of Zeno's Stoicism. Godwin's political philosophy did affect the Anglo-American liberal tradition, but did not play as obvious a role in the development of the anarchist tradition.
Benjamin Tucker, the great American individualist, derived his anarchism from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Josiah Warren, both of whom opposed Capitalism and The State, and both of whom embraced individualism. All three men focused on the economics of a radically free market, without coercion or monopoly.
(Warren is considered to be the first American anarchist, though he never used that label: he called himself a "Peaceful Revolutionary". Proudhon is, as far as we know, the first man to apply the A-word to himself and to his philosophy.)
Meanwhile, the revolutionary communists of Eastern Europe were hashing out the particulars of what they called Internationalism. Mikhail Bakunin shared Karl Marx's vision of a non-hierarchical, peaceful and international worker's community, as well as a general rejection of religion and the power of The Church, but Bakunin rejected Marx's assertion that such an anarchy could only be achieved through a "temporary" centralization of power in The State. Marx saw a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a necessary-but-transitional stage (which Marx called 'socialism') in the historically inevitable goal of a peaceful, world-wide anarchy (which he called 'communism').
Bakunin insisted that a centralized State would never willingly yield power, whether it was Tsarist, capitalist or socialist -- "No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation..." -- The violent revolution would have to be against all forms of centralization and authority -- "freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up."
The most famous anarchist seems to be Emma Goldman, whose anarcho-communism was based on the philosophy of Russian aristocrat, Prince Peter Kropotkin. His anarchist philosophy was collectivist, communist and non-violent, though he doesn't seem to have rejected violence and revolution as unambiguously as did the American individualists -- or as much as his countryman, Leo Tolstoy.
Both Emma Goldman and Benjamin Tucker were born in the 19th century and died in the 20th century. They knew of each other but never met. Tucker joined Emma Goldman's Free Speech League, but Goldman was not impressed with Tucker or Tucker's free-market economics. She did, however, trace anarchist philosophy back to American individualists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and emphasized the concept of individual liberty as much as she emphasized class liberation.
