Anarchism as a named political movement took shape in nineteenth-century Europe, but its first systematic statement came earlier, from an English former minister turned philosopher.

William Godwin

William Godwin (1756 to 1836) published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793, while the French Revolution was under way. He argued that human beings can be guided by reason, and that government, which works through force and fear, stunts that capacity. He expected that as people grew more rational and benevolent, government would gradually become unnecessary, replaced by small communities that settled matters by open discussion. He opposed violent revolution and trusted persuasion and education instead. Godwin did not call himself an anarchist, a word then used mainly as an insult, but he is usually counted as the first modern anarchist philosopher. He married the writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797; their daughter became Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 to 1865), a largely self-educated French printer, was the first person to call himself an anarchist, in his 1840 book What Is Property? His answer to the title question became famous: “Property is theft!”

The slogan is often misread. Proudhon did not object to people keeping the homes, tools or farms they personally used. He distinguished possession, the use of things by those who work them, from property in the sense of ownership that lets someone collect rent, interest or profit from the labor of others. That kind of claim, he argued, takes what workers produce. His views shifted over his life, and in later writings he treated small property as a shield for individuals against the state.

Proudhon's positive program is called mutualism: independent producers and workers' associations exchanging goods fairly, a people's bank offering credit at little or no interest, and a federation of local communities in place of a centralized state.

Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin (1814 to 1876) was a Russian aristocrat who became a revolutionary. He took part in uprisings across Europe, was imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia, and escaped in 1861. His view is often called collectivist anarchism: land and the means of production should be held in common by workers' associations, with each worker rewarded according to the work done. In an 1867 essay he wrote that “freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice,” and that “socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

The split with Marx

Bakunin and Karl Marx both belonged to the International Workingmen's Association, the First International, founded in London in 1864. Both wanted to end capitalism. They disagreed sharply about how.

• Marx argued that workers should build political parties, win state power and use it during a transition, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, before the state eventually withered away.
• Bakunin warned that a state run in the workers' name would produce a new ruling class of officials and experts who would dominate the workers in turn. The state, he insisted, must be abolished in the revolution itself, not at some later date.

The quarrel was also personal and organizational. At the Hague Congress of 1872, Marx's supporters had Bakunin expelled from the International, which soon split. Many later readers saw Bakunin's warning as a forecast of the Soviet one-party state. Marxists reply that Bakunin offered no workable plan for defending a revolution, and that his own secret revolutionary societies were hardly democratic.

Worked example: the mill and the landlord

Picture a nineteenth-century French village with two mills. The first is run by Jeanne, who owns it, works it every day and grinds grain for her neighbors. The second belongs to a count who lives in Paris; he hires a miller, pays him a fixed wage and keeps the rest of the earnings.

Apply Proudhon. Jeanne's mill is possession: she uses what she works, and Proudhon would protect it. The count's mill is property in Proudhon's critical sense, because the count collects income from someone else's labor without working. When Proudhon said property is theft, he meant the count, not Jeanne. His remedy would be cheap credit from a people's bank so the hired miller could buy his own mill or join a cooperative, plus a federation of villages to settle disputes.

Apply Godwin. He would hope to persuade the count, through argument and moral education, that keeping the surplus is unjust, and he would oppose seizing the mill by force.

Apply Bakunin. Both mills, and the land around them, should become the collective property of the workers' association, with each worker rewarded according to labor. The change would come through revolution, not persuasion.

Finally, imagine a Marxist in the village. She agrees the count's income is exploitation, but argues that workers must first win control of the national government. Bakunin's warning would be that the officials who then manage the mills from Paris might become the new count.