Volume 14, Number 10 · May 21, 1970
Notes on Anarchism
By Noam Chomsky
A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that 'anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything'—including, he noted, those whose acts are such that 'a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.'[1] There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as 'anarchist.' It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology. Even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as the French writer Daniel Guérin does in his book Anarchism,[2] it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social change.
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