POSITION · THE ANARCHIST CORNER
Authority, fathers, and the order without rulers
Anarchism holds that what people make together belongs to all of them, and that no one has a natural right to rule anyone. The goal is order without rulers. We are not anarchist because its central claim is half true. No man has a right to rule in himself, but God gives the right to rule to men, and he gave it first to fathers.
01
Where did it come from?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called himself an anarchist in 1840, in a book that asked What Is Property? and answered, “It is robbery.” Mikhail Bakunin named the idea’s root himself. Retelling the fall, he cast Satan as the hero, “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds,” for urging man “to disobey and eat,” and he reversed Voltaire to say that “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him” (God and the State, written 1871). Peter Kropotkin supplied the economics: “All belongs to all” (The Conquest of Bread, 1892). Noam Chomsky restated the idea in 1995 as a test every authority must pass, the authority of parents over children included.
02
What truth has been twisted to produce it?
Scripture agrees that no man rules by his own right. Jesus told Pilate, “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:11), and he told his disciples the great among them must serve (Mark 10:42–43). Anarchism skips Scripture’s first step: “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1).
Anarchism takes a true thing, that no man has a right to rule in himself, and turns it into a false one, that no one may rule at all.
03
Where does it lead?
Anarchism’s own claims undo themselves. Karl Marx pointed out that Proudhon’s slogan defeats itself, since theft “presupposes the existence of property” (1865). So does God’s law against theft (Exod. 20:14 [20:15]). Chomsky’s test concedes the first authority God made. If his grandchildren ran into a busy street, he said, he would use “not only authority but also physical coercion” to stop them, and he judged the act easily justified. And in November 1936, with a war to fight, Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist union federation, the CNT, sent four of its leaders into the Republic’s cabinet, one as minister of justice.
Scripture shows what happens when no one rules. Judges ends with a murder, a civil war, and a tribe nearly wiped out, and it names the cause: “in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own sight” (Judg. 21:25). Order without rulers is every man ruling himself, and Bakunin knew where that offer was first made: “ye would be as gods” (Gen. 3:5).
04
Why we are not anarchist
Authority is God’s gift, and it begins in the home. The Westminster Larger Catechism reads the fifth commandment’s “father and mother” to mean “not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth” (Q. 124). A father’s rule is how God cares for a child. Scripture’s remedy for a bad ruler is not the end of rule but a prophet sent to him, as Nathan was sent to David (2 Kgdms 12:7), and a people who submit for the Lord’s sake (1 Pet. 2:13), pray for their rulers, and speak God’s law to them.
Sources
P.-J. Proudhon, What Is Property? (1840), ch. 1, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (1876).
Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (written 1871, published 1882), trans. Benjamin R. Tucker.
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892), ch. 1, English edition of 1913.
Noam Chomsky, interview by Kevin Doyle, May 1995, Red & Black Revolution no. 2 (1996).
Karl Marx, letter to J. B. Schweitzer, 24 January 1865.
Third Secretary of Embassy in Spain (Wendelin) to the Secretary of State, telegram, November 1936, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1936, vol. II, doc. 499.
The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 124.
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