The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (7 page)

The process whereby colonists in North America broke free from the British Empire to found the United States.
Despite the political upheavals of the previous century, Britain itself in the middle of the eighteenth century remained a rigidly hierarchical society, still rooted in its feudal past. By contrast, on the other side of the Atlantic, Puritanism and the experience of frontier life had generated antiauthority, individualistic attitudes, while the absence of an aristocracy and the ease with which land could be acquired made possible a degree of social mobility unheard of in Europe. The original charters establishing the colonies had provided for self-government, and, subsequently, successive British administrations allowed the colonists great freedom to conduct their own affairs. By the mid-eighteenth century a large proportion of adult white males in the colonies possessed the suffrage while also enjoying the privileges of a free press and freedom of religious worship. The colonies, in other words, had grown apart from the mother country, their inhabitants had begun to think of themselves as Americans, and, not surprisingly, they proved unreceptive to attempts to bring them to heel.
British politicians, for their part, with the ending of the Seven Years War (1756–63) turned their attention to the problems of administering an empire. In order to meet the large debt incurred by war with France and the continuing costs of protecting the western frontier and defending the colonists from the Indians the British government sought new sources of revenue. Believing, not unreasonably, that those same colonists should contribute to the funds necessary for their defence Parliament passed the Revenue Act, otherwise known as the ‘Sugar Act’, in 1764, and the Stamp Act in 1765. The latter required the affixing of a stamp, which had to be purchased, to a wide range of legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards, and other items.
It was the fact that this and other legislation was introduced solely for the purpose of raising revenue that made it so offensive to Americans. As they saw it, this was to infringe one of the most hallowed principles of good government, the right of free people not to be taxed without their consent. Accordingly, the representatives of nine colonies at the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 agreed a number of resolutions, including one asserting, ‘That it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted rights of Englishmen, that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives’. On the same occasion the Congress rejected categorically the claim of the British government that no basic rights had been violated because colonists enjoyed
‘virtual representation’
in the House of Commons.
The Stamp Act proved unenforceable and, a year after its passage, was repealed, but Parliament remained unwilling to forgo its claim to paramountcy and continued to pass legislation based on that assumption. Growing resentment in the colonies led to the convening of the First Continental Congress in 1774. This gathering claimed for the people of the colonies the right to enjoy without infringement ‘life, liberty and property’; rejected again the relevance of virtual representation in their case; and repeatedly asserted their entitlement to all the rights and immunities of free-born Englishmen. The first shots in the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington in April 1775 and the Declaration of Independence formally breaking the link between the colonies and Britain was signed on 4 July 1776.
The American Revolution was essentially a political revolution growing out of the unwillingness of colonists to submit to an imperial power bent on maintaining its ultimate supremacy. Even though the revolutionaries in this case were motivated in part by a concern for property rights this was not a conflict primarily about economics, but about the values of democratic government. This was also, in several senses, a conservative revolution. Many of those prominent in the movement towards independence were most reluctant to break the link with Britain and only accepted the need to do so as a last resort. They also insisted that in resisting the British government they were merely asserting their rights as Englishmen—that it was the government in London that had first disrupted the
status quo
by enforcing illegitimate measures in the colonies. Furthermore, unlike subsequent revolutions in France and Russia the American version was a limited, political revolution involving no fundamental reordering of existing economic or social structures.
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Literally, a friend of the court, who may give evidence in court cases, acting either as a disinterested adviser or in order to represent the views of people or bodies that, although not directly involved in the particular case, may be affected by its outcome. The term is used mostly in US law.

 
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See
additional member system
.

 
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The view that society can and should be organized without a coercive state. Although some primitive societies are known that fulfil this criterion, they are usually called ‘acephalous’ (headless) while anarchism is normally seen as a way of changing modern societies. This specialized usage of the word differs markedly from common usage, which takes anarchism as a synonym for moral and political disorder. This pejorative usage is as old as the Greek origins of the word. It was reinforced by an offshoot from mainstream anarchism that for a time carried out spectacular political assassinations, such as those of Tsar Alexander II of Russia (1881), President Carnot of France (1894), and President McKinley of the USA (1901). There is no single positive anarchist doctrine, and apart from their rejection of the state, anarchist thinkers differ fundamentally, supporting a range of proposals from the most extreme
individualism
to complete
collectivism
.
While supporters of the state see it as necessary to solve problems of security and order (and in many cases, to provide other services), anarchists reverse the argument, and see such problems as a direct consequence of its existence whatever form it may take. The earliest developed theory of anarchism, although not by that name, was
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793), by William
Godwin
. He said that governments keep their power only by misleading and corrupting their subjects. As individual human reason and judgement grow, and as they lead necessarily to justice and right, governments will become less and less capable of doing this. They will eventually vanish.
Stirner
, although he rejected the word ‘anarchism’, which he applied to liberalism, was the most extreme individualist, denying any idea of obligation or truth. When the individual recognizes himself as the only value, he will reject every moral and institutional structure, and will be able to live with others in a ‘union of egoists’ based solely on self-interest. Other individualist anarchists have been far less extreme. Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939), for example, suggested that each individual should enjoy the maximum liberty compatible with that of others, and that society would best be organized as a free market without any authoritative institutions. Since 1945, this line of thought has been continued and sometimes modified in
libertarianism
.
Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon
(1809–65), recognized by
Marx
as the founder of scientific socialism (until 1846 when Proudhon refused to become the French correspondent of a socialist information network because he saw Marx as too authoritarian), became the leading revolutionary thinker in Europe as a result of his book
What is Property?
(1840). His answer to the question was, ‘Property is theft’. Proudhon saw society (and indeed the universe) as contradictory, something which could not be changed, but which could be regulated by balancing its necessary pluralisms to avoid disastrous extremes. Proudhon rejected the ideas of God and the state, along with the institutions deriving from them, as the two connected sources of human enslavement. He was one of the first to assert that groups and society exist as such, and are not simply aggregations of individuals. In his theory of exploitation, the surplus taken by capitalists is the result of co-operation between workers rather than (as in Marx) what each produces individually beyond the level of subsistence. In place of the state, Proudhon proposed economic and territorial federalism, with each productive unit managed by its workers and each area by its inhabitants. This system would be continually renewed. Relations between every different level of organization, from the smallest group to the whole of humanity, would be negotiated by delegates. By this means, Proudhon was able to propose that artisans and peasants remain in modern society alongside industrial production. This still reflects the French economy better than Marx's model.
Michael
Bakunin
(1814–76) was a follower of Proudhon. He saw the wage labourer, necessarily a slave, as typical, and therefore proposed collective ownership. Both the governed and the governors in a society based on the state were corrupted by it, losing their status as human beings. Bakunin opposed Marx, who wished to transform rather than abolish the state, in the First International, which as a result disappeared in 1876.
Peter
Kropotkin
(1842–1921) attempted to provide a scientific foundation based on
Darwin
for his form of anarchism. In
Mutual Aid
(1897), he argued that evolutionary success was a function of the extent to which members of particular species had adopted the practice of helping each other in ways which did not necessarily benefit the individual. His application of this to humanity, however, finished with the medieval city which he saw as the most perfect form of society so far achieved. A few examples of cooperation had survived, but it would become dominant only with the revolution which would result from the combination of mass revolutionary feelings with the ideas of anarchist intellectuals.
Almost by definition, there are as many forms of anarchism as there are supporters of it. The main criteria in terms of which they differ concern the legitimacy of different means ranging from the violence of the assassins to the pacifism of
Tolstoy
(1828–1910), as well as the social forms already examined. In the reaction against the so-called
totalitarian
states of Hitler and Stalin , anarchism played little part in contrast to
liberalism
, although the two have been combined in
libertarianism
.
CS