The A Word

Anarchism. According to Wikipedia, it comes from the Medieval Latin word "Anarchia," which means "the state of not having a ruler ".

I thought the word meant chaos. It conjured a hazy memory of cartoon drawings from my high school history books: black-and-white caricatures of scraggly-bearded, crazed European immigrants lobbing round bombs during the late 19th Century. Or a buzz word like Blac Bloc tossed around on local t.v. news during the WTO protests in Seattle.

My curiosity began with a book review I read in The New Yorker magazine. The book was Death In The Haymarket: A Story Of Chicago, The First Labor Movement, And The Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (by James Green, Pantheon, 2006) and it led me to seek more details about its larger-than-life characters. I began to read related history and biographies and learned about the expediency of tainting a word for eternity--a political philosophy and a way of life is marginalized. This blog is simply an attempt to gain insight and value from elements of the philosophy.