Far from being impossible, as Thomas Hobbes and many other political commentators have argued, anarchy was a very successful form of human social organization which existed for the most of the time of human existence on this planet. Because these societies without states were preliterate, it is impossible to say to what degree this may have been a conscious choice.
I hope someday in the not too distant future to expand the Afterward into a book. Contrary to popular misconceptions, those unifying principles are not chaos and terrorism, but a rejection of hierarchy, authority and exploitation, and an alternative vision of a society without domination based on freedom and equality. Anarchists reject the State and its institutions, advocating societies based on free association, without anyone having the power to dominate or exploit another.
Long before anyone consciously articulated anarchist ideas, people had lived in societies without a state for thousands of years. So-called primitive and prehistoric peoples lacked any formal institutions of government and hierarchical social structures based on relationships of command and obedience Clastres, Volume Two, Selection Around years ago, the first hierarchical societies began to emerge in which a minority of their members assumed positions of prestige and authority, from which they came to exercise power over others Barclay, Volume Three, Selection It took thousands of years for this process of state formation finally to encompass the entire globe, with some people continuing to live in stateless societies into the 20th century.
Members of stateless societies lived in roughly egalitarian communities without rank or status Taylor, For the most part, stateless societies had sustainable subsistence economies based on relationships of equality, reciprocity and mutual aid Clastres, Volume Two, Selection 64; Bookchin, Volume Three, Selection 26 ; Sahlins , Barclay and Kropotkin State institutions were forced on most societies by external powers, or were created in response to such power.
As most people were innocent of government, having lived without it for thousands of years, they had nothing against which to compare their so-called primitive forms of social organization until it was too late. Although they may have had nonhierarchical conceptions of their societies and the natural world Bookchin, Volume 3, Selection 25 , it is unlikely that they conceived of anarchy as some sort of ideal.
