Anarchy: What's in a name?

Those who benefit from a centralised state have entirely succeeded in changing the public understanding of the word anarchy.

Governments who, for good reasons or ill, advocate a strong central authority - to support the assumption that change can be 'imposed from above' (Bogdanor, 1983) - have taken great care to discredit the anarchist ideology whose name, from its Greek origins, means without rulers (Goodway, 2011).

Politics common amongst anarchists can be summarised in Thoreau's (1849) words:

'The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.'

As Proudhon put it, anarchism seeks 'Order Without Power'.

So how did this word, anarchy, change so much as to become a means to dismiss, sideline and discredit ideological movements?

Why have opponents of anarchist thought sought to make the words chaos and anarchy synonymous - to imply that the absence of rulers, a ruling class or hierarchy would lead to a collapse of social order?

The answers lie in the power of words to shape our perceptions. The word anarchism stands as a testament to the evolution of language that makes comprehending texts, purely in terms of itself as an isolated meaningful object, difficult.

With multiple authors engaged in Voloshinov's 'struggle for meaning' over a word, and multiple readers engaged with that word - bringing with them their own subjective baggage; the competition surrounding meaning will swamp a plain text analysis in competing contexts.

Finding a means of creating a text that can stand alone and convey its meaning without the need to constantly reinforce it, is the Holy Grail of literary and language theorists.

And that quest carries immense importance in politics, where the 'struggle for meaning' is used to shape words to 'justify' the assaulting peaceful protesters, such as Chilean student protesters affiliated to student leader Camila Vallejo Dowling; even when those peaceful campaigners are engaged in the legitimate opposition to and scrutiny of Government power & policy. It is of the utmost importance that vigilance be coupled with the tools necessary to see through political debate to what is underneath - in the case of anarchy, the attempt to discredit alternatives in order to ensure, for good or ill, the continued strength of central authority.

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References:
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+ Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press, 1983.

+ David Goodway's 'What does it mean to be an "anarchist"?'; in The Guardian; 7 September 2011.

+ Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'; 1849.

+ Robert Booth's 'Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police'; in The Guardian; 31 July 2011.