All those who have experienced the impulse to resist authority, whether the authority of parents, teachers or the state, share an affinity with anarchism because the leitmotif of this political ideology is a detestation of all forms of authority, rule and government external to the individual. (1) It is not that anarchists believe in no government at all, they believe in self-government; they believe that all political decisions should be arrived at by self-sufficient groups of free individuals inspired by principles of co-operation and mutual aid. The major anarchist philosophers - William Godwin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Max

Stirner and Prince Peter Kropotkin - promoted the values of justice, equality, freedom and individualism; they sought a society in which the accumulation of private property would not take place, in which there would be a complete decentralisation of power and of industry, in which small self-sufficient communes would constitute the basic units. Central governments, bureaucracies, and nation states would disappear (the communes would form themselves into a loose federation).

It is clear from this brief summary that anarchism is not at all synonymous with the common conception of 'anarchy' (total chaos, madness, random violence). There was, it is true, a strain of violence within anarchism: Michael Bakunin, the professional revolutionary, did not believe that the anarchist utopia could be achieved by peaceful means and therefore he celebrated destruction as an essential wiping clean of the slate. Other anarchist thinkers deplored violence as a means and disowned the European terrorists of the 1890s whose wave of bomb attacks and assassinations established the stereotype of the mindless anarchist killer in the common consciousness.

During the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries anarchism, and its variants anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism, were more influential in France, Italy and Spain than their rival ideology Marxism. A number of artists and art critics read anarchist theoretical texts and magazines and supported the social objectives of anarchism; for example, Courbet (a friend of Proudhon), Camille and Lucien Pissarro, T. A. Steinlen, H. E. Cross, Maximillien Luce, Theo van Rysselberghe, Charles Angrand, Paul Signac, Felix Vallotton, and Felix Feneon. (2) Besides their altruistic reasons for supporting anarchism, artists had selfish reasons: their avant-garde work frequently met with indifference or a hostile reception and they were branded as radicals whether they were or not; they often found it as difficult to survive as the poorest workers (factors such as the loss of aristocratic patronage, the invention of photography, the triumph of bourgeois capitalism alienated them from society and subjected them to the pressures and humiliations of the market place).