DaveNewcastle
Established Member
Perhaps you weren't impressed by the definition hinted at by Schnellzug in his/her post above (with link to that most unhelpful Wiki. Its reference to Gandhi might have been helpful.)?
Dismissing the colloquial use of the term as a derogatory criticism of people who delberately cause mayhem and destruction (which in traditional political terminology might be closer to nihilism than anarchy), it is a sound system of beliefs that communities are capable of forming and sustaining stable and co-operative societies without the need for governance and state controls, by virtue of people's innate bonding in friendships, affection and common pursuits, needs, desires and intentions; human nature has the capability to do the work of a state (in terms of ethics and social regulation).
There is little chance of finding evidential examples because virtually all societies available for study are governed and/or controlled. Anthropologists have referred to the Kalahari Bushmen as one such group and historians have looked to France after the Revolution for evidence of the mutual-respect which assists the development of co-operative society without governance. There are other examples available for you to study, but it is becoming increasingly hard to eliminate the pressure of governance when that pressure is expressed in terms of wealth, health, and access to consumer markets and is mediated by global communications.
Although these might not satisfy your requirement of an acceptable example of anarchy, there are some powerful and widespread expressions of human nature as emergent properties which can be studied to examine the things that people do collectively when driven by their own interests, fears, greed, and other dispositions:
One that is utterly unregulated is the development of language within a culture (repeatedly accused of degeneration while repeatedly enabling more sophisticated discourse);
One that is regulated but permitted to operate as an anarchistic system within that regulation are the markets (the market wealth arising from belief of growth without evidence and collapse in 2008 with no new evidence demonstrates the expression of collective disposition);
Others point to the animal kingdom (the collective social behaviour of a flock of birds or shoal of fish is taken to be anarchistic).
I will avoid the arguments of the humanists which, while basing ethics on the naturally emergent properties of human society, as an anarchist would also claim, they do not attempt to undermine governance or law but seem to confine their arguments to a rejection of religious institutions.
Political analysists often conflate anarchy with libertarianism (an error probably perpetuated by Milton Friedman and adopted by Margaret Thatcher), which is as regrettable an error as that of those who conflate anarchy with nihilism or any other doctrine of disorder.
The writer who has probably done the most to undermine my own confidence in the potential for anarchy is a philosopher who I have found to be persuasive on so many other issues, Richard Rorty, who has argued that the truely common motivations that we all share are indeed negative attitudes (e.g. pain, grief, loss). A critic of anarchy might find his 'Contingency, Solidarity and Irony' supportive.
My own preferred example of anarchistic society functioning effectively is the Australian aborigine culture before white dominance of that island.
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