Anarchism and the Myth of the Primitive: Godwin and Kropotkin
 Samuel Clark 
Draft: for final version, see Studies in Social and Political Thought 15(2008): 6-25 
Anarchists are commonly supposed to hold deeply optimistic views about human nature, and to be nostalgic for ‘primitive’ (as opposed to ‘civilised’) societies. I shall argue here that these claims are false. It is worth doing so, both as a recovery of some interesting thought from misrepresentation, and because a precise account of primitivism will be useful in other contexts. ‘Traditionally, anarchists are seen to possess an optimistic conception of human nature, an optimism essential to the success of their vision of a stateless society.’2 According to James Joll, ‘The fundamental idea that man is by nature good and that it is institutions that corrupt him remains the basis of all anarchist thought.’3 For him, anarchists share the mental pathology of heretical Christians who demand and expect ‘a return to the Golden Age of the Garden of Eden before the Fall’4 . Roger Scruton claims that ‘typical anarchist beliefs’ include that ‘men are benign by nature and corrupted by government’5 . Irving Horowitz, that ‘Anarchism has as its theoretical underpinning an idealization of natural man in contrast and in oppostion to civilized man … What is offered is a belief in “natural man” as more fundamental and historically prior to “political man”.’6 Norman Barry, that ‘Communitarian [as opposed to libertarian] anarchism depends upon an optimistic view of human nature as essentially benign and cooperative.’7 These examples could easily be continued. They impute one or both of two claims to anarchists: that they believe, first, in a pure and good human nature which is distorted or masked by current circumstances; second, in a long-lost golden age. In sections 1 and 2 below I set out these claims in 2 more detail, and then show in each case that they do not apply to two representative anarchists, William Godwin and Peter Kropotkin. Claims that anarchists are primitivists have often been used to ground criticism. Robert Dahl, for instance, offers as ‘a critique of anarchism’ the thought that ‘While some romantic anarchists may imagine our returning to the tiny autonomous groups of some preliterate societies, short of a cataclysm that no sane person wants, a return to the infancy of the species looks to be impossible or, if not impossible, highly undesirable.’8 Benjamin Barber attacks anarchists because ‘their view of actual men is wildly romanticized. Hunger, greed, ambition, avarice, the will to power, to glory, to honour, and to security which have played some role in all traditional ethnologies find no place in the anarchist portrait of man’9 . Barber directs this attack specifically against twentieth-century American anarchists like Abbie Hoffman, but is explicit that he believes the tradition from Godwin onwards to be implicated in this wild romanticism. His evidence in fact consists of unsupported claims about the elitist psychology of individual anarchists and a few, out-of-context quotations. Similarly, the only support Horowitz can give for his characterisation (quoted above) comes from Denis Diderot, who, in Horowitz’s own words, ‘advocated a parliamentary monarchism in which representation would be elected by the propertied classes’10, and was therefore clearly not an anarchist. In the face of evidence this weak, it is tempting to dismiss the whole line of attack as a selfsustaining polemic. However, there are two forms of this criticism which require a more detailed response. I call them accusations of ‘primitivism’, for convenience and because each can be related to one of the various meanings of ‘primitive’. This article will display, 3 analyse and refute two important forms of the assertion that anarchists are primitivists. ‘Primitive’ is a complex term. It can mean unsophisticated, savage, stupid or childish; pure; original or primary; low or simple; an early stage of evolution or progress; a relic or survival in a world that has moved on. It can refer to people or societies without our technology or without institutions like our states. ‘Primitive’ stands in some complex relation to a cluster of terms including ‘savage’, ‘native’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘undeveloped’, ‘unevolved’ and ‘prehistoric’, and also to opposing terms like ‘civilised’, ‘developed’, ‘complex’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘modern’. We should note the term’s ideological weight: calling societies or people ‘primitive’ has often been involved in, and even stood in for, justifications of marginalisation, oppression and extermination. It can also be used in a less extreme but still polemical way, to indicate a comfortable value judgement: ‘we are civilised, they are primitive.’ The two meanings of the term which relate to the criticisms of anarchism under discussion here are primitive as pure, and primitive as original or primary. The criticisms which involve these meanings are, respectively: the claim that anarchism depends on an unrealistic notion of uncorrupted human nature (‘human nature primitivism’); and the claim that anarchists are nostalgic for a mythical golden age (‘golden age primitivism’). I define and respond to each in turn.