Is Anarchy Really Possible?

While all governments are regimes not all regimes, as Hannah Arendt had explained, are necessarily governments merely because they can kill their opponents, etc. Governments must always have a basis of some kind of true support as to their actual existing authority that, consequently, establishes their then valid power and right to exist; regimes are, thus, only systems of mere force simply existing for themselves, for the power holders, and against any opposition; they do not, in fact, so exist by rightful authority and any power resultantly exercised is, by definition, all wrongful and totally illegitimate; and, revolutions are, of course, one recommended remedy for this political illness.

All regimes can, therefore, be rightfully subject to being overthrown; and, when governments turn, repeatedly, toward the unlawful expedients applied to by mere regimes, they too, eventually, deserve to be destroyed and replaced by rightful authority and power to be held by a future government. And, not everything that is called law needs to be taken to be truly legal and lawful if done against the true teachings of classical Natural Law. There can be, therefore, legitimate revolutions against intolerable regimes and (formerly legally established) governments.

Further than this, St. Thomas Aquinas and others had correctly taught the legitimacy of exercising a necessary tyrannicide in proper defense of law, justice, the people, and the maintenance of needed right order in society and the polity. However, not all so-called revolutions are necessarily truly revolutionary in terms of actually supplying liberty and justice and right order to a country’s people; thus, Arendt had correctly denied the label of revolution to what happened in Russia in 1917 and France in 1789; but, she did recognize accurately that the American Revolution had, in fact, succeeded where the Russian and French occurrences totally and miserably failed.

This is because they merely continued the inherent, tyrannical, despotic tendencies of the government or regime that they had merely replaced with a then renewed and, of course, much worse despotisms. The American Revolution is the true model for all actual revolution, meaning where the government resulting is to only represent and be owned by the people and not as with the certainly authoritarian or totalitarian regime as to how it owns the people. Thus, anarchy need not be the only or solely assumed answer to tyranny, corruption, injustice, and oppression.

Dreamland: Anarchism Revealed

Anarchism, therefore, must ever remain just an ideological fairyland abstraction to delight the simple beliefs of, perhaps, supposed cultural anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, and other such silly folk who wish to fondly live in a (chaotic) land of dreams. In short, it is neither intellectually nor practically viable or credible, which, in some ways, is still very much regrettable.