The story of anarchist anti-statism turns out to have an unexpected wrinkle, in which that tale crosses another story of anarchists and terminology that is rather bizarre. In attempting to clarify Proudhon’s treatment of “government” and “the state,” it has been necessary to follow those terms through a rather large number of texts and context, which add up to a rather dizzying number of uses, in order to draw some general conclusions about the shift in Proudhon’s thought from what we might now think of as an anti-statist position to an analysis in which we find room for an anarchist state, but none for any governmental principle. Part of the difficulty has, of course, been the close association of anarchism with anti-statism in the present, which leads us to believe that Proudhon should have been an anti-statist, and leads us to take his strong critiques of the state, in texts like “Resistance to the Revolution,” as evidence that he was a foe of statism at first, and then changed his mind.
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