DAVID T. WIECK Anarchism, non-ideological and prior to philosophy and to science, we may best, if with slight semantical awkwardness, speak of as an Idea: a mode of speech familiar to at least some anarchists, certainly to those in the Spanish and Italian traditions. Characterization as an Idea situates anarchism in that constellation or cosmos of Ideas, kindred in spirit one to another although wholly concordant by no means, that assumed major significance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe and the Americas: Ideas of socialism, reason, liberty, equality, democracy, mankind, progress, history, the nation. Certain of these, such as anarchism and socialism, expressed social ideals directly; certain, among them socialism, and the idea of the nation equally fatefully, became the source of later ideologies. We lack an unambiguous name for that pre-ideological mode of thought; idealistic may be best but in a sense that is pre-philosophical and discontinuous with philosophic Idealism. (The sense of Idea here is not Hegel's but that of a recently emerged mode of thought that he sought to understand and appropriate. He blamed the « abstract» Ideas for the course of the French Revolution, not realizing, or preferring not to see that although they were undoubtedly used as manipulative abstractions, i.e., ideologically, by the wielders of new power, they had meaning enough, and concretely, for the poor and oppressed.) An Idea like anarchism, as I conceive it, is a thought, a thinking, a conviction, a desire, an aim, a vision of life, whose nature is an insistence that it be realized and whose full meaning is to become manifest only in its realization. It expresses a potentiality of human being, recognizable by human beings and embraceable as a goal that together they endeavor to consummate. It exists in (and as) social movements, in (and as) movements of mind, in (and as) the lives, actions, and experiences of persons. It has ground in the social present and objectivity and potential reality as a shared and social aim. Although capable of articulation, it is essentially conceptual, certainly not rationalistic. At its core, as its .,matter,» as its material source, is feeling -feelings about relations among human beings, about personal identity and worth, about human being. In terming anarchism an Idea, I mean to convey specifically that it is non-doctrinal; that it has always been .,understood» 28
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