I must have been eight or nine years old when I first heard the a-word. I don’t remember the context, but I do remember asking my mother what ‘anarchists’ were. She said: anarchists are people who want to destroy everything, and rebuild it all from scratch.
To her credit, my mother’s answer was quite generous: at least it included the part about rebuilding. It did get me thinking that anarchists had good intentions, that they wanted to ‘destroy everything’ not just for the hell of it, but because they thought ‘everything’ was unjust and dysfunctional. Her definition was neither accurate nor very nuanced, but there was a grain of truth to her association of anarchism with the notion that society needed to be changed at a very fundamental level, and that such change couldn’t happen through piecemeal reform but instead required a thorough transformation from the ground up.
