Far back in time Authority stood on thrones and altars, with the plumed sables of despotism waving on his brow, while in his hands he held two iron gyves, the one to fetter thought, the other to fetter action; and these two gyves were called the Church and State. Liberty! Ah, Liberty was then a name scarcely to pass the lips; dreamed of only in solitude, spoken of only in dungeons! Yet out of the blackest mire the whitest lily blooms! Out of the dungeon, out of the sorrow, out of the sacrifice, out of the pain, grew this child of the heart; and pure and strong she grew until the sabled plumes have tottered on the despot’s brow, and a great palsy shakes the hands that once so firmly held the gyves of Church and State. For, ever seeking to overthrow each other, the one for the aggrandizement of self, the other for the love of all mankind, these two powers have contended; and every energy, every passion, every desire, good or evil, has been ranged on this side or on that, blunderingly or wisely, and nations have swung to and fro in their breath as upon a hinge. And one by one the powers of Authority have been crippled, and step by step Liberty has advanced, until to-day mankind is beginning to measure the forces that, struggling blindly together, are yet evolving light, to drink in the sublime ideal of freedom. Yet, oh, how long the struggle with vested ignorance, with greed in power!

For everybody has a natural right, not only to defend his own person and property against aggressors, but also to go to the assistance and defence of everybody else, whose person or property is invaded. The natural right of each individual to defend his own person and property against an aggressor, and to go to the assistance and defence of everyone else whose person or property is invaded, is a right without which men could not exist on the earth.

The identification of anarchy with disorder is not a trivial matter. The power of our conceptions to blind us to the facts of the world around us cannot be gainsaid. I myself have had the experience of eating lunch just outside Temple University’s law school in North Philadelphia with a brilliant law professor who was declaiming upon the absolute necessity of the state provision of police services. He did this just as one of Temple’s uniformed private armed guards passed by escorting a female student to the Metro stop in this crime-ridden neighborhood that is vastly underserved by the Philadelphia police force.

For market anarchists, war in many ways represents the epitome of the state's interaction with human civilization; indeed, I have often suggested that to be consistently and undeviatingly anti-war means to be anti-state. And to reject war and the state, in turn, is to favor a safer world, not the treacherous, entropic nightmare prophesied by today's flag-bearers of military adventurism.

Unlike many observers of history, anarchists see a common thread behind most of mankind's problems: the state. In the 20th-century alone, states have murdered well over 100,000,000 human beings, whether in war, concentration camps, or man-made famine. And this is merely a continuation of a seemingly endless historical pattern: almost from the beginning of recorded history, governments have existed. Once they arose, they allowed a ruling class to live off the labor of the mass of ordinary people; and these ruling classes have generally used their ill-gotten gains to build armies and wage war to extend their sphere of influence. At the same time, governments have always suppressed unpopular minorities, dissent, and the efforts of geniuses and innovators to raise humanity to new intellectual, moral, cultural, and economic heights. By transferring surplus wealth from producers to the state's ruling elite, the state has often strangled any incentive for long-run economic growth and thus stifled humanity's ascent from poverty; and at the same time the state has always used that surplus wealth to cement its power.