Problemáticas teóricas e histórias dos estudos de referência do anarquismo

Abstract

This article starts from two factors – the hypothesis of the relevance of anarchist theories to Sociology and the lack of studies of this object in the academic field – and restart the discussion of anarchism, from a critical bibliographic bal-ance of its reference studies, seeking to highlight the main theoretical and historical issues and explain the state of the art of the existing debate that has influenced productions, although scattered, inside and outside the universities. Seven reference studies are defined and, beginning with the methodological issue that involves the relationship between social theory and history, it analyzes their anarchism definitions, the paths taken by their authors to elaborate them and their key findings. Through a balance, it points the main problems that underlie these studies, among which are: narrow set of authors and episodes taken into account in the investigations as well as generalizations from a restricted database; almost exclusive focus on Western Europe / North Atlantic axis; approaches that are ahistorical (which state that anarchism has always existed), that bind it to terminological usage and/or anarchists self-definition (who claim its emergence in the eighteenth century, in the first half of the nineteenth century etc.); focus on great men, with the use of history from above; inadequate definitions of anarchism (which conceptualize it as anti-statism, opposition to domination, antithesis of Marxism), that does not allow understanding it properly and differentiating it from other political ideologies.