Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements

The anarchists attack the principle of authority which is central to contemporary social forms, and in doing so they arouse a guilty kind of repugnance in ordinary people; they are rather like Ivan Karamazov crying out in the court-room, ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’ The very ambivalence of the average man’s attitude to authority makes him distrust those who speak openly the resentments he feels in secret, and thus it is in the psychological condition which Erich Fromm has named ’the fear of freedom’ that we may find the reason why—against the evidence of history—so many people still identify anarchism with unmitigated destruction and nihilism and political terror.