Also 6–7 -ie. [ad. Gr. ἀναρχία, n. of state f. ἄναρχ-ος without a chief or head, f. ἀν priv. + ἀρχός leader, chief. The word was also adopted in med.L. anarchia, and Fr. anarchie (Cotgr., 1611), from one or other of which the Eng. may have been immediately taken.]
1. Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder.
1539. Taverner, Erasm. Prov. (1552), 43. This unleful lyberty or lycence of the multytude is called an Anarchie.
1605. Bacon, Adv. Learn., II. xxiii. § 36 (1873), 241. Pompey … made it his design … to cast the state into an absolute anarchy and confusion.
1664. H. More, Myst. Iniq., 219. A Polity without an Head … would not be a Polity, but Anarchy.
1796. Burke, Corr., IV. 389. Except in cases of direct war, whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.
1840. Carlyle, Heroes (1858), 277. Without sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see nothing possible but an anarchy; the hatefullest of things.
1878. Lecky, Eng. in 18th C., I. i. 12. William threatened at once to retire to Holland and leave the country to anarchy.
2. transf. Absence or non-recognition of authority and order in any sphere.
1667. Milton, P. L., X. 283. The waste Wide Anarchie of Chaos.
1821. Byron, Sardan., I. ii. (1868), 356. The satraps uncontroll’d, the gods unworshipped, And all things in the anarchy of sloth.
1831. Brewster, Newton (1855), II. xix. 205. Some of the provincial mints were in a state of anarchy.
a. Non-recognition of moral law; moral disorder.
1656. Cowley, Chronicle, ix. Thousand worse Passions then possest The Inter-regnum of my Breast. Bless me from such an Anarchy!
1713. Steele, Englishm., No. 7. 44. The Licentious are in a State of barbarous Anarchy.
1875. Hamerton, Intell. Life, VI. ii. 203. A moral anarchy difficult to conceive.
b. Unsettledness or conflict of opinion.
1655. Fuller, Ch. Hist., I. 10 (in Webster). All Computation in the Primitive time is very uncertain, there being then (and a good while after) an Anarchy, as I may terme it, in Authours and their reckoning of years.
1719. Young, Revenge, IV. i. No more I’ll bear this battle of the mind, This inward anarchy.
1754. Chesterf., in Boswell, Johnson (1816), I. 237. Our language is, at present, in a state of anarchy.
1842. W. Grove, Corr. Phys. Forces, 3. An anarchy of thought,—a perpetuity of mental revolutions.
