Must there be nations, states, governments? What if the anarchists had won?

It's an unlikely notion, so completely have they faded from the scene. But 100 years ago, in Japan as elsewhere, the anarchists numbered in their ranks philosophers, visionaries, conspirators and passionately committed fellow-travelers who saw anarchism — not anarchy, which they denied would ensue — as the inevitable and much preferable successor to the repressive, oppressive, retrograde piece of machinery known as the state.

Their day would come, they thought. If it had, World War II might never have happened; human evolution could have run its course; today we'd be living ungoverned, free as birds, looking back on the age of governments with the same bemused disgust we accord human sacrifice, or the burning of heretics, or any other absurdity of the benighted, unenlightened past.