A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s
that “anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures
anything”—including, he noted, those whose acts are such that “a
mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.” it
remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and
determinate theory of society and social change. In his work
Anarchosyndicalism, the German anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker
presented a systematic conception of the development of
anarchist thought toward anarchosyndicalism along lines that
bear comparison to Guérin’s work. He wrote that anarchism is not
…a fixed, self-enclosed system, but rather a definite trend in
the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the
intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental
institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all
the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a
relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to
become broader and to affect wide