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Anti-statism refers to opposition to state intervention into personal, social or economic affairs. Anti-statist views may reject the state completely as well as rulership in general (e.g. anarchism), they may wish to reduce the size and scope of the state to a minimum (e.g. minarchism), or they may advocate a stateless society as a distant goal (e.g. autonomism). Henry David Thoreau expressed this evolutionary anti-statist view in his essay "Civil Disobedience:"

I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

General categories

Radical anti-statists differ greatly according to the beliefs they hold in addition to anti-statism. Thus the categories of anti-statist thought are sometimes classified as collectivist or individualist. Interpretations of the principles of anarchism are often contested between adherents of anarchism. There are social anarchists who are opposed to private property (such as anarcho-syndicalism, anarchist communism, anarcho-primitivism as well as some individualist anarchists) and other individualist anarchists who embrace private property (such as mutualism. agorism or anarcho-capitalism).

Anti-statist philosophies that seek to minimize the role or influence of the state are difficult to delimit. They range from panarchy (states competing in the same territory for patronage, an arrangement hard to distinguish from statelessness) to Marxism and Christian postmillennialism, which envision statelessness in the remote future, to liberalism (or more precisely classical liberalism), which seeks only to reduce, not abolish, the role of the state.

A significant difficulty in determining whether a thinker or philosophy is anti-statist is the problem of defining the state itself. Terminology has changed over time, and past writers often used the word, "state" in a different sense than we use it today. Thus, the anarchist Michael Bakunin used the term simply to mean a governing organization. Other writers used the term "state" to mean any law-making or law-enforcement agency. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. According to Max Weber, the state is an organization with an effective monopoly on the use of force in a particular geographic area.