The first suicide bomber in English literature is a crazed anarchist professor in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent who stalks around London wired up with explosives. Entranced by a vision of pure nothingness, he has only to squeeze a rubber ball in his pocket to annihilate the present and clear a space for a utopian future. His political comrades are a bunch of sinister continental freaks who succeed in blowing up a young boy with learning difficulties.

Anarchism, in short, has something of an image problem. Even Ruth Kinna, in this sympathetic, impressively well-informed history of the movement, has to admit that it has had its fair share of bombers and assassins. Yet she also illustrates its extraordinary creativity. Born in the 19th century, a brainchild of the Unholy Trinity of French libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Russian revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, anarchism rejected what it saw as Karl Marx’s narrow economic and proletarian viewpoint. Nevertheless, the two creeds have a lot in common. Both believe in class struggle, the abolition of private property and the overthrow of the state. Both see the role of the state as defending private property, a view that you can also find in Cicero. Marx thinks that the state will eventually wither away, while anarchists believe in helping it on its way as soon as they can.

Where the two camps really collide is on the question of power. Power for Marxists is in the service of material interests. It isn’t the last word. Anarchists agree about the material interests, but see power as more primary than that. Domination of any kind is to be rejected. Anarchism isn’t opposed to government as such, just to any form of it that isn’t self-government. For many, this includes democracy, which involves the tyranny of the majority over the individual. Marxists will work with liberal democracy, whereas anarchists won’t. For them, it is just a more kid-gloved kind of coercion.

Yet no society can survive without coercion. There is nothing despotic about being made to drive on the left, or stopping your flatmate from playing the bagpipes all night. Rules can facilitate freedom as well as obstruct it: if everyone drives on the same side of the road, I’m less likely to end up in a wheelchair. The political state is indeed a source of lethal violence, but it also arranges for children to learn how to tie their shoelaces. Not all power is repressive, nor all authority obnoxious. There is the authority of those who are seasoned in the struggle against patriarchy, which one would do well to respect. Telling someone something they need to know isn’t always “hierarchical”. Nor is knowledge, as some slightly wackier libertarians have maintained. Some anti-hierarchical anarchists believe that all opinions hold equal weight, in which case the view that all opinions don’t hold equal weight is also true. When the young Noam Chomsky (an anarchist, no less) came to Europe in the late 1960s with vital information on the political turmoil in the United States, some students refused to listen to him on the grounds that lecturing is a form of violence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Occupy London protesters in 2011. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Even so, anarchism has been among the most daring, imaginative political currents of the modern age, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Occupy movement of 2011-12 (20,000 Parisians were slaughtered in the wake of the Commune, a fact that those appalled by the French revolutionary terror generally fail to recall). By the end of the 19th century, the movement had become a global presence from Uruguay to Japan. Rejecting state socialism and revolutionary vanguards, it devoted itself instead to direct action, self-governing cooperatives, experiments in education, flexible networks and grass-roots organising. Kinna’s book is packed with information about this rich history, all of it delivered in a curiously toneless, styleless way. Some of the pioneering figures of modern anarchism, such as Emma Goldman and Paul Goodman, are appropriately honoured.

Anarchists don’t like restrictive labels, including the word “anarchism”. Yet the term isn’t all that restrictive: as Kinna points out, it includes class-struggle anarchism, social anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, post-left anarchy, individualistic anarchism and quite a lot more. Post-left anarchy, one of whose advocates once sponsored something called Groucho Marxism, is basically just a matter of having a good time. There are those activists for whom there can’t really be anarchist parties or political programmes, since parties and programmes are part of the problem rather than the solution. Anarchist politics thus becomes a form of anti-politics. You can only bring down the state by organising, but organisation hampers the free spirit. Disruption and transgression thus become the order of the day. Only by keeping on the move can you avoid becoming part of the system yourself.

Pressed to an extreme, freedom means freedom from the constraints of other people, and thus an unbridled individualism. This was the view of the 19th-century thinker Max Stirner, with his so-called philosophy of egoism. (As some wag remarked, one would like to know what Mrs Stirner thought about that). Philosophical egoism, however, has not had many takers in anarchist circles, as opposed to the common-or-garden variety. What has been more popular is the view that human nature is inherently good but is corrupted by external powers. One of the many problems with this view is that power works as well as it does because we internalise it, so that to violate it would be to violate ourselves.

The Government of No One ends with a useful set of brief anarchist biographies, but overlooks the career of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential of modern political thinkers, who was an anarchist at heart. There is also no entry for Edward Carpenter, who around the year 1900 ranked among Britain’s most celebrated anarchist writers and was a pioneer of gay politics. I should declare a personal interest in drawing attention to this fact, since I once spent four dreary years writing a doctoral thesis on him.

• Humour by Terry Eagleton is published by Yale. Government of No One by Ruth Kinna is publishsed by Pelican (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.