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1. We want to know Anarchism scientifically, for reasons both personal and external.

We wish to penetrate the essence of a movement that dares to question what is undoubted and to deny what is venerable, and nevertheless takes hold of wider and wider circles.

Besides, we wish to make up our minds whether it is not necessary to meet such a movement with force, to protect the established order or at least its quiet progressive development, and, by ruthless measures, to guard against greater evils.

2. At present there is the greatest lack of clear ideas about Anarchism, and that not only among the masses but among scholars and statesmen.

Now it is a historic law of evolution that is decribed [sic] as the supreme law of Anarchism, now it is the happiness of the individual, now justice. Now they say that Anarchism culminates in the negation of every programme, that it has only a negative aim; now, again, that its negating and destroying side is balanced by a side that is affirmative and creative; now, to conclude, that what is original in Anarchism is to be found exclusively in its utterances about the ideal society, that its real, true essence consists in its positive efforts.

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