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I suspect that etymological propriety has seldom played much of a role in the popular acceptance of popular political terms. Proudhon might have had strong opinions about such things, but perhaps Claude Pelletier, who gave us atercratie, only had enough Greek to be dangerous. Anyway, in the context of "Constructing Anarchisms," the point of bringing up the range of proposed alternatives to anarchismatercratie, acracia, anticracy, acéphocratie, libertarian socialism — isn't to quibble about whether or not the proposers were language scholars, but to underline the specific processes by which anarchism emerged as the preferred term.

I think of atercratic as a rather clumsy word, but when I wanted to propose a title for a work of more-or-less anarchist history, which could have been written by someone who came of political age in New York libertarian circles in the 1870s, it seemed the most useful of the historical options available. Pelletier is certainly an unduly neglected figure. Perhaps it's time to finish up my various partial translations of his work, so that atercratie isn't just reduced to my appropriation of the terminology.