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A lot of people hear the word "anarchy" and think that it means chaos or violence. The precise meaning of the word is "without leaders." The "-arch-" part refers to leadership or government, and the "an-" part means absence or opposition to something.
Social anarchism refers to a society with de-centralized authority, so political decisions are made at the local level as much as possible. This involves human-scale communities that would be independant and/or autonomous, but federated with each other.
A lot of modern anarchist theory comes from the writings of nineteenth-century Europeans like Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon. These guys don't get talked about in the mass-media as much as the nineteenth-century communist theorists like Marx and Engels. I think this is because no government has ever embraced or endorsed social anarchism. How COULD a government endorse the dismantling of government?
Social anarchism should not be confused with various libertarian movements that would shut down government while leaving big business intact and unhindered. That approach would just centralize decision-making into the hands of corporate CEO's, a nightmare scenario if I've ever heard one.
Anyway, do some word searches on those names I mentioned and you should find plenty, at least until governments and corporations lobotomize the Internet. For starters, you might try Mikhail Bakunin: Philosophy, and Putting the Record Straight on Mikhail Bakunin or maybeAnarchism and Freedom.
Some very important contributions have been made to anarchist theory by Noam Chomsky, who is not only a twentieth-century writer, but still happens to be alive. Check out A Few References to Noam Chomsky.
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