Introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism

Abstract

Anarchism is a political concept and social movement associated with future or present politico-social projects without the state. It is informed by a commitment to the autonomy of the individual and the quest for voluntary consensus. In historical overviews of anarchism, it is often presented as possessing family resemblances to political, intellectual, and cultural innovations in classical Greece, ancient China, medieval Basra and medieval Europe, Civil War England, and Revolutionary Paris. Equally anthropologists will point to ‘stateless peoples’ throughout the world and human history as evidence of the deep pedigree that informs anarchist rejections of the state as an organising principle, and, indeed for most of humankind’s existence, the state did not exist. As a self-conscious ideology—as an ‘ism’—anarchism may owe its existence to the political formulations and intellectual currents that shaped Europe in the wake of the dual revolution, but it is also, crucially, a global and not merely European tradition. Anarchism’s history—its tenets, concepts, approaches, arguments, and style—was thus nurtured by global currents that spread people and ideas around the world, and its local manifestation was often shaped by domestic cultural and intellectual traditions that make anarchism an elusively protean ideology.

The Revival of Anarchism as Politics, Methodology, and Its Presence in Academia

Anarchism is a political concept and social movement associated with future or here and now politico-social projects without the state. It is informed by a commitment to the autonomy of the individual and the quest for voluntary consensus. In historical overviews of anarchism, it is often presented as possessing family resemblances to political, intellectual, and cultural innovations in classical Greece, ancient China, medieval Basra and medieval Europe, Civil War England, and Revolutionary Paris. Equally, anthropologists will point to ‘stateless peoples’ throughout the world and throughout all of human history as evidence of the deep pedigree that informs anarchist rejections of the state as an organising principle, and, indeed for most of humankind’s existence, the state did not exist. As a self-conscious ideology—as an ‘ism’—anarchism may owe its existence to the political formulations and intellectual currents that shaped Europe in the wake of the dual revolution, but it is also, crucially, a global and not merely European tradition. Anarchism’s history—its tenets, concepts, approaches, arguments, and style—was thus nurtured by global currents that spread people and ideas around the world, and its local manifestation was often shaped by domestic cultural and intellectual traditions that make anarchism an elusively protean ideology.[1]

The sub-schools that are a feature of anarchism—its admixtures of ‘individualism’, ‘collectivism’, ‘communism’, and ‘syndicalism’, which are cross-cut by differing attitudes towards the economy and organisation—add a layer of complexity to fathoming the nature of this ideology. And more recently, as we shall see, new takes on anarchism have become significant presences: anarcha-feminism, Green anarchism, and postmodern or postanarchism, draw on or refine ideas and practices which had always been present in the anarchist canon.

Since the Second World War, three waves of anarchist revival have occurred in the wake of the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the march of Franco’s troops into the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona in early 1939. Although certain formations of syndicalist action, particularly in the Global South from the 1940s, may be said to carry forward much of the spirit of pre-Second World War anarchism. But these movements, at least until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition of the People’s Republic of China from a Leninist to a capitalist state, tended to be overshadowed by national liberation movements drawing their inspiration from the so-called socialist world.[2]

The first wave of the anarchist revival of the 1940s and ‘50s was primarily composed of coteries of intellectuals, artists, students, and bohemians, and included, in the Anglophone world, people such as Paul Goodman, Colin Ward, Ursula Le Guin, Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Judith Malina, and Murray Bookchin. Much of their intellectual and imaginative labours were not, at first, joined to mass movements, even if they may have been inspired by their histories, or drawn energy from observing the various political and social movements that began to move to the centre of radical political life. Similarly, despite their occasional dismissal by rival anarchists for their bookish elitism, neither did they exert much influence in mainstream academia, or even mainstream political and civil society more broadly. But their anarchist methodologies, anarchist provocations, and anarchist imaginations, did stimulate new pathways in a host of academic disciplines including sociology, pedagogy, psychology, geography, urban planning, literature and historical studies, and they occasionally found coverage in various media outlets as ‘public intellectuals’, chiefly commenting on the cultural issues on which their modest fame tended to rest.[3] C. Wright Mills, a figure moving in these circles, is a case in point.[4] Famous for his role in defining this ‘new’ left in opposition to the ‘old’ which was seemingly discrediting itself in various totalitarian experiments, he articulated an anti-Cold War sociology that attempted to break out of the straitjacket of ‘Bomb Culture’[5] functionalist sociology. More than an academic distraction, he wanted to warn the peoples and elites of the East and West of an impending nuclear catastrophe, seeing in the Cold War antagonists self-reinforcing, mirror-image, military-industrial complexes in operation. Wright Mills’ work, urgent in the context of mutually assured destruction, drew its power from an older tradition of thinking and activism: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), through his signal intellectual influence Thorstein Veblen, an admirer of the IWW in its 1910s pomp, and the nineteenth-century anarchist tradition of social enquiry that had, amongst other things, launched a powerful moral critique of capitalism and the state.

Voices like Wright Mills’ were muffled but slowly gained traction with the dual crises of Suez and Budapest, and the emergence of the African American Freedom Movement.[6] Nevertheless, when the first edition of George Woodcock’s seminal general history of anarchism appeared in 1962, the author saw fit to issue a sombre obituary for anarchist politics. This book, Woodcock told his readers, analysed a movement which was dead.[7] In the wake of the unexpected events of 1968, and the broader period of social change and turmoil that stretched from the middle of the 1950s to the 1970s, Woodcock, in a second edition, conceded his death notice may have been premature.[8] His shift from pessimism to optimism was partly a product of the fact that he drifted out of anarchism’s orbit when he left austerity Britain for a new life on the west coast of Canada in 1949, but it was also a reflection of the changed circumstances for a movement that had seemingly drifted into redundancy after the tragedy of Spain.[9] Black flags were spotted anew from Paris to Berkeley, with the events in Paris in the spring of 1968 suggesting that, apparently, spontaneous events founded on direct action and grassroots occupations could paralyse an advanced capitalist democracy within a matter of days.[10]

During the 1970s and 1980s, the spin-offs from the 1960s and ‘1968’ were embodied in a variety of new social movements highlighting new, second-wave, anarchist-inflected groupuscules, activists, and thinkers. These included second-wave feminism, the Greens, the anti-nuke movements, and Gay Rights, all of which practised forms of small ‘A’ anarchism that invoked participatory democracy, affinity groups, the personal as political, consensual forms of democratic governance, prefiguration, and direct action.[11] Despite the clear resurgence of interest in anarchist ideas that these groups represented, it is important not to replace Woodcock’s 1962 obituary with eulogy. These waves of ‘New Anarchism’, or new politics with an anarchist flavour, style, theory, and methodology, were still overshadowed by social democratic, socialist, Eurocommunist, and Global South radical populist and Leninist-Nationalist competitors. Moreover, the intellectual and organisational bases of these movements could be varied, drawing strength and inspiration from a potpourri of historical and contemporary actors.[12] But something had, nevertheless, changed.

The greatest impulse for a more publicly noticeable revival of anarchism as action, theory, and methodology emerged from a complex of historical ruptures. The penetration of varieties of neo-liberalism in the West and the Global South; the downfall of the Soviet Union and the Marxist-Leninist model in its former bloc, and in its iteration as the ‘heroic guerrilla’ or radical post-colonial governments in the Global South; and the astounding rise of the Chinese model of Leninist Capitalism in place of Maoism, all informed an unstable political universe in which anarchism was rediscovered.[13] Besides the rise of political Islamism, the greatest challenge to the New World Order were forms of anarchism or anarchist-type movement that point to a third wave of anarcho-activism. This new radicalism was embodied in the rising in the Lacandon jungles of Mexico’sChiapas in 1994, under the banner of the post-Leninist Zapatistas and cognate movements in urban and rural areas of Latin America. This sparked a series of mobilisations that culminated, via the War on Terror/Iraq War, with the crisis of 2007/2008, the Occupy/Square movements, and associated social aftershocks from 2010 to 2014, which have unsettled mainstream politics in a similar manner to 1968, globally reshuffling the deck in unanticipated and unpredictable ways. This 20-year wave of social movements is a complex story of several strands. The Global Justice Movement, the networking of social forums, the War on Terror after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the end of the so-called Great Moderation or Great Speculation, the crash in 2008, and the Euro Crisis and the Age of Austerity led to the rise of Square movements from Tahrir to Zuccotti Square, grassroots radicalisms and left-wing populism in Latin America, and then in Europe and North America (and of course to a counter-blast of right-wing populisms).[14]

These strands of dissent became a motor in Latin America, North America, Europe, and elsewhere, inspiring academics and public intellectuals, and spurring in turn the unprecedented growth of ‘Anarchist Studies’ in the universities, and amongst a broader interested public.[15] But the intellectual field had been fertilised by several generations of radical academics, and by curious and sympathetic investigators and practitioners in the social sciences, the humanities and the arts, stretching from the 1940s to the present.[16] One did not need to be an anarchist to see that the questions posed by anarchism demanded addressing; as did, for example, in its classical period, the theoretician of the bourgeois state, capitalism, and bureaucracy, Max Weber, who sharpened his own research agenda and political ethos by engaging in close discussions and friendly debates with anarchists and syndicalists.[17] Similarly, in our own era, anarchism has served as a muse, sparring partner, or method, without those engaged in their respective fields necessarily declaring themselves ‘card-carrying’ anarchists, or producing works aimed at a self-identified anarchist mass movement. For the anthropologist David Graeber, for example, who was closely associated with the direct-actionist Global Justice Movement and later ‘present at the creation’ of Occupy Wall Street, anarchism was a form of consensual grassroots democracy without the state, and much of his academic work seeks to understand how people can negotiate their lives without the state.[18] Similarly, for another anthropologist, James Scott, an anarchist ‘squint’, assisted the investigator in perceiving the hidden transcripts of peasants’ lives in the Global South (e.g. in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and Egypt), who sought, and still seek, to escape the legibility of the prowling machines of the state.[19]

The burst of interest in anarchism in all its manifestations has been fuelled by a feedback loop nourished by several generations of post-1945 anarchist thinkers, sympathetic academics, and scholars who, like latter-day Max Webers, see the merit in the questions anarchists pose, the examples they set, and the methodologies they pursue. For example, historians of the transnational, diasporic, and cosmopolitan movements of anarchism and syndicalism between the 1870s and 1920s have been inspired by the examples of the Global Justice Movement and Occupy occurring outside their seminar rooms.[20] Conversely, the political theorists and public intellectuals of the Square have cited the transnationalism of early-twentieth-century anarchism and syndicalism as precursors of the networked, rhizomic, digitalised, waves of dissent today. In terms of publications, the burst of monographs, anthologies, and edited works on all aspects of anarchism (classical, new, and ‘post’),[21] makes apparent that the present situation is different than the 1950s, the wave of interest in the 1960s and 1970s,[22] and the focus on anarchism that emerged from Punk and the new social movements of the 1980s.[23] In each of these cases, one can note a spike of publishing activity, but until the end of the Cold War and even perhaps to the dawn of this century, Marxist, postmodernist, and post-colonial forms of radical thought overshadowed the brief appearances of anarchism in the print and digital word. That, as this book testifies, is not necessarily the case any longer.

Overview of This Handbook

The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism addresses, engages with, and challenges the anarchist tradition in ways that reflect the resurgence of interest in anarchist politics and its diverse manifestations. We do not give the reader biographical summaries of the so-called sages of anarchism.[24] In the standard histories of anarchism that have dominated the scholarship since the 1960s, a line of descent is usually traced between key intellectuals apparently engaged in a mutual conversation, as if aiming to stake out the boundaries of a distinct ideology. William Godwin, Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Emma Goldman, all usually feature, while innovators aim to bring others into the ‘canon’, Alexander Berkman perhaps, or Gustav Landauer, or Leo Tolstoy. So too these histories often progress from disquisitions on key personalities to a movement-based approach, frequently presenting a pre-history starting sometime before the nineteenth century and the emergence of self-conscious and self-defined anarchism, and then tailing off with the anarchist and syndicalist defeat in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). More recent attempts have endeavoured to correct the obvious faults in these narratives: disrupting Eurocentric accounts, presenting less masculinist and hetero-normative interpretations, and taking the post-1945 era more seriously. We have not chosen sides in battles such as these, but we have tried to draw from and refine the models of twenty or so years of anthologies and edited volumes, to produce a rich tour d’horizon guided by an indisciplinarity that gives the reader a historical and conceptual overview of the field.

Given the decline of Marxism as the hegemonic force on the left, there has been a renewed interest in the ideas, the history, and the potentialities of anarchist politics. Reflecting this renewed interest, the Handbook of Anarchism unites leading scholars from around the world in exploring anarchism as an ideology, offering an examination of its core principles, an analysis of its history, and an assessment of its contribution to the struggles confronting humanity today. In this regard, the approach taken by the Handbook is an amalgam of the previous waves of anthologies and edited volumes, but it is the most comprehensive attempt so far. Grounded in a conceptual and historical approach, each entry charts the distinctively anarchist take on a particular intellectual, political, cultural, and social phenomenon. At its heart, therefore, is a sustained process of conceptual definition, demonstrating how anarchism emerged as an independent ideology in the nineteenth century, how it has grown into a diverse tradition across the twentieth century, and how it continues to help shape, often in unexpected ways, contemporary political and social action.

This volume therefore bridges the gap between historical approaches to anarchism and the vibrant and ever-expanding discussion of new forms of anarchism that are taking shape in the twenty-first century. The chapters that comprise the book point, as Carne Ross suggests in his preface to this volume, to the urgency of taking seriously the questions that anarchism has posed throughout its history. Ross, a former UK diplomat who became disenchanted with his role after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, has himself been informed by these ideas in both an intellectual sense and by witnessing the diverse manifestations of these values in practical social struggles. Finding inspiration in the Occupy Movement, the mutual aid of Occupy Sandy, and the experimental communalism in Rojava, anarchism for Ross has become a method, a process, and a means to a fairer society, not an end result in itself.[25] The dynamics of this position are examined across the four sections of this book. These sections are:

Part I ‘Core Principles and Problématiques’ is designed to stake out the core concepts that shaped the emergence of anarchism as an ideology and to give an idea of the ways different thinkers have grappled distinctively with key intellectual, political, and practical social problems.

Chapters in Part I include ‘The State’, in which Nathan Jun draws upon Michael Freeden’s morphological theory of ideology to examine diverse conceptions of the state within the anarchist tradition. In the ‘Individual and Community’, Laurence Davis argues that anarchism demonstrates its coherence as an ideology partly through the pluralist coexistence of individualism and collectivism at its heart. In his chapter on ‘Freedom’, Alex Prichard suggests, building on evidence from five different historical contexts, that competing conceptions of freedom can be reconciled through anarchist constitutionalism, and by conceiving of anarchism within the republican tradition of non-domination in which decision-making, rules, and regulations can be aligned to conceptions of the good.[26]

Deric Shannon’s chapter in Part I throws further light on the conceptual issues that have characterised anarchism’s distinctiveness. In ‘Anti-Capitalism and Libertarian Political Economy’, he argues that despite the claims of certain anarcho-capitalists, libertarian approaches to political economy have always been rooted in anti-capitalism. The author defines the anarchist contributions to political economy by examining historical and contemporary anarchist takes on wage labour/exploitation, private property, markets, class society, and states. He then dissects how capitalist values are naturalised, examining the assertion that human beings are natural utility maximisers and that capitalism is a ‘natural’ result of the desire in human nature for human beings to dominate one another. Moving to anarchist approaches to political and social change, in his chapter ‘Tactics: Conceptions of Social Change, Revolution and Anarchist Organisation’, Dana Williams explicates key components of the anarchist toolkit, particularly ‘direct action’ and ‘prefiguration’, which promote the goals of horizontalism, liberation, and egalitarianism. These tactics are not exclusive to the anarchists, and have been developed in cooperation with other movements, namely, other non-state and non-elite actors in a wide variety of community, education, and alternative-building efforts.

Carl Levy’s chapter in Part I on ‘Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism’ discusses the two faces of cosmopolitanism: ‘Stoical imperialism’ and ‘Cynical Anarcho-Cosmopolitanism’. It traces elements from the latter tradition into the Radical Enlightenment and extra-European thought and practice in the Global South and later in the sinews of transnational anarchism and syndicalism, and today in the practices and theorisations of the Global Justice, Occupy, and Square movements in contradistinction to the International Relations concept of international society and ‘anarchy’. Ole Birk Laursen takes a related theme in his chapter, ‘Anarchism and Anti-Imperialism’, providing an overview of anarchist approaches to anti-imperialism, offering examples of collaborations, solidarities, antagonisms, and syntheses between anarchists and anti-colonialists from across the British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonial worlds in the period 1870–1960.

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Lara Apps’ chapter, ‘Anarchism and Religion’, reviews the many different types of interactions between religion and anarchism including religious scholars articulating a theology which engages with anarchism, and how anarchists interpret religious scriptures to point to anarchist politics. But the main aim of this chapter is to map out the intersections of religion and anarchism by examining four themes: anarchist quarrels with religion and its institutions; anarchist interpretation of founding scriptures and figures; anarchist theology; and historical studies of specific religious thinkers, communities, and movements. Shifting from religion to science, the final chapter in Part I, by Elliot Murphy, explores ‘Anarchism and Science’, revisiting classical anarchism’s close relationship to the sciences, particularly Peter Kropotkin’s assertion that anarchism was akin to the experimental method of the natural sciences.[27] Building on Kropotkin’s prediction that science would confirm the veracity of much of the anarchist project, Murphy suggests that the psychological and behavioural sciences are now closer than ever to discovering the origin and structure of humanity’s moral faculties, an idea central to the altruism which underwrote Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid.[28] In what is a bold counter-thrust to the growing post-anarchist narrative, Murphy also argues that political critique can and indeed should be based on naturalism and not the first premises of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Judith Butler, and other thinkers associated with postmodernism.

Part II ‘Core Traditions’ gives an overview of the ways in which—under the broad category of anarchism—different thinkers and activists have tried to carve out particular political positions stressing specific aspects of the anarchist intellectual identity as fundamental. Contributors to Part II convey the key claims of these ‘schools’, considering their defining internal debates, and exploring the ways particular thinkers and activists have tried to distinguish their ideas from other schools of anarchist thought.

Chapters in Part II include ‘Mutualism’, where Shawn Wilbur delineates a strand of anarchism founded on the proposition of non-governmental society and non-capitalist commerce through bilateral agreements and mutual guarantees between free individuals and groupings. This chapter summarises the work of the first self-declared anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It then precedes to differentiate schools of mutualism associated with Proudhonian anarchist collectivism and anarchist communism, tracing continuities, especially in the American context, with the individualism of Benjamin Tucker and the more recent but related varieties of ‘market anarchism’ now advanced by Kevin Carson’s ‘free-market anti-capitalism’.[29] In his chapter, ‘Individualism and Anarchism’, Peter Ryley emphasises that individualist anarchism does not abide by one tradition. Most importantly, although some collectivists have denied its anarchist authenticity, Ryley mounts a strong defence of its legitimacy. This individualist anarchism is founded, Ryley argues, on the autonomous moral individual and an economics based on direct ownership.

Davide Turcato discusses ‘Anarchist Communism’ in his chapter, the hegemonic ideology of anarchists during the era of ‘classical anarchism’. Although the idea that products should be distributed according to the needs of the individual was a constant throughout the history of anarchism, Turcato notes that anarchist communism was never a single coherent current. He identifies three main trends: anti-organisationalist anarchist communists in dispute with organisationalists; socially oriented anarchist communists positing their doctrine in contradistinction to individualists; and finally, after the Bolshevik Revolution, libertarian communists contrasting their doctrine to the authoritarian communism of the Marxist-Leninists who seemed to monopolise the term ‘communism’.

Syndicalism was the doctrine and method which allowed anarchists to become noticeably influential during the era of classical anarchism, and in his chapter Lucien van der Walt defines it as a radically democratic unionism which, through solidarity, self-activity, and direct action (from self-education to the general strike), aims to construct a free socialist order based on self-management grounded in interlinked assemblies and councils. Van der Walt disputes the pessimistic predictions of Robert Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’[30] which he feels syndicalist trade unions could, and can, avoid. This chapter supplies the reader with a synoptic history of the origins, growth, and global dissemination of syndicalism from the 1870s to the 1940s. But he insists that syndicalism should not be consigned to the museum of historical curiosities. Noted perhaps for its destructive purism and sectarianism, it also displays an unquenchable vitality and creativity over its 150-year history.

The last chapters in Part II point to currents that have played increasingly important roles in shaping anarchism since 1945: ‘Anarcha-Feminism’, ‘Green Anarchism’, and ‘Postanarchism’. In her chapter Donna Kowal traces the origins of anarcha-feminism to the contribution of key thinkers from the nineteenth century, such as Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Lucia Sánchez Saornil, pinpointing agreements and disagreements between them. Since these pioneers, anarcha-feminism has developed as a distinct school of thought and praxis that has mounted a critique of authority through the experiences of women, particularly the constraints posed by sexual double standards and the gendered division of labour. In his chapter on ‘Green Anarchism’, Andy Price traces its take-off from the resurgence of the anarchist tradition and the emergence of a Green movement in the late 1960s. Through a review of the three main and differing contributors to Green Anarchism—from Murray Bookchin, Arne Naess, and John Zerzan—Price concludes that all genuine Green thinking is by definition anarchistic. But this chapter also demonstrates that there are many varying shades of Green Anarchism.

Finally, the emergence of a genuinely new and at times controversial synthesis known as postanarchism is discussed in lucid and engaging tones by one of its proponents, Saul Newman. Postanarchism, Newman argues, is a synthesis of anarchist philosophy and poststructuralist theory (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Lacan) and has been employed to understand and define the contemporary autonomous movements and decentralised networks discussed earlier in this introduction. Controversially, Newman contends that postanarchism differentiates itself from nineteenth-century anarchism through its disavowal of universal metanarratives and ontological certainties. Human nature is not assumed to be benign, nor is there a latent rational social order under the constraints of the oppressive state which an anarchist revolution will reveal. Like the poststructuralists, the postanarchists believe that the human subject is discursively constructed and that social relations are characterised by their contingent nature. Anarchy is not an end-state awaiting to be revealed once the constraints of statist society are smashed in revolutionary action. Instead, Newman proposes an ontologically anarchic politics grounded on this form of ‘post-foundational’ anarchism. But Newman is not naïve and points to the amorphous, indistinct, and shape-shifting nature of contemporary forms of power. If there are no clear normative guidelines in this post-foundational anarchism, how are social actors, who may be enchained by voluntary servitude, to act?

Part III ‘Key Events/Histories’ examines the responses of anarchists to particular events, their involvement in episodes of historical importance, and the significance of their interpretations of these events to the development of anarchist theory.

Part III begins with C. Alexander McKinley’s ‘The French Revolution and 1848’ in which the author details the ways in which the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Revolution(s) of 1848 shaped anarchism in its early but crucial phases. He contends that although they were not anarchists, and future anarchists may have been hostile to much of their thought, key components of anarchism can be found in aspects of the writings of Enlightenment thinkers including Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and others. McKinley notes that key components of anarchist practice (particularly the direct democracy of the sections of the Commune of Paris) made their appearance during the French Revolution, as did the word ‘anarchist’, a term of disparagement against the radicals of the French Revolution. The next chapter discusses the anarchism of the First International (formally known as the International Workingmen’s Association).[31] Lasting from 1864 to around 1880, Robert Graham highlights its role as a watershed in the history of anarchist movements and ideas. It is within the debates carried out in the First International that modern anarchism was first clearly articulated. It was here also that anarchists advanced their revolutionary alternatives to both parliamentary socialism and the advocates of revolutionary dictatorship in a Marxist mould.

In his chapter, ‘The Spectre of the Commune and French Anarchists in the 1890s’, John Merriman analyses the event which made anarchism flesh for many of its supporters and detractors from 1871 to the outbreak of war in 1914. But although Merriman notes the importance of the example of the Paris Commune of 1871 on anarchist political theory, his chapter focusses on its influence on the reality of anarchist organisation in France, and above all, in Paris. The crushing of the Paris Commune in a sea of blood remained crucial in the collective memory of Parisians and in the global anarchist movements as a prime example of state terrorism, and indeed motivated the actions of anarchist terrorist, Émile Henry, whose Communard father had been condemned to death in absentia. The Communard ‘martyrs’ were joined by other martyrs after Haymarket in Chicago in 1886, discussed by Kenyon Zimmer in the next chapter, ‘Haymarket and the Rise of Syndicalism’. Zimmer’s chapter is a global survey of how anarchists’ views of the workers’ movement and trade unions evolved, and their participation in these movements. This chapter is a companion piece to van der Walt’s, but from the specific angle of how the American strike movement of 1886 influenced the development of syndicalist ideas in Europe, and the subsequent global dissemination and intermixture with local traditions of labour radicalism.

Themes broached in Merriman’s chapter are given a global account in Constance Bantman’s contribution, ‘The Era of Propaganda by the Deed’. In a richly analytical contribution, the author traces the ideological genesis of the notion of propaganda by the deed, reviewing the terrorist wave which it partly inspired from the 1880s to the 1920s. Bantman stresses that the link between the notion of propaganda by the deed and this wave, or waves, of anarchist terrorism is complex and that anarchism was not solely a movement of terrorism. Thus she outlines the divisions amongst the anarchists regarding the use of political violence, and examines the frequent difficulties of identifying acts that were examples of anarchist terrorism, as they were frequently clouded by lone wolf acts, police provocations, and opaque boundaries with mere criminality. The author remarks on the fascinating academic and media debate which has been spurred by possible parallels between anarchist terrorism and post-9/11 Islamist-inspired attacks.

If the First International and its schisms, and the contemporaneous Paris Commune of 1871, were watersheds in the emergence of classical anarchism, surely the outbreak of war in 1914 was equally important for its long-term decline. In his chapter on ‘Anarchism and the First World War’, Matthew Adams discusses how the war heightened governmental suspicion and coercion of anarchists, and disrupted networks of international cooperation between anarchist individuals and organisations. But the First World War also posited an existential crisis of belief for the anarchist movement, magnified by the public debate between two of its greatest antebellum personalities and thinkers, Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta, in which the Russian anarchist embraced the cause of the Entente, and the Italian anarchist denounced him as an apostate and believed that the war’s instability would give rise to revolutionary opportunities for anarchists. Using this set-piece debate to explore anarchist responses to the outbreak of the war in Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Russia, the clash over intervention in the war posed the issue of the distinctive political identity of the anarchists, generated fresh tactical perspectives on anti-militarism and anti-colonialism, and demonstrated the theoretical and tactical plurality of anarchism, a red thread through this volume.

The Russian Revolution was precisely the type of opportunity Malatesta believed the war would produce.[32] In his chapter, ‘Anarchism and Marxism in the Russian Revolution’, Anthony D’Agostino approaches the events of 1917–1921 by employing the longer view, and emphasising that the dramatic events of the Revolution and Civil War were foreshadowed by the decades-long conflict between Bakunin, Kropotkin, and other anarchists on one side and Marx and the Marxists on the other. The author contends that these Russian anarchists had constructed a sophisticated theory of the state which was suited for an age of revolution, stretching from the Italian Risorgimento to the Mexican Revolution. The Russian anarchists, D’Agostino suggests, understood the unique Russian case which placed it outside the evolutionary pathways increasingly embraced by the Marxists of Western and Central Europe. In an interlude before his discussion of the events of 1917–1921, D’Agostino weighs the influence of Jan Wacław Machajski, on the radical realism of Lenin and the anarchists, because, of course, like the Polish theorist, Bakunin had predicted that the victory of the Marxist dictatorship would not result in the triumph of the proletariat but the rise of a New Class of savants and ex-worker party bureaucrats.[33] D’Agostino thus argues that Machajski’s reconciliation with Bolshevism mirrored the reaction of many anarchist militants in Russia to the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917. For these anarchists, the Bolsheviks were the vanguard in the revolt against imperialist war, the reaction, for instance, of anti-war Malatesta, discussed previously in Adams’ chapter. D’Agostino retains a radical realism in his conclusion: would any state power have allowed Kronstadt or Makhno to persist after the alliance of convenience ended? And would an agrarian Russian federative polity without state compulsion survived in a world of states?

This takes us on to the other case study, James Yeoman’s ‘The Spanish Civil War’, which poses the same dilemmas and reveals similar ironies. Yeoman’s valuable review of the most recent studies of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War begins with a discussion of the development of the Spanish anarchist movement from its origins to the eve of the events of the summer of 1936. From July 1936 to early 1937, Yeoman details how anarchist ideas were implemented in an unparalleled fashion in factories and agricultural production under workers and peasants’ committees and then reversed in the wake of the May Days in Barcelona in 1937, with the anarcho-syndicalist Confederacíon Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) being removed from dominance in the north-east of Spain. But Yeoman also emphasises two important but until recently overlooked aspects of the Civil War period: that despite this major set-back for the anarchist movement, it still played a significant role in the republican war effort until Franco’s victory in April 1939, and that the anarchists’ role in the Spanish Civil War outside the north-east of Spain needs greater investigation.

The re-emergence of the anarchists in the streets after 1945 is the theme of the chapters by David Berry, ‘Anarchism and 1968’ and Francis Dupuis-Déri, ‘From the Zapatistas to Seattle: The ‘New Anarchists’. The events of 1968 seemed to herald the emergence of a new type of anarchism after the deep freeze following the collapse of Spanish anarchism in 1939. Whereas 1968 happened when Marxism was still a vigorous and attractive competitor for the anarchists and the anarchist tradition, the era of the ‘new anarchists’ discussed by Dupuis-Déri occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of Marxism as a political project. In both cases, however, the mainstream media were startled by the reappearance of black flags in the streets of Paris in 1968 and Seattle in 1999. As Berry argues, it is assumed that the events of 1968 were a type of anarchist or anarchistic revolution, yet the scholarly work on the role of the anarchists and anarchist ideas on the events in France in May–June 1968 has been surprisingly limited. Drawing on a wide variety of periodicals, pamphlets, police files, and the personal archives of militants, this chapter is a comprehensive account of the role of the anarchists in the events and ponders the extent to which the spirit of ‘68 can be said to be libertarian or anarchistic. Berry concludes that whereas 1968 was seen as endorsement of anarchist ideas of spontaneous popular revolt, the anarchist movement itself was in disarray. Small ‘A’ anarchism thus makes its debut in this post-1945 setting, and re-emerges in the startling events of Seattle, 1999, where Dupuis-Déri argues that the anarchists stole the show in the so-called Battle of Seattle, where a broad-based alliance shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) Summit. The goal of this chapter is to identify these new anarchists and their new anarchism. How did these new activists translate their collective organisation, decision-making processes, and collective action into anarchism? Returning to May ‘68, he proceeds to discuss the Zapatistas’ uprising in 1994 and goes into great detail about the events which occurred on 30 November 1999. The final section is devoted to how these new anarchists were interpreted theoretically by Barbara Epstein, David Graeber, and Richard Day, and in contrast why other radical political theorists and philosophers such as Nancy Fraser and Chantal Mouffe argue that the new anarchists should engage with Podemos, the US Democrats, and SYRIZA and disavow their anarchism.

Part IV ‘Anarchist Applications’ focusses on the contemporary relevance of anarchist ideas and the contributions anarchist activists and thinkers have made to movements, theoretical conflicts, and particular social struggles. Although the focus in this section is on the role that anarchists have played—and the distinctive contributions that anarchist ideas have made—to a particular problem or theme, authors also reflect on the deeper history of attempts by anarchists to grapple with particular issues.

Part IV begins with a chapter on ‘Utopian and Intentional Communities’ by Rhiannon Firth, where she notes the complex, yet mutually reinforcing, relationship between utopian and intentional communities and anarchism. Utopianism is not an uncontested term in the anarchist tradition, where it can be dismissed as a blueprint authoritarianism. Instead Firth posits a ‘critical utopianism’ using the work of Lucy Sargisson and Tom Moylan, which is suitable for the anarchists because it is critical of the status quo, is self-critical, and explores forms of domination and exclusion that may arise within utopian experiments and intentional communities. Judith Suissa’s chapter ‘Anarchist Education’ deals with one of the chief cultural manifestations of anarchism over the past two centuries: education. Suissa argues that central anarchist values such as mutual aid, autonomy, and cooperation yield an anarchist alternative to mainstream forms of educational provision. She provides the reader with a historical account of anarchist educational experiments and goes on to discuss formal and informal education, as well as issues within educational philosophy and theory. While the anarchist tradition of educational thought and practice overlaps to some degree with non-anarchist forms of libertarian, progressive, and democratic education, anarchist education and theory and practice offers a unique perspective, while also proffering valuable resources to mount criticisms of contemporary mainstream educational policy and practice.

In ‘The City, Urban Planning & Architecture’, Michael Coates addresses how anarchists do architecture, which of course was of keen interest to the first wave of post-1945 anarchist thinkers, including Colin Ward and Paul and Percival Goodman. How can a grassroots anarchist approach to architecture be possible if, over the past 200 years, it has become professionalised and the practice of building buildings industrialised? Coates focusses on case studies in the 1970s and the operation of the SOLON housing and architectural works cooperative, the cooperative housing groups created to resist demolition in Liverpool, and the Architects’ Revolutionary Council which mounted a rebellion of professionals against the profession. In contrast, Benjamin Franks’ chapter on ‘Anarchism and Ethics’ does not describe how to do practical things in an anarchist manner, but how morality and ethics informed by anarchism can guide our practical activities. Reviewing the main meta-ethical and normative positions associated with different constellations of anarchism and post-anarchism, Franks argues for an anti-hierarchical virtue approach which, the author concludes, is the most productive and consistent for social anarchism, and he illustrates his point through the debates of contemporary anarchist activists and anarchist practices that are rich in virtues.

James Gifford’s chapter on ‘Literature and Anarchism’ has linkages with the previously discussed chapters on utopianism and on education.[34] As a work of the imagination, and as form of pedagogy, literature is crucial to the culture and presence of anarchism. Also as Gifford argues, anarchism has extensively contributed conceptual, thematic, and topical contents to literary work, while authors have made major contributions to anarchism as a political philosophy and practice. Gifford’s ambitious chapter, which includes poetry and prose, surveys Romantic through Modernist and Contemporary literature in relation to anarchism, with an emphasis on English language literary traditions in Europe and North America since the 1790s. This chapter also covers authors whose depictions of, or topical engagements with, anarchism helped shape popular consciousness or mainstream conceptions of anarchism, primarily Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent and G. K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday. On the other hand, Gifford also serves up a fascinating discussion of popular literature and genre writing engaged with anarchism, including works by Ursula Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Starhawk, and Allan Moore.

In a similar vein Mark Mattern’s chapter, ‘Anarchism and Art’, argues that the arts have been integral to anarchism since its inception, with foundational thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman all writing persuasively and eloquently about the power of art as a potential tool of social criticism and revolutionary vision and as an essential component of a life free of domination.[35] Contemporary artists engage with these themes and open up new approaches, but anarchist themes have also informed artists’ quests for a life free from alienation over the last 150 years, and art continues to play a role in opening cracks in dominant structures of everyday life where anarchist values and practices can take root. Mattern’s chapter summarises the arguments of the foundational and contemporary anarchists and then illustrates several popular art forms in terms of core anarchist values of autonomy, equality, power, and direct action. Lucy Nicholas’ chapter, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, returns us to themes pursued in the chapter on ‘Anarcha-Feminism’, analysing anarchist approaches to the dominative aspects of gender and sexualities. These historical, and more recent, approaches have offered unique ways of understanding the underlying mechanisms that explain why these axes of oppression have been so difficult to challenge, as well as offering anarchist ways of understanding the more interpersonal and social workings of power. Although this causes Nicholas to return to the era of Emma Goldman and her comrades, this chapter focusses on more contemporary anarchist approaches to feminism and critiques of gendered hierarchy. Advancing arguments which have reached mainstream discourse and public/social policy, some approaches call for more anarchistic gender relations rather than the existing binary genders and challenging gender roles more broadly. A second, more contemporary and queer theory-informed analysis points to the coercive nature of the gender binary and envisions its eradication. This chapter thus demonstrates how anarchism can be applied to critique compulsory heterosexuality or heteronormativity, as well as monogamy and traditional sexual ethics.

We had cause to note new inflections, or new formations, in anarchism as theory and practice since 1945, including innovations such asGreen Anarchism, and new takes on sexuality and gender. Sky Croeser’s chapter, ‘Post-Industrial and Digital Society’, investigates the new material and technological realities of twenty-first-century anarchism. Her chapter explores some of the diverse changes to production and consumption facilitated by the Internet, particularly those that embody a shift towards non-hierarchical and participatory practices. These practices are explicitly informed by anarchist praxis and history, and the development of independent, non-commercial, communications infrastructures online has frequently been driven by a concern with evading state censorship and surveillance. These communications infrastructures are often produced by collectives drawing on anarchist principles, but other emerging practices are heavily influenced by US capitalist-libertarian subcultures. Anarchists have expressed extreme wariness at claims trumpeting the radical potential of these practices. But this chapter investigates other potentialities beyond the gaze of hacktivists, Bitcoin fanatics, and venture capitalists in libertarian garb. Anarchist praxis is frequently at its most disruptive in the networks of solidarity and mutual aid facilitated by the Internet.[36] Although by no means all anarchists, these networks of people are nevertheless challenging capitalist and statist constructions of labour and consumption, and this chapter describes how these new gift economies are developing radical, anti-capitalist, and anti-hierarchical discourses around labour and consumption.

Since the era of classical anarchism, concerns around human relations with non-human animals, and with the raising of animals for food, have played an important role in the history of anarchist thought and practical political engagement. Élisée Reclus’ argument in On Vegetarianism,[37] for example, emphasised our emotional connections to other creatures and the dominating power and violence implied in the production and consumption of meat. In her chapter, ‘Farming and Food’, Erika Cudworth considers that the openness of anarchism to multiple forms of domination makes it particularly well-suited to develop powerful critiques of human domination of other animals. As Cudworth notes, Kropotkin and Bookchin both saw humanity as co-constituted in ‘federations’ of life with non-humans, and this chapter examines anarchist foregrounding the intersectionalised oppression of humans and other animals in the food and farming industries. The chapter evaluates the role of anarchism in human-animal studies and argues that anarchism has a significant impact on the sub-field of Critical Animal Studies. But Cudworth also notes tensions within both human-animal studies and anarchism. Some see animal liberation as a tertiary concern for anarchism, but others see it as on the cutting edge of contemporary political action. Some anarchists call for the end to industrial animal food production but not the end of eating meat, and some call for a post-industrial society based on hunting for food, while others call for a vegan future. Cudworth recommends an anarchist food politics which endorses more compassionate ways of being in the world and resistance to the violence implicated in the global networks of making other animals into food.

Marina Sitrin returns to a theme examined by Dupuis-Déri, taking a closer look at new horizontal forms of social action spanning the globe in her chapter ‘Anarchism and the Newest Social Movements’. She discusses the functioning of such movements as Occupy Wall Street in the United States; the autonomous movements in Greece, from Solidarity Health Clinics to recuperated workplaces; movements in defence of the land in Argentina, Bolivia, the United States, and Canada; Nuit Debout in France; and resistance to housing evictions and occupations, from the Plataforma (PAH) in Spain to Occupy Homes in the United States. This chapter delves into the specifics of the newer anti-capitalist movements and also refers back to the Zapatistas in the Chiapas, the Global Justice Movement, and the Argentine assembly movements after 2001. Sitrin interrogates the extent to which there are similarities with anarchist approaches and visions, and examines the composition of these new social movements.

In a related chapter which hearkens back to earlier accounts of anti-imperialism and syndicalism as a global phenomenon, Maia Ramnath’s ‘Non-Westerns Anarchisms’ offers a broad overview of non-Western anarchisms, touching upon the historical and contemporary manifestations of anti-authoritarian movements and tendencies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. In parallel but differently from earlier discussions of self-identified anarchists and anarchists’ movements, and the larger social movements which interacted with them but also manifest autonomous forms of small ‘A’ anarchism, Ramnath divides her field of enquiry into people and groups who self-identify as part of the modern genealogy of modern anarchist traditions, from syndicalist to insurrectionary. She consequently challenges Western ownership of that tradition, widening its field of view, including people and groups who use different vocabularies which are rooted in a variety of philosophical traditions but demonstrate an affinity with anarchism. Ramnath maps the power relations and relevant forms of oppression, exploitation, and hierarchy as they manifest in each specific context, and their corresponding histories of resistance and the making of alternative politics, which draw on available cultural repertories. Her purview is ambitious including manifestations from Mexico to Kurdistan, and Egypt to the Philippines, amongst many others. All of these examples have specific conditions and histories, but all non-Western anarchisms share a history of colonisation and foreign occupation or intervention. Ramnath therefore unpicks the additional layer of complexity in the story of power and resistance to power, requiring a systemic awareness of where a given society is located in relation to global structures of capital and empire as these intersect or collude with locally rooted forms of domination.

This highlights the complex shadings of issues of indigeneity, religion, modernity, industrialisation, and nationalism and communism in resistance struggles, and the next chapter by Kathy Ferguson and Kahala Johnson, ‘Anarchism & Indigeneity’, continues to focus on the intersection of self-identified anarchists and other movements and individuals who share affinities and similar aims and goals. Ferguson and Johnson note that anarchists and indigenous activists have historically made alliances to fight colonialism, as was notable in early-twentieth-century struggles in Mexico and India. They often ally today in struggles against environmental degradation and settler colonialism, and in the context of other shared concerns, but Ferguson and Johnson also note that encounters of anarchism and indigenous thinking can generate conflict. This chapter explores these attractions and repulsions, but the authors, nevertheless, locate a vibrant, shared epicentre of resurgent activity generated by the land itself/zherself. How, the authors ask, do relations with the land prefigure anarcha-indigenous interdependences and non-human kinships beyond the varieties of violence of sovereignty, property, territory, and law?

In the final chapter of this volume, Laura Galián continues with the theme of the Global South and anarchism and thenew anarchism of the Square and Occupy movements which is a shared praxis of North and South. In the case of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and other Southern Mediterranean countries, anarchist groups and forms of politics re-emerged in recent years with the Revolutions of 2011. Tahrir, and other squares in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, constituted spaces of convergence, of encounter, and of ‘anarchist experiences’ in themselves. These experiences culminated in the establishment of self-declared anarchist groups and of different autonomousspaces and collectives that, by reclaiming their right to the city and radicalising public space, were organised in horizontal, decentralised, and anti-hierarchical ways. Their goal was to keep alive the demands of the 2011 Revolutions. Galián incorporates recent theories of social movements and revisits concepts such as ‘civic humanity’ in order to incorporate autonomous spaces and collectives in to the culture of contemporary anarchism in Southern Mediterranean contexts.

Conclusion

The reader will undoubtedly pick those chapters and themes which best suit her tastes, but one of the strengths of this volume is the way it highlights the threads connecting what, at first, may seem to be disparate subjects. One can follow the theme of the Global South and anarchism, for example, through separate chapters on anti-imperialism, syndicalism, anarchism and social movements, non-Western anarchisms, anarchism and indigeneity, and anarchism and the Arab Spring. The same applies to a plethora of other themes: anarchism and feminism, for instance, or anarchism and social movements after 1945, or anarchism and culture, run in multifarious ways across all four sections of this book.

As this introduction, or even a cursory glance at the contents page makes clear, this is a book composed of multiple threads. But these strands—approaching anarchism as a political and philosophical theory, as a historical force, and as a lived reality for activists and dissidents—mesh in a detailed assessment of anarchism’s past, its present, and perhaps also its future. As much as the contents of this book reflect the intellectual sophistication characteristic of the anarchist tradition, there is also something fitting about the variety captured in these pages. After all, for anarchists, plurality, diversity, and inclusion are supreme values, ones they see imperilled by the homogenising force of the state and capitalism, and ones that alternative forms of anarchist-inspired living must allow to flourish to be counted as improvements upon the present. This openness and flexibility can make anarchism, to the chagrin of political theorists, difficult to pin down, to define, and to catalogue. As Alfredo Bonanno writes, ‘anarchist’:

Is not a definition that can be made once and for all, put in a safe and considered a patrimony to be tapped little by little. Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty, or said once and for all, “There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person” […] Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone.[38]

In their various ways the authors in this book have grappled with this Bonannian challenge. And while conclusive, fixed definitions would be an affront to the anarchist project, what is apparent in these pages is the depth and sophistication that has characterised this much-maligned, and constantly evolving, political tradition.

One of the ‘new anarchists’ we met at the outset of this chapter, Herbert Read, once drew a distinction between ‘change’ and ‘adventure’. Change, he judged, was the basis of life, captured in the constantly unfolding and regenerating processes of the natural world, where life grew from the decay that was an inevitable consequence of life. Adventure, he reflected, was the manifestation of change as the ‘essence of civilisation’, a commitment to innovation, to experimentation, to pushing the boundaries of knowledge, art, and science. But he also thought that this distinction between change and adventure was essentially illusory. ‘Change or adventure’, he concluded, ‘—it is one and the same philosophy which we seek to express […] and we believe valid, equally in science, art and religion’.[39] This was also an expression of his anarchism, a political vision he believed must enshrine flexibility and change in its intellectual adventures as it grappled with the existential problems of today, and mirror the organic, mutating, processes of nature in its practical organisational forms. This was a philosophy too alive to ever be locked up in a gravestone.

[1] For definitions of anarchism see, B. Franks, ‘Anarchism’, in M. Freeden, L. Tower Sargent, and M. Stears (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 385–404 and L. Davis, ‘Anarchism’, in V. Geoghegan and R. Wilford (Eds), Political Ideologies. An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2014), 213–238. For an overall of the literature on the social and political history of anarchism, see C. Levy, ‘Social Histories of Anarchism’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 4:2 (2010), 1–44.

[2] See in this volume, Lucien van der Walt, ‘Anarchism and Syndicalism’.

[3] C. Honeywell, ‘Paul Goodman: Finding an Audience for Anarchism in Twentieth Century America’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 5:2 (2011), 65–83; C. Honeywell, A British Anarchist Tradition: Herbert Read, Alex Comfort and Colin Ward (London: Continuum, 2011); D. Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (Oakland: PM Press, 2012); C. Wilber & D. F. White (Eds), Autonomy Solidarity Possibility the Colin Ward Reader (Oakland: AK Press, 2011); C. Levy (Ed), Colin Ward: Life, Times and Thought (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2013); C. Burke and K. Jones (Eds), Education, Childhood and Anarchism. Talking Colin Ward (London: Routledge, 2014); M. S. Adams, Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism. Between Reason and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); B. J. Pauli, ‘The New Anarchism in Britain and the US: Towards a richer understanding of post-war anarchist thought’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 20:2 (2015), 134–155.

[4] C. Levy, “I am a Goddamned Anarchist’: C. Wright Mills, the Anarchists and Participatory Democracy’, MSS., forthcoming.

[5] J. Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968).

[6] A. Cornell, Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 147–239.

[7] G. Woodcock, Anarchism: A history of libertarian ideas and movements (Cleveland: World Publishing Co, 1962), 467–476.

[8] G. Woodcock, Anarchism: A history of libertarian ideas and movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 452–463.

[9] M. S. Adams & L. Kelly, ‘George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: Peasant radicalism, anarchism, and the Canadian state’, Intellectual History Review (2017), 1–25 & Matthew S. Adams, ‘Memory, History, and Homesteading: George Woodcock, Herbert Read and Intellectual Networks’, Anarchist Studies 23:1 (2015), 86–104.

[10] See in this volume, Dave Berry, ‘Anarchism and 1968’.

[11] M. Maekelbergh. ‘The Road to Democracy: The Political Legacy of “1968”’, International Review of Social History, 56:2 (2011), 301–322.

[12] C. Levy, ‘Anarchism and Leninist Communism: 1917 and all that’, Socialist History, 52 (2017), 86–88.

[13] Ibid., 88.

[14] R. Zibechi, Territories in Resistance. A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements (Oakland: AK Press, 2012); S. della Porta, Can Democracy be Saved? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); P. Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2017).

[15] The peer-reviewed journal, Anarchist Studies, started publication in 1993 and is still going strong.

[16] C. Levy and S. Newman (Eds), The Anarchist Imagination: Anarchism encounters the Humanities and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2018)

[17] S. Whimster (ed), Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999); J. Shantz and D. M. Williams, Anarchy and Society: Reflections on Anarchist Sociology (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

[18] D. Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (London: Allen Lane, 2013).

[19] J. C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism. Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

[20] C. Bantman and Bert Altena (Eds), Reassessing the Transnational Turn. Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies (London: Routledge, 2015).

[21] Most historical works on anarchism have been excluded. T. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1994); J. Purkis and J. Bowen (Eds), Twenty-First Century Anarchism (London: Cassell, 1997); S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the dislocation of power (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001); S. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); S. Newman, Postanarchism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); M. Albert, Parecon. Life after Capitalism (London: Verso, 2003); S. M. Sheehan, Anarchism (London: Reaktion, 2003); J. Bowen and J. Bowen (Eds), Changing Anarchism. Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); C. Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); R. Graham (Ed), From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939): A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Volume One (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005); R. Graham, Anarchism. A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Volume Two. The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939–1977) (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2009); R. Graham, Anarchism. A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Volume 3. The New Anarchism, 1974–2012 (Montréal: Black Rose Press, 2013); R. Kinna, Anarchism. A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005); R. J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist currents in the newest social movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005); B. Franks, Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press and Dark Star, 2006); J. Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2006); A. Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press); S. Clark, Living without Domination: The possibility of an anarchist utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); P. McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority: A philosophical introduction to classical anarchism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008); R. Amster, A. DeLeon, L. A. Fernandez, A. J. Nocella II, and D. Shannon (Eds), Contemporary Anarchist Studies. An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (London: Routledge, 2009); M. A. Bamyeh, Anarchy as Order. The History and Future of Civic Humanity (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); L. David and R. Kinna (Eds), Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); B. Franks and M. Wilson (Eds), Anarchism and Moral Philosophy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); N. Jun and S. Wald (Eds), New Perspectives on Anarchism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010); J. Shantz, Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of Resistance (London: Routledge, 2010); A. Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011); A. Christoyannopoulos (Ed), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); A. Christoyannopoulos and M. S. Adams (Eds), Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume I (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2017); S. Evren (Eds), Post-Anarchism. A Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2011); J. Heckert and R. Cleminson (Eds), Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, relationships and power (London: Routledge, 2011); J. C. Klausen and J. Martel (Eds), How not to be Governed. Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011); J. Shantz, Against all Authority: Anarchism and the literary imagination (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011); R. Amster, Anarchism Today (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012); C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, D. Shannon, and A. Volcano (Eds), Queering Anarchism. Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire (Oakland: AK Press, 2012); R. H. Haworth (Ed), Anarchist Pedagogies. Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (Oakland: PM Press, 2012); R. Kinna (Ed), The Continuum Companion to Anarchism (London: Continuum, 2012); N. Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (London: Continuum, 2012); A. Prichard, R. Kinna, S. Pinta, and D. Berry (Eds), Libertarian Socialism. Politics in Back and Red (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); M. Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Anti-Authoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Oakland: AK Press, 2012); D. Shannon, A. J. Nocella II, & J. Asimakopoulos (Eds), The Accumulation of Freedom. Writings on Anarchist Economics (Oakland: AK Press, 2012); J. Shantz, Green Syndicalism: An alternative red/green vision (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012); J. Blumenfeld, C. Bottici, and S. Critichley (Eds), The Anarchist Turn (London: Pluto Press, 2013); J. R. Clarke, The Impossible Community. Realising Communitarian Anarchism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); J. A. Meléndez Badillo and N. J. Jun (Eds), Without Borders or Limits. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013); Z. Vodovnik, A Living Spirit of Revolt. The Infrapolitics of Anarchism (Oakland: PM Press, 2013); J. S. Cohn, Underground Passages: Anarchist resistance culture, 1848–2011 (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015); R. Craib and B. Maxwell (Eds), No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms (Oakland: PM Press, 2015); M. Lopes et al. (Eds), Theories of Resistance. Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016); S. Springer, The Anarchist Roots of Geography. Towards Spatial Emancipation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); S. Springer et al. (Eds), The Radicalisation of Pedagogy. Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit Revolt (London: Rowan and Littlefield, 2016); N. Jun, Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2017); D. M. Williams, Black Flags and Social Movements. A Sociological Analysis of Movement Anarchism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); B. Franks, N. Jun, and L. Williams (Eds), Anarchism. A Conceptual Approach (London: Routledge, 2018); F. Ferretti, G. Barrera de la Torre, Anthony Ince, and F. Toro (Eds), Historical Geographies of Anarchism. Early Critical Geographies and Present-Day Scientific Challenges (London: Routledge, 2018). The contributors to this volume have also published in this period, but we invite you to read their chapter and endnotes to gather their other manifold contributions. We should also point to the ongoing series of academic monographs published first by Continuum, then Bloomsbury Press and now Manchester University Press. A selection of Noam Chomsky’s writings on anarchism for all three waves can be found in N. Chomsky, On Anarchism (New York: The New Press, 2013).

[22] Many historical works on anarchism have been excluded. Woodcock, Anarchism; I. L. Horowitz (Ed), The Anarchists (New York: 1964); I. L. Horowitz (Ed), The Anarchists (New York: Dell, 1964); J. Joll, The Anarchists (London: Eure & Spottiswoode, 1964); L. Krimmerman and L. Parry (Eds), Patterns of Anarchy (New York: Garden City, 1966); D. Guérin, Anarchism from Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); R. P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); D. E. Apter and J. Joll (Eds), Anarchism Today (London: Macmillan, 1971); A. Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971); M. Shatz (Ed), The Essential Workers of Anarchism (New York: Bantam Book, 1971); C. Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973); and for a selection of articles from the important journal, Anarchy, see C. Ward (Ed), A Decade of Anarchy (1961–1970) (London: Freedom Press, 1987); G. Baldelli, Social Anarchism (London: Penguin, 1972); T. Perlin (Ed) Contemporary Anarchism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979).

[23] Most historical works on anarchism have been excluded. J. Roland Pennock and J. W. Chapman (Eds), Anarchism (New York: NYU, 1978); H. J. Ehrlich et al. (Eds), Reinventing Anarchy: What are anarchists thinking these days? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); A. Ritter, Anarchism, a Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); M. Taylor, Community, Anarchy & Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); M. Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); D. Miller, Anarchism (London: J. M. Dent, 1984); J. P. Clark, The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on culture, nature and power (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1984); A. Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988); D. Goodway (Ed), For Anarchism. History, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 1989); H. Ehrlich et al. (Eds), Reinventing Anarchy, Again (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996). There are various works by Murray Bookchin which were published in different formats in later years, but see the discussion of Andy Price in this volume. The anarchism of Punk was expressed in zines, music, and fashions and these material culture is discussed in M. Dines and M. Worley (Eds), Aesthetic of Our Anger (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2016) and M. Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[24] R. Kinna and S. Evren (Eds), ‘Blasting the Canon’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, (1), 2013.

[25] C. Ross, The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

[26] It is also worth reading, M. Wilson, Rules without Rulers (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014).

[27] For further discussions of anarchism, an anarchist methodology and the sociology of science see, P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975) and S. Restivo, Red, Black and Objective: Science, sociology, and anarchism (London: Routledge, 2016).

[28] L. A. Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation. Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[29] Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (NP: Booksurge, 2007).

[30] R. Michels, Political Parties: A sociological study of oligarchical tendencies in modern democracy (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1915).

[31] For the most recent treatment of the First International see, F. Bensimon, Q. Deleurmoz, & J. Moisand (Eds), ‘Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth’. The First International in a Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

[32] C. Levy, ‘Malatesta and the war interventionist debate 1914–17: From the ‘Red Week’ to the Russian Revolution’, in M. S. Adams and R. Kinna (Eds), Anarchism 1914–18. Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 69–94.

[33] For attempts to apply Machajski and later New Class theories to the socialism of the Second International, see C. Levy (Ed), Socialism and the Intelligentsia 1880–1914 (Routledge Library Editions: Social and Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century) (London: Routledge, 2017, First edition 1987).

[34] It is also worthwhile consulting his recent book, Personal Modernism. Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2014).

[35] His recent book is also useful, Anarchism and Art: Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016).

[36] For a cautionary tale of the limits of grassroots cyber-organising see, Z. Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

[37] First published in The Humane Review, January 1901.

[38] A. M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension, translated by Jean Weir (London: Elephant Editions, 1998), 3.

[39] H. Read, ‘Philosophy of Change’, in J. R. M. Brumwell (Eds), This Changing World: A series of contributions by some of our leading thinkers, to case light upon the pattern of the modern world (London: Reader’s Union, 1945), 263–268 (267); See also, Matthew S. Adams, ‘Art, Education, and Revolution: Herbert Read and the Reorientation of British Anarchism’, History of European Ideas, 39:5 (2013), 709–728; Matthew S. Adams, ‘To Hell with Culture: Fascism, Rhetoric, and the War for Democracy’, Anarchist Studies, 23:2 (2015), 18–37.