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Title: Social Histories of Anarchism Author: Carl Levy Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: history, class struggle Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism , FALL 2010, Vol. 4, No. 2 (FALL 2010), pp. 1–44
This article is a synoptic overview of a larger project on the social
histories of anarchism from the eighteenth century to the present. The
specific themes of this article are a discussion of the periodization of
anarchism as an ism, an ideology originating in nineteenth-century
Europe, and its relationship to and differences with more general
libertarian or noncoercive modes of behavior and organization found in
all human societies. Secondly, the dissemination of anarchism (and
syndicalism) throughout the globe and thus the role of the Global South
in the history of anarchism will be surveyed. This article focuses on
the period of classical anarchism (1860s to 1940s) and therefore
discusses the differences between preanarchism and classical anarchism
on the one hand, and classical anarchism and postanarchism on the other.
Once that is established, which in turn sets the context for the
ideology of classical anarchism, the article proceeds to examine the
dissemination and reception of anarchism from the 1880s to 1914—in many
ways the heyday of anarchism as a global movement, in which it competed
with, and at times challenged, the hegemony of social democracy. This
challenge was most successfully mounted where anarchism merged with or
lived under the protective cover of the syndicalist movement. Thus, a
discussion of the relationships among anarchism, syndicalism, and the
globalization of the labor movement in the period 1880–1914 is pursued.
But anarchism also “punched over its weight” by having the best tunes:
anarchist culture and anarchist practices seeped into the broader
socialist and labor movements through popular forms of sociability on
the one hand and the close relationship of avant-garde literature and
the figurative arts on the other. Thus the sociology and social history
of patterns of neighborhood and recreational embeddedness of anarchist
subcultures are discussed in tandem with a review of the literature on
the relationships among the intelligentsia, anarchism, and bohemia. The
article concludes with a review of the growing literature on the
dissemination and reception of classical anarchism in the Global South.
Standard accounts of anarchism (Max Nettlau, James Joli, George
Woodcock, and Peter Marshall) combine renditions of histories of ideas,
political biography, and accounts of political and social movements. But
my project seeks to collate and employ the outpouring of published and
unpublished academic writing on the social history of anarchism, a
product of the explosive growth of higher education since the 1960s and
the accompanying innovations in historiography, the social sciences, and
the humanities. By employing similar methodologies and asking similar
questions about anarchism that have been posed in kindred fields of
social, socialist, and labor histories, anarchism is no longer
approached as a context-less, ahistorical study in social pathology. In
their recent magisterial account, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der
Walt have been inspired by this method. However they limit their project
to “class struggle anarchism,” essentially variations on syndicalist and
peasant forms of anarchism.[1] Although they have produced an impressive
global mapping of aspects of classical anarchism, their terms of
reference are too limited and sectarian for my tastes. I will return to
their important contribution to the mapping of classical anarchism in
the Global South later in this article. In any case, full engagement
with other disciplines in the social sciences, as recently suggested by
Davide Turcato, is still to be carried out on a global scale.[2]
Thus this article is about historical periodization and definitional
boundaries, the dissemination of modes of organization and the
intersections of ideas and cultures, played out within the imperial
carve-out of the globe and through the circuits of capital and labor
that embraced it by 1914. Anarchism was an alternative form of
modernity, which mounted in the most thorough way a criticism of empire
and nation-state but simultaneously was part and parcel of the processes
of modernization and globalization, which swept the globe before 1914.
In a broader project, which this article reviews, I cover individual
fields of study that help one situate anarchism in this larger
framework, some of which I published earlier in my career, while others
await publication:
nineteenth-century Europe and the origins of the ism, anarchism
movements, and varieties of counterculture
My future aim is to synthesize published and forthcoming works in a
summary monograph, the structure of which is anticipated in this
article. As a partisan of a magpie approach, I employ the methodological
tool best suited for the task at hand; in this sense the enterprise is
inspired by libertarian pragmatism, there is no master theory, though a
chronological and definitional bounded narrative is present. Each
subfield requires a different type of methodology drawn from the social
sciences, history, or the humanities. For example, Quentin Skinners
contextual approach, linguistic discourse analysis, Reinhart Kosellecks
“conceptual history,” or Thomas Dixons “word history” may be appropriate
for the investigation of the construction of the ism, anarchism. The
flourishing fields of nationalism or diaspora studies, or aspects of
global political economy are useful for the study of the theme
nationalism, internationalism, and anarchism.[11] Indeed at the European
Social Science History Conference, held in Lisbon in 2008, several
panels were devoted to approaching the history of anarchism in much the
same way as suggested here. Thus panellists employed social movement
theory,[12] sociological theories of collective violence and
repression,[13] Foucauldian social theory,[14] theories of geographical
space,[15] and network theory.[16]
But before we engage with these approaches, a discussion of historical
periodization is in order.
The periodization of anarchism is a controversial subject. Thus in
standard accounts, anarchist thought and anarchist-type social or
political movements are variously identified in classical Greece,
ancient China, medieval Europe, Civil War England, and Revolutionary
Paris.[17] On the other hand, another group of historians of ideas and
political philosophers assert that anarchism, as a self-conscious
ideology, is a product of nineteenth-century European politics and
thought. George Crowder identifies the key attributes of anarchist
political thought as its antistatism, its perfectionism, and its
scientism.[18] It is an ideology formed in the aftershock of the French
Revolution and the dynamics of revolution and restoration that consumed
French politics until 1871. It is also shaped by the emergent global
economy and the combined and uneven development of capitalism in Europe.
Anarchism is the cumulative reworking of Rousseau, Comte, and Hegel
through the lenses of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. By the
late nineteenth century the classical anarchist canon and its associated
practices were embedded in a self-consciously anarchist movement with
variations on the central theme (Individualism, Collectivism, Communism,
and Syndicalism). One can also situate anarchism externally on a
continuum between liberalism and state socialism. In turn, types of
anarchism are situated internally by differing attitudes toward the
economy and organization.[19]
But all types of anarchism had a common drive for a future without the
state, a commitment to the autonomy of the individual, and a quest for
voluntary consensus: anarchists might be children of Rousseau in their
perfectionism and their emphasis on education to teach human beings to
behave in a libertarian manner, but at least in theory anarchists did
not force us to be free. Undoubtedly in really existing social movements
(except those composed of pacifists), anarchists behaved more like
libertarian socialists, in that violence, even the surgical violence
advocated by Errico Malatesta, for example, involved coercion and/or
killing. Thus anarchists active in social movements in the classical
phase were in theory philosophical anarchists, but in practice
libertarian socialists: indeed this was acknowledged by Malatesta at
several occasions and by worthy adversaries such as Louis Post, an
American official involved in freeing imprisoned anarchists in the wake
of Americas Red Scare of 1919.[20] As abstract ideology, anarchism may
have as its thesis liberalism and as its antithesis socialism, while
awaiting a satisfactory synthesis. Yet as applied ideology, it is
socialisms spurned, abused, and ignored loyal opposition, maintaining a
vigilant weather eye for the emergence of new forms of hierarchy,
centralization, and monopolies of power, property, or other intangible
advantages within the Left itself and in any postrevolutionary
government.[21]
Classical anarchism was no longer viable or attractive after the Spanish
Civil War and the Second World War, in the context of the Cold War or
the welfare state and a mass consumer society. Here the student, the
student dropout, and the university lecturer replaced the anarchist
peasant, the anarchist artisan, and the mobile semiskilled anarchist
worker. The anarchist movement was transformed from being a movement
disproportionately composed of the self-educated to one composed of
those in possession of a considerable amount of social and cultural
capital. Industrial or agrarian anarchism was replaced by
postmaterialist, ecological, or postmodern anarchism. The celebration of
science was replaced by a jaundiced or dismissive attitude toward
science and technology. Anarchism was no longer a revolutionary project
but a series of provocative reformist acts—whether of a practical bent
(as in the example of the work of Colin Ward[22]) or as part of student
and new social movements from the 1960s onward, and more recently since
the 1980s the symbolic or guerrilla actions of green anarchists and
antiglobalization activists, or in the intellectual disputations of
postmodern anarchists in the academy. For post-modern anarchists, a
progressive teleological narrative was discounted. Nevertheless,
curiously, these same advocates of a postmodernist take on anarchism
demonstrated surprising reverence for the past by claiming linkages with
the classical anarchist legacy (Stimer and Bakunin), while other
anarchists since the 1950s had been inspired by classical anarchisms
anarcho-feminism, its forays into ecology, most notable in the work of
Murray Bookchin, and attempts at establishing urban and rural communal
experiments.[23]
Employing Crowder s approach, one can create an ideal typical model of
classical anarchism. Thus antistatism, perfectionism, and scientism are
useful ideological discriminators, although one might question, as Ruth
Kinna does, the exact dosages of these three ingredients in the
anarchist brew and the pigeonholing of the well-known and more obscure
figures of “classical anarchism.”[24] The analytical philosopher Paul
McLaughlin suggests that classical anarchisms essence is found in its
scepticism about authority.[25] But Samuel Clark notes that classical
anarchists were not radical sceptics of all authority, and they sought
an ethical justifiable form of authority.
The classical anarchists should not be confused with the so-called
utopian socialists of the first third of the nineteenth century. For the
most part classical anarchists shared with Marx a critical view of
socialist or communitarian utopias.[26] Kropotkins utopia was based on
engagement in the mundane world of fields, factories, and workshops,
coupled with a sober appreciation of the inductive-deductive scientific
method and not the Marxian Hegelian dialectic, which he felt was utopian
in the pejorative sense of the word. His anarcho-communist politics,
which by the late nineteenth century had become the mainstream anarchist
view, was founded on small acts of libertarian mutualism played out in
civil society, underlining his belief that revolution was possible
because institutions of present-day, everyday life harbored the seeds of
an anarchist future. Thus Kropotkin combined the reformist scepticism of
Edward Bernstein, the caution of the empirical scientist, and the zeal
of the revolutionary.[27]
But whatever form of future societal arrangement stimulated the
anarchists’ imaginations, no anarchist could deny the need to do away
with the state. If this is the case, the concept of anarchism as a
context-less and timeless ideology causes problems if one wants to
embrace the family tree approach to studying the origins, evolution, and
dissemination of a self-conscious doctrine called “anarchism.” It is
very difficult to be antistatist if the modern state form does not exist
and the concept is alien to the prevailing culture. The modern state as
the most effective and compact engine of power devised by humankind was
a product of feudal Europe. Recent research has argued that ancient
pristine states (Minoan, Sumerian, Egyptian, Indus Valley, Yellow river,
Mesoamerican, and Peruvian states) were generally succeeded by a variety
of other forms of rule; and thus for thousands of years, once the
pristine state declined, empire without a central modern nation-state
core, guilds, city-state communes, religious fraternities, overseas
trading companies, and universal religious organization constituted most
forms of governance in Eurasia and vast areas of Africa and the Americas
before Europe’s early modern period.[28]
If we turn to so-called primitive societies, when Harold Barclay, Pierre
Clastres, or David Graeber[29] discuss stateless societies or “people
without government,” these anthropologists are at their most interesting
when they situate these societies on a scale from coercion to consensus,
not on a scale which measures the degree to which they have approximated
a “stateless society”—nonsensical in the given contexts, albeit recently
Samuel Clark provided us with food for thought through an interesting
philosophical discussion of the juxtaposition of rules and methods that
govern “stateless” Sudanese Nuer society with that of Spanish
anarchists.[30]
To repeat: classical anarchism was a critique of the modern state, a
critique of the most effective constellation of power human beings have
ever constructed.[31] The legacies of classical anarchism may have
influenced postmodern theories of informal micropower, and such insights
can indeed can be recycled to their source by social historians of
classical anarchism to analyze its political economy, its forms of
conviviality,[32] the roles of gender and sexuality,[33] and the hidden
informal power structures of the movement itself, but a focused analysis
of classical anarchism within its historical context needs to stick to
antistatism as one of the key discriminators, even if classical
anarchists did not ignore other forms of hierarchy and power (slavery,
the patriarchal family, the Church, among others).[34]
The most interesting historical anthropological work retraces how the
state came to see itself as a state and act like a state, and the
process by which it then aggrandized adjacent zones in which the state
form was inchoate or nonexistent. James Scott has analyzed the
disastrous interaction of the high modern state and its agrarian
hinterland, from the Soviet Union to Brazil—a discussion to which this
article returns when it discusses comparative studies of peasant
anarchism. His more recent anarchist history focuses on Zomia, an area
of highlands stretching from modern northeastern India through Southeast
Asia and southern China, in which Scott relates how a variety of groups
(or evolving ethnicities) fled from state-controlled valleys and
remained out of the reach of the infrastructural power of the
modernizing state until the second half of the twentieth century.[35] In
a similar fashion, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in
fascinating detail the pirate “anarchist” confederacies of the
eighteenth-century Caribbean Spanish Main, whereas others have related
the history of Maroon or runaway slave republics in the Caribbean and
Brazil.[36] In all of these cases the ideology of anarchism is not
present (although nearly so in the pirate confederacies); rather, they
are studies of the transition zone, where a fully fledged world system
of nation-states and the global market are rapidly changing the rules of
the “sovereignty game,” and in this respect these studies are
interesting halfway houses. Indeed, when I discuss the social and
geopolitical bases for the self-conscious ideological anarchism of
Mexican or Ukrainian rural movements of the early twentieth century, the
parallels to the themes of center and periphery, global market, and
state power are very suggestive indeed.
Let us turn to Crowders other two discriminators, perfectionism and
scientism. These two are interlinked to what has been called the
“Enlightenment project.” Is it possible to associate the noncoercive
philosophies, ideologies, and movements of preanarchism to these
discriminators? Is classical anarchism a spunky millenarian leftover
from an older era, as Gerald Brenan or Eric Hobsbawm famously argued in
their accounts of Spanish anarchism?[37] Does an invocation of the
ideology of anarchism have any purchase in either Norman Cohns portrayal
of medieval Christian movements in Europe[38] or indeed Patricia Crones
original and fascinating account of ninth-century Muslim “anarchist”
thinkers in Basra?[39]
Anarchism as ism is not only rational, as Turcato argues[40]; it is
rationalist. It is unthinkable without the popularization of the
scientific method and the Enlightenment. The postanarchists are right
when they identify the mainstream of classical anarchism in its
scientific and positivist metanarrative (although they may be wrong to
be dismissive of this inheritance and to have caricaturized anarchist
positivism in the bargain). Classical anarchists were progenitors of
modernity. They were quite literally Max Weber s alter ego, perhaps
seductive and embarrassing members of the family, but definitely sharing
the same genetic code.[41] Thus the Spanish anarchists were not
primitive rebels, as Eric Hobsbawm famously suggested; they were part
and parcel of the socialist intellectual debate of the late nineteenth
century. Hobsbawm narrates an evolutionary story, a false genealogy, to
prove the effectiveness and modernity of his preferred variety of
Marxism.[42]
However, we should take care not to be overly zealous boundary guards
between the religious and secular worlds. The notion that the
Enlightenment and its intellectual children were divorced from religion
by a militant secularism is now largely debunked. And the relationship
between religion and modern science is far more complex than we
supposed. Thus the “precursor to anarchism,” William Godwin, was a
dissenting Christian, a Muggletonian anarchist, and indeed a Whig
Constitutionalist of an odd sort.[43] Besides being a thorough
anti-Semite and antifeminist, Proudhon was a religious socialist, a
lapsed Catholic atheist.[44] Bakunin, pan-Slavist, radical democrat and
populist, Gods wrestling partner, was also a “religious” Freemason.[45]
In this respect the religious-secular interface of classical anarchism
could be elucidated by an engagement with Jonathan Israels study of the
Radical Enlightenment,[46] Gregory Claey s work on utopian socialism and
cosmopolitanism,[47] or Maurizio Isabellas discussion of the “Liberal
International” of post-Napoleonic exiles, whose modes of operation,
sensibilities, and interactions with host communities established the
model for future communities of nationalist, anarchist, and syndicalist
diasporas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[48]
---
Having implied the boundary between preanarchism and classical anarchism
is porous should not convince us to adopt the fashionable concept of
political religion to understand classical anarchism.[49] Cohn
anticipated it, and its appropriateness in the medieval context may be
questioned, but surely its transposition to later eras is an example of
the sort of academic bad faith and mental laziness, which Noam Chomsky
demolished in his famous study of the New Mandarins.[50] Indeed in
contrast to Norman Cohns argument, the latest detailed study of social
revolt in medieval Europe (circa 1200–1425) demonstrates that, whereas
religious themes may have been noticeable in the early modern period,
these were not so prevalent during the medieval era when revolutionary
movements were motivated by a secular “lust for liberty” with strong
anticlerical overtones.[51] Nor were classical anarchists motivated by a
“religious” belief in the natural goodness of human beings or a yearning
to return to a golden Edenic primitive past, as a recent forensic
analysis the lapsed Calvinist Godwin and the scientific Kropotkin
demonstrates quite convincingly.[52]
As a distinctive ideology and set of social practices, anarchism is the
product of the era of the First International (1864–1876) and the Paris
Commune (1871). Indeed, well-defined Marxist and anarchist ideologies
are not evident until the late 1870s and even 1880s. The political
thought of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin became flesh when adopted by
social movements, in much the same manner that German and other social
democrats found Marxian or Engelsian “scientific socialism” congenial to
their growing political parties after 1880.[53] In a parallel fashion to
the spread, reception, and appropriation of Marxism, certain social
movements in France, Italy, and Spain were predisposed to anarchist
rather than Marxist ideology because cantonalist or communal-based forms
of radicalism anticipated anarchism in action. Therefore the evolution
of anarcho-collectivist and anarcho-communist doctrines flourished
within these uniquely receptive subcultures.[54]
But even within a less receptive environment such as the United Kingdom,
the ethical anarchism of late Victorian Britain was closely and in some
cases directly linked to the much broader tradition of ethical
socialism. Anarchism as “voluntaryism” (a term then in vogue) could be
digested once violence was absented from the menu. (William Morris’s
beliefs—which wavered between a libertarian socialism that was for all
intents and purposes anarchism and a fierce attack on “anarchism” as a
synonym for terrorism—exemplify his confusion but also anarchisms
congeniality to currents of British socialism and radical
liberalism.)[55] Similarly, in the United States, Gilded Age post-Civil
War radicalism was not that dissimilar to home-grown anarchism; indeed
to paraphrase the American anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, anarchists were
merely unterrified Jeffersonian democrats.[56] In this respect the term
“anarchist” is less interesting than the terms “collectivist,”
“federalist,” “Internationalist” (as in being a member of the First
International), or “communist.” By contrast, the term “libertarian”
became popular at the turn of the century to indicate a broader
subculture and style of life, which included both the artistic
“bohemias” (Greenwich Village, Schwabing, Montmartre, Fitrovia, among
others) and the anarchist countercultures of free schools, free sexual
unions, antimilitarism, communes, and cooperatives.[57] After the turn
of the century, syndicalism lent anarchism the institutional cover and
vitality to remain part of a broad radical oppositional force against
social democracy until the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution,
or until 1939 in the case of Spain.
This first take on the cycles of classical anarchism demonstrates its
protean qualities. Anarchism survived through mutation and creative
application, but is this very different from parallel histories of the
spread and dissemination of Marxism and socialism? As Irving Horowitz
suggested in the 1960s, a contextual and situational analysis—which
takes into account social, economic, and political circumstances—is the
most fruitful approach to study the origins and mutation of the sub-isms
within anarchism (individualism, collectivism, communism, syndicalism)
during its classical period.[58] Or as Benjamin Franks suggests, one
could adopt Michael Freedens approach to the study of ideologies in
which each ideology has core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts, and
thus Crowder s definition could serve as a central unit of analysis,
giving coherence to classical anarchism but allowing its constituent
schools the liberty to follow variations on these core attributes.[59]
Introduction
It is remarkable that historians forgot that frequent cognitive
dissonance is the default position of the minds of human beings. We are
able to hold two contradictory worldviews in our heads simultaneously;
this is certainly the case when one investigates the social universe of
anarchism before 1914. Activists were able, for example, to declare
individualist and antiorganizationalist anarchism as their final goal
while being the most loyal members of trade union organizations. Social
organization allowed for the flourishing of the individual personality,
they argued.[60] This is one of the reasons that Schmidt and van der
Walts strict definition of classical anarchism as class struggle
anarchism is unsatisfactory. It leads them to claim that Godwin,
Stirner, Proudhon, and Tucker may have been libertarian or mutualist but
not anarchist because they were either not totally anticapitalist or, in
the case of Stirner, antipathetic to any form of socialism.[61] Of
course there is a valid discussion to be had about when anarchism became
a self-conscious social movement, when the emergent ideology was
reflected in a mass movement of anarchists. Although Proudhon used
anarchism in its modern sense, his followers were mutualists, and it is
only in the late 1860s that a social movement called “anarchism” arrives
on the scene, accompanied as we have seen by many variations on the
theme. But Schmidt and van der Walt have overlooked the way militants
and theoreticians even within “class war anarchism” wove a variety of
intellectual legacies (from mutualism to individualism) into their
ideology. Their approach is also two-dimensional by their dismissal of
the global cultural intelligentsia, who are largely overlooked because
they are considered mere “lifestyle anarchists.” But the boundaries
between class struggle anarchism and this lifestyle anarchism, or
philosophical anarchism, are not easily drawn without distorting and
impoverishing the social history of classical anarchism, as I hope this
article will show.
Measuring the effects of these varieties of anarchism in political
cultures is made more difficult by the informality of anarchist
organization. Hence one must look at the appropriate sources: club,
café, and public house subcultures,[62] certain rural districts or urban
quarters,[63] the diaspora rather than the homeland.[64] It is also
worth bearing in mind that one did not have to be a signed-up member of
an anarchist group to be affected by its influence; in Italy, for
example, it was perfectly possible to vote socialist but be very
sympathetic to anarchism and anarchist militants.[65] As socialist party
schools and pamphlets became more prominent in the years before 1914,
boundaries may have become more rigid, but anarchist and libertarian
heresies seeped through party barriers, either through the effect of
notable individuals, the force-field of syndicalism, or longstanding
anarchist countercultural institutions and symbols (the Paris Commune,
aspects of history and practice of May Day, and anarchist songs, for
example).[66]
The anarchist movement cut its teeth during the First International, and
after 1889, a Second International composed of national parliamentary
socialists at first marginalized the anarchists in the early 1890s and
finally expelled them in 1896. But what remains understudied is the
Bermuda triangle of anarchist history, when hybrid organizations of
revolutionary socialists and collectivists were notable in Germany, the
Low Countries, France, and the United States from the late 1870s to the
early 1890s (the German Jungen and localists, the French followers of
Allemane or Brousse, the Partito operaio italiano, and American
supporters of the Chicago Idea). These movements were suspicious of
parliamentary socialism, critical of intellectual leadership, and
supportive of localism and forms of revolutionary municipal socialism.
Much of the prehistory of syndicalism can be found here, but we still
lack a synthetic overview of this period; rather it is seen as an
interlude between the era of the First and Second Internationals.[67]
Another cycle of classical anarchism can be traced in the development
and evolution of the practice of terrorism and assassinations. We can
pinpoint two clusters of activity—in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and
the 1890s, with outliers stretching into the earlier twentieth
century—in Barcelona, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Russia.[68] Within Spain,
Julián Casanova has charted the dialectic between forms of mass violence
and terrorism and wider social movements over an eighty-year span (1860s
to 1940s).[69]Thus violence in the Spanish movement can be detected in
clandestine and decentralized forms of terror (assassinations and
bombings), rural insurrections and rural or urban mass organizing, and
on occasion, full-fledged insurrectionary moments (1909,1917» 19331934־»
and 1936).[70]
Modes of terrorism are finally getting serious historical treatment; the
spread of a subterranean literature and “practical manuals” has been
undertaken. Ruth Kinna has published a vast collection of terrorist
pamphlet literature.[71] Martin Millers broader contextual account of
terrorism and Richard Jensens magisterial overview of anarchist
assassinations are essential,[72] and Steven Marks has charted the
spread of the “Russian method” to other movements.[73] The evolution of
concepts, the propaganda by the deed (from demonstrative rural or urban
acts to bombing and assassination), the affinity group and insurgent
localized forms of struggle (“skirmishing”) have been traced.[74]
Likewise, the reciprocal exchange of anarchist modes of violence between
Fenians, Narodniks, and Bengali nationalists has been studied.[75] In
this respect the study of diaspora and refugee networks has become very
fashionable because of attempts to compare and contrast contemporary
global Islamist networks with those of classical anarchism, and
therefore anarchist studies is receiving support from the most unlikely
sources.[76] Historical symmetries present themselves to political
scientists, resulting in comparisons between Italian anarchists in
London in the 1890s and Algerian Islamists in the London of the 1990s,
or comparisons of different global waves of terrorism from the anarchist
wave to the Islamist wave. The bombing of Wall Street by an Italian
anarchist on 16 September 1920—which was the bloodiest terrorist attack
in New York City before 9/11, occurring just several hundred meters from
9/11 s Ground Zero—is the subject of Beverly Gages recent monograph, a
brilliantly researched book that details how law enforcement agencies
were hobbled by incompetence and grandstanding xenophobia. In the end
the bomber, Mario Buda, died in his bed decades later.[77] Buda has been
identified as the “inventor” of the car bomb, albeit his bomb was placed
in a horse-drawn wagon.[78]
Except for Russia, anarchist terrorism took few lives during this era,
far less than the terrorism of nationalists for example, yet it caught
the popular and literary imagination in the most dramatic fashion, and
for much of the public, the bomb-throwing terrorist became the image of
the anarchist. Thus it is necessary to examine the magnifying effect of
the rise of the mass circulation press, the search for sensation and
bohemian exoticism in modern life, and the spectacular meanings given to
anarchist bombings and assassinations that occur under the gaze of
modern urban newspaper reader.[79] Undoubtedly, Paris in the 1890s would
be an excellent case study.[80] But we do have a very entertaining,
well-researched and popularly written book by Alex Butter worth, who
supplies us with a pen portrait of this murky world of journalists,
police spies, international power politics, and anarchist exiles before
1914.[81]
The Paris Commune (1871) and the First World War (1914–1918) are signal
events in the history of classical anarchism, and in traditional
accounts of the persistence of anarchism, Spain is the exception to the
rule. A review of the literature on Spanish anarchism would deserve an
article in itself. In any case popular nationalism, the interventionist
social state, and the rise of Bolshevism, it is argued, took the wind
out of the sails of the good ship Anarchy but seemed to avoid Spain.[82]
It is definitely the case that next generation of anarchists and
syndicalists in Southern Europe (barring Spain) saw many recruits
migrate to international communism. (One reason that the CNT-FAI
[Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica] faced
a different constellation of forces is that Spanish communism was
ruptured by the emergence of the POUM [Partido Obrero Unificación
Marxista].)[83] Nor should the unique interaction of Catalan
nationalism, intellectuals, and syndicalist organizers in Barcelona be
forgotten when one deals with the Spanish case, as Angel Smith
demonstrates.[84]
However, anyone who studies memoir literature or the international
anarchist movements newspapers will sense a gestalt shift from the 1920s
to the 1940s.[85] Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of local and
national of studies of syndicalism and anarchism during the interwar
period presents a more nuanced picture. The interplay of wartime and
postwar anarchist and syndicalist networks with newer but related
organizations of shop steward movements and council communists has been
noted in the literature; the spike of anarchist activity lasted from
roughly 1917 to 1924.[86] Furthermore, the upstart Bolsheviks had a
fight on their hands: anarchists and libertarian syndicalists retained a
greater presence in local political cultures in France and even Germany
far longer into the 1920s and 1930s than has previously been thought.
Nevertheless, a younger generation, which might have been attracted to
anarchism or syndicalism as movements more radical than social
democratic parties or trade unions, were wooed by the communists, and
thus the true believers started pondering the questions of freedom and
the role of the individual more intensely in light of the inroads of
fascism and communism in the interwar period. They asked themselves:
what was at the core of anarchist belief? And they anticipated the
polemics associated with the disenchanted “God that died” ex-Communists
of the 1950s.[87]
I have already mentioned the cycle of libertarian countercultural
anarchism, which I will return to in great detail under the rubric of
Intelligentsia, Bohemia, and Anarchism. But before that we must look
more closely at syndicalism and anarchism.
Syndicalism
Internationalized patterns of capital and labor lay at the bottom of the
mass support for the First International, especially the attachment of
English, Belgian, and French trade unionists. A wave of globalization,
reaching an apogee before our own era, occurred in the period 1880 to
1914. Individual anarchists using their own networks (for example,
Errico Malatesta or Emile Pouget in London during the 1890s) and
political refugees from the generic revolutionary organizations of the
Bermuda Triangle period (see above) were the pioneers who shaped the
ideologies and repertoires of action, which came to be known as
syndicalism in the early twentieth century.[88] The anarchists played a
prominent part in the generic internationalist syndicalism, in which
antimilitarism and industrial trade unionism were disseminated by a new
mobile proletariat of laborers, transportation workers, and some skilled
artisans, most notably Italians, Spaniards, Russians, Scandinavians,
Britons, Irish, and Yiddish-speaking Jews of various nationalities. They
were part of the vast labor migration between Europe, the Americas, and
the so-called White Dominions of the British Empire. This reached a
crescendo just as a series of international strikes surged through the
global economy, clustered around the period of the Russian Revolution of
1905 to 1914, and was interwoven with open insurrections such as
Barcelonas “Tragic Week” in 1909 and central Italy’s “Red Week” in
1914.[89]
The three most relevant fields of study are the political cultures
forged from occupational groups (miners, landless laborers, seamen,
lumberjacks, tailors, as examples), suburbs or districts of cities
(Barcelona, Turin, Buenos Aires, Tampa, Paterson, among others), and
diasporic communities (Italians, Jews, and others). Larger mental maps
are needed. Associated studies by Benedict Anderson, José Moya, Davide
Turcato, or Richard Jensen[90] can be used as templates to give us a
broader picture of the radiation of strike waves and demonstrate how
anarchism and syndicalism were energized by these cosmopolitan
organizers, intellectuals, and workers.
One must start with history of the relationship of self-educated and the
educated middle classes within anarchism. Earlier in my career, I looked
at this within the context of socialism before 1914, but we need a
similar effort for anarchism.[91] Every since Max Nettlau claimed it was
so, many historians have argued that classical anarchism had a higher
percentage of self-educated activists than the socialism of the Second
International and indeed that anarchists were keen on denouncing the
predominance of bourgeois leaders in socialist political parties and
former proletarian careerists in socialist trade unions.[92] And
although some local case studies seem to prove the anarchists’ point, it
would useful to have a global amalgamation of the statistics, which one
could garner from the wide variety of national and local studies and
biographical dictionaries now available. Associated with this would be
an atlas of anarchist global culture—songs, fashions, and rituals—for
many of these were the province of the anarchist autodidact. In a
similar vein, anarchists in the Modern School movement and within
turn-of-the-century Stirnerite circles present interesting case studies
of the interweaving of the self-educated and the formally trained. Paul
Avrichs sensitive study of the Modern School movement is unsurpassed,
but one could go further a field and examine, for example, the
relationship between the working and middle class followers of
provincial anarchist-oriented Futurism in pre-First World War Italy.[93]
But even if their numbers may have been limited, intellectuals and
professionals were important in the anarchist movement. There are
several ways to approach this: the relationship of anarchism to the
emergent social sciences, clearly as a “problem” to be solved (Cesare
Lombroso and all that); but there was also an anarchist criminology
promoted by Pietro Gori that simply inverted the first premises of
Lombroso s work, yet remained wedded to positivist assumptions and
mentality.[94] In an interesting comparative study, Richard Bach Jensen
explains how, after 1900, the more liberal Giolittian regime in Italy
drew a line under the terrorist panic of the 1890s by using Lombrosos
theories to medicalize anarchist defendants: attempted political
assassinations resulted in the defendants being declared insane and
shunted off to asylums instead of becoming political martyrs, whereas in
Spain the strict enforcement of the law led to a cycle of
assassinations, executions, and revenge attacks.[95]
Anarchism was a source of inspiration for bourgeois sociologists (Max
Weber and Robert Michels). Indeed if Weber s anticapitalist duelling
partner was Karl Marx, Weber used anarchists as foils for shaping his
political sociology.[96] Anarchists were precursors to the theoreticians
of the elites, and in Bakunins writings one glimpses an early version of
theories of social and cultural capital and a prophetic discussion of a
“New Class” of Red Apparatchiks and authoritarian technocratic
scientists.[97]
Anarchism and modern geography deserve a great deal more study. Elisée
Reclus was a pioneer geographer who combined a universal biotic approach
with an anarchist critique of spatial power and has recently attracted
the renewed interest of radical postmodern sociologists. Kropotkin
pioneered the idea of garden cities; his manifold influences on
anarchism and anarchist-influenced urban planning and theory have been
charted by Steven Marks in his study of the global influence of Russian
culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[98]
This leads us to the well-studied field of bohemia. In the best studies
the interaction of the self-educated and the formally trained artist is
at the crux of the story. Thus the political economy (the cabaret, for
example) of a district (such as Montmartre) is interlaced with the life
and modes of operation of the artist and the relationship between
his/her “daring” work and the need for a citywide art market (such as
Paris), in which bourgeois critics such as Felix Fénéon acted as
mediators between bourgeois society and illicit anarchist activity, as
well as arbiters and patrons of new schools of art and art markets; the
approach could be extended to New Yorks Greenwich Village, for
example.[99] Alan Antliff s stunning book on modernism and anarchism is
a triumph of intellectual and art history and is one of the best
examples of a thriving literature in the history of art that examines
how anarchism served as a muse to Post-Impressionists, Futurists,
Dadaists, and some Surrealists.[100] In any case, here too global maps
are needed. In much the same way that anarchists served as messengers of
syndicalist ideology and its repertoire of social action, mobile artists
and self-educated activists percolated through international bohemia.
The political economy of the “professional” anarchist journalist or the
full-time speaker is directly linked to this milieu. Journalism and
literature were central to their lives, and both famous (Emma Goldman
and Carlo Tresca among them) and lesser-known comrades were part of
interlocking antebellum worlds of global bohemia and international
syndicalism.[101]
The relationship of anarchism to the colonial and postcolonial world is
as complex and multilayered as the concept of the Global South itself.
The recent works of Schmidt and van der Walt and the forthcoming edited
overview of class struggle anarchism, labor radicalism, and syndicalism
in the colonial and postcolonial worlds are uniquely important
contributions to the field.[102] As previously mentioned, the spread of
syndicalism in the early twentieth century followed the circuits of
international capital and empire. There are now a considerable number of
studies of diasporic communities of the anarchists based in entrepot
imperial cities (such as Marseilles, Tunis, Alexandria, Hong Kong, and
Tokyo)[103] and the thriving migrant anarchist and syndicalist
communities in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Australia, and South
Africa.[104]
Another parallel literature involves the debate about the reception of
anarchism as an ism. Thus some historians of Japan and China assert that
radicals in these countries were attracted to anarchism as ism because
of domestic and religious idioms and traditions that predisposed them to
it (Neo-Confucianism and Taoism, among others). Other historians have
argued that anarchism was attractive to radicals because of its foreign
modernity, precisely because it was a modern European ideology, which
facilitated the mobilization of the masses against local elites and
“foreign devils.”[105] But this argument can be placed within the
broader debate over the interaction of Western science and ideology with
varieties of previously hegemonic codified forms of knowledge.[106]
Indeed, the most striking recent contribution to this debate is Sho
Konishi s study of the sojourn of Russian Populist Lev Mechnikov to the
Japan of the Meiji Ishin, what is known in English as the “Meiji
Restoration.” Mechnikov developed a concept of mutual aid linked to a
debunking of Social Darwinism, which formed the basis later of
Kropotkins anarcho-communism. Konishi argues that Mechnikov interpreted
the Japanese kaikoku not as the opening of the nation to the West, but
as an internal Japanese practice founded on mutual aid and equity, which
was an alternative road to modernity that was not entirely reliant on
Western knowledge. This astounding article suggests a reversal of the
feedback loop: Kropotkinite anarchism is heavily reliant on a concept of
mutual aid originally developed by a fellow Russian radicals digestion
of Japanese culture and thought. On the other hand, Steven Marks reminds
us how Japanese anarchists in the early twentieth century easily
incorporated Tolstoy in to their forms of anarchism because his thought
was congenial to a Zen Buddhist outlook. In turn, Japanese Kropotkinite
anarcho-communists criticized the Japanese states program of
modernization by deploying the subversive flipside of the same Western
culture that the state elites were so keen on importing into Japan.[107]
In a similar fashion in India, Gandhis anarchism employed Tolstoy,
Thoreau, and the American Transcendentalists to create a form of rooted
cosmopolitanism that reconciled the universal with the specificity of
Indian village life. As Mustapha Kamal Pasha demonstrates, Gandhis
politics of nonviolence merged Tolstoyan Christianity with ahimsä, a
concept that lent positive connotations to nonviolence and formed the
concept of good conduct, a disciplined practice of conducting ones duty,
which was a mode of behavior Gandhi found absent in mainstream Western
civilization.[108]
The eastern shores of the Mediterranean provide us with another case
study. Here the polyglot and cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire served as the
setting in which Islam, minority religions, and modern isms experience a
complex pattern of interaction. In Alexandria, a community of European
anarchists lived in proximity to the Egyptian nationalist movement,
which combined Mazzinian themes with a revival of Islam. The Italian
Errico Malatesta raised a group of ex־Garibaldian volunteers to fight
alongside Urabi and his Egyptian insurgents against the British in 1882,
but he realized that that the Egyptian fellah (peasant) had little in
common with anarchists in the European quarters of Alexandria.[109] The
modernization of Egypt with the rise of the cotton cash crop, factories,
and the building of the Suez Canal stimulated an exodus from the
countryside into Egyptian cities, even as employment opportunities
attracted artisans, laborers, shopkeepers, and the educated middle
classes from the rest of the Ottoman Empire, Italy, France, and the
Iberian peninsula, as well as from the Hapsburg and Russian Empires.
Here, too, globalization led to the growth of pockets of anarchist and
protosyndicalist activity, which has long been overshadowed in the
historiography of the origins of local and pan-Arab nationalism, and in
teleological fashion has ignored these episodes of cosmopolitan and
internationalist currents of radicalism that jar with nationalist,
pan-Arabist, or Islamist historical narratives.
Thus we have the pioneering work of Anthony Gorman on the Popular
University of Alexandria.[110] But we now know a great deal more since
the landmark publication of Ilham Khuri-Makdisis astonishing comparative
account of three nodal cities (Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria), a study
of varieties of secular radicalism in the Eastern Mediterranean in the
period 1860–1914, in which anarchist rationalist culture, and
particularly the Spanish anarchist educationalist Francisco Ferrer,
played an important role.[[111] She demonstrates how Italian, Greek, or
Eastern European Jewish radical artisans and intellectuals interacted
with indigenous anti-imperialist and social radicals. Whereas Christian
minorities tended to be closer to these secular and anarchist radicals,
nevertheless trade union solidarity, cemented by a struggle against
entrepot capitalists, dissolved some of the sectarian boundaries between
Muslim and non-Muslim and overcame other mental boundaries that
separated the denizens of the European quarters from the rest of the
population.
If there was an “anarchist Levant,” there was surely also an “anarchist
Pacific” as Benedict Anderson has shown us.[112] Andersons biography of
José Rizal, the martyred Filipino revolutionary and novelist, charts his
close contacts with Spanish and other European anarchists in the 1890s
and how he combined Tagalog, Spanish, other European cultures with
Filipino nationalism. Anderson presents us with a series of
cartographies of anarchism and radical nationalism that stretch from
East Asia to the Mediterranean and are bound together by the logic and
logistics of Spanish and other European imperialisms.
Rizal and the Chinese anarchist novelist Ba Jin (whose adopted name
spells out the first letters of Bakunin and Kropotkin) are archetypal
liminal intellectuals whose lives are case studies of hybridity.[113] On
the other hand, it must be asked to what extent anarchism was just
another Eurocentric or Orientalist ideology in which, consciously or
unconsciously, the first premises of the dominant global racial
hierarchy were reproduced by European comrades themselves? Thus themes
from postcolonial literature may be fruitfully applied to the study of
anarchism in the Global South.
Another approach to studying the Global South employs comparative
studies of peasant radicalism.[114] The most useful case study might be
the peasant movements in Spain, Mexico, Korea-Manchuria, and Ukraine,
where extensive primary research has been done. Here the image of the
Global South elides into the binominal, periphery, and semiperiphery, so
perhaps we travel from Edward Said to Barrington Moore and Immanuel
Wallerstein; that is, we travel from postcolonialism to comparative
rural sociology and global political economy. In these four cases, rural
peasant society lies on a contested frontier in which the effects of
closer integration to the global capitalist market, though part of daily
life, were concurrently resisted though communal quests for
self-sufficient alternatives. Older bonds of paternal obligation were
collapsing, but newer, more powerful forms of state rule were stymied or
compromised by the effects of civil and/or international war.
Structural causes, however, do not explain why radical peasant movements
turn toward anarchism; peasant movements chose nationalist, religious,
or socialist alternatives in many other cases. Therefore, to explain the
emergence of openly anarchist movements, agency is a key variable, but
not only agency in the form of anarchist leadership at the head of a
given movement, but rather an embedded stratum of anarchist activists in
the countryside urging their less politicized neighbors in times of
distress and disruption.[115] The exact relationship leaders and cadres
have to each other, the overall relationship between city and
countryside, and the urban and rural cultural codes of radicalism vary
in each of these cases. Thus many years ago Temma Kaplan demonstrated
how the peasant anarchists of Andalusia were closely connected to
artisans and intellectuals in nearby towns, how disruptive marketplace
relations were important in shaping the world views of small cultivators
who were dominated by commercial monopolists, so that at first
Bakuninist collectivism (rather than outright anarcho-communism) meshed
nicely with these rural anarchists.[116]
During the revolutionary era in Mexico (1910–1920), the followers of
Emiliano Zapata in the south of the country lived in tension with
syndicalist-oriented anarchists in Mexico City who had cast their lot
with the revolutionary central government, and thus urban anarchist
worker battalions fought the peasant radicals of the south. The peasant
anarchist movements of Mexico were composed of a coalition of Indian
communities, small rancheros, and displaced peasants whose demands could
not be reconciled with urban anarchist workers. The latter had staked
out their political space within the national capital in which Mexico
City’s revolutionary government afforded them a political opportunity
structure. And thus urban worker anarchists were frightened by the
rumors of looting in other cities, which had followed the triumph of
some peasant armies elsewhere in Mexico.[117]
The anarchists of Ukraine were a variation on the rural ‘Green
radicalism of Civil War Russia (1918–1921), found particularly in the
lower Volga valley. Since the late nineteenth century, Ukraine had
become a major global breadbasket, and the hard currency earned by the
Ukrainian grain trade helped fund the expansion and modernization of the
Russian armed forces. Thus Ukrainian lands were not marginal to the fate
of the Russian Empire or to the rhythms of global political economy. But
after years of world and civil war, the breakdown of the central state,
and the disappearance of the larger landowners, Ukrainian anarchists
(like the Greens) gained support from a distressed populace by
advocating the usage of the mir (the local community) as a vehicle to
free themselves from the international marketplace, from foreign,
nationalist, and White armies, and equally from the Bolshevik Red Army,
whose forced grain requisitions were feared and detested. However in
this case, unlike Mexico, anarchist and local hero Nestor Mahkno was a
conduit of urban political culture, which was filtered through a circle
of urban anarchist advisors, so that the division between countryside
and radical city was less obvious than in Mexico. Although the
urban-based Red Army was detested, it was also an ally against the
Whites. In turn, Makhnos decisive victories over the White armies saved
Bolshevik Moscow twice from conquest by counterrevolutionaries.[118]
In the Manchurian-Korean case, the “Korean Makhno,” Kim Chua-Chin, was
able to take advantage of the breakdown of the state order in Manchuria
in the period before its invasion by Imperial Japanese forces in 1931. A
large Korean population straddling the Manchurian- Korean border,
anti-Japanese feeling, pan-Koreanism, and social radicalism influenced
by anarcho-communism allowed his army temporarily to seize large swathes
of territory between 1929 and 1931.[119]
Giving the Global South its due weight in the history of classical
anarchism will therefore revolutionize our understanding of its
geographical morphology and indeed, deepen our knowledge of the origins
of key aspects of the ideology itself. Thus Spain does not look so
exceptional if we view the entire globe rather than only its northern
half. The largest “anarchist” city in the world in 1910 was not
Barcelona but Buenos Aires[120]; a tier of cities in the Global South
possessed noticeable anarchist and syndicalist political subcultures
(Canton, Havana, Lima, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Säo Paulo, Shanghai,
and Tokyo); in the first three decades of the twentieth century,
anarchist-dominated trade unions in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico
were proportionally more dominant in their respective countries overall
labor movements than their famous cousin, the Spanish CNT.[121] More
generally, one of the major differences between the socialist Second
International and the global anarchist and syndicalist movements before
1914 was this: whereas the anarchist and syndicalists had a mass base in
the Global South, the socialists of the Second International lacked one
and indeed pointedly ignored large swathes of the informally colonized
and colonial worlds.[122]
In this article I have focussed on the questions of the definition of
anarchism, its periodization, and its geographical dissemination. I have
adopted a restrictive definition of anarchism, thus emphasizing the ism
of anarchism. I have not employed anarchism to mean a general
libertarian trend or sensibility in all human societies for all
historical epochs. I have adopted a definition of anarchism advanced by
an historian of political thought, but I realize that such a definition
always needs to be more nuanced when one confronts the messy boundaries
of social history.
Several themes in this overview require further study. Thus the
boundaries between preanarchism and classical anarchism need more
research, particularly the relationship between the legacies of revealed
religion on lapsed believers who had turned to anarchism. How did the
thought and mental habits of revealed religion affect the formation of
classical anarchism itself? Thus a good start is Michael Löwy s
sensitive treatment of the precise roles of millenarianism and anarchism
in peasant movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For
him the millenarian tradition is transmuted in modern anarchist
movements by rationalist, literate, and calculating social actors, in
which faith is translated into a secular passion.[123] We also need a
good deal more investigation of the origins of modern antistatism, that
is to say, the linkages between traditions of decentralized forms of
governance and customary self-rule and adjudication, which preceded the
presence of the modern state.
Finally there is the dissemination of anarchism in the Global South. The
interaction of European ideologies (including anarchism) with native
traditions has given rise to an exciting new literature that draws upon
postcolonial studies. But it also draws on the transnational and
diasporic turn in regional and world history. In this regard the study
of the dissemination and reception of anarchism and its kindred doctrine
syndicalism deserves the attention of a wider spectrum of historians and
historical sociologists.
But there is also the utility of an anarchist method or sensitivity in
writing global or European history itself. So, for example, Kropotkins
interest in the communes and guilds of medieval Europe anticipates a
recent path-breaking account of social revolts in medieval Europe.
Echoing Kropotkin without acknowledging his influence, Samuel Cohn Jr.
argues that, by the early fourteenth century, the growth of guild
communities and peasant militias and the concomitant lowering of taxes
blunted the arrogance of magnates and mitigated against regimes based on
war, violence, and plunder, thus shifting the balance of power from
warlord elites to more peaceful and democratic constellations of power.
But these decentralized and peaceful forms of self-rule were followed by
a backlash in which an ensuing growth of the early modern state revamped
a more effective version of the earlier reign of warlords and witnessed
the revival of hierarchical and authoritarian methods and the diminution
or elimination of the powers of communes, city-states, and other shared
zones of sovereignty.[124] Thus to recall James Scott, an anarchist
method will help understand how constellations of political power learn
to look and act like states, and how free zones such as Zomia are
gradually digested by empowered adjacent states.[125]
But it would also be possible to envisage a history of modernity that
emphasizes a dialectical movement between the post-Westphalian state and
waves of worldwide cosmopolitan protest manifested through the periodic
collective breakdown of the international condominium of such sovereign
bodies. Thus since the eighteenth century, global history has recorded
waves of civil or industrial unrest, popular antimilitarism or war
weariness, and acute interconnected civil wars[126] that have blindsided
the putative panoptical predictive capacities of the early modern,
capitalist, or communist States (1789–1793,1820–21,1830,1848,1871: the
era of the French Revolution and its aftermath; 1905–1914: the
Syndicalist revolt and the first Russian Revolution; 1917–1924: World
War and revolution; 1944–1947: the Resistance and World War; 1968:
student, citizens, and workers revolts; even 1989–1991: the fall of
communism). But here too, the same backlash response Cohn detected in
early modern Europe is writ large in international society, so that
challenges to the state form and the international state system itself
are followed by innovation and reinforcement of state power over
contested geographical space and the human body itself. Two recent
examples will suffice.
In Jeremi Suri s innovative study of the origins of the détentes between
China and the United States and between the U.S.S.R. and the United
States in the Nixon era, he argues that the great powers reacted to the
eruption of grassroots public protest (East and West) by seizing the
initiative, separating politics from global civil society, reasserting
the power of the state, and ending the great disruptions of the
1960s.[127] By the twenty-first century, in response to the unstoppable
migratory flow of forced and economic migrants, nation-states of the
Global North, and increasingly others, are more likely to fit their
“borders” around the ceaseless and spontaneous flow of people rather
than be bound by border posts or lines drawn in the sand or on
maps.[128]
A comparative global social history of anarchism helps us define the
parameters of anarchism as ideology, but it might also serve histories
of the rise and development of the state. The anarchist imagination
inspires approaches that transcend the constraints of both Marxist and
realist accounts of global and international histories because it
highlights the role of the unintended effects of subaltern movements,
such as students or migrants, for setting the tempo of major historical
change. This anarchist take on methodological individualism
counterbalances the circular functionalist reasoning that one finds all
too often in studies that overemphasize rigid social class and
competitive state elite analyses or depend too much on determinisi
political economy and geopolitics.[129]
Much of what has been discussed in this article shares the first
premises of the transnational turn in global history and its subset,
transnational labor history; and to complete a circle of reciprocal
influences, the study of anarchist and labor cosmopolitanism during the
era of globalization before 1914 has been an inspiration for historians
and sociologists seeking to make sense of the new order of labor
militancy in the industrialized Global South, which has arisen since the
1960s.[130] In turn models taken from the study of cultural diasporas
have been helpful to historians of classical anarchism. José Moya
promises a study of the migratory patterns of Italian, Spanish, and
Russian Jewish anarchists who plied back and forth across the Atlantic,
an “Anarchist Atlantic” directly inspired by Paul Gilroy’s “Black
Atlantic.”[131] Thus the social history of anarchism offers much to the
burgeoning fields of transnational and global histories, and in turn
these fields will enrich the historiography of anarchism.
Previous versions of this paper were given at the Seventh European
Social Science History Conference, University of Lisbon (26 February-1
March 2008); the German Historical Institute, Rome, 7 July 2008;
Anarchist Studies Network, Political Studies Association, Loughborough
University, 46־ September 2008; School of History, Welsh History and
Archaeology, University of Bangor, 6 October 2008; Political Ideologies
Research Seminar, Department of Politics and International Relations,
University of Oxford, 3 February 2009; and the Department of Politics
Seminar, Goldsmiths, University of London, 17 March 2009. I would like
to thank various members of the audience at these conferences and
seminars. The editorial board of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism
and their anonymous reviewers supplied useful and supportive criticism
to an earlier version of this paper, and they should be thanked. The
usual caveats apply.
[1] For the standard accounts, see Max Nettlau, A Short History of
Anarchism (London: Freedom, 1996); George Woodcock, Anarchism: a History
of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986,
2^(nd) ed.); James Joli, The Anarchists (London: RKP, 1979, 2^(nd) ed.);
Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
(London: HarperPerennial, 2007,2^(nd) ed.). For Michael Schmidt and
Lucien van der Walt, see Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics
of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Edinburgh, UK: AK Press, 2009).
[2] Davide Turcato, “Making Sense of Anarchism: The Experiments with
Revolution of Errico Malatesta, Italian Exile in London, 1889–1900”
(Ph.D. diss., Simon Fraser University, 2009); and Davide Turcato,
“Introduction, Making Sense of Anarchism,” in History of Libertarian
Ideas, voi. 2, The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939–1977), ed.
Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Press, 2009), xv-xxiv.
[3] Carl Levy, “Malatesta in Exile,” Annali della Fondazione Luigi
Einaudi 15 (1981): 245–70; Carl Levy, “Malatesta in London: The Era of
Dynamite,” The Italianist, ed. L. Sponza and A. Tosi, “A Century of
Italian Emigration in Britain 1880 to 1980s,” (special supplement) 13
(1993): 25–42.
[4] Carl Levy, “Currents of Italian Syndicalism before 1926,”
International Review of Social History 45 (2000): 209–50.
[5] Carl Levy, “Anarchism, Internationalism and Nationalism in Europe,
1860–1939,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 50, 3 (2004):
330–42.
[6] Carl Levy, “Max Weber, Anarchism and Libertarian Culture:
Personality and Power Politics,” in Max Weberand the Culture of Anarchy,
ed. Sam Whimster (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 83–109.
[7] Carl Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin in Italian History: 1870s to
1930s,” in Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in
Society and Culture, eds. Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi (New York:
Macmillan Paigrave, 2007), 207–21.
[8] Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists (New York: NYU/Berg Press,
1999).
[9] Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists.
[10] Carl Levy, “Italian and Spanish Anarchism Compared: Nation, Region
and Patriotism, 1860–1945,” forthcoming.
[11] For summary of these fields, see Thomas Dixon, The Invention of
Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008). I have tried my hand at realizing some of these
objects in a study that is related to the social histories of anarchism;
see “‘Sovversivismo’: The Radical Political Culture of Otherness in
Liberal Italy,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12,1 (2007): 147–61.
[12]
B. Altena, “How About the History of Anarchism as a National Social
Movement?,” Seventh European Social Science History Conference,
University of Lisbon, 26 February-1 March 2008.
[13]
E. Romanos, “Analyzing Anarchist Mobilization in a Highly Repressive
Context: The Spanish Case,” Seventh European Social Science History
Conference.
[14] Davide Turcato, “Making Sense of Anarchism,” Seventh European
Social Science History Conference.
[15]
T. Goyens, “Social Space and the Practice of Anarchist History,”
Seventh European Social Science History Conference; and his
wonderful monograph, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist
Movement in New York City; 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois
press, 2007).
[16] Turcato, “Making Sense of Anarchism.”
[17] Marshall, Demanding the Impossible. Ruth Kinna writes interestingly
on the historiography of anarchism; see her Anarchism: A Beginner’s
Guide (Oxford: One World, 2005), and the incisive comments by Schmidt
and van der Walt, Black Flamey 17.
[18]
G. Crowder, Classical Anarchism. The Political Thought of Godwin,
Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). A
good account of the political economy of classical anarchism is
found in Robert Knowles, Political Economy from Below: Economic
Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840–1914 (London: Routledge,
2004).
[19]
A. Skirda, Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from
Proudhon to May 1968 (Edinburgh, UK: AK Press, 2002).
[20] For a good overview of Malatesta, see Paul Nursey-Bray, “Malatesta
and the Anarchist Revolution,” Anarchist Studies 3,1 (1995): 25–44.
[21] David Morland, Demanding the Impossible: Human Nature and Politics
in Nineteenth-Century Social Anarchism (London: Cassell, 1997), 199.
[22] Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1973); Stuart
White, “Making Anarchism Respectable? The Social Philosophy of Colin
Ward,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12,1 (2007): 11–28.
[23] I give a summary in “Anarchism,” Encarta Encyclopedia (London:
Webster’s International, Microsoft Encarta,
http://encarta.msn.com/enclyclopediay 2004). There is a vast literature
on postwar anarchism and postanarchism. See David Apter and James Joli,
eds., Anarchism Today (London: Macmillan, 1971); Richard Gombin, The
Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975); H. J.
Ehlrich, ed., Re-inventing Anarchy: What are the Anarchists Thinking
These DaysÌ (London: RKP, 1979); Murray Bookchin, “New Social Movements:
The Anarchic Dimension,” in For Anarchism: History; Theory and Practicet
ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge, 1989), 259–74; Todd May, The
Political Philosophy of Poststructural Anarchism (College Station:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); J. Purkis and J. Bowen,
eds., Twenty-First Century Anarchism: Unorthodox Ideas for a New
Millennium (London: Cassell, 1997); Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan:
Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham: Lexington,
2001); Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lanham: Lexington, 2002); David
Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 61–73; S. M.
Sheehan, Anarchism (London: Reaktion Books, 2003); J. Purkis and J.
Bowen, eds., Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a
Global Age (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004); J. F.
Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements
(London: Pluto Press, 2005); Benjamin Franks, “Postanarchism: A Critical
Assessment,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12,2 (2007): 127–46; G.
Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social
Movements and the Decolonialization of Everyday Life (Edinburgh, UK: AK
Press, new ed., 2007); Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian
Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008); R. Amster
et al., Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of
Anarchy in the Academic (London: Routledge, 2009); Graham, History of
Libertarian Ideas, voi. 2; Saul Newman, The Politics of Post-Anarchism
(Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
[24] Ruth Kinna, “The Anarchist Canon,” Anarchist Studies 5,1 (1997):
67–71.
[25] Paul McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical
Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007).
[26] Samuel Clark, Living without Domination (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,
2007).
[27] Ruth Kinna, “Anarchism and the Politics of Utopia,” in Anarchism
and Utopianism, eds. Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2009), 221–40.
[28] Samuel Clark has a very useful summary of the literature on the
evolution of the state and the state system from the fourteenth to the
twentieth centuries. See Clark, Living without Domination, 75–106;
Michel Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vols. 1 and 2 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1993); and John Darwin, After Tamerlaine:
The Global History of Empire (London: Penguin, Allen Lane, 2007).
[29] Pierre Clastres, Society against the State (Boston: MIT Press,
1989); David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004); Harold Barclay, People without
Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy (London: Freedom Press, new ed.,
2006).
[30] Clark, Living without Domination, 109–38.
[31] See the life’s work of Michel Mann on the origins and development
of the state and the concept of infrastructural reach.
[32]
S. Gemie, “Counter-Community: An Aspect of Anarchist Political
Culture,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 349–67.
[33]
S. Gemie, “ Anarchism and Feminism: A Historical Survey,” Women’s
History Review 5, 3 (1996): 414–44; M. Nash, Defying Male
Civilization: Women and the Spanish Civil War (Denver: Arden Press,
1995); Richard Cleminson, Anarchism, Science and Sex: Eugenics in
Eastern Spain (Bern: Peter Laing, 2000); M. Ackelsberg, Free Women
of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women
(Edinburgh, UK: AK Press, new ed., 2004).
[34] Clark, Living without Domination, 97.
[35]
J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998); and J. C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An
Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2009). Also consult Fernanda Pirie’s study of
Ladakh for a slightly different approach, which stresses similar
ecological factors as found in Zomia, but goes on to give a
fascinating description of the methods of conflict resolution,
which have survived interference by both the Indian state and
the Buddhist hierarchy, and brings to mind Kropotkin’s
discussion of the differences between customary practices and
state enforced law; Peace and Conflict in Ladakh: The
Construction of a Fragile Web of Order (Amsterdam: Brill, 2007).
[36] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The
Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000); C.
Land, “Flying the Black Flag: Revolt, Revolution, and the Social
Organization of Piracy in the ‘Golden Age,”’ Management & Organizational
History, 2, 2 (2007): 169–192; Clark, Living without Domination,
101–103.
[37] Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social
Movements in the 19^(th) and 20^(th) Centuries (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 3^(rd) ed., 1971), ch. 5; and Gerald
Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, Canto ed., 1990). For an overview of this discussion, see M. G.
Duncan, “Spanish Anarchism Refracted: Themes and Images in Millenarian
and Revisionist Literature,” Journal of Contemporary History 23,3
(1988): 323–46.
[38]
N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and
Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, rev. ed.,
1993).
[39] Patricia Crone, “Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists,” Past & Present
169 (2000): 3–28; and Harold Barclay, “Islam, Muslim Societies and
Anarchy,” Anarchist Studies 10, 2 (2003): 5–18.
[40] Turcato, “Making Sense of Anarchism..
[41] Whimster, Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchism.
[42] Clark, Living without Domination, 121–26; Hobsbawm, Primitive
Rebels.
[43] Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1984).
[44] For a pioneering attempt to discuss the relationship between
revealed and organized religions and anarchism, see Religious Anarchism:
New Perspectives, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2009). K. Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
and the Rise of Revolutionary Syndicalism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
[45] The latest biography of Bakunin downgrades the psychosexual
approach favored by previous biographers; see M. Leier, Bakunin: The
Creative Passion (New York: St. Martins Press, 2006). For the orthodox
approach, see E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan, 1937); and
Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of
Utopianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). However, Leier may
understate the preanarchist influences on the anarchist phase of
Bakunins life.
[46] Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making
of Modernity, 1650–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and
Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the
Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[47]
G. Claeys, “Reciprocal Dependence, Virtue and Progress: Some Sources of
Early Socialist Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism in Britain
1750–1850,” in Internationalism in the Labour Movement, 1830–1914,
voi. 1, eds. F. van Holthoon and M. van der Linden (Leiden, NL: E.J.
Brill, 1988).
[48]
M. Isabella, The Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal
International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009).
[49] Mark Sedgwick, “Al-Qaeda and the Nature of Religious Terrorism,”
Terrorism and Political Violence, 16, 4 (2004): 795–814; Michel
Burleigh, Earthly Passions: The Conflict between Religion and Politics
from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: Harper Collins,
2005); Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the
European Dictators to Al Qaeda (London: Harper Collins, 2006).
[50] Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1969).
[51]
S. L. Cohn Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in
Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006).
[52]
S. Clark, “Anarchism and the Myth of the Primitive: Godwin and
Kropotkin,” Studies in Social and Political Thought 15 (2008): 6–25.
[53] Eric Hobsbawm, “The Fortunes of Marx’s and Engel’s Writings,” in
History of Marxism, voi. 1, Marxism in Marx’s Day, ed. Eric Hobsbawm
(Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1982); Franco Andreucci, “The
Diffusion of Marxism in Italy during the Nineteenth Century,” in
Culture, Identity and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, eds. Raphael
Samuel and Gareth Stedman- Jones (London: RKP, 1983); Franco Andreucci,
Il marxismo collettivo: Socialismo, marxismo e circolazione delle idée
dalla seconda alla terza intemazionale (Milan, IT: Franco Angeli, 1986);
Carl Levy, “Introduction: Historical and Theoretical Issues,” in
Socialism and the Intelligentsia 1870–1914, ed. Carl Levy (London: RKP,
1987), 8–10.
[54] David Stafford, From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study in the
Political Activities of Paul Brousse 1870–1890 (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1971); Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary
Anarchism, 1872–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
George Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in
Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); K. S.
Vincent, Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoît Malón and French
Reformist Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
Nunio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993).
[55] I discuss “voluntaryism” in “Malatesta in Exile.” See also John
Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost World of British Anarchism
(London: Paladin, 1978); M. Bevir, “ The Rise of Ethical Anarchism in
Britain, 1885–1900,” Historical Research: Bulletin of the Institute of
Historical Research 69,169 (1996): 143–65; Ruth Kinna, William Morris
and the Art of Socialism (Cardiff, UK: Cardiff University Press, 2000);
M. Thomas, Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 1880–1914:
Revolutions in Everyday Life (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); Ruth Kinna,
“William Morris and the Problem of Englishness,” European Journal of
Political Thought 5,1 (2006): 85–99. For a careful analysis of British
public opinion and anarchism, see H. Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in
British Public Opinion 1880–1914,” Victorian Studies 31,4 (1988):
487–516.
[56]
J. J. Martin, Men Against the State (DeKalb, IL: Adrian Allen
Associated, 1953); E. M. Schuster, Native American Anarchism: A
Study ofLeft- Wing American Individualism (New York: Da Capo,
1970); Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life ofVoltarine
de Cleyre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); F.
Brooks, “American Individualist Anarchism: What It Was and Why
It Failed,” Journal of Political Ideologies 1,1 (1996): 95–75
[57] In general see, Gemie, “Counter-community”; and S. Gemie,
“Historians, Anarchism and Political Culture,” Anarchist Studies 6,1
(1998): 153–59. A good example of the anarchists’ countercommunity
remains Paul Avrich’s study of the Modern School, The Modern School
Movement: Anarchism and Education in the US (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980). Also see the recent study of the effects of
Ferrers teachings on a broader band of militant freethinkers and
socialists before 1914; D. Laqua, ‘“Laïque, démocratique et sociale?’
Socialism and Freethinkers’ International,” Labour History Review 74,3
(2009): 253–73. Recent examples of sexual politics are Sheila
Rowbotham’s magisterial biography, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty
and Love (London: Verso, 2008); and Ginger Frost’s ‘“Love is Always
Free’: Anarchism, Free Unions and Utopianism in Edwardian England,”
Anarchist Studies 17,1 (2009): 73–94. On art, literature, anarchism, and
Bohemia, see E. W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and
Belgium, 1885–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); Reg
Carr, Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 1977); J. Rubin, Realism and Social Vision
in Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press,
1980); C. Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter 1844–1929: Prophet of Human
Fellowship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); J. U.
Halperin, Felix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Patricia Leighton,
Re-ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989); Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural
Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1989); J. G. Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground:
Art, Science and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France (Baton Rouge: LSU
Press, 1994); G. Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist
Rebellion and Fascist Reaction (Providence, RI: Berghan, 1996); A.
Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives during the
Fin-de-Siècle (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillian, 1997); D. Weir, Anarchy and
Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1997); Whimster, Max Weber and the Culture of
Anarchy; S. Gemie, “Octave Mirbeau and the Changing Nature of Right-Wing
Political Culture: France 1870–1914,” International Review of Social
History, 43 (1998): 111–35; D. Sweetman, Explosive Acts:
Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde and Felix Fénéon and the Art of Anarchy of
the Fin-de-Siécle (New York: Basic Books, 1999); D. Kadler, Mosaic
Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 2000); Kinna, William Morris; A. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism:.
Art, Politics and the First American Avant Garde (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001); Thomas, Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in
Britain; David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow:
Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to
Colin Ward (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006).
[58] Irving Horowitz, The Anarchists (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964),
30–55; Kinna, Anarchism: A Beginners Guide, 20.
[59]
B. Franks, “The Beginnings and Ends of the Schism..(unpublished paper)
6–8; Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual
Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Michael
Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
[60] Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists, 40–41.
[61] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 18–19.
[62] For recent examples see Goyens, Beer and Revolution; P. Di Paola,
“Club anarchici di Londra: Sociabilità, politica, cultura,” Società e
storia 38,2 (2005): 353–72; Chris Ealham’s study of the streets,
neighborhoods, suburbs, and anarchist heartlands of Barcelona, Class
Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898–1937 (London: Routledge, 2005);
and Roman Ducoulombier, Les Anarchistes contre la République.
Contribution à Vhistoire des réseaux sous la Troisième République
(1880–1914) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008).
[63] For some examples, see Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists; Jerome
Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas, 2^(nd) ed. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2004); N. Rider, “The Practice of Direct Action: the
Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931” in For Anarchism: History, Theory,
Practice, ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge, 1989), 79–108; A. Smith,
ed., Red Barcelona: Social Protest and Labour Mobilization in the
Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002); Chris Ealham, “An Imagined
Geography: Ideology, Urban Space and Protest in the Centre of
Barcelona’s ‘Chinatown,’ 1835–1936”, International Review of Social
History 50, 3 (2005): 37397-•
[64] Davide Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement,”
International Review of Social History 52, 3 (2007): 407–44; and C.
Bantman, “Internationalism without an International?,” Revue Belge de
Philologie e d’Histoire 84,4 (2006): 961–83.
[65] Carl Levy, “Italian Anarchism, 1870–1926,” in For Anarchism:
History, 44–45.
[66] For the legacy of the Paris Commune, see Eva Civolani, ^anarchismo
dopo la Comune, I casi italiano e spagnolo (Milan, IT: Franco Angeli,
1981); Maurizio Antonioli, “Bakunin tra sindacalismo rivoluzionario e
anarchismo,” in Azione diretta e organizzazione operaia. Sindacalismo
rivoluzionario e anarchismo tra la fine delVOttocento e ilfascismo
(Manduria, 149.31.21.88 on Mon, 14 Sf on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
IT: Piero Lacaita Editore, 1990); J. Jennings, “Syndicalism and the
French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 349–67.
For the legacy of Haymarket, May Day, and anarchism, see Paul Avrich,
The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984);
Maurizio Antonioli, Vieni 0 Maggio: Aspetti del Primo Maggio in Italia
tra Ottocento e Novevento (Milan, IT: Franco Angeli, 1988); B. Nelson,
Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicagos Anarchists 1870–1900
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
[67] Levy, “Introduction: Historical and Theoretical Issues”; and S.
Pinta, “Anarchism, Marxism and the Ideological Composition of the
Chicago Idea,” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 12, 4
(2009): 403–20. One could also add the swirling debates within the
British labor movement, which took place from the 1880s into the early
1900s, concerning alternatives to the bureaucratic state and
parliamentary representation (direct democracy, the referendum, and
forms of localism) that were the harbinger to the syndicalist revolt of
1910–1914 and impacted the development of Guild Socialism. On this, see
Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour
Movement 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[68] Richard Bach Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist
Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe.” Terrorism and Political
Violence 16,1 (2004): 116–53.
[69]
J. Casanova, “Terror and Violence: The Dark Face of Spanish Anarchism,”
International Labor and Working-Class History 67 (2005): 79–99.
[70] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 20.
[71] Ruth Kinna, ed., Early Writings on Terrorism, vols. 1–3 (London:
Routledge, 2006).
[72] Martin A. Miller, “Ordinary Terrorism in Historical Perspective,”
Journal for the Study of Radicalism 2,1 (2008): 125–54; and Jensen,
“Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century
Europe.”
[73]
S. G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World from Art to
Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 7–37.
[74] Marie Fleming, “Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist
Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Terrorism: An International
Journal 4,4 (1980): 1–23; U. Linse, ‘“Propaganda of the Deed’ and
‘Direct Action : Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in Social Protest,
Violence and Terror in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. W. J. Mommsen and
G. Hirschfield (London: Macmillan, 1982); C. Hawkins, “Assassination,
Self-Expression and Social Change: Emma Goldman and Political Violence,”
Anarchist Studies 7,3 (1999): 324-; N. Whelehan, “Political Violence and
Morality in Anarchist Theory and Practice: Luigi Galleani and Peter in
Comparative Perspective,” Anarchist Studies 13,2 (2005): 147–68; C.
Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin in Italian History”; C. Wellbrook,
“Seething with the Ideal: Galleanisti and Class Struggle in Late
Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century USA,” Working USA: The
Journal of Labor and Society 12,4 (2009): 403–20.
[75]
L. Clutterback, “The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries
or Extreme Irish Republicans?,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 16
(2004): 154–81; N. Whelehan, ‘“Skirmishing,’ the Irish World and
Empire,” Êire-Ireland 42,102 (2007): 180–200; M. Thorup, “The
Anarchist and the Partisan—Two Types of Terror in the History of
Irregular Warfare,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 20 (2008):
333–355. M. Silvestri, “The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan
Breem: Terrorism in Bengal and Its Relations to the European
Experience,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 21 (2009): 1–27. For
the debate over comparisons between Al-Qaeda and classical
anarchism, see this debate, James L. Gelvin, “Al-Qaeda and
Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology,” Terrorism and
Political Violence, 20 (2008): 563–581; L. Binder, “Comment on
Gelvin’s Essay on Al-Qaeda and Anarchism,” Terrorism and Political
Violence, 20 (2008): 582–588; R.B. Jensen, “Nineteenth Century
Anarchist Terrorism: How Comparable to the Terrorism of al-Qaeda?,”
Terrorism and Political Violence, 20 (2008): 589–596; G. Esenwein,
“Comments on James L. Gelvin’s Al-Qaeda and and Anarchism: A
Historian’s Reply to Terrorology? Terrorism and Political Violence,
20 (2008): 597–600; J. L. Gelvin, “Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A
Historian’s Reply to Terrorology: Responses to Commentaries,”
Terrorism and Political Violence, 20 (2008): 606–611.
[76]
D. C. Rapoport, “Then and Now: The Significance or Insignificance of
Historical Parallels”, paper given at “What Can and Cannot Be
Learned From the History about Terrorism: A Dialogue between
Historians and Social Scientists,” the Human Factors Division,
Science and Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland
Security, Arlington, Virginia, June 15–16,2007.
[77] Michael Collyer, “Secret Agents: Anarchists, Islamists and
Responses to Politically Active Refugees in London,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 28, 2 (2005): 278–303; P. Di Paola, “The Spies Who Came in from
the Heat: The International Surveillance of Anarchists in London,”
European History Quarterly 37,2 (2007): 89–215; Beverley Gage, The Day
Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The classic statement on waves
of terrorism is by David Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,”
in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, ed. Audrey Kurth
Cronin and James M. Ludes (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
2004). Some criticisms can be found in M. Sedwick, “Inspiration and the
Orgins of Global Waves of Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30
(2007), 97–112. And see why terrorism ends in E. Ayndinli, “Before
Jihadists There Were Anarchists: A Failed Case of Transnational
Violence,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 31 (2008): 903–923 and R. B.
Jensen, “The International Campaign against Anarchist Terrorism,
1880-1930S,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 21,1(2009): 89–109.
[78] Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London:
Verso, 2007), 1–4.
[79] Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite.”
[80] For a recent recreation of the Parisian milieu in the 1890s, see
John Merrimans The Dynamite Club (London: JR Books, 2009).
[81] Alex Butterworth, The World that Never Was: A True Story of
Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (London: Bodley, 2010).
[82] I discuss the generational gap in Gramsci and the Anarchists; also
see W. Thorpe, “Syndicalist Internationalism before World War II,” in
Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 1990), 237–60; Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition
to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2008); R. Tosstorff, “The Syndicalist Encounter with
Bolshevism,” Anarchist Studies 17, 2 (2009): 12–28.
[83] For the unusual history of Communism and dissident communists in
Spain and especially Catalonia in the 1920s and 1930s, see G. Meaker,
The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1974); B. Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution
and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1991); R. J. Alexander, The Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, vols.
1 and 2 (London: Janus, 1999).
[84] Angel Smith, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and
the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898–1923 (New York: Berghahn Books,
2007).
[85] A good example is Armando Borghi’s Italian anarchists
autobiography, Mezzo secolo di Anarchia (1898–1945) (Naples: Edizioni
Scientifiche Italiane, 1954). Also consult the correspondence of
Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile
/ Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard and Anna Drinan (New
York: Schocken, 1975).
[86] See references in note 82 and A. Lindemann, “7he Red Years”:
European Socialism versus Bolshevism, 1919–1920 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974); W. Thorpe, “The Workers Themselves”:
Revolutionary Syndicalism and Industrial Labour, 1912–1923 (Dordrecht,
NL: Kluwer Academic Amsterdam, International Institute of Social
History, 1989), chs. 3–6; W. Thorpe, “The European Syndicalists and War
1914–1918,” Contemporary European History 10,4 (2001): 1–24; W. Thorpe,
“El Ferrol, Rio de Janeiro, Zimmerwald and Beyond: Syndicalist
Internationalism, 1914–1918,” Revue Belge de Philogie e DHistoire 84,4
(2006): 1005–24; R. Darlington, “Revolutionary Syndicalist Opposition to
the First World War: A Comparative Reassessment,” Revue Belge di
Philogie e DHistoire 84,4 (2006): 983–1004.
[87] See for example, D. Berry, “Fascism or Revolution: Anarchism and
Antifascism in France, 1933–1939>” Contemporary European History 8,1
(1999): 5171-. And also see the recent study of evolution toward a
premature Cold War position: K. Zimmer, “Premature AntiCommunists?:
American Anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and Left-Wing Libertarian
Anti-Communism, 1917–1939,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of
the Americas.71–45 :(2009) 2 ,6
[88] Levy, “Malatesta in Exile”; H. Oliver, The International Anarchist
Movement in Late Victorian London (London: Croom Helm, 1983); Levy,
“Malatesta in London”; G. Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento
anarchico italiano e internazionale (Milan, IT: Franco Angeli, 2003);
Bantman, “Internationalism without an International?”; C. Bantman, “The
Militant Go-Between: Émile Pouget’s Transnational Propaganda
(1880–1914),” Labour History Review 74,3 (2009): 274–87; Davide Turcato,
“European Anarchism in the 1890s: Why Labor Matters in Categorizing
Anarchism,” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 12 (2009):
451–66.
[89]
B. Holton, British Syndicalism (London: Pluto, 1976); F. Boll,
“International Strike Waves: A Critical Assessment,” in The
Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany,
eds. W. J. Mommsen and H-G Husung (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985); M.
Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of
the World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988,2^(nd) ed.);
Thorpe, “7he Workers Themselves”; S. Salerno, Red November, Black
November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the
World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); C. Tsuzuchi, Tom Mann 1856–1941
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); J. C. White, Tom Mann (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 1991); V. Burgmann, Revolutionary
Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in
Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); M. Mann,
“Sources of Variation in Working-Class Movements in the Twentieth
Century’ New Left Review 212 (1995): 14–54; M. van der Linden,
“Second Thoughts on Revolutionary Syndicalism,” Labour History
Review 63, 2 (1998): 182–96; D. Gabaccia, “Worker Internationalism
and Italian Labor History, 1870–1914,” International Labor and
Working Class History 45,1 (1999): 63–79; D. Howell, “Taking
Syndicalism Seriously,” Socialist History 16 (1999): 27–46; L. van
der Walt, “The Industrial Union Is the Embryo of the Socialist
Commonwealth: The International Socialist League and Revolutionary
Syndicalism in South Africa, 1915–1920,” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 19,1 (1999): 1–24; D.
Gabaccia, Italy s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000); D.
Gabaccia and F. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor
Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2001); N. Kirk, Comrades and Cousins:
Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and
Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin, 2003); Levy,
“Anarchism, Nationalism and Internationalism”; J. Moya, “The
Positive Side of a Stereotype: Jewish Anarchists in
EarlyTwentieth-Century Buenos Aires,” Jewish History 18,1 (2004):
19–48; R Shor, “Left Labor Agitators in the Pacific Rim of the Early
Twentieth Century,” International Labor and Working-Class History 67
(2005): 148–63; R. Darlington, “Syndicalism and the Influence of
Anarchism in France, Italy and Spain,” Anarchist Studies 17, 2
(2009): 29–54; Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame; S. Hirsch
and L. van der Walt, eds., Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial
and Post-Colonial World, 1870–1914 (Amsterdam: Brill Academic Press,
2010).
[90] Moya, “The Positive Side of a Stereotype”; Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles
and Dynamite”; B. Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the
Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); Turcato, “Italian
Anarchism as a Transnational Movement.”
[91] Levy, Socialism and the Intelligentsia.
[92] See the discussion by Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame,
271–72.
[93] Avrich, The Modern School Movement; for an overview of studies on
Futurism, see Berghaus, Between Fascism and Anarchism.
[94]
D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 5; M. Antonioli,
Pietro Gori Cavaliere errante deUanarchismo (Pisa, IT: BFS,
1995); M. Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of
Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).
[95] Richard Bach Jensen, “Criminal Anthropology and Anarchist Terrorism
in Spain and Italy,” Mediterranean History Review 16, 2 (2001): 31–44.
[96]
M. Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central
Europe (London: Athlone Press, 1992); Whimster, Max Weber and the
Culture of Anarchism.
[97]
A. Gouldner, The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New
Class: A Frame of References, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an
Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and
Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era
(New York: Seabury, 1979); A. Gouldner, The Two Marxism:
Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (London:
Macmillan, 1980); A. Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of
Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985); G. Berti, Il pensiero anarchico: dal
settecento al novecento (Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore, 1998).
[98] For postmodern and critical Marxist geography, see Alberto Toscano,
“Geography Against Capitalism: Elisée Reclus, David Harvey and the
Spatial Strategies of Liberation,” paper given to the Research Unit for
Politics and Ethics, Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of
London, 19 January 2010. Also see S. Huston, “Kropotkin and Spatial
Social Theory,” Anarchist Studies 5, 3 (1997): 109–30; R. Kinna,
“Kropotkins Theory of Mutual Aid in Historical Context,” International
Review of Social History 40,2 (1995): 259–83; B. Morris, “Kropotkin’s
Metaphysics of Nature,” Anarchist Studies 9,2 (2001): 165–81; R. Kinna,
“Fields of Vision and Revolutionary Change,” Substance 36,2 (2007):
67–86; V. Postinikov, “Russian Roots: From Populism to Radical
Ecological Thought,” Anarchist Studies 12,1 (2004): 60–71. In a similar
fashion, Reclus has been rediscovered; see J. P. Clark and C. Martin,
eds., Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of
Elisée Reclus (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004). For the relationship
between recent anarchist theory and postmodern and critical sociology,
see J. Purkis, “Towards an Anarchist Sociology,” in Bowen and Purkis,
Changing Anarchism, 39–54.
[99] Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics; Halperin, Felix Fénéon;
Varias, Paris and the Anarchists.
[100] AntlifF, Anarchist Modernism; also see Alan Antliff, Anarchy and
Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver,
BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007).
[101] The following is a representative sample of an immense field: R.
Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982, 2^(nd) ed.); A. Wexler, Emma Goldman
in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); A. Wexler, Emma Goldman in
Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989); C. Falk, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); B. Halund, Emma Goldman:
Sexuality and the Impurity of the State (Montréal: Black Rose Books,
1993); C. Falk, “Emma Goldman, Power Politics and the Theatrics of Free
Expression,” Women’s History Review 11, 1 (2002): 11–26; C. Falk, ed.,
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, voi. 1, Made
in America, 1890–1901, voi. 2, Making Free Speech, 1902–1909 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003); K. Morgan, “Herald of the Future?
Emma Goldman, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Superman,” Anarchist
Studies 17, 2 (2009): 29–54. Mary Gluck examines in depth the origins
and interweaving of the stock types of “Bohemia” in early
nineteenth-century Paris in Popular Utopia: Modernism and Urban Culture
in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005). These types and forms of behavior (decadence, primitive painting,
and so forth) were also closely connected to commercial activities and
consumerism. These worlds are captured brilliantly in the film “Reds”
(1981), directed by and starring Warren Beatty. For Carlo Tresca and his
milieu in Greenwich Village, see the marvellous biography by Nunzio
Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (New York: Paigrave
Macmillan, 2005). For some examples of the French cultural map, see
Gaetano Manfredonia, La chanson anarchiste en France des origines à 1914
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); and C. Alexander McKindley, “Anarchists and
the Music of the French Revolution,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism
1,2 (2007): 1–33. And for the Italian cultural map, see S. Catanuto and
F. Schirone, II canto anarchico in Italia nellottocento e novecento
(Milan, IT: Zero in condotta, 2001).
[102] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame; and Hirsch and van der
Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World.
[103] For Alexandria, see A. Gorman, “Anarchists and Education: The Free
Popular University of Egypt (1906),” Middle Eastern Studies 41,3 (2005):
303–20; and A. Gorman, “Anarchists on the Nile: Radical Internationalism
in Egypt, 1860–1914,” Seventh European Social Science History
Conference. For Hong Kong, see Anderson, Under Three Flags. And for
Tokyo, see J. Crump, Hatta Shüzö and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan
(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1993).
[104]
J. W. F. Dulles, Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900–1915
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973); R. Munck,
Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and
Politics, 1855–1985 (London: Zed, 1987); K. Shaffer,
Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth
Century Cuba (Gainesville: University of Florida Press,
2005); K. Shaffer, 4“Havana Hub’: The Role of Tierra and
Libertarian Journalism in Linking Cuba and Caribbean
Anarchist Networks, 1903–1915,” Seventh European Social
Science History Conference; L. van der Walt, “Anarchism and
Syndicalism in an African Port City: Cape Town, the IWW and
the ICU, 1904–1924,” Seventh European Social Science History
Conference; K. Shaffer, “Contrasting Internationalism:
Transnational Anarchists Confront US Expansionism in the
Caribbean, 1890S-1920S,” Eighth European Social Science
History Conference, Ghent, Belgium, April 2010.
[105]
R. Scalapino and G. T. Yu, The Chinese Anarchist Movement (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1961); A. Dirlik, “The Path not
Taken: The Anarchist Alternative to Chinese Socialism (1921–1927)”,
International Review of Social History 34,1 (1989): 1–41; P. Zarrow,
Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990); A. Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); J.
Crump, “Anarchism and Nationalism in East Asia,” Anarchist Studies
4, 1 (1994): 45–64; G.A. Hoston, The State, Identity, and the
National Question in China and Japan (Princeton: Princeton
University Press): 127–218; “Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism: An
Interview with Arif Dirlik,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 1, 2
(1997); J. A. Rapp, “Maoism and Anarchism: Mao Zedong’s Response to
the Anarchist Critique of Marxism,” Anarchist Studies 9,1 (2001):
3–28.
[106] Sanjay Seth, “Reason Unhinged: The Non-Western World and Modem,
Western Knowledge,” Inaugural Lecture, Department of Politics,
Goldsmiths, University of London, 13 January 2009.
[107] Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, 124–25.
[108]
M. Kamal Pasha, “After Imperial Reason: Gandhi and the New
Cosmopolitanism,” Paper presented to the Centre for Post-Colonial
Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, 3 March 2010. In general,
see G. Ostergaard and M. Currell, The Gentle Anarchists (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971); and G. Ostergaard, “Indian
Anarchism: the Curious Case of Vinoba Bhave, Anarchist ‘Saint of
Government,”* in Goodway, For Anarchism, 201–16. For an excellent
survey of the Tolstoy-Gandhi connection, see Marks, How Russia
Shaped the World, 123–30. For the context of Tolstoy’s Christian
Anarchism see, A. Christoyan-nopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A
Political Commentary on the Gospel (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010).
[109] Berti, Errico Malatesta, 99.
[110] Gorman, “Anarchists and Education”; and Gorman, “Anarchists on the
Nile.”
[111]
I. Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global
Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California, 2010).
[112] Anderson, Under Three Flags.
[113] On Ba Jin, see O. Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth
between Two Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967);
N. Mao, Pa Chin (New York: Twayne, 1978); N. Kaldis, ‘“Ba Jin,’” in
Encylopedia of Modern Asia, voi. 1, eds. Karen Christensen and David
Levinson (New York: Scribner’s, 2002), 209a-b. We await the English
translation of Chen Sihe’s biography of Ba Jin and Mamoru Yamaguchi’s
extensive work on Ba Jin’s correspondence with the global anarchist
movement.
[114]
D. Dahlmann, Land und Freiheit: Macnovscina und Zapatismo als Bespiele
agrarrevolution Bewegungen (Stuttgart, DE: F. Steiner Verlag
Weisbaden, 1986); and V. V. Magagna, Communities of Grain: Rural
Rebellions in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991).
[115] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 286–91.
[116]
T. Kaplan, Anarchists in Andalusia 1868–1903 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1977). Also see the very persuasive arguments of
James Casey, “The Spanish Anarchist Peasant: How Primitive a
Rebel?,” Journal of European Studies 8 (1978): 34–43.
[117]
J. A. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1889–1931
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Paul Avrich,
Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988); C. M. MacLachlin, Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution:
The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magon in the United
States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); W. S.
Albro, Always a Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magon and the Mexican
Révolution (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press,
1992); J. A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and
the Plan of San Diego (Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press,
1992); D. Hodges, Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). The limitations of
the Bolshevik model in Mexico due to earlier forms of anarchism
radicalism are discussed by Daniela Spenser in “Radical Mexico.
Limits tò the Impact of Soviet Communism,” Latin American
Perspectives 35,2 (2008): 57–70.
[118] Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1967); M. Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno,
1918–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1976); M. Malet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil
War in the Russian Civil War (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982);
Dahlmann, Land und Freiheit; O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The
Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921) (Oxford, UK: Clarendon,
1989); S. Cipko, “Nestor Makhno: A Mini-Historiography of the Anarchist
Revolution,” The Raven, Anarchist Quarterly 4,1 (1991): 57–75; E.
Cinella, “Makhno nella rivoluzione ucraina del 1917–1921,” Rivista
storica delVAnarchismo, 7, 1 (2000): 9–46; A. Skirda, Nestor Makhno,
Anarchy s Cossock: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine,
1917–1922 (Edinbrugh, UK: AK Press, 2004).
[119] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 284–85.
[120]
J. Moya, Cousins and Strangers. Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires,
1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and
Moya, “The Positive Side of a Stereotype.”
[121] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 20–21,291.
[122] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 311.
[123]
M. Löwy, “From Captain Swing to Pancho Villa: Instances of Peasant
Resistance in the Historiography of Eric Hobsbawm,” Diogenes 48,1
(2000): 1–29.
[124] Cohn, Lust for Liberty, 156.
[125] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.
[126] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 211–18.
[127]
J. Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolutions and the Rise of Détente
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
[128] By the twenty-first century, to stem the flow of forced migrants
into their territories, liberal democracies have excised parts of their
own sovereign territories (islands off their coast and airports zones);
mounted naval patrols and exercised illegal sovereign powers over
cowering refugees on the high seas, and deported them to third
countries; placed immigration officials in foreign airports to check the
credentials of would-be asylum seekers; and compelled airline and
employees of other transport firms to act as surrogate immigration
officials at ports of embarkation. For a good discussion of this
“Elastic State,” see Elsbeth Guild’s Security and Migration in the
21^(st) Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009). Georg Menz has another
take on this “Elastic State,” using the concept of the “Competition
State,” where the state manages migration (more economic migrants, fewer
refugees and asylum seekers) in tandem with nationally based objectives
for a flourishing national economy, which relies on intrusion of global
forces to succeed; see Georg Menz, The Political Economy of Managed
Migration: Nonstate Actors, Europeanization, and the Politics of
Designing Migration Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[129] See Turcato, “Introduction: Making Sense of Anarchism.” For the
uses of a cosmopolitan libertarian approach in contemporary
international relations, see A. Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values,
and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), and M. Frost, Global Ethics: Anarchy Freedom and
International Relations (London: Routledge, 2009). For the relationship
of classical anarchism, particularly Proudhon’s extensive ruminations on
the balance of power, supranationality, and other themes, see A.
Prichard, “Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political
Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865),” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 35, 3 (2007): 623–45.1 draw together classical
anarchism and contemporary studies of cosmopolitanism in “Anarchism and
Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Ideologies, forthcoming.
[130]
D. Stevis, “International Labor Organizations, 1863–1997: The Weight of
History and Challenges of the Present,” Journal of World-Systems
Research 4,1 (1998): 52–75; B. J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers*
Movement and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); V. Burgmann, “From Syndicalism to Seattle:
Class and the Politics of Identity,” International Labor and
Working-Class History 67 (2005): 1–21; N. Kirk, D. R. MacRaild,
and M. Nolan, “Transnational Ideas, Activities and Organization in
Labour History 1860s to 1920s,” Labour History Review 74,3 (2009):
221–32.
[131]
J. Moya, personal correspondence; J. Moya, “Modernizing Modernity and
the Trans/ formation of the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth
Century,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (New York:
Prentice-Hall, 2006); P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993).