History Of Anarchism Research Articles

“Anarchy in the streets”: anarchism, public order and social housing in Portugal (1900-1940)

ABSTRACT In this article we aim to contribute to the history of contemporary State by bringing into the picture what often falls outside its domain, defies its logic and is built against it. For that purpose, we look at the history of anarchism in Portugal, dominant among the Portuguese working classes during the first decades of the 20th century, and suggest that the threat that anarchism posed to the affirmation of modern State powers contributed to the urban planning and social housing projects developed by private and public institutions. In other words, and despite anarchism being an anti-statist political culture, in this article we are interested in the conflicting but mutually constitutive relationship between anarchism and the State. Our main focus is on the disciplinary and moral dimensions of the social housing projects developed throughout a historical period that encompasses different political regimes (Monarchy, Republic and a Fascist dictatorship). As we argue, those projects had amongst their purposes the destruction of the “collectivist tendencies,” class struggle and the overcoming of the nefarious and unpredictable effects that industrialisation had brought.

For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1938

For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1938

Reencountering The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Archival and Historiographic Reassessments

This article follows up on the book The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914 (2013), by exploring some primary material uncovered since this publication, and considering the ways in which research into the history of anarchism as a transnational movement has evolved. In the years since the publication of this book, a great deal of research has furthered or challenged its findings, especially in relation to print culture and the study of global anarchist networks. The mass digitisation of periodicals (both anarchist and mainstream) and archives in the last ten years offers new tools to find detailed information about the personal and political lives of these elusive anarchists in London – and further afield, thus rectifying the original study’s London-centric focus. These sources are also crucial in documenting the ways in which anarchists were perceived and portrayed in Britain, France and internationally, and constructed into a major public threat through media discourse.

Biography, culture and militancy in Spanish anarchism: Higinio Noja Ruiz (1894–1972)

ABSTRACT Higinio Noja Ruiz (Nerva, Huelva, 1894-Valencia, 1972) remains a little-known figure in the history of anarchism and libertarian culture in Spain. However, he enjoyed great prestige during the 1920s and 1930s thanks to his novels, essays, leaflets, and articles, which were widely read by a libertarian and working-class audience. Noja Ruiz was a man of many talents: a social writer and novelist, an anarcho-syndicalist essayist and thinker, a rationalist teacher, and a pedagogue. In addition to this intellectual and cultural activity, Noja’s militant commitment included agitation and tireless propaganda efforts as a libertarian “man of action,” especially in the late 1910s and early 1920s. This article is part of a broader study on the life and work of Noja and it reflects firstly on the Spanish anarchist culture of the first half of the 20th century; secondly, it deals with the different models of militancy within the libertarian movement in Spain; and thirdly, it assesses how useful the study of biographies can be in those two research fields.

Dr Félix Martí Ibáñez's 'Considerations on Homosexuality' and the Spanish Anarchist Cultural Project

This article places a reconsideration of the Spanish anarchist doctor Félix Martí Ibáñez's work on sexual morality and, in particular, homosexuality within the dual historiographical framework of scientific ideas and anarchism's own history of engagement with these subjects. It argues that recent developments in the writing of the history of anarchism have paid far more attention to the articulation of cultural issues within anarchist movements as part of their overall contestation against the 'bourgeois', religious and capitalist world and sets this article within this renewed framework. The thought of Félix Martí Ibáñez is assessed not for its supposed 'scientificity' but for what it tells us about the eclectic nature of Spanish anarchism at the time and for what such thought signifies for today's libertarian movement.

Rejecting ‘all the faces of subjugation’: Daniel Guérin on direct democracy, self-management and individual autonomy

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ideas of French writer and revolutionary Daniel Guérin (1904–88), focussing on his conception of democracy. It argues that Guérin’s thinking developed from the ‘macro-social’ to the ‘micro-social’ as his ideological perspective changed. In the 1940s and 50s, Guérin’s unorthodox Marxist approach to the historiography of the French Revolution and his adoption of a Kropotkinian emphasis on the grassroots democracy of the sans-culotte movement led him to see the Revolution as representing the birth of a ‘new type of democracy’. Some form of direct democracy was the only structure which was compatible with what he saw as true, essentially libertarian socialism. In the 1950s and 60s, these conclusions led him to shift the focus of his research onto the history of anarchism and of worker self-management, anarchism’s most important contribution to socialist and democratic thought. Democracy in the workplace, he argued, was the essential corollary of the abolition of private property and the socialisation of the economy. Finally, in the 1960s and 70s, partly because of his own struggles with heteronormativity and having discovered Stirner, he focussed on disalienation and personal autonomy. Each of these three levels of liberation was seen as a precondition of an authentic socialist democracy.

El anarquismo español con, por y ante la Segunda República Española (1931-1936)

The history of the anarchist movement has been dominated by a series of commonplaces that have deformed it. However, when we look at the documentary sources, we see an anarchist movement very different from the one commonly presented. The present work starts from an analysis of the historiography of anarchism and then goes into the history of anarchism during the republican period between 1931 and 1936. It establishes the libertarian prominence at the time of the proclamation of the Republic, the dispositions that entailed the confrontation with the reforms of the first biennium and the internal division of the CNT, to end with a new turn towards the workers’ alliance. The article is a complex understanding of a fundamental movement in the history of the first third of the 20th century and of the Second Spanish Republic.

Redes anarquistas en la Europa de posguerra: latencia y renovación entre ciclos de protesta

Este artículo estudia el anarquismo en el periodo posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial centrándose en dos redes significativamente activas en Europa occidental: una red de jóvenes libertarios desafectos de la inoperancia de sus respectivas federaciones anarquistas nacionales, y una red de publicaciones libertarias que puso en circulación la obra de diversos intelectuales críticos con los principios, tácticas y finalidades del anarquismo social tradicional. Estas redes de intercambio y comunicación ayudaron a repensar el anarquismo en un contexto político particularmente poco receptivo a sus demandas. Su estudio nos permitirá definir mejor el periodo de posguerra como fase poco visible del anarquismo que sirvió sin embargo para la formulación de nuevos principios ideológicos y opciones estratégicas. Al final, el artículo sugiere que algunos de estos desarrollos aparecerán más tarde en movimientos de protesta precursores de la movilización internacional de 1968. La hipótesis de trabajo es que la fase de latencia de posguerra sirvió de puente entre los turbulentos años treinta y la nueva visibilidad del anarquismo alrededor de 1968.

The Anarchist Movement in Ukraine at the Height of the New Economic Policy (1924-25)

This paper examines a virtually unknown period of the development of the anarchist movement in Ukraine, ignored by both Soviet and post-Soviet historians, for whom the history of anarchism in the Soviet Union ended in 1921. The author,basing his information on archival materials,including the archives of the Soviet secret police agencies (ChK, GPU, OGPU), extends the life of the anarchist movement through the mid-1920s. This was a period of revitalization of the movement, especially among students, young workers, and the unemployed in the cities of Eastern and Southern Ukraine (Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Poltava). Despite repression by the government, the anarchist movement in the USSR in the 1920s was able to sustain itself by going underground.

Féminisme, anarchisme et fédéralisme. L’exemple de l’organisation Alternative libertaire entre 2006 et 2012

This article examines the spatial, and especially scalar, dimension of feminism in a contemporary French anarchist organisation. This perspective is contextualised by a reminder of the role of feminism in the political history of anarchism and of the role of the spatial dimention through the question of anarchist federalism. The empirical study is based on research conducted through participant observation within the organisation Alternative Libertaire between 2006 and 2012. The problem to be addressed is the question of whether anarchist women succeed as well as they claim in bringing into question, in their promotion of feminism both inside the organisation and outside, the centrality of Paris in favour of an anarchist federalism. For this reason two scales or levels are studied: the national level and the local level of the city. The city of Paris is treated as both the national capital and as a locality.

“So Variable and Inconstant a System”: Rereading the Anarchism of William Godwin’s Political Justice

JARED MCGEOUGH “So Variable and Inconstant a System”: Rereading the Anarchism ofWilliam Godwin’s PoliticalJustice Such, I am afraid, is man. Mixed in all his qualities, and inconsistent in all his purposes. . . . [I]t is vain that the philosopher . . . seeks to reduce the shapeless mass intoform, and endeavours to lay down rulesfor so variable and inconstant a system. —Godwin, Italian Letters' F rom blare’s image of a fiery being who “stamps the stony law to dust” to Shelley’s vision of the “sceptreless” man in Prometheus Un­ bound, romantic writing is replete with aesthetic, philosophical, and socio­ political topoi that seem to anticipate what becomes known as “anarchism” in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, intellectual historians often situate the origins of anarchism and romanticism in close proximity by locating the beginning of the former in William Godwin’s Enquiry Con­ cerning PoliticalJustice, first published the same year as Blake’s “Song of Lib­ erty” (1793), and revised in two later editions of 1796 and 1798.2 Political 1. William Godwin, Italian Letters, or the History of the Count St. Julian (1784), ed. Burton R. Pollin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 32. 2. On Godwin’s historical role as a founding father of modern anarchism, see Encyclopedia Britannica, nth ed., s.v. “Anarchism”; George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History ofLibertarian Ideas and Movements (1962) (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004); Peter H. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History ofAnarchism (London: Harper, 2007); John P. Clark, The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). On anarchism’s relationship to romanti­ cism see Marshall, William Blake: Visionary Anarchist (London: Freedom Press, 1988); Mal­ colm Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 80—82. SiR, 52 (Summer 2013) 275 Tib JARED MCGEOUGH Justice caused a sensation when it first appeared in February 1793, and be­ came a highly influential text for both first and second generation roman­ tics, including Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and his son-inlaw Percy Shelley, whose wife Mary dedicated Frankenstein (1818) to her father.3 At the heart of Political Justice lies Godwin’s dual conviction that “man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improve­ ment,” and that a universal principle ofjustice supersedes “the shrine of positive law and political institution.”4 Where perfectibility names a dia­ chronic principle of gradual progression through which an individual casts aside his or her dependency on institutions, justice synchronically grounds this movement towards a society in which “immutable reason is the true legislator” (PJ 1798, 1:221). Since the emergence of both deconstruction and new historicism in the 1980s, however, the veracity of romanticism’s proto-anarchistic political ideals has been shown to be tenuous at best.5 A strikingly analogous shift has occurred in recent studies of anarchism.6 Drawing from a diverse set of thinkers usually identified as post-structuralist—including Bataille, Fou­ cault, Deleuze (and Deleuze-Guattari), Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Lacan—“post”-anarchist theory begins from a critique of what it sees as a residual essentialism within classical anarchism, specifically its desire for an “innate morality and rationality” which is then opposed to an “inherently 3. For a discussion of Coleridge’s and Southey’s failed attempt at creating a utopian com­ munity based on Godwinian principles, see Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning PoliticalJustice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 3 vols., ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 1:86, 13. All ref­ erences to Political Justice (PJ) are from Priestley’s facsimile of the third edition, hereafter quoted parenthetically in the text by volume, page, and the year of the edition cited. All quotations from the 1793 and 1796 editions are followed by the volume number 3 to indicate the third volume of Priestley’s edition, which includes all of the editorial changes that Godwin had made for the two prior versions of the text. 5. See Paul...

Unlimited Questioning: The Literary Anarchism of William Godwin

In his classic 1962 study, George Woodcock writes that anarchism a creed inspired and ridden by paradox, and thus, while its advocates theoretically reject tradition, they are nevertheless very much concerned with ancestry of their doctrine (35). Although Woodcock is here referring to earlier anarchist historians like Peter Kropotkin, his remark discloses broader anxieties about historical and conceptual ancestry that can be directly related to what is now called theory. Such anxieties inevitably haunt any form of thought that calls itself post-, which at once designates something after that is yet end of what it supersedes, a beyond that remains uneasily tied to archive of classical nineteenth-century anarchism. Thus, Saul Newman argues that the prefix 'post' in post-anarchism should so much designate an 'after' or 'beyond' of anarchism, rather a working at conceptual limits of anarchism with aim of revising, renewing, and even radicalizing its implications (Post-anarchism 62). Post-anarchism is therefore not so much a distinct model of ... politics, but rather a certain held of inquiry and ongoing problematization in which conceptual categories of anarchism are rethought (Post-anarchism 62-63). This essay seeks to expand post-anarchism's field of enquiry by reconsidering its origins in philosophical and literary texts of William Godwin. Despite Newman's desire to see post-anarchism as a discourse capable of revising and renewing its own historical concepts, much post-anarchist theory remains curiously silent about Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which was published in 1793 and revised in 1796 and 1798, is nevertheless often cited as a founding philosophical text for modern anarchism. (1) Where discussion of Godwin does appear in contemporary anarchist theory, as in Andrew W. Koch's Poststructuralism and Epistemological Basis of Anarchism, his views are largely dismissed as essentialist (24-25). (2) At same time, if anarchist theory today pays little heed to Godwin's political philosophy, there has also been a near-total forgetting of his literary texts, to say nothing of his work beyond 1790s: between 1784 and 1833 Godwin published eight novels, along with collections of essays, histories, and biographies. (3) The diversity of Godwin's corpus attests to fact that his writing is at once deeply entrenched within political and steps outside of political. This relationship to political in turn provides an essential commentary upon potentials for anarchist theory in our own time, in which a too-narrow definition of political often ties us to fantasy of politics as sole engine of social change, thus blinding us to possibilities of thinking of political otherwise. Given this almost complete forgetting of Godwin, what conceptual displacements of anarchism emerge within Godwin's texts? How might these displacements call for their own interpretation at an archaeological or unconscious level? (4) What developments in anarchist theory have made it possible to read Godwin now, and how might these developments provide means to read Godwin otherwise within history of anarchism itself? This essay moves toward answering such questions by addressing largely unexplored relationship between Godwin's anarchism and his literary texts. Specifically, my argument proceeds from a sense that post-anarchist critique of essentialism often imputed to earlier, classical anarchist theory can already be found in Godwin himself. Moreover, it is Godwin's distinctive use of literature that allows him to revise and question utopian rhetoric of his anarchism. The latter claim is especially groundbreaking, as literary critics have increasingly emphasized ways in which Godwin's novels expose gaps within his political theory. (5) The following discussion nonetheless aims to bring together aspects of these more nuanced interpretations of Godwin's literary texts with his canonical role as one of founding thinkers of modern anarchism. …

An Anarchist History

According to James C. Scott, in The Art of Not Being Governed, the resistance of Southeast Asian “hill peoples” to state subordination manifested itself in their deliberate abandonment of both sedentary agriculture and literacy. He argues that “tribality” (group-generated state evasion) is the polar opposite of “peasantry” (state-controlled agriculture). The hill peoples’ foraging and swiddening were thus political choices. Scott’s anthropological and geographical approach to these historical studies is admirable, but, despite his book’s subtitle (An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia), it lacks any reflection on the history of anarchism beyond the observation that tens of millions of persons wanted to avoid being bossed and taxed by the state. There is in the book, moreover, an absence of reflection on the oppressive nature of society: the state, Scott claims, is always repressive, whereas societies without a state are freer. This essay review asks whether the author shares with states, despite his criticism of them, a paucity of concern for the fates of individuals.

Social Histories of Anarchism

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

Social space and the practice of anarchist history

This essay argues for the integration of a spatial analysis in historical research and writing. The history of anarchism and other oppositional, decentralized movements can be better understood when the spatial implications of their ideological practices are critically examined. The uses, production, and conceptualization of space and places should be an essential dimension of historical research and interpretation.

The Haymarket Bomb

This essay represents the events surrounding the Haymarket tragedy in the idiom and reporting of the day. It forms the beginning of a history of anarchism in the United States

In the Shadow of the Labour Movement. The History of Anarchism in Austria and Germany

In the Shadow of the Labour Movement. The History of Anarchism in Austria and Germany