ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: ANARCHY
FOR ANARCHISM
FOR ANARCHISM
History, Theory, and Practice
Edited by
DAVID GOODWAY
Volume 2
First published in 1989
This edition published in 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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1989 Introduction David Goodway
1989 Chapter 4 Peter Marshall
1989 Chapter 6 Alan Carter
1989 All other material Routledge
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ISBN: 978-0-415-83448-3 (Set)
eISBN: 978-0-203-77102-0 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-415-83945-7 (Volume 2)
eISBN: 978-0-203-77103-7 (Volume 2)
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For Anarchism
History, Theory, and Practice
edited by David Goodway
First published 1989
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Introduction David Goodway 1989
Chapter 4 Peter Marshall 1989
Chapter 6 Alan Carter 1989
All other material Routledge 1989
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Guernsey Press Co. Ltd., Guernsey, Channel Islands.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
For anarchism: history, theory and practice.
1. Anarchism
I. Goodway, David
335.83
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data also available
ISBN 0 415 02954 6
ISBN 0 415 02955 4 Pbk
Murray Bookchin is founder and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology, Rochester, Vermont. A prolific writer, his books include Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), Toward an Ecological Society (1980), and The Ecology of Freedom (1982). He lives in Burlington, Vermont.
Tom Cahill is Lecturer in Politics, University of Lancaster. He is editor of the Bulletin of Anarchist Research.
Alan Carter is Lecturer in Philosophy, Heythrop College, University of London. He is the author of Marx: A Radical Critique (1988) and The Philosophical Foundations of Property Rights (1989).
Robert Graham is the author of several articles and reviews on the intellectual history of anarchism. He lives in Canada.
David Goodway is Lecturer in History, Department of External Studies, University of Leeds. He has published London Chartism 18381848 (1982). He is convenor of the Anarchist Research Group and is currently working on a history of British Neo-Romanticism.
Daniel Gurin is a French writer whose many books cover a wide range of political, historical, social, and sexual topics. Among those to have been translated into English are Fascism and Big Business, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, Class Struggle in the First French Republic, and 100 Years of Labor in the USA. He died in April 1988, aged 83.
Carl Levy is a Research Fellow, University of Kent. He is editor of Socialism and the Intelligentsia, 18801914 (1987), also in the History Workshop series, and author of several essays on Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and modern intellectuals.
Peter Marshall is a freelance writer who lives in North Wales. His books include William Godwin (1984) and Cuba Libre: Breaking the Chains? (1987). He is currently working on a history of libertarian ideas.
Geoffrey Ostergaard is Senior Lecturer in Political Science, University of Birmingham. He is the author of Co-operative Democracy with J. A. Banks (1955), Power in Co-operatives with A. H. Halsey (1965), The Gentle Anarchists with Melville Currell (1971), and Nonviolent Revolution in India (1985).
Nick Rider gained a PhD from the University of Lancaster in 1988 with his thesis, Anarchism, urbanization and social conflict in Barcelona, 19001932. He is now working as a freelance researcher and translator.
Michael Smith is Head of Learning Resources, Kingston Polytechnic. He is the author of The Libertarians and Education (1983) among other works.
David Goodway
Anarchism flourished between the 1860s and the 1930s. During these decades it attracted the adherence of mass movements of the working class, principally in Europe and the Americas. Its heyday can be more precisely located from around 1880 until the First World War. But libertarian thinkers were developing the anarchist critique of contemporary nineteenth-century society during the earlier decades, beginning indeed with William Godwin in the 1790s (although he remained unrecognized as an anarchist theorist and precursor until exactly one hundred years later).
Anarchism was especially strong in France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and the United States (but only in the immigrant communities of America, particularly among the Russian Jews and Italians). It was a powerful force in the Low Countries, on the one hand, and, on the other, in Latin America. In Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world at large anarchism remained, of course, a negligible influence.
Partly because of its protean nature, it is notoriously difficult to delineate anarchism. I consider it helpful to view anarchism as combining a socialist critique of capitalism with a liberal critique of socialism, a (laissez-faire) liberal rejection of the state, both as status quo and as a vehicle for social change, with a socialist insistence upon human solidarity and communitarianism.1 In total, then, anarchism can be understood as the most extreme form of libertarian socialism, the term so frequently employed as its synonym.
However this may be, anarchism is a revolutionary doctrine. And it was in two of the revolutions of the twentieth century that anarchism achieved some kind of practical political success.
