Anarchy 70/Anarchist anthologies

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Anarchist anthologies

NICOLAS WALTER

After the histor­ies of anarch­ism come the an­tho­lo­gies. We have already had Anarch­ism by George Woodcock, and The Anarch­ists by James Joll, which were re­viewed in anarchy 28 and 46. Now we have The Anarch­ists (no con­nec­tion) edited by Irving L. Horowitz, and Pat­terns of Anarchy edited by Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry, which are re­viewed together now.

  Both books are Amer­ican paper­backs edited by Amer­ican aca­dem­ics. Horowitz is As­soci­ate Pro­fessor of So­ci­ology at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity, St. Louis, and The Anarch­ists is pub­lished by Dell as Laurel Book 0131 (1964, 95c.). Krimerman is As­sist­ant Pro­fessor of Philo­sophy at Louisi­ana State Uni­ver­sity, New Orleans, and Perry is Lec­turer in History at New York State Uni­ver­sity, Buffalo, and Pat­terns of Anarchy is pub­lished by Double­day as Anchor Book A501 (1966, $1.95).

  Both books come from out­side the anarch­ist move­ment. The Anarch­ists ori­gin­ated when C. Wright Mills, the left-wing Amer­ican soci­olo­gist, planned “a reader on Anar­chists, Crim­in­als and Devi­ants” (shades of Lombroso!). He later “came to con­sider anarch­ism as one of the three major pivots of Marxism, the other two being <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: So­cial

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Demo­cracy and Bolshev­ism”, and then planned a tri­logy of an­tho­lo­gies of Marxist, Trotsky­ist, and anarch­ist writ­ings. The only one he pro­duced before he died in 1962 was The Marxists (1962, pub­lished as a Penguin Book in 1963). He hadn’t begun work on the anarch­ist volume, and it was taken over by his dis­ciple Horowitz (who has edited a post­hum­ous volume of his essays and a me­morial volume of essays by his ad­mirers). It is com­fort­ing to know that Horowitz has more sens­ible ideas about anarch­ism than Wright Mills: “My own view is that anarch­ism, far from being a ‘pivot’ of Marxism, as Mills be­lieved, is an ef­fort to fash­ion a rad­ical al­tern­at­ive to the Marxist tradi­tion in its ortho­dox forms.”

  Patterns of Anarchy ori­gin­ated when Krimerman and Perry “began to dis­cuss, in deep ignor­ance, the like­li­hood that the anarch­ist posi­tion had not been given its due.” Well, it is prob­ably better to have no ideas than wrong ideas. “Agreed on the likely value of anarch­ism, we were almost stymied by the paucity of avail­able ma­ter­i­als. Slowly the idea of an an­tho­logy took hold, as we con­tinued to un­cover inter­est­ing but neglec­ted anarch­ist writ­ings. Our amaze­ment at the wealth of anarch­ist liter­ature has been grow­ing ever since.”

  The Anarch­ists has 640 pages. It begins with a Pre­face and an Intro­duc­tion and ends with a Post­script by the editor. The rest of the book is di­vided into two parts con­tain­ing 35 passages.

  “The Theory” is di­vided into three sec­tions. “Anarch­ism as a Cri­tique of So­ciety” con­tains ex­tracts from Diderot’s Sup­ple­ment to Bougain­ville’s “Voyage” (1772)^*; Mala­testa’s pamph­let Anarchy (1891)*; Proudhon’s book What is Prop­erty? (1840); Godwin’s book Polit­ical Just­ice (1793); Bakunin’s essays “Sci­ence and the Urgent Revo­lu­tion­ary Task” (1870) and “The Pro­gramme of the Inter­na­tional Revo­lu­tion­ary Alli­ance” (1871)*, both from G. P. Maximoff’s book The Polit­ical Philo­sophy of Bakunin (1953); Kropot­kin’s book Modern Sci­ence and Anarch­ism (1903)*; Benjamin Tucker’s article “State Social­ism and Anarch­ism” from his maga­zine Liberty (1886)* and his book Instead of a Book (1893); and Rudolf Rocker’s essay “Anarch­ism and Anarcho-Syn­dic­al­ism” from Feliks Gross’s book European Ideo­logies (1948).

  “Anarch­ism as a Style of Life” con­tains ex­tracts from Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907); Dostoevski’s novel Notes from Underground (1864)*; Tolstoy’s book What Then Shall We Do? (1886)*; Albert Camus’s book The Rebel (1951)*; Emma Goldman’s essays “The Tragedy of Women’s Eman­cip­a­tion” (1906)* and “Marriage and Love”,* both from her maga­zine Mother Earth and her book Anarch­ism and Other Essays (1910); and the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927), from the edition by Frank­furter and Jack­son.

  “Anarch­ism as a Sys­tem of Philo­sophy” con­tains ex­tracts from Max Stirner’s book The Ego and His Own (1845)*; Thoreau’s essay “Resist­ance to Civil Govern­ment” (1848)*; Josiah Warren’s book True Civil­isa­tion (1869); William Hocking’s book Man and the State (1926); Herbert Read’s article “Anarch­ism and Capit­al­ist So­ciety”, from the maga­zine Re­con­struir (1962); and Paul Schilpp’s article “In Defence

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of Socrates’ Judges”, from the maga­zine Enquiry (1944).

  “The Practice” is di­vided into two sec­tions. “The Histor­ical Di­men­sion” con­tains ac­counts of the anarch­ist move­ment in Spain up to 1902 (by Gerald Brenan), in Italy during the 1870s (by Richard Hostetter, in the United States during the 1880s (by Samuel Yellen), in France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States during the 1890s (by Barbara Tuchman), in Russia up to 1883 (by Thomas Masaryk, in America out­side the United States and in northern Europe out­side Britain up to the 1930s (by George Woodcock), and in Spain during the 1930s (by Hugh Thomas), to­gether with Alexander Berkman’s diary of the Kronstadt Rising (1921).

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* I have aster­isked the pas­sages which have some­thing wrong with them, and this will give an idea of the prob­lem; there is no room here to list all the mis­takes in detail.

** These two stories have been de­mol­ished by Vernon Richards in his article “Anarch­ism and the His­tor­i­ans” (anarchy 46) and his book Malatesta: His Life and Ideas (1965).

† Thomas Masaryk’s Spirit of Russia may have been a good book when it was pub­lished, nearly half a cen­tury ago, but it has been com­pletely super­seded by Franco Venturi’s Russian Pop­u­lism—pub­lished in this country as Roots of Revo­lu­tion (1960).