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.

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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).