Show Notes
The first great "philosophical" or non-religious anarchist in the West, author of the novel Caleb Williams or Things as They Are, and the still underrated classic An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft (whom he married and with whom he had a daughter [Mary Shelley]) are major influences.
More from The Great Anarchists
The fascinating linguist and research-heavy political commentator who helped get anarchist theory through a particularly fallow period.
In the 20th century, anarchism ceased as a mass revolutionary movement (except perhaps in Spain in the 1930s). Why? I give three reasons here: the internal momentum of the state, reaching its culmination as a war and genocide machine; the internal direction of the left, particularly around Bolshevism, toward extreme statism (from welfare state liberalism to socialist state control of the economy to state communism); and the terrible strategic and ethical mistake that anarchists made around 19...
Can you be a religious anarchist? Bakunin probobly thought not; Emma Goldman thought so. But any way you look at it, Tolstoy was a beautiful writer with a beautiful Christian vision. I agree with him, and Petr Chelčický, and William Lloyd Garrison, that Christianity is incompatible with human government. PS pacifism entails antistatism
The brilliant speaker and inspiring visionary (1869-1940): from Haymarket to the McKinley assassination, from confronting Lenin in his office to the Spanish Civil War. Alexander Berkman. Nestor Makhno.
The great American feminist and anarchist emerged from the American individualist tradition into the communist anarchist movement of Johann Most and Emma Goldman. Voltairine de Cleyre was also the greatest anarchist prose stylist this side of Thoreau.