Deepening Anarchism, International Relations (Anarchist Studies #18)

Anarchist Studies 18.
2 03/11/2010 11:49 Page 1
ANARCHIST STUDIES
Volume 18 Number 2
Anarchist Studies 18.2 03/11/2010 11:49 Page 2
Editor
Ruth Kinna
Department of Politics, History and International Relations, University of Loughborough,
Loughborough LE11 3TU
Book reviews editor

Dave Berry, Department of Politics, International Relations and European Studies,
Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU
Associate editors
L. Susan Brown (Independent), political and social theory
Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds), Spanish and Portuguese
Carl Levy (Goldsmiths College), social policy/politics
Jon Purkis (Independent), human and health sciences
Sharif Gemie (School of Humanities/Social Sciences University of Glamorgan)
Lewis Call (California Polytechnic State University), intellectual history
Art editor
Allan Antliff (University of Victoria), history of art
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Cover photo: Lev Tolstoi at Iasnaia Poliana, circa May, 1901 John Kinna
Anarchist Studies is indexed in Alternative Press Index, British Humanities Index, CIRA,
Left Index, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Sociological Abstracts and
Sonances.
Contents
About this issues cover 5
Editorial Ruth Kinna 7
Bethink yourselves or you will perish: Leo Tolstoys voice a centenary after
his death Alexandre Christoyannopoulos 11
Tolstoy, history and non-violence Terry Hopton 19
Deepening anarchism: international relations and the anarchist ideal Alex Prichard 29
Henry Adams and Andrei Bely: The explosive mind Caroline Hamilton 58
Functional representation and its anarchist origins Jason Royce Lindsey 85
The anarchist aphorist: Wilde and Gottesman, paradox and subversion

Kristian Williams 101
REVIEW ARTICLE
Islam.alt Sharif Gemie 109
REVIEWS
Randall Amster et al, Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory

Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy Reviewed by Jeffrey D. Hilmer 114
Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism. An

International Comparative Analysis Reviewed by Susan Milner 116
Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective (eds), Teaching Rebellion: Stories
from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca Reviewed by Brian Martin 118
Bernd Kast (ed.) 2009. Die Kritik Stirners und die Kritik an Stirner
Reviewed by Peter Seyferth 120
Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross, Labor Law For the Rank and Filer: Building
Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law Reviewed by Dana M. Williams 121
Clifton Ross (dir), Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out (DVD)
Reviewed by Sara C. Motta 123
Tripp York, Living on Hope while Living in Babylon: The Christian anarchists of
the twentieth century Reviewed by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos 126
Editorial board
Chris Atton (Napier University, Edinburgh), alternative media, anarchism on the internet
Harold Barclay (Professor Emeritus University of Alberta), anthropology
Hlne Bowen-Raddeker (University of New South Wales), Japanese anarchism,

gender, feminism
Tom Cahill (Shifting Ground, France), social movements
Paul Chambers (University of Glamorgan), sociology of religion
Graeme Chesters (Bradford University), social movements, complexity theory and

participation studies
Noam Chomsky (MIT), linguistics
Ronald Creagh (Professeur Emrite de Montpellier/Research on anarchism), history
Sureyyya Evren (University of Loughborough), art, culture and politics
Karen Goaman (Open University, London Metropolitan), anthropology, archaeology,

communications
David Goodway (Independent researcher), history
Robert Graham (Independent researcher), history of ideas/contemporary anarchist theory
Judy Greenway (University of East London), cultural studies
Caroline Hamilton (University of Pittsburg), literature
Clifford Harper (Independent), illustration
Terry Hopton (University of Central Lancashire), classical anarchist theory
Margaert Majumdar (University of Portsmouth), Francophone studies
Brian Martin (University of Wollongong), social sciences
George McKay (University of Salford), cultural studies
Brian Morris (Emeritus Professor, Goldsmiths, London), anthropology
Alex Prichard (London School of Economics), history, international relations, politics
Richard Porton (Independent researcher), film studies
Raimund Schffner (University of Heidelberg), English literature
Ian Welsh (Cardiff University), sociology

About this issues cover
When I learned this issue of Anarchist Studies would focus on Tolstoi I was reminded
of two reflections concerning his anarchism from the era of the Russian Civil War.
The first is a letter Kropotkin sent to a Russian Tolstoyan group, dated November 20,
1920, in which he expressed profound regret that he could not join them in
commemoration of that powerful voice who had urged people to construct a new
society on fraternal foundations and without masters. The second is a poetic tribute
by Alexi and Lev Gordin published in the March 6, 1918 issue of Anarkhiia, the
central newspaper of the Moscow Federation of Anarchists:
Lev Nikolai Tolstoi
You lion, you child
The wrath of your thought flames, loving and forgiving

You are the proclamation
and the evocation
of anarchy resurrected
and ethics are your foundation
Shepherd of feelings and ideas,

you are both vision and expression
It cannot be . . . and it isnt!

(translated by Allan Antliff and Nina Gurianova)
The paradoxical twist in the last line (which alludes to the declarative ending of a
short story by Tolstoi Notes of a Madman in which the protagonist lives in
terror of his own mortality), shows up the corrosive interplay between Tolstois
ethical authoritarianism and his anarchism, which also figures in his theory of art.
Tolstois definitive statement, What is Art (1898), critiques arts role in the service of
power and dismisses rarefied aesthetic and critical practices as cultural elitism.
The best art, he argues, sweeps away any barriers between it and the masses,
transmitting, without any superfluities, the feeling which the artist has experienced
and wishes to transmit (What is Art, 197). This sets the stage for the propagation of
Tolstoyan values in the society to come. Art of the future, writes Tolstoi, chosen
from among all the art defused among mankind, will consist, not in transmitting
feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, as is the case today, but in
Allan Antiff
6
transmitting such feelings as embody the highest religious perception of our times.
Artistic diversity is subsumed into a self-serving tautology: Only those productions
will be considered art which transmit feelings drawing men together in brotherly
union, or such universal feelings as can unite all men (192). Guided by the Kingdom
of God Within, the great masses of people would relegate bad, harmful work to
the dustbin, while the production of elitist art, bereft of the hierarchical social infra-
structures that once sustained it, would fade of its own accord (192-193).
Is this artistic anarchism? It cannot be but it was, at least for Tolstoi.
As for the photograph: according to information provided by the University of
Leeds Russian archive, the lady is Elena Sergeevna Denisenko (1863-1942), the ille-
gitimate daughter of Tolstois daughter, Maria. Maria later became a nun and Elena
was adopted by her brother (and Tolstois son), Sergei. The children are Onisim
(1894-1918) and Tatiana (1897-?) Denisenko. The place is near the Tree of the
Poor at Iasnaia Poliana. The date is probably late May 1901.
Allan Antliff
Anarchist Studies 18.2

Anarchist Studies 18.2 2010 ISSN 0976 3393
www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/anarchiststudies/
Editorial
Ruth Kinna
This year is the hundredth anniversary of Leo Tolstoys death, and the journal is
marking the occasion with two short appreciations, by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos
and Terry Hopton. Allan Antliff s art editorial is also devoted to Tolstoy.
Tolstoys anarchism is still controversial. In part the explanation lies in the
designation of his anarchism as Christian. Because of the association of
Christianity with the Church, the conjunction seemingly ties anarchism to a
history of political reaction, repression and oppression. Yet Tolstoys Christianity
was unorthodox and shaped by biting criticism of Church authority a point
brought out by Alex Christoyannopoulos. And although, as Kropotkin noted,
critics were always eager to assert this link to the Church in order to discredit his
politics, his religion was not designed to fit any particular belief system. This, at
least, was Kropotkins view. In a letter originally published just after Tolstoys
death, Kropotkin responded to the charge that his final retirement to a monastery
had indicated a return to the embrace of the Russian Synod. Tolstoys commit-
ment, he argued, was
to the working out of a universal rationalist religion, divested of all the mystical
elements of modern Christianity a religion which, he says, would be equally
acceptable to the Christian, the Buddhist, the Hebrew, the Musulman [Muslim],
the follower of Lao-tse and also to the Freethinkers and to every ethical philoso-
pher (The Times, 15 November 1991).
The controversy about Tolstoy also stems from his understanding of non-violence
the subject of Terry Hoptons essay. Tolstoy is excluded from the broad anarchist
tradition importantly analysed in Black Flame by Michael Schmidt and Lucien Van
der Walt because his rejection of the state is said to have been informed by a brand of
introspective mysticism.1 Tolstoy, they argue, rejected direct action in favour of
Ruth Kinna
8
contemplation, and, in contrast to anarchist pacifists, he withdrew from all forms of
resistance, even peaceful coercion.
Tolstoys work, particularly his position on non-intervention to protect third
parties from abuse, is certainly challenging. His standards of godliness appear to
make impossibly high demands on ordinary humans, requiring individuals to show
enormous moral courage. And some of his short stories Prayer, for example
point to an accommodation with hardship and tragedy which is difficult to bear. His
Letter to A Non-Commissioned Officer includes the following reflection:
The people are oppressed, robbed, poor, ignorant, dying of hunger. Why? Because
the land is in the hands of the rich; the people are enslaved in mills and in factories,
obliged to earn money because taxes are demanded from them, and the price of
their labour is diminished, while the price of things they need in increased.
How are they to escape? By taking the land from the rich? But if this is done,
soldiers will come and will kill the rebels or put them in prison. Take the mills and
factories? The same will happen. Organise and support a strike? But it is sure to
fail. The rich will hold out longer than the workers, and the armies are always on
the side of the capitalists. The people will never extricate themselves from the want
while they are kept, as long as the army is in the hands of the governing classes
(Letters on War, London: Free Age Press, n.d., p33).
Nevertheless, if Tolstoys response to oppression was in a sense introspective, it

did not imply a refusal to resist, only a different understanding of what resistance
entailed. His view was that individuals should resist hypnosis and fraud
behaviours fostered by and enforced in the state, and in which the Church was
complicit and he found the answer to these behaviours in the ability to
overcome fear of disobedience. One of his most resounding and consistent calls
was for individuals to resist military service, not just because the army encouraged
the most obvious cruelties, but more importantly because acceptance perfectly
illustrated the bewitching power of the states oppressive practices. Refusing to
serve signalled a rejection of the economic and social purposes that the military
was organised to meet; purposes that Tolstoy believed made every non-resister
morally participant in violence.
Undoubtedly, the rigorously rationalist and ethical dimension of Tolstoys anar-
chism is likely to trouble some modern anarchists. His treatment of the avant garde
in What is Art? might alienate others. On the other hand, the habit of some early
twentieth century activists to read Tolstoy as a companion to Stirner and to find in

Editorial
9
both an appeal to self-transformation will only confirm the suspicions of critics like
Schmidt and van der Walt. What all these concerns and criticisms highlight,
however, is the rich suggestiveness of Tolstoys work. Not surprising, then, that in
the hundred years since his death, the value of his contribution to anarchist thought
and practice has been recognised by a number of important anarchists Daniel
Gurin, for example, as well as Kropotkin. And his influence on significant parts of
the anarchist movement has been and remains profound. It is fitting, therefore, to
mark this centenary.
The other articles and essays collected in this issue range over broad territory.
Alex Prichards essay focuses on Proudhon to whom Tolstoy, as Terry Hopton
indicates, was indebted. He argues that anarchist concerns about the operation of
the state in the domestic sphere have wrongly diverted attention from the interna-
tional realm, and he calls for the development of an approach which factors both
levels of state behaviour and the relationship between the two into anarchist
analysis. In an essay which also touches on Tolstoy, Caroline Hamilton explores
turn-of-the-century debates about anarchy and order, and the creative relationship
between science, art and destruction, violence and expression, through an examina-
tion of the fictional writings of Henry Adams and Andrei Bely. Jason Lindsey
discusses contemporary liberal theories of functional representation.
Notwithstanding the neglect of anarchist work in this area, he argues that the
apparently anarchistic turn of some liberal theory is to be welcomed. Kristian
Williams essay on Oscar Wildes aphorisms and Mother Earth raises questions
about the inherently subversive quality of paradox.
The next issue promises a similarly rich diversity of ideas, with articles on
Kropotkins theory of mutual aid and the DIY politics of CrimethInc. scheduled for
publication. A reminder that the following issue, for Autumn 2011, is being planned
as a special issue to celebrate the life of Colin Ward. If you want to contribute to this
issue, please contact Carl Levy at c.levy@gold.ac.uk.
NOTE
1. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism is published
by AK Press (Edinburgh and Oakland, CA 2009).

GEORGES FONTENIS (1920-2010)
It is with great sadness that we learned of the death on 9 August of

Georges Fontenis, who played an important role in the rebuilding of
the French anarchist movement after 1945, in the anticolonialist
movement at the time of the Algerian war, in supporting the libertarian
anti-Francoist movement in exile, and in the formation of a libertarian
communist movement. Obituaries have appeared in Le Monde (14
August) and in French, English and Spanish on anarkismo.net.

Bethink yourselves or you will perish:

Leo Tolstoys voice a centenary after
his death
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos
When Leo Tolstoy died in November 1910, he was just as famous for his radical
political and religious writings as he was for his fictional literature. Yet during the
hundred years that have passed since, his Christian anarchist voice has been drowned
by the sort of historical forces he had always been so eager to make sense of. Today,
only few of even those acquainted with his literature know much about his unusual
and radical religious and political writings (other perhaps than that they were
unusual, radical, religious and political). What he has to say to Christians, to anar-
chists and indeed to the wider public, however, is just as urgent today as it was at the
time of writing. In this testimonial to mark the centenary of his death, therefore, I
wish to first provide a brief story of what happened to Tolstoys voice, and then to
hint at the importance of the sort of contributions he can make to a number of vital
challenges facing us today.
1. TOLSTOYS DROWNING VOICE SINCE 1910

Following a very long and tormenting existential crisis, Tolstoy came to the conclu-
sion, while reading the gospels, that violence (for a number of reasons) cannot but be
evil, that the only way to prevent such evil is never to use violence ourselves, and that
therefore all the institutions that use or endorse violence have to be exposed as evil
and have to be rendered obsolete. He obviously derived a number of further implica-
tions from this core of his new social vision, which, though too complex to be
examined here,1 caused him to spend the last thirty years of his life tirelessly articu-
lating his view and trying to convince the wider public of its rationale.
Tolstoy addressed his Christian anarchist message to many sections of society,
often through letters and essays, but also through books, plays and novels. His epis-
12
tolary appeal to the Tsar fell on deaf ears;2 his open appeal to the clergy eventually
led to excommunication;3 and his various appeals to social reformers and revolution-
aries were received as utopian distractions from more pressing concerns.4 In the
wider Russian, European and global public, however, many were inspired by his
cause and admired his dedication to it. He received countless letters and visits, and
carefully answered all the queries sent to him about his teaching.5 Some admirers
went on to set up Tolstoyan communes across Europe and beyond, others made up
their mind to become conscientious objectors, and many agreed with Tolstoys pene-
trating verbal demolition of the Russian order.6 His voice, however, would not be
heard for long for a number of reasons.
With the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution two colossal outbursts of
violence Tolstoy had been so anxious for humanity to avoid the world and espe-
cially Russia became engulfed in such turmoil that his voice was drowned by the
louder and more numerous ones calling for violence, war and revolution. Patriotism,
universal military conscription, stupefying church-state rituals and dogma, along
with the coercive force of the state apparatus all phenomena which Tolstoy had
spent decades denouncing each contributed to shifting the focus away from his
radical vision to the seemingly more urgent matters for which violent resistance was
surely necessary.
Aside from the overwhelming effect of this broader political turmoil, there were
also very deliberate efforts to mute Tolstoys voice and followers. In Stalins Russia,
Tolstoy was depicted as a brilliant illustrator of the Russian peasantry and aristoc-
racy, but one whose late political writings could be swept aside as the mad ramblings
of a foolish eccentric. His followers were increasingly persecuted, sent to prison,
exiled to Siberia or simply exterminated.7 Meanwhile the rest of Europe was busy
with a huge economic crisis, clashing ideologies, and mounting nationalist passions
and military tensions that reached their climax in 1939. The ensuing Cold War
framed post-war ideological options in a Manichean binary that neatly kept views
like Tolstoys safely at bay. In other words, Tolstoys voice would always struggle to be
heard in the twentieth century.
Yet Tolstoys message was not completely lost. Mohandes Gandhi picked up an
essential part of it.8 Gandhi was no anarchist, but he admired and was directly
inspired by Tolstoys condemnation and strict rejection of violence. In so doing, he
demonstrated one of the most potent aspects of Tolstoys Christian anarchism: its
universal or not-specifically-Christian appeal. That is, although Tolstoys
Christian anarchism was nominally Christian because it was from Jesus that it
drew its rejection of violence and (hence) the state, Jesus for Tolstoy was not a

Bethink yourselves or you will perish

13
divine but simply a rational teacher. Tolstoy believed that what he preached was
not particularly Christian but reasonable, and thus intelligible to all. In short, he
took Jesus teaching on love and violence out of its Christian casing and couched it
in the universal language of reason, where non-Christians (like Gandhi) could
also hear it.9
When anarchism and pacifism enjoyed a revival in the 1960s, more people re-
discovered Tolstoy and drew inspiration from him. Christian anarchist and other
radical leftist Christian ideas inspired a few to set up movements and communities,
and to participate in anti-war demonstrations and non-violent direct action.10 But,
generally speaking, Tolstoys ideas were not studied in systematic detail. Even in
Liberation Theology, one struggles to find much engagement with Christian anar-
chist thought.
Tolstoy had been largely ignored during his lifetime, and the political events that
unfolded after his death, along with direct persecution, drowned his voice even
further. No surprise, then, that despite Tolstoys enduring fame as a novelist, his
political views remain understudied, and his writings do not feature on relevant
reading lists despite their continued urgency and relevance.
2. THE CONTINUING URGENCY OF TOLSTOYS CHRISTIAN ANARCHISM

Details of Tolstoys radical political thought have been expounded in previous issues
of this journal.11 A centenary after his death, though, it might be worth recalling
why his writings should be studied by Christians and anarchists, as well as by the
wider human community.
One could argue that Tolstoy was not really a Christian. He did not go to
church, did not believe in key church dogmas, and did not see Jesus as anything more
than a rational but normal human being. Yet in stubbornly refusing to turn the spot-
light away from what is after all a central aspect of Jesus teaching and example, he
challenged self-proclaimed Christians to examine the content of their professed
faith.
Highlighting their frequent failure to follow the radical political side of Jesus
teaching, Tolstoy accused Christians of the same hypocrisy that Jesus condemned in
religious groups of his own time. For Tolstoy, only if they embraced Jesus anarchism
could Christians portray themselves as the shining example of the sort of community
or church that Jesus had called his followers to. In short, with his detailed and
moving exegesis of the gospels, Tolstoy confronted Christians with a choice and
that is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime.12

14
Tolstoy also offers a critique of institutionalised Christianity that has lost little
relevance a century on. It may be that people are less religious than they were in the
late nineteenth century, but the religious institutions he was denouncing live on, as
do their unhealthy ties to the state. That distrust of institutional religion is wider
today only lends credence to Tolstoys critique, and his bitter anticlericalism might
appease secular anarchists unease at the Christian epithet to Tolstoys anarchism.
Either way, Tolstoys numerous complaints about institutionalised churches are just
as good a read today as they must have been then.13
Turning to Tolstoys message to the anarchist movement again, little of what
he wrote is less pertinent today than a century back. Once he was better informed
about anarchism, Tolstoy was happy to declare that he agreed with anarchism on
just about everything except, of course, violence.14 For Tolstoy, violence is simply
always wrong, hurtful, counter-productive, deluded. A good end never justifies
violent means, because means take over and obscure the ends. Foregoing violence is
certainly not easy. It requires courage (and indeed hope that it can work), but for
Tolstoy it is the only way to succeed in building an alternative society.
This pacifist position is of course shared by many in the anarchist movement too
(and can also be foundational to their rejection of the state), but many anarchists still
counsel violence, however reluctantly, as a necessary method to further their revolu-
tionary cause. Tolstoy who had a sympathetic view of revolutionaries warns this
will neither convert the doubters nor succeed in abolishing oppressive structures,
and will provide political authorities with the anger and justification to repress the
advocates of political alternatives whose voices are so important today. The negative
consequences of violence outweigh any positive impact, whereas non-violence, whose
positive impact is admittedly less forceful, immediate or even certain, at least avoids
alienating the public and feeding the flames of institutional anger. To the broader
anarchist movement, therefore, Tolstoy offers a compelling contribution to the
debate on revolutionary means, a debate which is arguably central to anarchisms
hopes for success.15
Finally, today just as in his lifetime, the message Tolstoy addresses to the
public beyond Christians and anarchists, and especially to aristocrats and other
middle- or upper-class elites, has lost neither pertinence nor potency. In detail,
clearly and eloquently, Tolstoy denounces capitalism and private property as wage
slavery;16 state violence as illegitimate, exploitative and brutal in its scale and
administrative coldness;17 patriotism as a hypnotic tool that distorts a natural
enough feeling of kinship for all human beings into a galvaniser of support for
killing and stealing on an international scale;18 arms races, peace conferences and


15
international alliances as blatantly hypocritical geopolitical manoeuvres in prepa-
ration for the next war;19 and any church support of the state as a clear, greedy
and tragic betrayal of Jesus teaching and example.20 Reading Tolstoy on any of
these topics cannot leave many unmoved by the aesthetic and intellectual force of
his analysis. Tolstoy has a lot to say about todays world, and what he says about it
he says well.
In an unfolding twenty-first century, which promises ecological doom and
economic crises on an unknown scale, the usual social deprivation and political
oppression, an increasingly unstable international order and probably more domestic
unrest, it is perhaps even more important than a century ago that Tolstoys prophetic
critique is heard and seriously considered. Tolstoys concern with these writings was
always to stir people out of their hypnotic acceptance of a violent, unjust and suicidal
world, to see the true potential of a non-violent anarchist alternative, and to
encourage them to if not work for it at least stop being complicit in making it seem
impossible.
Tolstoy was at pains to draw attention to the true, violent nature of the current
order because he felt that the simple recognition of the truth of this diagnosis
would inevitably compel his readers to follow the same logical journey to the
conclusions that he reached. Bethink yourselves, he argued, and by the mere reali-
sation of the truth you will inevitably act differently.21 The aim of his political
writings was to awaken humanity and save it by converting it to a mode of living
that would be based on love and not violence. Tolstoy died of pneumonia in
Astapovo train station while trying to escape to a monastery to find peace and rest
from his tumultuous surroundings. If his message is not heard, humanity may also
face extinction before it ever reaches the just and loving society so many of its
prophets have been calling it to.
The author wishes to thank Fanny Forest, Ruth Kinna and Terry Hopton for their
helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The quoted words in the title are para-
phrased from Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You, in The Kingdom of
God and Peace Essays, trans. Aylmer Maude (New Delhi: Rupa, 2001), 398.
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos completed his doctoral thesis at the University of

Kent. He has lectured for the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church
University, and is now a Lecturer in Politics and History at Loughborough
University. His publications include Christian Anarchism: A Political Interpretation
of the Bible, articles in Anarchist Studies and Politics and Religion, and a book chapter

16
in New Perspectives on Anarchism. He has also edited Religious Anarchism: New
Perspectives, and is working on a book on Tolstoys political thought.
Email: a.christoyannopoulos@lboro.ac.uk
Website: www.christoyannopoulos.com
NOTES
1. See Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Leo Tolstoy on the State: A Detailed Picture of
Tolstoys Denunciation of State Violence and Deception, Anarchist Studies 16/1
(2008); Terry Hopton, Tolstoy, God and Anarchism, Anarchist Studies 8 (2000). No
English book-length study of Tolstoys Christian anarchism exists to this day, but I am
currently working on one.
2. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Fontana,
1993), 378.
3. Leo Tolstoy, A Reply to the Synods Edict of Excommunication, and to Letters
Received by Me Concerning It, and An Appeal to the Clergy, both in On Life and
Essays on Religion, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1934).
4. Leo Tolstoy, An Appeal to Social Reformers, and On Socialism, State and Christian,
in Government Is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, ed. David Stephens,
trans. Vladimir Tchertkoff (London: Phoenix, 1990); Leo Tolstoy, I Cannot Be
Silent, Thou Shalt Not Kill, and Whats to Be Done?, all in Recollections and Essays,
trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).
5. Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972);
George Kennan, A Visit to Count Tolstoi, The Century Magazine 34/2 (1887); Rene
Fueloep-Miller, Tolstoy the Apostolic Crusader, Russian Review 19/2 (1960); Leo
Tolstoy, Gandhi Letters, in Maude, Recollections and Essays.
6. Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914, 442-470; Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian
Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010),
254-258; George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and
Movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
7. Paul Avrich, Russian Anarchists and the Civil War, Russian Review 27/3 (1968);
Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914; Cory Bushman, A Brief History of Peasant
Tolstoyans, The Mormon Worker, issue 2, January 2008, available from
http://www.themormonworker.org/articles/issue2/a_brief_history_of_peasant_tolsto
yants.php [accessed 2 May 2008].
8. Janko Lavrin, Tolstoy and Gandhi, Russian Review 19/2 (1960).
9. Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914; Christian Bartolf, Tolstoys Legacy for Mankind: A


17
Manifesto for Nonviolence, paper presented at Second International Conference on
Tolstoy and World Literature, Yasnaya Polyana and Tula, 12-28 August 2000, available
from http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/tolstoj/tolstoy.htm [accessed 5
November 2006].
10. Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914; Ammon Hennacy, The Book of Ammon, ed. Jim
Missey and Joan Thomas, Second ed. (Baltimore: Fortkamp, 1994). For famous
figures commenting on Tolstoy, see for instance Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the
Fox (London: Mentor, 1957); George Orwell, Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, available
from http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf [accessed 7 June 2006];
W. B. Gallie, Tolstoy: From War and Peace to the Kingdom of God Is within You,
in Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Kennan, A Visit to Count Tolstoi;
Marc Slonim, Four Western Writers on Tolstoy, Russian Review 19/2 (1960).
11. Christoyannopoulos, Leo Tolstoy on the State; Hopton, Tolstoy, God and Anarchism.
12. The best example of such exegesis is Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe, trans. Fyvie Mayo?
(London: C. W. Daniel, 1902). Also very interesting is Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel in
Brief , in A Confession and the Gospel in Brief, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford
University Press, 1933).
13. See, for instance: Leo Tolstoy, The Restoration of Hell, The Kingdom of God Is
within You, An Appeal to the Clergy, Church and State, Reason and Religion: A
Letter to an Inquirer, Religion and Morality, What Is Religion, and Wherein Lies Its
Essence?, all in Maude, On Life and Essays on Religion.
14. Even Tolstoys religiosity turns out not to be a big difference between him and other
anarchists, because Tolstoys approach to religion is very rationalistic and deistic, and
he certainly did not see God as some kind of supernatural tyrant. For more on this, see
for instance A. A. Guseinov, Faith, God, and Nonviolence in the Teachings of Lev
Tolstoy, Russian Studies in Philosophy 38/2 (1999); E. B. Greenwood, Tolstoy and
Religion, in New Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Malcolm Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978); Hopton, Tolstoy, God and Anarchism.
15. On top of the texts cited as Tolstoys appeals to social reformers and revolutionaries,
see Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, in A Confession and Other
Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (London: Penguin, 1987); Leo Tolstoy, On
Anarchy, in Stephens, Government Is Violence.
16. Leo Tolstoy, The Slavery of Our Times, in Essays from Tula, trans. Free Age Press
(London: Sheppard, 1948); Lyof N. Tolsto, What to Do? (London: Walter Scott).
17. Christoyannopoulos, Leo Tolstoy on the State; Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is
within You.

18
18. Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves!, in Maude, Recollections and Essays; Leo Tolstoy,
Christianity and Patriotism, and Patriotism and Government, both in The Kingdom
of God and Peace Essays, trans. Aylmer Maude (New Delhi: Rupa, 2001); Leo Tolstoy,
Patriotism, or Peace?, in Tolstoys Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence,
trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Bergman, 1967).
19. Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism.
20. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, in Kentish, A Confession and Other Religious Writings;
Tolstoy, Church and State; Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You.
21. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You; Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves!.

Tolstoy, history and non-violence

Terry Hopton
It is difficult to discuss Tolstoys thought without invoking Berlins famous dictum

that, Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog.1 Applying this
to Tolstoys views of history, which have a prominent place in War and Peace, Berlin
shows how Tolstoys fox-like knowledge of the many things that constitute the
complexity of events was both an incentive to seek, yet an obstacle to the discovery
of, the one big thing that would make sense of history. As Berlin shows, Tolstoys
search for an overarching explanation of history led him to expose the deceptive
character and weakness of the purported explanations currently employed by histo-
rians. However, it is not easy at first to identify what Tolstoy advocates as an
alternative. This is inevitably so, because for Tolstoy the question of history is
wrapped up with the far greater question of the meaning of life. This meaning,
which the peasant Platon Karataev understands in War and Peace and which Pierre
Bezukhov comes to grasp, or feel, is, according to Berlin, an experience of being part
of the flow of life in the universe; a sense of oneness with creation.2 In the later reli-
gious writings this meaning was identified, crystallised, articulated, or some might
say, reduced, to the idea that we must do Gods will.3 At this elusive and superlatively
abstract level of generality it is easy to trace a thematic continuity from the truth of
the novel to that of the later religious writings. Less easily, and less conspicuously,
continuity can also be traced in the form of the compendious category of what
Tolstoy holds to be false. Here it runs from the failure of current historical explana-
tions, exposed in the authorial interjections and appendices to War and Peace,4 to
the failure of moral and political theories condemned in the later writings. Central
to this continuity is a very striking, but ambiguous, claim about the limitations of
individual action. It is necessary to explore this before Tolstoys theory can be
properly appreciated.
In the imaginative world of the novel Tolstoy shows a profound understanding of
the inner life and motivations of individual action in all its transient complexity. He
also acutely perceived the self-deceptions, illusions and rationalisations that always
Terry Hopton
20
seem to attend an individuals reflection on their own life. By contrast, in the case of
collective action, of events like battles not to mention wars and the course of history
generally there seems to Tolstoy to be little hope of reaching any authentic under-
standing. If it is difficult to see into the heart of a single individual in order to
understand their actions, how much more is this true with collective action where
there are many, many individuals. It is, of course, the attempt to understand the
former in the context of the latter that is such a conspicuous feature of War and Peace.
In that novel Tolstoys understanding of his characters comes from his own creative
imagination, unlike the real events in which they are placed.5 When he turned to the
actual events themselves as described by historians, instead of a real understanding of
the immense and contingent complexity of events, he found only rationalisations.
Thus, in the case of these events, the same sort of self-deceptions and illusions
exposed so incisively in the central characters of the novel, were repeated on a grand
scale where they passed for genuine historical explanations. In other words, repeated
and compounded, the self-deceptions of the real individuals involved remained unex-
posed and, unlike those of his characters, were taken at face value. These then became
the data of explanation, rather than their actual motives and experience. To these
deceptions, were added those of the historians themselves about their own motives
and their lack of ability to understand events. Rather than admit their limitations,
Tolstoy implies, both historians and historical actors alike use abstractions like the
power of ideas, or the controlling influence of great men, or vague concepts like
forces and so on.6 These rationalisations disguise from historians their own igno-
rance of the real causes of events by concentrating on individual great men, or by
treating ideas as powerful individual agents that control events. Both simplify, and at
the same time falsify, history. By such means historians, according to Tolstoy, seek to
treat historical events as they would the actions of one individual at a personal level
and yet events are constituted by the actions and interactions of countless individuals.7
As is well known, Tolstoy particularly objects to the idea that great men such as
Napoleon cause or control events. It is important, however, to see that this represents
merely the most obvious example of what he sees as a general failure of historiog-
raphy. Tolstoys objection is that an event is such a complex interaction of human
acts that no individual however great can be singled out as the cause of the outcome.
The result of a battle, for example, is the consequence of the bravery, stupidity and so
on, of thousands of individuals and of the concatenation of their actions. Each of
these is a cause and none of them are, in themselves, decisive. Moreover, Tolstoy
claims that the great man is himself subject to circumstances and intervenes into a
complex situation created by others. He does not even command an overall view of


21
events; still less can he control them.8 The great man is thus demoted to the status
of one amongst others.
Historians, Tolstoy believes, arbitrarily select what counts as an event from the
flow of history and, within this, select some things as the cause or causes of them.
Here the plans and actions of identifiable agents, particularly great men, readily lend
themselves to interpretation as decisive causes because the evidence for them is
usually plainly in view. When there is a correspondence between the plan of the
great man and the outcome of the event, he is said to have caused it or to have been
in control. Conversely, by implication, when things do not correspond to plan, then
responsibility for failure is still attributed to the same source. It is as if so-called great
men collude with historians, preferring to accept responsibility for specific failures
and disasters rather than accept their own general impotence in shaping history. In
fact, Tolstoy claims that trying to capture any complex event like a battle is to
produce a necessary lie compared to what really happened.
Tolstoys strictures could be taken as a merited attack on bad historiography but,
at their most extreme, they seem to threaten the scholarly selectivity that is part of
any historical judgement. They also seem to demand a depth and breadth of under-
standing that is impossible to achieve. The implication is that any social explanation
is likely to be built on false foundations, suggesting that we can never be truly said to
understand collective action at all.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Tolstoy is guilty of polemical exaggeration
and travesty. In part this is because he is asking so much of historical explanation.
Perhaps this is because his standard of an adequate account is implicitly derived from
authorial control of plot and character in a novel, while in the later writings it
becomes clear that only God can comprehend the pattern of events. In any case, he
seems to present the historian with a stark choice: Either he must carry on perpe-
trating delusions, or he must abandon selectivity of events and causes and seek,
instead, to understand the countless concrete minute particulars. The former will
produce false history; however, the latter looks utterly impossible, and thus will
produce no history at all. Indeed, in this respect, it is far from clear that Tolstoy
himself avoided the errors for which he castigates others.
In parallel with the attack on the great man theory as an example of the failure
of historical explanation, Tolstoy also attacks its effect on moral responsibility. By
causally attributing events to Napoleon, we ascribe to him moral responsibility for
them as well. This absolves everyone else of their moral responsibility for events, even
though it is they that collectively produce them. Thus the great man theory has to be
attacked for its moral effects as well as in its explanatory role. At this point there

Terry Hopton
22
seems to be a glaring discrepancy in Tolstoys argument, because causal responsibility
and moral responsibility appear to diverge. This is most obvious precisely in the case
of Napoleon. As is widely recognised, despite Tolstoys claim that, as a great man,
Napoleon has no real power over events, he is still blamed for them and condemned
as evil by Tolstoy. But if Napoleon is no more in control of events than anyone else,
why is he singled out as blameworthy? Perhaps Tolstoys point is that Napoleon, like
anyone else, is responsible for the consequences of his actions, however little he can
foresee them, and however little he can individually shape events. But Tolstoy may
also be interpreted as claiming that Napoleon is especially to blame for wanting to
bring about war, and for the arrogance of supposing that he alone can do so thereby
falsely absolving all others of their share of blame. It is difficult to be certain about
Tolstoys argument here. And it is extremely unlikely that an interpretation on the
lines proposed will succeed in rendering all of Tolstoys remarks about Napoleon
mutually compatible. However, it can be suggested that the discrepancy represents, in
a dramatic form, a deeper tension between Tolstoys ideas of freedom and responsi-
bility. For Tolstoy everyone, Napoleon included, has little causal effect on events, but
carries total responsibility for them. This, as Berlin suggests, appears to carry the
implication that we are in control only of the immediate effects of our actions, but
not of the collective consequences of them.9 Yet it appears that we are accountable for
our intentions, actions and for their outcome even though there may be, it seems, little
relation between them. The impact of this daunting doctrine of moral responsibility
is felt throughout the rest of Tolstoys theory.
There is another fairly obvious discrepancy in Tolstoys doctrine that creates a
profound ambiguity at its core. Alongside the view of history just mentioned, and the
very stringent idea of moral responsibility that goes with it, there appears to be a
stronger thesis to which Tolstoy inclines. This thesis seems to rule out moral responsi-
bility completely and is, provisionally, most simply described as a form of
determinism. It appears to be the result of Tolstoys anxiety to emphasise the insignifi-
cance of the individual within the scheme of things. It is easy for Tolstoy to slide by
overstatement from the thesis that we have little control over events, and must
become part of their flow, to the much stronger thesis that we have no control at all
over what we do. Indeed, Berlins discussion in The Hedgehog and the Fox accurately
reflects this tension in Tolstoys thought, without attempting to resolve it.10 Perhaps it
is incapable of resolution. But the difficulty with the stronger thesis is that its deter-
minism, by obliterating free will, makes the notion of moral responsibility not just
dauntingly stringent, but incoherent. This would create an inconsistency for Tolstoy
because it is precisely the demand that we take moral responsibility for our lives that is


23
the incessant theme of his later writings. Yet determinism robs us of the freedom of
action that constitutes moral agency. At this point it is tempting to resort to a form of
dualism, inspired by the example of Kant, and ascribe this to Tolstoy in order to make
the stronger thesis coherent. This, indeed, is what Spence suggests in his study of
Tolstoy.11 However, if there is a dualism here it is different from that of Kant. Kant
saw that morality was only possible in a world of causal determination if human will
could be determined autonomously, by reason, rather than by natural causation.
Tolstoys rather fugitive concept of freedom can be gathered from the discussion in
The Kingdom of God is Within You.
man is free. His freedom does not consist in being able to act spontaneously, inde-
pendently of the course of life and of the influence of existing causes, but it means
that by recognising and professing the truth revealed to him he can become a free
and joyful participant in the eternal and infinite work performed by God or by the
life of the world; or he can, by not recognising that truth, become its slave and be
painfully forced to go where he does not wish to go. Truth not only points out the
path of human life, it also reveals the only path along which it can go. And therefore
all men must inevitably follow that path willingly or unwillingly some voluntarily
accomplishing the task life sets before them, others involuntarily submitting to the
law of life. Mans freedom lies in having that choice. Freedom within such narrow
limits seems so insignificant to men that they do not notice it.12
Here it appears, according to the stronger thesis, that we have no real freedom of
action, merely freedom in adopting whatever attitude we take towards our lives.
Tolstoy apparently wishes to hold both the stronger and weaker theses. Both
have important implications for his advocacy of non-violence. The weaker thesis of
moral responsibility in the face of the uncertainty of collective action can support
non-violence as a way, perhaps the only way, of taking responsibility for ourselves and
others without engaging in collective action with them. Conversely, the stronger
thesis which, following Greenwood, could now more cautiously be identified as a
kind of Providentialism,13 seems essential to Tolstoys theory because it guarantees
that non-violence will not produce evil consequences on a wider scale. There are two
views of human freedom and moral responsibility running through Tolstoys
argument. One emphasises an individuals responsibility, the other the insignificance
of that same individual in the flow of things. One emphasises our ignorance of the
pattern of that flow, the other that there must be a pattern and that we can be
assured of this.

Terry Hopton
24
As a result of the deep and unresolved ambiguity in Tolstoys theory it is clear
that he insists that we are totally responsible for our actions, but that their conse-
quences are impossible to control or foresee except, perhaps, within an immediate
circle. Inevitably, given Tolstoys theory, this means that for us as social or polit-
ical agents moral action becomes deeply perplexing. At the same time, he believes,
we can accept Providentialism providing that, in spite of our ignorance of its
workings, we can derive from it a principle by which we can guide our lives. We
need such a principle precisely because of the burden of responsibility which
Tolstoys theory places upon us. If great men are held responsible for events, yet
have so little effect upon them, how much more problematic is the position of
ordinary people. We cannot, on Tolstoys view, justify our actions by wider conse-
quences because we do not know in advance what they will be. Even less can we
subject these consequences to control in accordance with some overall plan. And
yet it is this form of justification and outlook, which Tolstoy calls the social
conception of life, that, unsurprisingly, dominates political and social thought
and action.14
It is the social conception of life that constitutes the impediment that stands
between us and the life that we should lead. There is an essential continuity between
the false way of explaining historical events and the false way of justifying politics
and society. If we cannot comprehend things with hindsight, we cannot a fortiori do
so with foresight. Hence, Tolstoy not only sets his theory in opposition to all histori-
ography, but to most social and political theory as well. Yet there is more. It is not
just that conception as a theory to which Tolstoy objects, it is also the conception in
practice. A false conception, as will be seen, gives rise both to false institutions and to
false ways of overcoming them. In brief, he stands in opposition to the entire social
system and our present way of life. Taken together, they are all sustained by our
culpable self-deception by which we avoid doing the one thing that we morally must
do. This one thing is given by the true conception that dominates the later writings.
Its principle is that we must do Gods will.15
Tolstoy believes that we already know that we must do Gods will in our
conscience. But Our whole life is in flagrant contradiction with all that we know
and believe to be necessary and right.16 Hence it is important to clear away the illu-
sions and self-deceptions that so effectively prevent us from doing what we know,
with certainty, to be right. However, in order to clear them away, it is necessary to
understand how they arise. This understanding will take the form of a theory of
sorts. But this will not be another social or political theory as normally conceived;
rather it will be merely the prelude to an urgent and direct appeal by Tolstoy to each


25
individual to change their lives. For him, the truth is simple and known to all, but
living in accordance with it is so difficult.
The essence of Gods will is that we should love others and do them no
violence.17 For Tolstoy this duty is both certain and absolute. It prohibits violence for
any reason, including self-defence, or to protect the innocent and defenceless. If we
fulfil this duty then we will take responsibility for our own lives and act morally. This
we can do, Tolstoy thinks, without needing the social conception of life and without
needing to foresee the ultimate consequences of our actions. Conversely, the imme-
diate consequences of violence are both clear in practice and wrong in principle. The
only possible form of justification left for violence is that of an appeal to its ultimate
consequences, but it is precisely these that Tolstoy claims are unknowable. In addition,
Tolstoy believes that non-violence is alone incapable of producing evil consequences
because it accords with Gods will which cannot be evil. This obviously relies on
Providentialism and it is absolutely fundamental to Tolstoys entire theory. I do not
know, nor do I need to know, Gods plan, but only what he requires of me. And that
is clear and certain, Tolstoy claims.18
At first glance it may seem that Tolstoy is advocating a love of humanity as the
basis for his philosophy of non-violence. However, it is important to recognise
that, whilst such love is not an undesirable result of our actions, Tolstoy insists that
it must not be made our motive or goal. This goal would simply turn Tolstoys
theory into another social conception, thereby putting its goal above our duty to
God. Our duty to God is not a goal that we have to aim for, rather it is something
we must do immediately. Love of humanity would inevitably be weak, in any case,
because humanity is a fiction.19 Really, Tolstoy claims, talk of humanity involves
an unwarranted extension of personal feelings and relations to an abstraction in
the form of a collective person. It is as false as the historical abstractions criticised
earlier (with similar consequences in terms of weakening individual responsibility).
Tolstoy suggests that, however good it may appear, humanity is such an intangible
goal that we can have no idea of how to further its cause. And yet it, like other
goals, creates the danger that compromises will be allowed in its name, so that evil
deeds violence are done and allegedly justified in order to produce it. Much
the same is true of other groups of lesser extent and more determinate number
than humanity, such as the nation. These, too, can become a goal whose attain-
ment is entirely uncertain and yet which justifies violence done for its sake. Here
the temptation to evil is stronger because violence can be committed against one
group in the name of another. All such justifications Tolstoy strikingly construes
as forms of self-love. It is surprising to see what is normally seen as devotion to

Terry Hopton
26
others construed as self-love or selfishness.20 But his point is that groups can be
every bit as selfish as individuals, as is the case with patriotism, for example. So the
self-sacrifice of an individual for the sake of a group, which might seem so
commendable, would simply perpetuate the attitude of selfishness within it. Often,
in any case, the demand for the self-sacrifice of others is made from selfish motives
by those who lead or claim to represent such groups. By this means they cover up
their own more immediate and narrow selfish interests. (One might add that this
could involve yet another example of self-deception).21 It is thus no good being
selfless if it furthers the selfishness of others. Tolstoy concludes that the only way
to avoid selfishness of oneself or others is to do Gods will. Any alternative is
simply denounced by him as pagan.
By doing Gods will we refrain from violence against others, and thus we will
obviously have a beneficial effect on their welfare. But, Tolstoy claims, this effect can
only be the indirect consequence. To try to pursue welfare directly is to want the
fruit without the root, and will be fraught with uncertainty.22 Conversely, if we do
Gods will we must accept that the consequences are in accordance with what He
wants, and although we may not comprehend this, we must trust in Him. By
adopting the social conception, however noble its purpose, we will be creating duties
other than those to do Gods will. These will include duties to the state. We will thus
be unable to avoid a conflict of duties between those owed to God and those owed
to the state. Tolstoys fear is that it will then become easy, by self-deception and pleas
of moral perplexity, to compromise what we know in our conscience to be true. We
will take our present way of life as unalterable and accept that evil means like
violence are necessary, or not really evil, so long as they are for a socially defined
moral goal. Again, as in the writing of history, the self-deception that is employed to
cover our inability to understand the consequences of actions leads to falsehood. But
by trusting in God, all the things that the social conception pursues that are truly
good, will come about by His will.
As Tolstoy insists, Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and
all these things shall be added unto you.23
I would like to thank Alex Christoyannopoulos and Brian Rosebury for their comments
on an earlier version. I am also indebted to Tony Bamber for numerous conversations on
Tolstoy over recent years.
Terry Hopton is the Head of Division of Criminology at the University of Central

Lancashire. In spite of this, his interests include classical anarchist theory. His main


27
area of research is on the relation of law, politics and morality including justifications
of punishment and political obligation.
Email: tchopton@uclan.ac.uk
NOTES
1. Berlin is quoting a fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, The fox knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the
Fox, in Berlin, Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1978), pp. 22-81,
pp. 22, 24.
2. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, p. 72.
3. Tolstoys conception of God is obviously too large a subject to discuss here. This is
unfortunate since the coherence of Tolstoys theory depends on it. In particular I find
it difficult to decide whether the Enlightenment conception of God, to which Tolstoy
seems to subscribe, can carry all the weight it does in the theory (without something
more supernatural). I would like to thank Alex Christoyannopoulos for emphasising
this problem.
4. In the following discussion I shall draw largely on the Second Epilogue to War and
Peace (1869), Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Aylmer Maude (London:
Macmillan, 1942), pp. 1305-44.
5. This may extend to the real historical individuals like Kutuzov that are included in the
novel. There seems to be little doubt that the character Kutuzov in the novel is signif-
icantly different from the historical Kutuzov. This is also the case with Napoleon.
6. Tolstoy, War and Peace, pp. 1309-13, 1318, yet it is not clear that Tolstoy avoids these
completely in his own writings.
7. Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 1313.
8. Tolstoy, War and Peace, pp. 1322-3, 1327.
9. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, p. 44.
10. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, pp. 41-4.
11. Spence, G. W., Tolstoy the Ascetic (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1967),
chapter one.
12. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, (1893), translated by Aylmer Maude
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 426.
13. Greenwood, E.B., Tolstoy, The Comprehensive Vision (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 62.
14. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, pp. 123, 198, and passim.
15. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, pp. 440-1.
16. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 136; see also Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby, trans-

Terry Hopton
28
lated by Aylmer Maude, in Tolstoys Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-violence
(London: Peter Owen, 1968), pp. 241-53, passim.
17. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 1, and passim; see also Letter to Ernest Howard
Crosby, passim.
18. Tolstoy, Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby, p. 244.
22. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 127.
23. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 444, citing Matthew vi. 24.

Deepening anarchism: international

relations and the anarchist ideal
Alex Prichard
ABSTRACT
Anarchist practice is localist and anarchist theory has generally followed in its
disregard for the structures of global politics and the ways in which these undermine
the possibility of the anarchist ideals. In this paper I set out one set of reasons as to
why this state of affairs has come about and go back to the origins of anarchist
thought to see if we can make sense of this contemporary context. I argue that a
better understanding, a founding schism between Proudhons revolutionary
conservatism and Bakunins revolutionary pan-Slavism can help us think through
how we might consider the international with greater sophistication vis--vis
anarchist praxis. What I will argue is that Bakunins position has stood the test of
time within the anarchist movement, but that this is an unfortunate and counter-
productive state of affairs.
Keywords Proudhon, Bakunin, International Relations, Balance of Power, Revolutionary Nationalism
INTRODUCTION
Noam Chomsky has argued the following:
world affairs are trivial: theres nothing in the social sciences or history or
whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen year old.
You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to
think, but theres nothing deep if there are any theories around that require
some special kind of training to understand, then theyve been kept a closely
guarded secret.1
Alex Prichard
30
Generally, this rather negative attitude is replicated in much reflection on the inter-
national and theres a lot to be said for it. If we can point to the facts on the
ground and come to simple moral conclusions about them, while at the same time
dismissing the sophistry of the academy, then all else is irrelevant window dressing to
sustain political or academic careers. Indeed, Mark Laffey levels almost precisely this
charge at the discipline of International Relations (IR) and particularly its theorists.2
Laffey suggests that Chomsky therefore has a lot to offer the sometimes hubristic,
often esoteric, theory-driven discipline of IR by bringing the empirical world and
simple moral truths to a discipline more likely to obfuscate ethics with questions of
power and cover up the empirical simplicities of the world with highfaluting theory.
Laffey argues that the political, profoundly democratic point is to empower people
to believe that they can in fact find out how their world works, and to legitimate
their findings.3
This is all well and good and I do not substantively disagree, but unfortunately
anarchist thinking about international relations seems to have suffered for taking
advice like Chomskys too seriously: anarchist thought displays a distinct lack of
theoretical reflection and sustained analysis of the international. Anarchists tend to
look at world politics as a discreet set of area studies linked by a world view. There is
little systematic analysis of the structures of global power that constrain and enable
meaningful and progressive social change, nor any meaningful history of the emer-
gence of the contemporary global order. Throughout its history anarchism has
largely had a bottom up ontology, which translates into a concern with what states
do to their people more than what states do to each other and how the latter
constrains the very possibility of progressive politics.
In fact, contemporary anarchist theory of the international is largely non-
existent and anarchist thought is almost completely ignored within IR. Until the end
of the Cold War IR was largely a discipline with a top down approach to global
power, concerned more with inter-state rivalry than with the concerns of the people
states were supposed to protect. IR theorists worried themselves with state strategy
rather than social emancipation. This largely explains the absence of anarchist
thought in the discipline. There has therefore been a manifest case of mutual igno-
rance within both IR and anarchism of arguments, findings, and theories that might
have mutual benefit.
This is a shame, and has serious consequences for both IR and anarchist studies.
Here I want to focus on the implications for anarchist praxis or on the implica-
tions of ignoring international politics for the anarchist ideal of a life without states
and capitalism. I have discussed the absence of anarchism in IR elsewhere.4 In what

Deepening anarchism
31
follows I will first set out an unavoidably brief survey of contemporary approaches to
the international in anarchist thought. I will argue that on the whole they are insuf-
ficiently attuned to the structures of world politics and how these structures
constrain and enable social order and social change, and this is problematic if we
desire a revolutionary approach to the latter.5
To illustrate why anarchist theorists need to pay more attention to the interna-
tional I will set out the historical consequences of Bakunins failure to take
international politics more seriously while supporting national liberation struggles in
nineteenth century Poland and Italy. I contrast Bakunins ideas with those of
Proudhon to suggest a more fruitful way of conceptualising anarchist praxis and how
to think about international relations from an anarchist perspective. There at the
birth of the nation state in the nineteenth century, their ideas ought to be of unique
interest for anarchists wishing to understand contemporary struggles and how to
think through the relationship between communal self-determination and the
machinations of world politics. In the conclusion I will return to the question of
contemporary anarchist praxis vis--vis the international and, rather than offer a
hard and fast set of conclusions, raise questions that have been too-long ignored by
anarchist theorists.
The point I will aim to make clear, then, is that despite sharing much in terms of
their view of the just social order, Proudhon and Bakunin differed markedly on how
to get there. What we find is that the difference between Bakunin and Proudhon
turned on their understanding of the international, specifically, the international
balance of power and how the structure of world order constrained and enabled
revolutionary social action. Proudhon believed that the only way to achieve a just
world order, to emancipate the many and restrain the powerful few, was to bring
European states to heel by embedding the structural status quo, the 1815 Vienna
settlement, and then to progressively mutualise and federate society. This, Proudhon
argued, would remove the states ability and need to go to war. Proudhon believed
that ultimately the emaciation of the state through the development of autonomous
sub-state associations and regional political units and their institutionalisation
through horizontal forms of federalism would in itself constitute a radical transfor-
mation of political community.
Bakunin disagreed. He argued that if emancipation was what was wanted, what
was needed was violent insurrection to destroy states completely and thereby
liberate and educate the subject populations of Europe, exploited and held in check
by the 1815 Imperial settlement agreed at the Congress of Vienna. Bakunin
believed that out of the ashes of imperialism there would emerge the natural,

Alex Prichard
32
immanent, spontaneous and benign volont generale of the masses. This latent
nature would rise from below upwards, to replace the spurious and exploitative
social order imposed upon people by states from above downwards. It is this train
of thought, one that romanticises an unreflective natural common sense, that
remains dominant in anarchist thought. I want to argue that history shows that a
return to Proudhons thought might be a worthwhile endeavour. I hope also that by
bringing past thought to light that contemporary anarchism can be deepened both
conceptually and historically.
ANARCHISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Anarchist approaches to war and international relations are few in number and those
that exist are widely ignored. Studies of anarchism and violence have tended to be
the norm and have somewhat myopically focused on the sensationalism of terrorism,
while the much more nuanced and profound nineteenth century debates about war
and mass killing executed by states have been all but forgotten. It is within the
context of these latter discussions that anarchist approaches to international relations
are to be found. Proudhons approach to world politics (one of the first, few and
most extensive socialist approaches to world affairs let alone anarchist6) was
denounced as militarist and muddle-headed almost from the outset.7 After the fall
of the Paris Commune broad swathes of the movement became anti-militarist, anti-
conscription and anti-imperialist. The problem was that when the call came to
defend the nation or homeland, most people ignored the anarchists and, even within
anarchist ranks, many signed up or vocally defended inter-state aggression. With the
rise of the Bolsheviks the anarchists again took a beating. Both in Russia and later in
Spain, where they were denounced as counter-revolutionary forces despite being at
the forefront of both revolutions, they were outnumbered, outgunned and outma-
noeuvred. Anarchist struggles were wiped out across Europe and the world. This
historical legacy of failure is surely a contributing factor to the contemporary
amnesia surrounding these past debates.
Within wider academic debates anarchisms legacy in the field of international
relations is all but forgotten. Thus, in the post-war period IR specialists have only
sporadically called for a turn to anarchism. Richard Falk, currently UN Special
Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, made such a call to help IR theorists re-
think the place of democracy and civic participation in the context of increasingly
alien international organisations.8 Thomas Weiss, also a long-time member of staff at
the UN and now professor of international politics at CUNY and outgoing

Deepening anarchism
33
President of the International Studies Association, once argued much the same thing
as Falk. For him the statism that characterised the Cold War was again the main
object of attack and anarchism was a more than suitable weapon.9 Writing only a
year before the Battle for Seattle, Scott Turner recognised that the impact and
global nature of the alter-globalisation movements seemed to contradict the egoist,
amoral and Hobbesian assumptions of IR theory, and called for a turn to Kropotkin
to make sense of this global solidarity movement.10 These articles raise important
questions about participation, power and theory, but they have been ignored by both
anarchists and IR specialists alike.
More recently the online anarchist publication Divergences has published articles
on numerous regions and conflict zones, all from an anarchist perspective. Because
there is little or any reflection on the structural dynamics that link these area studies,
what results is thoughtful journalism informed by anarchist politics rather than
persuasive analysis of the feasibility of anarchism to inform the transforming of these
political crises.11 A recent exception is Uri Gordons chapter on nationalism and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Anarchy Alive! and it provides a useful starting point
for the analysis to follow.
Gordon argues that the traditional praxis of anarchist labour struggle solidarity
as the primary vehicle of social transformation is utopian, particularly so in the
context of the absence of such a movement in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Working class solidarity and blanket solidarity with the downtrodden wherever they
may be, a position most clearly articulated by the Platformists, often translates into
an unreflective defence of Hamas, and similar groups elsewhere, simply on the basis
that they are the downtrodden.12 These two positions, labourism and unreflective
solidarity, emerge from an identifiable Bakuninist tendency within anarchist theory
that presupposes the existence of a primordial nation or people in Palestine that is
being repressed by the Israeli state, one that only needs the removal of the latter for
the former to flourish in an entirely benign and anarchist-friendly way.13 Gordon
chastises Wayne Price, his key interlocutor here, for imploring the international
community to allow a full right of return, for demanding an Israeli retreat to the
1967 borders, and so on. This, Gordon argues, is a strategy far removed from anar-
chism, and even if it were not, the politicians who actually get to decide whether or
not a Palestinian state is finally established are not exactly asking anarchists their
opinion.14 Gordon concludes that internationalism, anti-statism, nationalist roman-
ticism and faith in the working class, reduce traditional anarchist theory, and by this
he means platformist anarcho-syndicalism, to an irrelevance in terms of its ability to
support national liberation struggles in Palestine.15

Alex Prichard
34
Gordons alternative is to suggest that anarchists should take pride in the direct
action ethic that has been employed to good effect in the Occupied Territories and
elsewhere. Walking children across the road, protecting harvests, building solidarity
networks and help[ing] preserve peoples livelihoods and dignity [is] not a step
towards statehood, Gordon argues, and is thereby more anarchistic.16 This
movement towards re-building human dignity and social solidarity also has a more
powerful and meaningful effect on the local population than all the pages penned on
the conflict by anarchists, and in the context of the absence of working class soli-
darity in the region is a far more realistic praxis. Moreover, strategically, Gordon
suggests that this solidarity might also encourage by example; informing people
through anarchist praxis of the communalist and mutual aid alternatives to statism
espoused by all sides in the conflict, and avoiding the utopian romanticism attendant
with notions of a Palestinian or Israeli nation state. Long-term, this strategy might
even build the foundations of a movement that would go some way towards realising
that distant no state solution to the crises of statism and capitalism everywhere.
Gordon argues that the creation of genuine peace requires the creation and fostering
of political spaces which facilitate voluntary cooperation and mutual aid between
Israelis and Palestinians.17
But is Gordons strategy any more realistic that Prices? Is Gordon right to ask us
to give up on thinking about these issues at the structural level; to stop talking about
class and inter-state behaviour or debating the relative merits of the actions of politi-
cians and diplomats? Does it matter that anarchists dont have the ear of the prince?
Anarchists should surely support Gordons pragmatism; however, my worry is that
without a more coherent theory of how this daily pragmatism links into the wider
regional balance of power, local actions will remain localised and might even (unin-
tentionally) undermine peace itself. What about Israeli security concerns and Iranian
nuclear ambitions, Egyptian fears of Islamic militancy and the after-effects of Gulf
War II? Would a militant left wing movement or a regional working class help or
hinder regional progress in this context? What happens if direct action undermines
rather than supports Israeli/Palestinian rapprochement, or builds militancy in ways
no one had given much thought to? How would that impact on the regional balance
of power and the prospects for radical social change?
The international is the unavoidable structural shell within which the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict plays itself out, and within which anarchists will neces-
sarily frame their responses to these questions, but few take any notice of it. Both
the conflict and the potential for anarchist praxis are, and will be, transformed by
moves at the regional and global level to a greater extent than they themselves will

Deepening anarchism
35
transform these dynamics. Surely anarchists need a wider conceptualisation of the
structural effects of the international system than to assume that with the coming of
the (insert favoured brand of anarchism here) revolution it will be recalibrated
automatically?
This is not the first time this debate has been had, and what is generally ignored
is the Proudhonist alternative to the Bakuninist norm in contemporary anarchist
theory of the international. What I will do next is show how Bakunins revolutionary
nationalism and anarchist syndicalism compared with Proudhons mutualist consti-
tutionalism in regards to the Italian Risorgimento and the Polish Question in the
1860s. I do not want to suggest that there are any direct lessons that we can draw for
anarchist praxis today (which would do violence to both the historical specificity of
our own time and theirs), only that we ought to pay attention to the failures of the
past so as to better inform our praxis in the present. My conclusions will be for a
deeper anarchism; one that does not ignore the international nor retreat to the
utopian visions of the transformative powers of revolutionary class struggle anar-
chism. My observations will no doubt raise many objections, but this is preferred to
the existing silence.
ANARCHISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the nineteenth century there were two main national liberation struggles that
preoccupied anarchists and indeed the whole of Europe: the Italian Risorgimento
and the debate over the unification of Poland. Looking in some detail at how
Proudhon and Bakunin differed in their assessment of these two cases, and the actual
path history took, will shed light on how we might understand national liberation
struggles from an anarchist perspective today. What we will see is that it is the way in
which each understood the structures of world politics that shaped the ensuing
praxis of anarchism. I will argue that theoretically Proudhon was more astute and
historically he has been vindicated.
Let us turn first to Italy. The Italian peninsula was effectively colonised by the
Kingdom of Piedmont (whose throne was in Sardinia) in the 1860s. Prior to this
Italy was, as Metternich put it, a geographical expression at the will of the
strongest.18 Europes empires jostled for supremacy there and the Italian Question
dominated political and social discourse. Politicians debated revolutionary nation-
alism and the shape any future Italian state ought to take whether it should be
republican or a Monarchy, a federation or a unified state, ruled by France or Austria
or fully autonomous, or a mixture of the above. The French press advanced the cause

Alex Prichard
36
of the Piedmontese and were awarded medals for their service to the Kingdom,
while Mazzini and Garibaldi looked for republican unity, but vacillated over how to
achieve it. Both advocated violent insurrection and revolution, though Mazzini, the
one-time arch-republican, eventually sided with Victor Emmanuelle, King of
Piedmont, to Proudhons disgust. Both Mazzini and Garibaldi were eventually
outwitted by Cavour, the Kings liberal, socialist-hating prime minister, and France
and Austria eventually lost control of their southern borders.
During this time the mainstream left focused their campaigns against the
Austro-Hungarian Empire precisely because of Metternichs refusal to countenance
the liberalisation of the Empire, and his persistent rejection of (minimal) claims for
regional autonomy in Italy and elsewhere. The political right, like Cavour and
leaders of other European states, also hated the regional power of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire and wanted it destroyed so that Piedmont could grow in power,
or France could feel less threatened. Proudhon, by contrast, was ambivalent,
remarking that it was de mode to denounce Austria, but any desire to abolish the
Empire must take into account that something would have to take its place and it
was not clear that the alternatives were that much better.19 Proudhon continued that
from 1815 to the present day, [territorial] unity has quite simply been a form of
bourgeois exploitation under the protection of bayonettes,20 and all Mazzini would
achieve with his so-called republicanism would be to inoculate Italy with
despotism. He also rather cannily observed, based on his analysis of European
history, that the desire to constitutionalise the Austrian Empire, the liberal call from
the left, would also actually cement the 1815 treaties rather than abolish them, by
deepening the existing international equilibrium through the extension of suffrage
which would legitimise it. Indeed, ironically, it was not at all clear that the Austrian
Empire was widely hated by broad swathes of the people over which it ruled, and so
it was not at all clear who the revolutionaries stood for. For example, when nation-
alist revolutionaries rose up in Austrian controlled Galicia in 1846, the peasants
massacred them.21 This was testament to the relationship between the people and
the Empire in this region, a relationship which, no matter how internally contradic-
tory from a revolutionary standpoint, the socialists simply chose to ignore. So, to
summarise, Proudhon argued:
I reject Italian unity because in my view it is nothing but an Italian fantasy; because
it is contrary to political principles, to the tendencies of civilization, to the rights of
the diverse nations of Italy; because it could not be instituted except by means of
armed dictatorship in contempt of geographical conditions and historical

Deepening anarchism
37
traditions; because in indefinitely adjourning Italys liberal aspirations, unity will
deal a severe blow to the development of liberty in Europe; and, finally, because
forced to create a formidable military force to contain the divergent populations,
this unity will destroy the established external balance and will provoke unrest
amongst neighbouring countries that will not end but by redrawing the political
map of Europe.22
This is a powerful statement of the follies of the drive for national unity; one which
Mazzini and Garibaldi assumed was the historical destiny of Italy and one which was
supposed to unify a protean people as one. Proudhons alternative linked freedom to
the political principle of federation and related the freedom of Italys diverse social
groups to the objective interests of states with very different interests and the
constraining structures of the European equilibrium. His fear of what might come to
pass led him to seek pragmatic opportunities wherein real change might have been
effected. One such moment was, he argued, the proposed Treaty of Villafranca, that
would have been signed between Napoleon III of France and Prime Minister Cavour
and King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont had the conflict between Piedmont and
Austria gone as planned.
The story goes like this. Austria was effectively tricked into war with the
Kingdom of Piedmont and, in keeping with a secret agreement, Napoleon III came
to Piedmonts aid in return for the prizes of Nice and Savoy then held by the
Piedmontese. The peace treaty between Napoleon III and Franz Joseph was supposed
to guarantee the division and federation of Italy into four. Lombardy (the plains
around Milan) was to be ceded to Napoleon III and then passed on to Cavour and
Piedmont (as per the terms of the secret treaty). Secondly, the states of Tuscany and
Modena were to be created to balance the autonomous Papal state and Venice the
latter becoming a free state in this Italian confederation but subject to the crown of
the Emperor of Austria. This concession to Austria was purely expedient on
Napoleon IIIs part since he realised his power in the region was waning and without
a counterbalance to Piedmont things could get tricky on his southern border as
Proudhon had argued they would.23 Unfortunately, the ensuing battle was inconclu-
sive and Napoleon III, fearing instability on his southern borders, reneged on the
secret treaty. Proudhon argued that the Treaty of Villafranca should have been
proclaimed as the Good News by all Italians. But, he argued, Italian
Machiavellianism, joined with the incomprehensible politics of the French press,
decided otherwise. But above all, the responsibility is Mazzinis.24
It is doubtful that Proudhon was aware of the secret treaty between Piedmont

Alex Prichard
38
and France, but Proudhon was quite clear that Mazzinis insurrectionary and
republican revolutionary nationalism (and his reprehensible siding with the
Piedmontese monarchy against France) was short-sighted. Mazzini used French
imperial ambitions in Italy to rouse the southern Italians, and Cavour also used this
to incite rebellion in the north of Italy both clear examples of ideology driving
political practice. Mazzini seemed blind to the fact that Cavour was using his
(Mazzinis) popularity for his own ends. Proudhon argued, from the moment that
they [Garibaldi and Mazzini] refuse to take account of the established powers and of
the necessities of the century, to deliver them from their demagogic emportement the
game was lost for them.25 And it was. With all the instruments of state power at his
disposal Cavour managed skilfully to outwit Garibaldi and Mazzini, who by playing
the unity card and inciting rebellion did Cavours dirty work for him, and also
managed to keep Britain on side by campaigning against the power of Austria and
the socialist peril in Italy and Europe. This attention to the international equilibrium
was central to Cavours success and it was in this context that Proudhon came to
argue that [t]he cause of the proletariat and that of European equilibrium are one;
both protest, with equal energy, against unity and in favour of a federal system.26
I will unpack the deeper theoretical questions raised by this brief introduction
below, but before I do that it is worth surveying how Bakunin saw these matters.
Unlike Proudhon, Bakunin spent three years in Italy between 1864 and 1867. Here
he established the secret International Revolutionary Brotherhood along Carbonari
lines, pioneered by Mazzini, and composed mainly of Mazzinians, Proudhonists and
English trade unionists. On his move to the south of Italy in 1865, Bakunin found a
region utterly disillusioned with the Risorgimento. From its disastrous free trade
agreements that plunged the south into penury, to the de jure imperialism of
Piedmontese rule there, unity had done nothing for the South. The south were also
tiring of Mazzinis slogan God and the People, which was slowly losing its appeal
once it became clear that he had nothing more to offer than unity.27 Indeed,
Pernicone has argued that Bakunin was the only man in Italy who possessed the
intellect, charisma, and audacity necessary to challenge Mazzini and convert his
disenchanted disciples to the cause of social revolution.28 The problem was the ideas
Bakunin brought to the campaign.
Bakunin was deeply influenced by Mazzini and his insurrectionary secret soci-
eties of this there can be little doubt. He wrote that Italy owes its political
independence mainly to the forty years of uninterrupted and irrepressible effort by
its great citizen Giuseppe Mazzini, who was able [] to resurrect the youth of Italy
and then train it in the perilous but valiant cause of patriotic conspiracy.29 Contra

Deepening anarchism
39
Proudhons analysis, and while he agreed that the Italians were (and remain) hugely
diverse in custom, tongue and geography, Bakunin maintained that there is a
common Italian character-type by which an Italian can immediately be distinguished
from a member of any other nation, even a southern one.30 Customary and racial
identity bound Italy in social unity but not in political unity;31 and if the extant
and spurious structures of the latter were abolished the former would rise up in its
place, flourish and constitute the basis for a new politics, or so he argued.
There are three key respects in which Bakunin differed from Mazzini on the
question of the relationship between God and the state, the value of federalism, and
the value of socialism. All three positions are outlined quite neatly in Bakunins
Programme of the Brotherhood (c.1865), the Programme and object of the secret
revolutionary organization of the international brotherhood (1868) and his declara-
tory appeal to the League of Peace and Freedom in September 1868.32 Here Bakunin
argued that members of the Brotherhood, organised in two classes of active and
honorary members (the latter the intellectual vanguard), must be atheists, federalists
and anti-statists. They must love liberty above all and seek to destroy any system
which manifestly and systematically curtailed the liberty of individuals, groups and
nations no matter who or where they are. Here Bakunin argued, in terms reminis-
cent of Proudhons General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century
(1851),33 that the objective was to destroy Churches, standing armies, centralised
powers, bureaucracy, governments, unitary parliaments, universities and State banks,
as well as aristocratic and bourgeois monopolies.34 Whatever rose spontaneously to
replace this would be both natural and right and would, in some nominally Hegelian
fashion, be providential.
This romantic passion for a latent people beneath the yoke of Empire trans-
lated into a call for creative destruction in the interests of a brighter future: The
passion for destruction is a creative passion, too35 he famously argued. Within three
years of this declaration he was calling for something far less. He now advocated an
Internationalist Federalism and a United States of Europe. This body would,
however, be the manifestation of the re-aligned, post-revolutionary political constel-
lations, with nations breathing unhindered by Empire, with people expressing
themselves through meaningful employment with the rewards shared equitably
between the workers, and with their souls free to soar unencumbered by the
doctrines of the church. In relation to Italy this translated as follows:
first of all an end to want, an end to poverty, the full satisfaction of all material
needs through collective labour equal and obligatory for all; then an end to all

Alex Prichard
40
masters and to domination of every kind, and the free construction of popular life
in accordance with popular needs, not from above downward, as in the state, but
from below upward, by the people themselves, dispensing with all governments and
parliaments a voluntary alliance of agricultural and factory worker associations,
communes, provinces, and nations; and finally, in more distant future, universal
human brotherhood triumphing on the ruins of all states.36
There is not much to dislike here. But the achievement of these goals is a different
matter. For Bakunin the solution was obvious. Italy, like Spain, should be rocked by
popular rebellion. Peasant and worker insurgencies, from the sherry collectives of
Andalusia to the marble quarries of Massa Carara, would bring about this ideal.
Bakunin believed that statism was proving itself to be unsustainable right across
Europe. In this vein he argued: despite all the endeavours of the constitutional
monarchists, and even the heroic but futile efforts of the two great leaders, Mazzini
and Garibaldi, the idea of the state has never been accepted, nor will it ever be, for it is
contrary to the true spirit and the contemporary instinctive desires and material
demands of the innumerable rural and urban proletariat.37 But did the universal creed
Bakunin pronounced speak to all peasants and workers in all times and places in the
same way? Given that the vast majority of revolutionaries in Italy at this time were
drawn from the educated bourgeoisie, it is debateable whether the working class, such
as it was, or the peasants, were listening. Moreover, while representativeness is surely
not the sole mark of the integrity of someones ideas, their practical application and
the foreseeable consequences are crucial. And in this regard, Bakunins lack of reflec-
tion on the structural dynamics of international power lent his thoughts a utopian
character which today sounds simply nave. He closed his Programme and object of
the secret revolutionary organization of the international brotherhood (1868) with
the observation that [a] hundred tightly and seriously allied revolutionaries will
suffice for the whole of Europe. Two or three hundred revolutionaries will be enough
to organise the largest of countries.38 What actually emerged from the revolutionary
ruins of nineteenth-century Italy was not anarchism but fascism. It seems in this
respect that Proudhon was right. The drive towards unity and revolutionary insurrec-
tions failed to deliver the grand promises made by its leaders.
INSURRECTION VS. PARTITION: ANARCHISM AND THE POLISH QUESTION

Bakunins endeavours in support of Polish liberation were no less politically and
philosophically nave. While the Polish Question was contemporary to the Italian

Deepening anarchism
41
Question, the differences between the two cases are significant. While Italy was
being colonised by the Kingdom of Piedmont, led by its cunning Prime Minister
Cavour, the revolutionary insurrections in Poland were sporadic and unsuccessful
and there was no such indigenous community that could constitute either a nation
or a state in the event of revolutionary anti-imperialist revolt. Attempts to create one
out of nothing, Proudhon argued, were misguided. Given the entrenchment of the
institution of the nobility and their fickle alliances with regional power blocs,
uniting Poland would present any one of these neighbouring Great Powers with too
great a temptation to invade and annex neighbouring lands. Moreover, it was not
clear that unification, let alone national unification, would advance the cause of the
predominantly serf population. Indeed, the opposite might well have been expected,
since in 1861 Tsar Alexander II unilaterally emancipated the Polish serfs in the
Russian territories.
Not one to be daunted by the scale of his ambition, Bakunin marched on. One
of the reasons for Bakunins unshakable faith in his own ability was his philosophy of
social order. Rejecting the Marxist view that people need to be led to freedom, or the
Rousseauean vision of forcing people to be free through republican institutions,
Bakunin believed that the
anarchist social revolution [] arises spontaneously within the people and destroys
everything that opposes the broad flow of popular life so as to create new forms of
free social organisation out of the very depths of peoples existence []
Metaphysicians or positivists, all these knights of science and thought, in the name
of which they consider themselves ordained to prescribe the laws of life, are reac-
tionaries, conscious or unconscious.39
All that was needed was a spark usually the harshness of objective social conditions
and revolutionary subjects would emerge spontaneously and fight their way into
the future led by the secret societies, anarchist ideologues or Marxists and so on. The
point is that the theory matters. Indeed, the passion for social justice ignited by these
struggles would provide an impetus for social learning. Popular science (rather than
specialist knowledge) was thus all that society needed to maintain its liberty. The
positivist Religion of Humanity, as Comte had dubbed it from as early as the1820s,
was considered a retrograde and barbaric science. Bakunins vision was more ideal-
istic: In the belief that the masses bear all the elements of their future organizational
norms in their own more or less historically evolved instincts, in their everyday needs
and their conscious and unconscious desires, we seek that ideal within the people

Alex Prichard
42
themselves.40 Only anarchism offered the correct social theory to guide instinct.
Bakunins philosophy is manifested most evidently in his pan-Slavism. In 1847
he gave a speech in Paris in celebration of the seventeenth anniversary of the 1830
insurrection, which drew whoops and cries of Bravo! from the crowd.41 Bakunin
believed pan-Slavism was a viable alternative to statism since it respected the notion
of nationality but rejected the spurious correspondence with existing bourgeois and
autocratic Russian power. A false nationality is one tied to a constructed state; real
nationality is a historical, local fact which has an undeniable right to general recog-
nition, like any other real and harmless fact.42 For Bakunin, nationalism was a local
manifestation of a universal identity, one born of history and tradition; but nation-
alism is transitory and internationalism would eventually break through. Bakunins
aim was to shed parochial Slavism in the interests of an internationalist pan-Slavism.
Crucially, however, what brings Bakunin closer to Mazzini than Proudhon is that he
sees armed and bloody struggle as the only way to achieve or consolidate this
national identity. This theory was common at the time but was contrary to the
historical record. As John Breuillys influential approach to the question of nation-
alism has shown, in the case of Germany, Italy and Poland, and to some extent
France, [n]ationalism was more important as a product than a cause of national
unification.43 Nationalism was used to corral the people after revolutionary social
change. Revolutionary nationalism was a tool imitated by states in order to entrench
and legitimise their rule.
Bakunins jailing for his incitement of Polish nationalism simply fuelled his revo-
lutionary impulse. Almost as soon as he had escaped exile in Siberia in 1861, he
penned an open letter To Russian, Polish and Other Slavic Friends in which he
demanded
only one thing: that every tribe, great and small, be given the full opportunity and
right to act according to its will. If it wants to merge with Russia and Poland let
it merge. Does it want to be an independent member of a Polish or Russian or
general Slavic federation? Then let it be so. Finally, does it want to separate
completely from every other people and live as a totally separate state? Then God
bless it! Let it separate.44
This sentiment did not last long. Within two years Bakunin actively set out to fight
for his ideals in support of the Polish uprising and set sail from London on the ill-
fated and quixotic trip to Lithuania aboard the ship the SS Ward Jackson. That
Bakunin only made it as far as Sweden, Carr suggests, is a fitting epitaph for the

Deepening anarchism
43
failed Polish uprising itself.45 By 1867 his fire for revolt had abated somewhat and he
came to rather contradictory conclusions:
By a cruel, systematic repression, as well as by infamous means, the Russian govern-

ment seems to want to provoke insurrection in Poland; for this reason, it will be
just as useful for the Polish people as for the Russians to restrain themselves. []
Do your best to persuade them to wait, as circumstances permit, but nevertheless,
dont waste time; make an active propaganda campaign and organize yourselves so
that youre ready when the critical moment arrives. [] And God knows! Maybe,
contrary to all predictions, your heroism will be crowned with success.46
When looking back a few years later, he remarked that [u]nfortunately for Poland,
its leading parties, which are still drawn primarily from the gentry, have been unable
to renounce their state-centred programme.47 Surely this observation should have
been made earlier? It seems he recognised class power and the real workings of
society a little late. Still smarting from failure but rejuvenated by his early experiences
in the International Working Mens Association, he then began to argue that pan-
Slavism was best realised through root and branch international social revolution
and working class solidarity. As he continued: the Slavic proletariat must enter the
International Working Mens Association en masse.48 He was wary of the Marxists,
but took succour from the fact that the Germans in the IWMA were marginalised
by the Italians, Swiss and French. This may have been the case, but only temporarily
so. The effective exile of Bakunin and the anarchists from the organisation by
moving the International to the USA sealed Marxs power within it and arguably
destroyed it as a revolutionary force.
When Bakunin eventually turned his attention to international relations in the
mid 1870s, he suggested that the most treacherous fact of international life was the
1815 settlement at the Congress of Vienna.
At that time no one suspected the truth which has now become obvious even to the
most stupid despots, that the so-called constitutional forms, or forms of popular repre-
sentation, do not impede state, military, political, and financial despotism. Instead,
they have the effect of legitimizing it and giving it a false appearance of popular
government, and they can significantly enhance its internal strength and vigour.49
This constitutionalism was precisely what Proudhon was advocating and I will
discuss it in a little more detail below but somewhat paradoxically, in 1867

Alex Prichard
44
Bakunin was one of the founding members of the Congress of the League of Peace
and Freedom that met in Geneva. Here he advanced his revolutionary nationalism as
the precursor to a universal peace. Drawing from memory years later, Bakunin
recounted his final speech to the congress where he had argued that
Universal peace will be impossible so long as the present centralised States exist. We
must desire their destruction in order that, on the ruins of these forced unions
organised from above by right of authority and conquest, there may arise free
unions organised from below by the free federation of communes into provinces, of
provinces into the nation, and of nations into the United States of Europe.50
True to insurrectionary form, Bakunin seemed never to learn from his own failings.
The point I am trying to make here is that a theoretically and ideologically driven
hope, rather than hard headed analysis, drove Bakunins politics. What marks out
Proudhons position from Bakunins, by contrast, is not only his desire to retain the
partition of Poland and his rejection of insurrectionary nationalism, but also the
extensive historical, social and political analysis he provides in support of his
position.51
Proudhon set out his observations in brief in the final part of his important but
neglected essay Si les Traits de 1815 ont cesser dxister (1863). These were them-
selves derived from a 900-page unpublished manuscript titled La Pologne,
Considrations sur la vie et la Mort des Nationalits.52 Standard biographies suggest
that the reason Proudhon refused to publish this work was that he feared his
negative assessment of Polish and Slavic ambitions would rub salt into the wounds of
revolutionary failure. Bakunin is said to have met with Proudhon in 1861, just as he
was finalising this manuscript and just as Bakunin was heading out on the ill-fated
Ward Jackson affair. Little wonder Proudhon refrained from publicly denouncing the
Polish uprisings at that time.
In this essay, Proudhon argued that Polish society consisted of two classes,
nobility and serf, with the former sustaining itself through simple parasitism on the
latter. Proudhon remarked that if there has ever been a corner of the globe where it
is true to say, from the perspective of practice rather than transcendent critique, that
property is theft, its in Poland.53 Here he argued that the nobility had historically
fought amongst themselves for seigniorial rights and routinely aligned with the three
regional powers of Prussia, Russia and Austria according to their own inter-dynastic
interests. Much as Italy meant little before the same period, the population had
little interest in Poland or, before the rejuvenation of history by the romantic revo-

Deepening anarchism
45
lutionaries, in its past or place in the world. The nobility periodically wrote and
devised constitutions that were not enacted, and generally did nothing to improve
the lot of the people. This, Proudhon argued, is the opposite of what happened in
other countries. Referring to Britain in an uncharacteristically generous way,
Proudhon argued that the new middle classes, epitomised in the actions of men like
Robert Owen, raised the moral and civic consciousness of the people through organ-
ising social power and enacting and defending secular principles of justice against the
interests and indifference of the landed nobility.
In Poland, the church and nobility did nothing of the sort and thus the position
of the people remained abject. In other words, there were no intermediary social and
political cleavages in Poland that, through acting against the interests of the nobility,
would enact a variation on the civic constitutions that had been the emerging norm
across Europe since 1815. With no countervailing domestic power, such as an eman-
cipated serf population or a bourgeois middle class, to restrain and root the nobility
in their own country, zones of influence were easily carved up between the main
regional powers and they became a major cause of European conflagration.54 The
prize of Polish lands was too much for its neighbours to resist, and with such little
internal organic connection between people and state, and the willingness of the
nobility to pander to regional powers, it was all too simple to annex the various prin-
cipalities. Proudhon therefore argued that Poland ought to remain partitioned until
a middle class could arise to temper the stark injustices in Polish society.55 To say
that this is contentious would be a gross understatment.
Nevertheless, Proudhon continued that the ongoing partition of Poland was also
central to European security and peace. It might also prove to be progressive if Polish
civil society could be animated into political self-consciousness in opposition to the
status quo. For example, in the late eighteenth century, Catherine II of Russia had
proposed the creation of a new middle class by reforming the lower nobility and
developing the peasantry into a commercial force by proposing to emancipate them.
The nobility denounced Catherine and her plans and claimed it to be a plot against
the existence of Poland itself which to a large degree it was if we consider Poland at
this time as nothing more than a collection of nobles and from this moment,
Proudhon argued, all was lost.56 The first two divisions of Poland can thus be
explained by the nobilitys unmediated hatred of the serfs, preferring the partition
of Poland to their emancipation in each case. Thankfully, Proudhon argued, this
participation actually helped the serfs breathe, giving life to their political aspira-
tions as a social class. However, quite contrary to Bakunin, Proudhon argued that the
congress of Vienna and the age of constitutions it ushered into Europe, despite

Alex Prichard
46
retaining the partition of Poland, also gave civic and constitutional impetus to Polish
political life.57 The various constitutions drafted during this period were evidence of
this. What was missing was a social force to enact and defend them.
It was for these reasons that Polish nationalism was a contradiction in terms for
Proudhon. He argued that since there was no organic link between the institution of
the nobility and the population; since the population were an undifferentiated mass
who were utterly disenfranchised; and because there were no institutions to link the
people to one another and thus check the nobility, there was no way in which the
people could come to govern themselves. Finally, since there was no nation as such,
the championing of it was nonsensical. Since nationalism ought at least to be about
self-government and autonomy of a nation, and since the people had not the means
to realise it, nor inclination to believe in it, any plea for Polish nationalism would
simply entrench the power of the nobility without redressing the issue of their alle-
giances and the stark social injustices that underpinned it. Polish nationalism, of the
variety advocated by the vast majority of socialists, a nationalism tied to a spurious
conception of confraternity and unity, was an unsophisticated panacea for a critically
complex reality. Proudhon would not have the whole of Europe sacrifice the benefits
of peace, predicated upon the strategic partitioning of Poland and the European
balance of power, for the sake of an aristocratic and utopian revolutionary coalition
for national autonomy and unity.58
However, Proudhon did agree with Bakunin on one thing. If there were any
cause for Polish nationalism it should be based, he argued in 1861, upon a European
conception of pan-Slavism tied to a restoration of Slavic rights in Russia. This, he
argued, would begin a process of realising a cultural and historical foundation upon
which to build a fight for civic political participation protected within the overar-
ching structure of the 1815 balance of power. Furthermore, Proudhon argued that
Russia should (and perhaps naively thought it would) take the initiative, much as
Alexander II had done at home in 1861, in emancipating the serfs of Poland. He also
argued that by suppressing Polish revolts in 1831, Imperial Russia began to galvanise
a distinctly Polish nationality or martyrs for the homeland.
In sum, the time simply was not right for the restoration of Poland, nor was
Polish nationalism either in Polands or in Europes interests. The republican revolu-
tionaries of Poland, in Proudhons final analysis, simply wanted to change the
conditions of rule in their country for their own benefit and the anarchists would be
foolish to follow them. The consequences of this plan were too dangerous to be
considered, and he argued, systematically, against Polish nationalism. At his most
extreme, he even asked of Poland: [e]st-il [] si malheureux de mourir? (is it really

Deepening anarchism
47
such a shame to die?).59 This is clearly unfeeling and unhelpful at best, but as
Norman Davis, one of the pre-eminent historians of Poland, has argued,
The strength of the Insurrectionary Tradition [in Poland ] bore no relation to the
numbers of its adherents or to the outcome of its political programme. It reflected
not the support of the masses, but the intense dedication of its devotees, whose
obstinate temper, conspiratorial habits, and unfailing guardianship of the Romantic
approach to Literature and History was effectively transmitted from generation to
generation.60
Tragically, attempts at Polish nationhood in the century leading up to the revival of

the Kingdom of Poland by Germany in 1916 mocked the intelligence of those it
sought to satisfy.61 Moreover, [i]n the nineteenth century, the Poles had been faced
with a life of deprivation. In the twentieth century, they were faced with extinc-
tion.62 Again, fascism followed in the wake of nationalist revolutionary failure.
Proudhon concluded that despite their differing contexts, both the Italian question
and the Polish question ought to have been resolved by the principle of mutualist
federation. He argued the following: I am perfectly convinced [] that the Polish
question cannot be resolved in any other way than the Italian question, that is to say
by federation.63 It is to this federal solution that I will now turn and in the
conclusion I will draw out some of the implications for this analysis for
contemporary anarchisms lack of engagement with international relations.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE ANARCHIST IDEAL

So how did Proudhon and Bakunin translate their empirical analysis of the dynamics
of nationalism and the European balance of power into a coherent political and
normative project? I will argue that while Bakunin has the fiery zeal that animated
and whipped up the revolutionaries, Proudhons more measured analysis drew,
indeed continues to draw, charges that his ideas were counter revolutionary. While
Proudhon argued that Bakunin and the revolutionaries were right to want to change
the world, their error was to perpetuate the religious dream by rushing off into a
fantastic future instead of grasping the reality that crushes it.64
Proudhons analysis was, as briefly demonstrated, deeply historical. He also took
many positives from the evolution of European states and the international order.
Prior to the Treaty of Westphalia, perhaps the definitive moment in the history of
the evolution of modern states, the religious authority of the Pope and his link to

Alex Prichard
48
God set down the principle of Christian order. Proudhon argued that Westphalia
signified less the emergence of the principle of statehood than, through the concept
of the balance of power, the first shift towards recognising secular conceptions of
social equilibrium.65 This implied that the people realised their own active political
agency undirected by God or nature. Following the American example, as Proudhon
recognised, the 1815 treaties, constituted in large part also by a new balance of
power between the monarchies and the emergent middle classes, were examples of
how Europe had constitutionalised itself internally, while the treaties that arose from
the Congress of Vienna stipulated the parameters and principles of inter-state rela-
tions. By way of empirical evidence, he lists nearly 100 constitutions that were
ratified, replaced and amended between 1789 and 1864. These may have been partly
prompted by the desire to restrain the emancipated peoples and emergent socialist
movement, but the political progress it signified was something the left ought to
have championed but did not. From his vantage point, it seemed to Proudhon that a
natural European order had emerged:
The existing states of Europe might be seen to be the final product of a centralising
and unifing movement, just as the current geological constitution is the product of
the final revolution of the globe. In posing the principle of equilibrium, the treaty
of Westphalia signifies the moment at which the centralising tendency began to
come to an end; the treaties of 1815, in opening the constitutional era, prepared
this dissolution.66
Proudhon called for a new equilibrium of political power, a new balance of asym-
metric power. The time had come for the working class to express its political
capacity as a self-conscious, plural movement alongside the nobility, kings, the
commons or the bourgeoisie. If and when the working class had a sense, and mani-
fested its political capacity, then the social order would be based on its true
foundations. He called for a constitutionalist approach to calibrating this new social
equilibrium. He argued that this would constitute the next stage in a European
historical process wherein social orders break down, recalibrate and become consti-
tutionally recognised or encoded. But for the dissolution of states to take place
Proudhon argued that European peace had first to be ensured, and it could only be
ensured if the balance of power was equitably entrenched at three different levels at
once: the international, the social, and the economic.
First, the international balance of power had to be stabilised. Whether or not
the costs of doing this were beyond what could be reasonably accepted depended

Deepening anarchism
49
on ones theory of world politics and of revolutionary social change indeed, it
still does. Anarchists today have not sufficiently reflected on these issues such that
any final conclusions can be drawn from existing first principles. Still, stabilising
the international equilibrium for Proudhon depended on the partition and ulti-
mately the federation of Poland, the promotion of Italian federalism and the
liberty of Belgium and the Low-Countries, which were a buffer zone between
France, Germany and Britain. For Proudhon the liberty of the latter and the parti-
tion of Poland had both protected the benign historical development of Europe by
neutralising the domination of any one power and by protecting the autonomy of
peoples: whoever violates [this order] is guilty before the human race67 he stated
emphatically.
The second balance of power was the social one. Here, treaties were merely an
international version of domestic constitutionalism. For Proudhon constitutions
reflect and formalise social relations and embed balances of power they do not
reflect a transcendent political order as was claimed by the liberals and Monarchists.
Again, the 100-plus constitutions in the immediate post-Revolutionary period were
his evidence of this. Proudhon was essentially arguing that if states can live in a
condition of relatively constitutionalised anarchy, then why couldnt other relatively
autonomous social groups? If states could realistically be federated (as they had in
the US and Switzerland to good effect), why could something more progressive than
what existed not be advocated at a social and economic level? Anarchy ought to be
the constitutive principle of all social order not just the international and consti-
tutionalism ought to be post-sovereign, or post-unity, or post-centralist. The rise of
the working class suggested a new collective force in society whose power and
autonomy ought to be constitutionally recognised and calibrated. The challenge for
the nineteenth century was to articulate the principle of working class unity and a
vision for the future.
Thus, writing some twenty-three years after he first identified his position as
anarchist, Proudhon found evidence in support of anarchism as a political and
economic ideology here, in the relations between states. The Treaties of Westphalia
signified the source of the radical reconstruction of social order tout court since it
began the secularisation of politics and showed that political orders are in actual fact
premised on human rather than divine principles and regulated not by god or a
natural order, but by humans: the French revolution should reclaim this tradition
from the treaty of Westphalia68 he argued, not that of an eternal European order.
Mutualism and/or federalism were central to this radical reconstruction.
Mutualism was, like the commutative relations at the interstate level, a principle of

Alex Prichard
50
social order that needed no centre. Unlike distributive conceptions of justice and
social order, which presuppose a centre to collect and redistribute, commutative rela-
tions can be organised federally or confederally (a semantic distinction not available
to Proudhon), without centre or circumference.69 This political vision had an
economic corollary. Capitalist economic relations are legally hierarchic, with private
property signifying the legal domain of the owner over his possessions including
the labour of his workers. Remove this legal defence of large scale industrial property,
Proudhon argued, and replace it with commutatively (rather than nationally)
socialised property and labour relations, and society would thus be transformed. The
mutualist contract is the social contract par excellence ; it excludes all egoism, all
parasitism, the arbitrary, all agiotage [currency exchange fees], all dissolution.70 The
way to realise this is through radical democratic processes that allow the fullest
number to decide over the greatest variety of issues including economic ones
usually excluded in liberal and bourgeois republicanism.
If the political right is inherent to man and citizen, consequently if the vote must
be direct, the same right is also inherent, with stronger reason, to each group of
naturally trained citizens, to each corporation, each commune or city; and the vote
in each one of these groups, must also be direct.71
Thus not only individuals, but groups ought also to be constitutionally recognised at
the domestic level. Central to this was recognising the political capacity of the
working class (the title of his last work) not through statist representation, but
through autonomous self-governance constitutionally recognised and maintained by
the force of numbers and self-conscious power. Once social order was ensured
through mutualist federalism, it would, Proudhon argued, become less possible for
states to wage wars because they could not raise the taxes to pay for it without the
direct consent of the people; they could not raise the armies to fight and the absence
of abject social poverty would be less of a prompt for people to fight for the spoils of
war. Proudhons analysis was based on the Swiss confederation, but his anarchism is
socially revolutionary precisely because it halts the adventurism of states by hitting
them where it hurts the most in the pocket. Proudhons early work calls for the
erasure of states altogether; in Du Principe Fdratif he argues for states that
resemble the cantons of Switzerland, with political, social and economic cleavages
delegating to aggregate decision-making bodies.72 This detail often elides superficial
readings, but the states Proudhon advocates towards the end of his life are nothing
like the ones he had fought against for the previous twenty-five years. His use of the

Deepening anarchism
51
word state is confusing, but it is not a contradiction. It is nevertheless arguably a
form of revolutionary conservatism.
Bakunin, by contrast, did not have much to say about the balance of power as
such, nor did he seem to appreciate its structural constraints and its power to limit
the ambitions of revolutionaries in more localised contexts. Bakunin followed
Napoleon III, Mazzini and others in his desire to see the 1815 imperial settlement
wrecked, with little or any sense of the dystopia that would follow. What would
replace states and what would stop states from invading fledgling Bakuninist
communes such as in Spain? Despite being one of Proudhons closest friends and
intellectual compatriots, it is doubtful he ever read any of Proudhons works on
Poland, Italy or the balance of power. In Statism and Anarchy, his key text in later
life, his only reference to Proudhon was to argue that, [f ]or all his efforts to ground
himself in reality [ Proudhon was], an idealist and a metaphysician. His starting-
point is the abstract idea of right.73 This comment hardly gives one much to work
with, but has generally been adopted by the anarchist and Marxist faithful ever since.
Bakunins proclamations were populist and lacked substance. For example, in his
final speech to the League of Peace and Freedom, he denounced states altogether
and rephrased his anarchism:
And so I must come to this conclusion: He who is with us desires the establish-
ment of freedom, justice, and peace, he who desires the triumph of humanity and
the complete liberation of the mass of the people, must desire with us the destruc-
tion of all States and the foundation on their ruins of a world federation of free
productive associations of all countries.74
The League, with its bourgeois and conservative leaders was not up to the task. The
tool had been tried, it had been found unsuitable, it had to be thrown away; it only
remained to seek another. The International Working Mens Association presents
itself as such.75 From then on Bakunins focus became entirely workerist and interna-
tionalist, but always linked to a revolutionary and romantic nationalism. Among the
unintended consequences of this policy was to aggravate the powers of Europe into
war with the socialists who would not join the government, and a skilful outmanoeu-
vring of the populism of those who would. Bismarck was the expert here, and again,
fascism followed.76
With the fall of the Commune and his expulsion from the International,
Bakunin belatedly came to see the full implications of this German nationalism.
Irked also by Marxs authoritarianism, his Statism and Anarchy is Germanophobic.

Alex Prichard
52
He rightly worries about the future of Europe with a new and more virulent form of
Napoleonic power in the ascendancy.77 Again, he comes to this a little late but
then so did most of Europe. For example, Proudhon believed Germany was heading
for a peaceful federation of peoples where all would be able to enjoy the fruits of
unity without any of the risks of centralisation.78
CONCLUSION
Anarchists must take international relations more seriously and to do so must think
carefully about the autonomous power of states at the international level as well as of
class and other forms of social power in the domestic context, and then see how each
level interacts. Without this analysis of how state and (international) society interact,
anarchism will always flounder when it comes to the realistic basis of its political
programmes. Turning to the international can also open up the range of the possible
and give any normative analysis more depth and consistency. I have also argued that
faith in the possibility of an anarchist future is unrealistic as a form of social analysis
and as a political programme. It has failed in the past and will likely fail again.
I have made this argument by comparing Bakunin and Proudhons visions of
anarchism and the place of the international therein. For Proudhon, European
international relations were a window onto all social relations. By this I mean
Proudhon believed that international relations exhibited the model social order for
domestic relations a self-regulating (in the future socialist) anarchy of social groups
loosely federated and internally democratic and constitutionalised. All social groups
ought to socialise their internal property relations, organise democratically and
constitutionalise their internal relations. Federation between social groups, from the
bottom upwards, is the natural corollary.
I have also argued that insurrectionary nationalism, a blind faith in the down-
trodden and an essential human nature that would spring up once the yoke of empire
was removed, was nave and did not reflect the weight of evidence. I would conclude
that Bakunins anarchism is therefore fundamentally flawed. Bakunin advocated an
international order much like the one Proudhon had championed, but his faith in
the people was misplaced, his later workerist blinkers no less so, and his theory of
spontaneous revolution tragically utopian. His failure to comprehend the precarious
equilibrium between states and his insistence that revolutionary nationalism would
bring about their demise was tragic. Proudhons principle of federation seems, with
hindsight, a far more practical and realistic path to social stability and benign social
change than Bakunins in the contexts in which they were advanced, which raises

Deepening anarchism
53
serious questions for contemporary insurrectionary anarchisms.
Recall that Gordon argued two things. First, that anarcho-syndicalists had an
overly romantic view of the nation and the ability of working class mobilisation to
provide the ends we all crave. It seems that anarcho-syndicalists are not only
hamstrung where no such class consciousness exits but, I would add, that they have
also forgotten their history. However, Gordon also argued that anarchists are not
only wasting their time in speculating about international affairs, they are also being
decidedly un-anarchistic: not only are politicians not exactly asking anarchists their
opinion, but also, to offer a strategy of social change informed by and reflective upon
the dynamics of international relations would be a strategy far removed from anar-
chism. I have tried to show that if anarchists do not bear in mind history and the
international context, and frame their prescriptions in terms which take these ques-
tions into consideration, they will simply fail.
I do not propose to offer simple anarchistic answers to the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict that would demand another paper, probably a book but I would
suggest that if anarchists want to have any relevance in contemporary political
debate, they need to understand and pay attention to international politics more
not less, and they need to move away from the tried, tested and failed Bakuninist
dogmas. Proudhon surely offers an alternative, but it is impossible here to reflect
on how we might use his writings to understand the contemporary world order.79
That said, a few general points can be made. Proudhons writings would suggest
that in order to be realistic about our prospects for large scale social change we
must first conduct rigorous class and historical analysis before the advocacy of
insurrection. Anarchist analysis demands an understanding of the regional power
balances before one tries to overturn them. Finally, respect peoples political
choices and build mutual trust through institutions (however informal, and in this
sense I agree with Gordon) before smashing or advocating the dismantling of what
little the downtrodden have.
Anarchists would also do well to recognise that Proudhon had quite consider-
able foresight, and this historical I told you so is not insignificant. Expanding his
analysis into a full-blown theory of international politics is beyond the scope of this
conclusion, but I would argue that a return to his thought might be a worthwhile
endeavour for anyone with an interest in how anarchism can speak to the interna-
tional or inter-state context in which all our actions inevitably take place.
This article was completed during an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship at the

University of Bristol. I hereby gratefully acknowledge this support. Grant code: PTA-

Alex Prichard
54
026-27-2404. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Jean-Christophe
Angaut, Uri Gordon, Piki Ish Shalom, Ruth Kinna, George Lawson, Paul
McLaughlin and participants at the International History Group seminar at the
Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University for extremely valuable
comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Unless indicated by the source text, all
translations and errors are my own.
Alex Prichard is LSE Fellow in International Relations at the London School of

Economics. He was awarded his PhD from Loughborough University in 2008
and has since held posts at the Universities of Bath and Bristol. He is currently
finalising a book on the international political theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
and completing a number of articles bringing anarchism to the discipline of
International Relations and world politics to anarchist thought. He is a founding
member and convenor of the PSA Anarchist Studies Network.
Email: w.a.prichard@lse.ac.uk
NOTES
1. Cited in Laffey, Mark. Discerning the Patterns of World Order: Noam Chomsky and
International Theory after the Cold War. Review of International Studies 29, no. 4
(2003): 599.
2. Ibid. NB: IR upper-case denotes the discipline of International Relations, interna-
tional relations (lower case) refers to the object of study.
3. Ibid, 603.
4. See Prichard, Alex. What can the Absence of Anarchism tell us about the History and
Purpose of IR? in Review of International Studies (forthcoming).
5. Until rather recently this was also common to Marxist thought. For a good collection
of essays that develop a Trotskyist approach to world politics see: Debating Uneven
and Combined Development: Towards a Marxist theory of the International in
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22 no. 1, 2009.
6. See Prichard, Alex. Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Millennium: Journal of International Studies
35, no. 3 (2007): 623-45.
7. Charles Besley cited in Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. La Guerre et la Paix, Recherches sur la
Principe et la Constitution du Droit des Gens. Nouvelle ed. 2 vols. Paris: Editions Tops,
1998, 247.

Deepening anarchism
55
8. Falk, Richard. Anarchism and World Order. In Nomos XIX: Anarchism, edited by J.
Roland Pennock and John Chapman. New York: New York University Press, 1979:
63-87.
9. Weiss, Thomas G. The Tradition of Philosophical Anarchism and Future Directions
in World Policy. Journal of Peace Research 12 (1975): 1-17.
10. Turner, Scott. Global Civil Society, Anarchy and Governance: Assessing an Emerging
Paradigm. Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 1 (1998): 25-42.
11. Divergences http://divergences.be/spip.php?article1144 [Accessed 26/01/09]
12. Gordon, Uri. Anarchy Alive: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory.
London: Pluto Press, 2008: 149-153.
13. Ibid., 152.
14. Ibid, p. 150; 165
15. Ibid., 154.
16. Ibid, 156.
17. Gordon, Uri. Israeli anarchism: Statist dilemmas and the dynamics of joint struggle.
Anarchist Studies 15, no. 1 (2003), p. 27.
18. Metternich cited in Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix, 214.
19. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. France et Rhin, Oeuvres Posthumes De P. J. Proudhon. Paris:
A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Companie, 1868: 223-225.
20. Ibid., 27, 28.
21. Proudhon, Si les Traits de 1815 ont Cess dExister, 306.
22. Ibid., 74-75.
23. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. La Fdration et lUnit en Italie. Paris: E. Dentu, 1862: 13.
24. Ibid., 30. cf., Taylor, A. J. P. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1954: 115.
25. Proudhon Du Principe Fdratif, 141.
26. Ibid., 147.
27. Pernicone, Nunzio. Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892. Princeton, N.J. ; Chichester:
Princeton University Press, 1993: 17.
28. Ibid., 18.
29. Bakunin, Mikhail. Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990: 55.
30. Ibid., 30.
31. Ibid., 31.
32. For each of these see Gurin, Daniel (ed.), No Gods, No Masters. Trans. Paul Sharkey.
Oakland, CA; Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005. For more on the League see Hazareesingh,
Sudhir. Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century French

Alex Prichard
56
Political Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. See also Carr, E.H. Michael
Bakunin. London: Macmillan, 1937.
33. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century.
Trans. John Beverley Robinson. London: Pluto Press, 1989, pp. 282-287.
34. Guerin, No Gods, no Masters, 155.
35. Cited in Shatz Introduction in Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, xvi.
36. Bakunin Statism and Anarchy, 33.
37. Ibid., 30.
38. Guerin No Gods no Masters, 183.
39. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 133.
40. Ibid., 135.
41. Bakunin, Michael. On the 17th Anniversary of the Polish Insurrection of 1830
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1847/poland-speech.htm
[Accessed 14/11/08].
43. Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1993: 96.
44. Cited in, Serge Cipko Mikhail Bakunin and the National Question, The Raven: anar-
chist quarterly, 9, January 1990. Volume 3, number 1. Available at
http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=3423 [Accessed 12/11/08].
45. Carr, Michael Bakunin, 285-286.
46. Bakunin, Michael, Appeal to my Polish Brothers, available at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/bakunin/russianbrothers.html
[Accessed 14/11/08].
48. Ibid., 49.
49. Ibid., 114. Emphasis added.
50. Carr, Michael Bakunin, 331.
51. Woodcock, George. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography. London: Routledge and
Keegan Paul, 1956: 239.
52. Available at the Biblioteque Municipal de Besanoon. This volume will be published
in French at the end of 2010.
54. Ibid., 298.
55. Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix, 175.
57. Proudhon. Du Principe Fdratif , 85. cf., Proudhon La Guerre et la Paix, 176-178.

Deepening anarchism
57
58. Cf. Amoudruz, Proudhon et lEurope, 77.
60. Davies, Norman. Gods Playground: A History of Poland Vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1981: 41.
61. Ibid., 6.
62. Ibid., 80.
63. Proudhon, Du Principe Fdratif, 163.
64. Cited in, Ritter, Alan. The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969: 26.
65. Cf. Teschke, Benno. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern
International Relations. London: Verso, 2003.
67. Ibid.
68. Proudhon, Du Principe Fdratif, 253. Emphasis added. For a thorough examination
of the origins of capitalism in this process see Teschke, Benno. The myth of 1648:
Class, geopolitics, and the making of modern international relations London: Verso,
2003.
69. Ibid, 46.
70. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. De La Capacit Politique Des Classes Oeuvrires. Paris:
Slatkine, 1982: 193.
71. Ibid., 268. Emphasis added.
72. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. The Principle of Federation. Trans. Richard Vernon. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1979: 61.
74. Carr, Michael Bakunin, 343
75. Ibid., 344
76. Pflanze, Otto. Nationalism in Europe, 1848-1871, The Review of Politics, 28, 1966:
131.
77. Shatz, Introduction, xxx.
78. Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix, 180.
79. For more on this see Prichard, Alex. Rethinking the State and Anarchy in IR Theory:
The Promises of Classical Anarchism (forthcoming) and Prichard, Alex. David Held
is an Anarchist. Discuss. (forthcoming).

Henry Adams and Andrei Bely:

The explosive mind
Caroline V. Hamilton
ABSTRACT
Although they belonged to different generations, the Russian novelist Andrei Bely
(1880-1934) and the American writer Henry Adams (1838-1918) were conservative
anti-statists who responded in illuminatingly similar ways to the new century. Both
framed their anti-statism in generational terms. Both deployed the imagery of chaos
and explosion to meditate upon what is often called the crisis of European civiliza-
tion, of which anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and World War I were
manifestations. While neither The Education of Henry Adams (1907) nor Belys high
modernist novel Petersburg (1913) attempts to represent anarchism as a political
movement, they have related concerns: anarchy and chaos, force and power, the
divided or fragmented self, Russia as a natural site for anarchy, an ambivalent fasci-
nation with oppositional politics. I call Bely and Adams fellow travellers of
anarchism, despite that ambivalence and their self-contradictory political attitudes,
because they recognise and invoke the anarchist sublime.
Keywords Anarchism, Dynamite, Henry Adams, Andrei Bely, Russian Revolution of 1905, Peter
Kropotkin, Plehve, Alfred Nobel, Madame Curie, Tolstoy
Bombs educate vigorously.

Henry Adams
In 1864 Emil Nobel and four other people were killed while working with nitroglyc-
erine in the explosives factory of Emils older brother Alfred. The Swedish
government closed down the factory, and Alfred resumed his experiments on a barge.
Three years after his brothers death, he invented dynamite: a mixture of nitroglyc-
Henry Adams and Andrei Bely

59
erine and kieselguhr, a porous siliceous earth, safer to handle than pure nitroglycerine,
set off with a blasting cap or detonator that Nobel perfected. The invention of
dynamite made Alfred Nobel a rich man. He patented it in Sweden, Britain and the
United States, and improved on his recipe, substituting wood pulp for kieselguhr,
adding sodium nitrate, and later inventing a more powerful gelatinous version. A
recluse, bachelor, and pacifist, Nobel would leave much of his fortune for annual,
international prizes, to be awarded, as he specified, in chemistry, medicine, physics,
literature and peace, to those who had contributed to the betterment of mankind.1
Dynamite was widely used during Nobels lifetime in mining, railroad construc-
tion, quarries and other destructively constructive projects. Chemically, it is a high
or detonating explosive, as opposed to a low or deflagrating explosive.
Nitroglycerine is its sensitizer. High explosives expand rapidly, producing heat and
gases; the chemical reaction spreads in a detonation wave, a particular kind of shock
wave possessing constant amplitude and velocity. Shock waves in turn are a kind of
acoustic wave, which is why dynamite explosions make a loud noise.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dynamite became associated
with the political violence of revolutionary anarchism. It improved the odds,
allowing a single worker to strike a palpable blow. In his history of the period, Eric
Hobsbawm refers to the anarchist epidemic of assassinations in the 1890s, to which
two monarchs, two presidents, and one prime minister fell victim.2 Ordinary people
were killed too. Emile Henry tossed a bomb into a Parisian restaurant, later
explaining, there are no innocent bourgeois. In Chicago in 1886 working men
gathered at the Haymarket for a rally; when the police showed up, someone in the
crowd hurled a bomb at them. Eight anarchists were held responsible and hanged. In
1893 Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb from the gallery into the French chamber of
deputies; no one was killed, but Vaillant was executed, crying Vive lanarchie!.
As a metaphor of sudden expansion and violent destruction, dynamite would
capture the fin-de-sicle imagination as computer jargon does today. In one of her
essays on the drama, Goldman wrote of Ibsen, Ghosts has acted like a bomb explo-
sion, shaking the social structure to its very foundations.3 As the guillotine had been
for the French Revolution, the bomb became the signature or signifier of anarchism.
Its signified was social revolution, cosmic chaos. The anarchist infatuation with the
bomb during the turn of the century was indicative of a tendency to represent
material events in a metaphoric, even aestheticised, way. The discourse of the bomb
belongs to the dynamical or revolutionary sublime, which the anarchists imagined as
ushering in the stateless utopia, implicitly ruled by the aesthetic category of the beau-
tiful.

60
All violence, even that motivated by understandable outrage, is irreconcilable
with any notion of beauty. No matter how vile the target, he inevitably becomes an
object of sympathy once he too is reduced to the state of suffering, frightened
humanity. Alexander Berkman attacked Frick because of his sympathy for the
Homestead workers, whose sufferings Frick had caused. Berkmans motivation can be
understood; the whole country seemed appalled by the Homestead lock-out. But
once Frick lay bleeding on his office floor, it was Berkman who became the monster.
By the same token, during their trials and executions, the Haymarket anarchists and
Sacco and Vanzetti aroused the sympathy of many middle-class Americans, who
suddenly saw anarchists as individuals, as human beings like themselves. As a polit-
ical tactic, violence often seems to be self-defeating, and the more anarchists were
identified with violence, the more unsympathetic they seemed to outsiders.
But, as workers pointed out, the ruling classes were unlikely to give up their priv-
ileges and possessions unless forced to do so. Humanitarian persuasion had made no
headway with plantation owners; it had taken a civil war to free the American slaves.
At the end of the nineteenth century Europe seemed to many anarchists a vast
gunpowder keg, needing only the right spark to set it off .4
Its historical specificity and metaphorical implications make the dynamite bomb
a particularly appropriate master trope for modernist literature. To political oppo-
nents of anarchism, the revolutionary bomb signifies the destruction of order, but to
some modernists the bomb had a positive charge.
CONSERVATIVE ANTI-STATISTS
Although they belonged to different generations, the Russian novelist Andrei Bely
(1880-1934) and the American writer Henry Adams (1838-1918) were conservative
anti-statists who responded in illuminatingly similar ways to the new century. Both
framed their anti-statism in generational terms. Both were interested in modern
science and mathematics, though Bely sought to present his version of mysticism as a
science, while Adams grappled with scientific orthodoxies. Like Adams, Bely, whose
father was a mathematician, was fascinated by new theories about mathematics and
physics natural forces, energy, infinity, unity, disorder.5 I call Bely and Adams
fellow travellers of anarchism, despite their ambivalent and self-contradictory polit-
ical attitudes, because they recognise and invoke the anarchist sublime.
Henry Adams and Andrei Bely deploy the imagery of chaos and explosion to
meditate upon what is often called the crisis of European civilization, of which anar-
chism, the Russian Revolution, and World War I were manifestations. While neither


61
The Education of Henry Adams (hereafter referenced as EHA) (1907) nor Belys
high modernist novel Petersburg (hereafter referenced as P) (1913) attempts to
represent anarchism as a political movement, they have related concerns: anarchy
and chaos, force and power, the divided or fragmented self, Russia as a natural site
for anarchy, an ambivalent fascination with oppositional politics. The contempo-
raneity of the two texts is even more specific: Petersburg is set during the 1905
Russian Revolution, and The Education concludes with the year 1905. For both
writers, furthermore, order is culture and anarchy is nature.
A particular bomb appears in both Petersburg and The Education. Both texts
specifically allude to the assassination of the notorious Russian Minister of the
Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, killed by a bomb thrown by a Socialist Revolutionary
on July 28, 1904.6 In his own account of 1905, Leon Trotsky evocatively describes
Plehve: he loathed the revolution with the fierce loathing of a police detective
grown old in his profession, threatened by a bomb from around every corner; he
pursued sedition with bloodshot eyes but in vain.7 The assassination was carried
out by the Battle Organisation, the terrorist wing of the Social Revolutionists, and
was approved by Evno Azef, who was both head of the Battle Organisation and a
secret agent of the police.8 Almost everyone except the tsar was happy about Plehves
death.9 Edward Judge, Plehves biographer, writes that by arousing or increasing the
enmity of almost every segment of the population, he had set in motion the forces
which had led to the Russian revolution of 1905, and accordingly he was the prin-
cipal author of this revolution.10
One of Petersburgs main characters, Apollon Apollonovich, is a friend and
protg of Plehve who occasionally thinks of the assassination.11 At the end of
Chapter 32 of The Education, Adams is wandering through the streets of Troyes
when he sees a notice posted in a shop window announcing the ministers assassina-
tion in St Petersburg. What Adams describes as the mad mixture of Russia and the
Crusades causes him to enter a nearby church and admire its windows as he ponders
the nexus of history and politics. Was assassination forever to be the last word of
Progress? he wonders. The church seems all the more serene for its contrast with
explosive murder, and Adams wonders with whom the conservative Christian anar-
chist should identify, the victim or the assassin.
THE CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN ANARCHIST

In a description that might apply to Andrei Bely too, Jackson Lears describes Henry
Adams as an antimodern modernist whose yearnings for authenticity and faith

62
coincided with his acceptance of a fragmented self in a fragmented universe;
accordingly, Adams prefigured the modern consciousness celebrated by many
avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the twentieth century.12
Adamss disturbing anti-Semitism, hostility to immigrants and nostalgia for the
past were among his reactionary traits. His intellectual heroes (high priests) were
Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill; according to Adamss biographer Ernest
Samuels, he had come wholly under the sway of his [Mills] libertarian doctrines.13
The two figures are suggestive of the complexities and potential contradictions of
Adamss politics. Tocqueville combined aristocratic loyalties and a belief in the
organic ties of feudal communities with a dislike of the cash nexus and a fear of what
he famously called the tyranny of the majority. The author of On Liberty, Mill was a
libertarian and an individualist, and a proponent of womens rights who advocated a
fairer distribution of wealth and admired the American anarchist Josiah Warren, but
who feared democracy, revolution and socialism.14
Critics have puzzled over Adamss description of himself as a conservative Christian
anarchist. Peter Conn explains it as follows: If we understand Adamss witty formula-
tion properly and loosely, if we take it to summarize a profound internal dialectic, a
conflict between tradition and innovation, between control and independence, between
order and liberation, then we might accept Adamss phrase as an epigraph to the cultural
history of the period.15 Conns response is smart and suggestive of the political, but
insufficiently specific. Katherine Hayles reads Adamss phrase as a three-part structure
marked by a void, a paradoxical antithesis.16 Other possible formulations, however,
would have provided the same tripartite structure or seeming antithesis pacifist revo-
lutionary aristocrat, for example so why this particular choice?
It is not difficult to accept Adamss characterisation of himself as conservative.
What immediately distinguished him from other boys is not character, he explains in
the beginning of The Education, but education as a result of that eighteenth-century
inheritance which he took with his name (EHA, 7). It is this sense of belonging to
the past that grounds Adamss conservatism for the rest of his life. His loyalties lie
with Quincy, the eighteenth-century home of his grandfather John Quincy Adams,
not with Boston, home of his capitalist grandfather Brooks (EHA, 21-22). In the
first chapter of The Education, these themes are already evident: The atmosphere of
education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, Adams
writes, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmothers birth, in the door
of political crime (EHA, 7).
Resistance to authority, as both a New England and Adams family trait, first
evinces itself in the boy Henrys rebellion one day against going to school, the


63
education that he hated (EHA, 12). His grandfather, former president John Quincy
Adams, walks him silently to school. A series of doublings and oppositions is intro-
duced: New England summers contrasted with New England winters, mercantile
Boston with agrarian Quincy, giving the boy a double nature (EHA, 9). The boy
Henry takes sides early: Town [Boston] was restraint, law, unity. Country, only
seven miles away [Quincy], was liberty, diversity, outlawry (EHA, 8). The young
conservative Christian anarchist prefers liberty and outlawry. The first part of The
Education, observes Carolyn Porter, reveals the incoherence of the authoritative
systems social, political, intellectual presiding over nineteenth-century society.17
The word anarchist encodes for Adams American, anti-statist, scientist and
anti-capitalist. It is remarkable that Adams would label himself thus in light of his
ancestry direct descent from two heads of state and despite the 1901 assassina-
tion of McKinley by a self-proclaimed anarchist. Adamss anti-capitalism is explicit in
The Education: he had, in a half-hearted way, struggled all his life against State
Street, Banks, Capitalism altogether as he knew it in Old England or New
England(EHA, 335); and Of all forms of society or government, this [capitalism]
was the one he liked least(EHA, 344). Capitalism is inherently anti-conservative, in
that, as Marx writes in the Communist Manifesto, its constant revolutionizing of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty
and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times.18
Adams also specifies that he is a Christian anarchist, thereby presumably distin-
guishing himself from the atheist and Jewish anarchists, but Adams feels some
vocational calling. Nature had given to the boy Henry, he writes, a character that, in
any previous century, would have led him into the Church (EHA, 26). Yet history
and culture trump this natural inclination; Adams admits that neither to him nor to
his brothers or sisters was religion real The religious instinct had vanished and
could not be revived (EHA, 34). As is apparent in Mont St Michel and Chartres,
Adamss Christianity is primarily aesthetic, taking the form of an attraction to the
thought and architecture of the Middle Ages. But the Church finds itself at odds
with modern science, whose theories prompt Adamss most profound engagement
with anarchy.
BELYS POLITICAL CONTRADICTIONS

Because of his attraction to the occult, his occasional anti-Semitism, and his fear of the
East, Andrei Bely might be taken for yet another modernist reactionary, appropriate
company for Eliot and Pound. In Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky analyzes the

64
politics of Bely and his fellow Russian Symbolists scathingly but with insight,
observing: Belys roots are in the past. But where is the old harmony now? On the
contrary, everything seems shaken up to Bely, everything is aslant, everything is thrown
out of equilibrium.19 According to Trotsky, Bely is a conservative, nostalgic for the aris-
tocratic, pastoral Russia of Tolstoy, Goncharov, and Turgenev:
Belys apparent dynamics mean only a running around and a struggling on the
mounds of a disappearing and disintegrating old regime. His verbal twists lead
nowhere. He has no hint of ideal revolutionism. In his core he is a realistic and spir-
itual conservative who has lost the ground under his feet and is in despair Torn
from the pivot of custom and individualism, Bely wishes to replace the whole
world with himself, to build everything anew from himself and through himself, to
discover everything anew in himself but his works, with all their different artistic
values, invariably represent a poetic or spiritualist sublimation of the old customs.20
Bely is more complex than Trotsky grants. His biographer, John Elsworth, writes:
Since the autumn of 1905, when he had witnessed the rising in Moscow and voted
for the transformation of the university into a revolutionary tribunal, and even
taken an active part when the university was then besieged, Belys sympathies had
been on the side of the revolutionary movement.21
Among Belys friends in this period were young men who identified themselves as
anarchists, such as Lev Lvovich Kobylinsky and Leonid Semenov.22 In a letter to
Blok in December 1911, Bely wrote, referring to the influence of Gregory Chulkov
and Ivanov, We were all mystical anarchists at that time.23
A personal acquaintance of Bely, Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) describes him as
a revolutionary, not a reactionary, a literary cubist and the only genuine and signifi-
cant futurist in Russian literature.24 In a passage that evokes the bomb, Berdyaev
declares: Bely belongs to a new era where the perception of man as a whole has been
shaken and man is passing through a process of fission. Bely plunges man into
cosmic infinity, he hands him over to be torn by cosmic whirlwinds.25
AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN ANTI-STATISM

Who does not desire his fathers death? asks Ivan Karamazov. Both Adams and Bely
represent anarchism as a revolt of the sons against the ruling fathers. In keeping with


65
a master trope of Russian literature, Bely figures political strife as intergenerational.
The plot of Petersburg turns on the assignment of Nicholas Apollonovich to assassi-
nate his father, Apollon Apollonovich, a powerful government minister. Because an
anarchist is above all an anti-statist, Adams, descended from two heads of state, is
implicated in an anti-patriarchal stance.
The native lands of Bely and Adams, Russia and the United States, share some
obvious but striking similarities: their immense size and diverse populations, ambiva-
lent attitudes toward Europe, the institutions of serfdom (abolished in 1861) and
slavery (abolished in 1863). Both also have an indigenous tradition of anti-statist
thought. The anarchists Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman were all Russian by birth. Like Joseph Conrad, Henry Adams
articulates the rather startling notion that the United States is a country particularly
hospitable to anarchism.26 The tension between the powerful tsarist bureaucracy and
the anarchic Russian people echoes the founding American struggle between the
urban centralism of Alexander Hamilton and the decentralised rural life champi-
oned by Jefferson.
One version of Russian anti-statism is nihilism, often confused with anarchism
and made infamous by Bakunins disciple Sergei Nechaev.27 Nihilists, Peter
Kropotkin explains, insist on reason and on absolute sincerity, on the rejection of
the conventional lies of civilized mankind, including religion and sentimentalism;
and art was also negated, since every object of art was bought with money exacted
from starving peasants or from underpaid workers.28 The Russian nihilists appear in
numerous famous nineteenth-century novels, including Turgenevs Fathers and Sons,
Dostoyevskys The Devils, Chernyshevskys What is to be Done? and Goncharovs
Precipice. Turgenev and Dostoyevsky represent nihilism as a rebellion of the sons
against the fathers, a theme that Bely adopts in Petersburg.
Anti-statism has a distinguished lineage in American history and literature.
Historians and proponents of anarchism have found evidence of anti-statist thought
in Antinomianism (Anne Hutchinson), Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Charles
Brockden Brown, and the Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman). In
America, Adams writes in The Education,
all were conservative Christian anarchists; the faith was national, racial, geographic.
The true American had not seen such supreme virtue in any of the innumerable
shades between social anarchy and social order as to mark it for exclusively human
and his own. He had never known a complete union either in Church or State or
Thought, and had never seen any need for it (EHA, 408).

66
It is in this sense, the revolutionary nature of the American character in the absence
of the crushing European institutions of Church and State, that every American is an
anarchist.
But while Russian anarchism is collectivist, American anarchism is predomi-
nantly individualist. At Walden Thoreau does not start a commune but separates
himself from his fellows. American anarchist and Wagner-buff Benjamin Tucker was
a leading exponent of individualist libertarian thought. In Anarchy and Authority in
American Literature, Irving Howe cites the propertyless status and wandering
propensities of Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn and Jim, all fleeing the encroaching state
in the clash between anarchic yearning and fixed authority.29
According to Adams, Russia is even more anarchic than the United States. He
calls Russias opposite condition a more interesting phase of conservative Christian
anarchy, citing the dominance, not the absence, of a powerful Church and State, the
presence of orthodox Jews and Virgin-adoring peasants, of nomads and tribes. The
contrast is between Americas hasty and unsure acceleration and Russian inertia
(EHA, 411). It seems to Adams that this inertia is virtually racial: The Russian
people could never have changed could they ever be changed? (EHA, 409). The
primitiveness of the Russians causes Adams to doubt the truth of evolution and
progress.
In The Russian Idea Berdyaev substantiates some of Adamss intuitions about the
Russian character, devoting a chapter to Russian anarchism, the causes of which, he
suggests, are both historical and psychological:
Throughout the nineteenth century the Intelligentsia fought against the Empire
and professed a stateless non-authoritarian ideal, and created extreme forms of
anarchist ideology An original anarchic element may be discerned in all social
tendencies of the Russian nineteenth century, both religious and anti-religious; in
the great Russian writers, in the very make-up of the Russian character, a make-up
which certainly did not lend itself to being organized Among a people who were
anarchist in their fundamental bent, there existed a State that developed to a
monstrous degree, and an all-powerful bureaucracy surrounding an autocratic Tsar
and separating him from the people The Russian feeling for freedom was
connected with anarchism rather than with the strict principle of liberalism.30
According to Berdyaev, Russian anarchism and mysticism are not strange bedfellows
as they would be in the West. They are combined in the Christian anarchism of Lev
Tolstoy, whom Bely knew as a child. In The Law of Love and The Law of Violence


67
(1908), a text closely contemporary with The Education and Petersburg, Tolstoy
wrote: People are so accustomed to the political structure in which they live that to
them it seems an unavoidably permanent form of human existence. But it only seems
so; people have lived and do live, outside the political structure The State is only a
temporary thing and in no way a permanent feature of human life.31
POLITICAL PETERSBURG
Russian writers of the nineteenth century tended to fall into two camps: those who,
like Turgenev, admired European culture and institutions, and the Slavophiles who,
like Dostoyevsky, feared that European influences would destroy Russian culture and
religion.32 The focus for some of this debate was the city of Petersburg, the Venice
of the North, built by Peter the Great according to a European model in the marshes
and fog of western Russia.
As the city was founded by and named after a czar and became the site of a vast
government bureaucracy, it is an appropriate image for that State which anarchists
sought to destroy. Alexander Pushkins poem The Bronze Horseman (whose title
refers to a statue of Peter) describes the flooding of the city and the resulting
madness of a poor clerk who imagines that the statue comes to life and pursues him.
As one critic writes, From Pushkin onward, the Petersburg cityscape, centring
around the Neva [River], would embody the image of a Cosmos never wholly safe
from the incursions of that Chaos from which it was wrested.33 Nikolai Gogol,
whose famous story about a government clerk, The Overcoat, is set in Petersburg,
wrote to his mother, Petersburg is not half what I expected I had thought of it as
much more beautiful, magnificent All the civil servants and officials can talk
about is their department or government office; everything seems to have been
crushed under a great weight.34 In Notes from Underground Dostoyevsky called
Petersburg the most abstract and premeditated town on the whole terrestrial
globe.35
The novel Petersburg is as formally innovative and politically ambivalent as
almost any of its canonical Anglo-American counterparts. It contains at least two
related major plots, one concerning the assignment of a young man to blow up his
father, a government official, with a bomb, the other concerning the same young
mans thwarted love for a married woman. Both plots play upon familiar thematics of
Russian literature and both interweave the public and the private, the political and
the metaphysical.
As with Joyces Ulysses and Kafkas novels, however, literary critics have tended to

68
neglect the political dimension of Petersburg in favour of its colour symbolism,
Freudianism, appropriation of mystical systems, and indebtedness to Gogol,
Dostoyevsky and other Russian novelists. Also like Ulysses, Petersburg might seem
anarchic at first reading but it contains a complex, orderly network of relationships.
These in turn are subverted, even jeopardised, by the imminence of explosion.
Because Petersburgs fictional and historical context is a revolutionary one, a
reading of its politics is necessary to its interpretation. No single reading can exhaust
the possible interpretations of such a multifaceted novel. But as the copious notes to
the authoritative translation of the novel suggests, Bely did have contemporary social
issues and political figures in mind as he wrote. Like Berman in All That Is Solid
Melts Into Air, therefore, I want to situate the novel in the context of the 1905 revo-
lution, and to recover its political unconscious. Unlike Berman, however, I am
arguing that anarchy and anarchism are constitutive of the aesthetics and politics of
the novel.
It might even be argued that the political unconscious of Petersburg is anarchist
in the broadest sense of the word, at the level of narration. In an article on the
linguistic features of the novel, Cynthia Simmons considers Belys use of non-
authoritarian discourse meaning that characters are not speaking through the
author.36 Non-authoritarian narrative forms, she explains, create an atmosphere of
verbal, as well as material, chaos and discourse failure. In particular, she notes the
presence of free indirect discourse, the form of non-authoritarian discourse most
conducive to the intermingling of codes (Bakhtins polyphony). Accordingly, Belys
own philosophical and political ideas are not imposed on the characters: the indi-
vidualization of codes serves to counter the authority and personality of the
narrator. Since authority was the chief target of anarchists, Simmonss argument is
suggestive for a reading of Petersburgs politics. Indeed, both authority and author-
ship are thematised and problematised. The narrative strategy of Petersburg is radical
precisely in what might be regarded as its anarchist refusal to endorse any single
authority or point of view. If indeterminacy and non-authoritarian features are
coded into the very fabric of the narration, anarchy is the de-centring centre of Belys
aesthetic.
The 1905 revolutions most infamous event took place in Petersburg on 9
January Bloody Sunday, when hundreds of workers who marched on the Winter
Palace to plead with the czar were murdered in the streets. The successful Russian
revolution of 1917 has overshadowed the failed revolution of 1905, but according to
Adam Ulam, the revolution of 1905 was the most elemental and all-encompassing
of the three the country was to experience in this century. The volume and ubiquity


69
of revolutionary turbulence surpassed anything which was to be witnessed either in
February or in October 1917.37 And while the Russian Revolution has also become
falsely synonymous with a single group, Lenins 13,000 Bolsheviks, these were by no
means the only revolutionaries on the Russian scene.38 In addition to the 18,000
Mensheviks there was the much larger group of Socialist Revolutionaries, whose
program and tactics were a curious blend of old populism, Marxism, and outright
anarchism.39
There were also anarchists proper anarchist-communists, anarcho-syndicalists,
and individualist anarchists, among them members of avant-garde circles in the arts
and disaffected former members of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social
Democrats.40 One historian of the 1905 revolution describes the anarchists role in
events as follows:
Once the revolution of 1905 began, some Social Democrats and SRs came under
the spell of the anarchist creed Although a few anarchist groups followed the
more benign teachings of Kropotkin and devoted themselves to propaganda and
agitation among the masses, in 1905 the advocates of terrorism held sway within
the movement. Adhering to Bakunins well-known dictum that the urge to destroy
is also a creative urge and convinced that their acts of violence would stimulate the
yearning for revenge by the masses against their exploiters, the terrorists carried out
numerous armed robberies to enable them to secure weapons, which they used to
assassinate officials. In the last months of 1905 hardly a day passed without some
anarchist outrage being reported in the daily press.41
It is the SR, with its anarchist wing and tendencies, who, I suspect, figure as the
conspirators in Belys Petersburg. The novels historical referents to anarchism are,
first, the actual presence of anarchist terrorists in the 1905 revolution; second, the
philosophical presence of mystical anarchism, with which Bely was familiar; and,
third, the metaphor of the bomb, which in this period is always an anarchist signifier.
Another historical footnote to the novel is the importance of double agents
and provocateurs to the 1905 Revolution. The secret police, in the form of the
agent-provocateur Lippanchenko, are also present in Petersburg. In a misguided
strategy, the secret police chief Serge Zubatov, who had been a member of the
radical Peoples Will, sought to unionise workers and align them with the czar, but
succeeded primarily in educating them about the Western labour movement and
raising their class consciousness.42 It was Zubatovs secret agent Evno Azef who
participated in the assassination of Plehve; the name Lippanchenko was one of

70
Azef s aliases.43 A secret agent rather than a genuine anarchist is at the heart of a
nefarious bomb plot.
The revolutionary context is explicit at various points of the novel. In chapter 6,
for example, the scope of revolutionary activity throughout Russia is described:
bomb-making in Tiflis, agitation at the universities (the universities of Russia were
one big mass meeting), red flags at the Reval iron works, strikes on the Moscow-
Kazan railway line, factory workers and longshoremen on strike in Petersburg. Yet, as
Berman recognises, for all the books panoramic scope, it never really gets close to
the workers who compose so much of the swarming myriapod, and who are the
driving force behind the 1905 revolution.44 Certainly this distance distinguishes
Petersburg not only from Gorkys Mother (1907), which Berman dislikes, but also
from another bomb novel, Frank Harriss The Bomb.
Petersburg pits Apollonian order and hierarchy against the Dionysian chaos of
the bomb, revolution, anarchism. Of the state bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich,
Bely writes: Only his love for the plane geometry of the state had invested him in
the polyhedrality of a responsible position (P, 11). As the state and Petersburg are
aligned with the forces of order, the islands that surround the city are aligned with
revolution and anarchy. Apollon Apollonovichs name comes from Nietzsches The
Birth of Tragedy, as do Dudkins references to the Dionysian. Dudkin says to Nikolai
Apollonovich, We are all Nietzscheans, and you are a Nietzschean, though you
wouldnt admit it (P, 57). Apollon Apollonovich rides through Petersburg in a
carriage, like Plehve, and like him fears assassination from someone on the streets. In
one scene he espies Dudkin, the terrorist who will later give Nikolai Apollonovich
the bomb intended for his father:
Contemplating the flowing silhouettes, Apollon Apollonovich likened them to

shining dots. One of these dots broke loose from its orbit and hurtled at him with
dizzying speed, taking the form of an immense crimson sphere
among the bowlers on the corner, he caught sight of a pair of eyes. And the
eyes expressed the inadmissible. They recognized the senator, and having recog-
nized him, they grew rabid, dilated, lit up, and flashed.
Subsequently, on delving into the details of the matter, Apollon Apollonovich
understood rather than remembered that the upstart intellectual was holding a
bundle in his hand (P, 14).
Among the anarchist ideas present in the novel are those articulated by the
upstart intellectual Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, whose mind is a virtual


71
compendium of anarchist theories popular at the turn of the century.45 Dudkin is a
representative of the so-called mystical anarchists whose ranks included
Vyacheveslav Ivanov, the Wagnerian Georgy Chulkov, and the symbolist poet
Alexander Blok. Their existence provides further confirmation of the link between
anarchism and modernism, as Prince Mirsky notes: the ascendancy of Ivanov over
the modernist circles of Petersburg became unquestioned and lasted for six or seven
years.46 In his pamphlet on mystical anarchism, Chulkov mentions by name and
sometimes quotes Max Stirner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Georg Brandes.47 In
agreement with Chulkov and Emma Goldman, Bely writes in his essay Revolution
and Culture: The real revolutionaries are Ibsen, and Stirner, and Nietzsche, not at
all Marx and Engels.48 We are all Nietzcheans, Dudkin tells Nikolai Apollonovich,
and you are also a Nietzschean, although you wouldnt admit it (P, 57). An assump-
tion that crucially links Bely to the anarchists is an insistence on the importance of a
transformation in consciousness, not only in institutions.
Petersburg has yet another political dimension in its Orientalism, its preoccupa-
tion with the Mongol, yellow faces, Oriental attire, and predictions of an invasion
from the East. The 1904-05 war between Japan and Russia, which Adams alludes to
in chapter 32 of The Education, is one specific historical referent for Belys preoccu-
pation with Orientalism, as is the geographical expanse of the Russian Empire,
extending from the Baltic to the Pacific. Allusions to the East occur throughout the
novel. One way that the son rebels against the father in Petersburg is in his preference
for Asian dress. The terrorist Dudkin has a recurrent hallucination of a fateful face
with very narrow little Mongol eyes (P, 26). Near the end of the novel, Nikolai is
living in Tunis, wearing a blue gandurah and a red Arabian chchia; later he visits
Egypt where he does research at the museum of Bulaq and sits in front of the
Sphinx: Yes, yes, Nikolai Apollonovich has been engulfed by Egypt. He foresees the
fate of Egypt in the twentieth century. Culture is a moldering head: everything in it
has died; nothing has remained. There will be an explosion: everything will be swept
away (P, 292, italics added).
Under the sign of the bomb, which is also the sign of anarchy, Western apoca-
lypse and Eastern menace are conjoined.
ADAMS ON ANARCHY AND SCIENCE

Henry Adamss understanding of anarchy is inflected by the scientific theories of his
era. In the course of his discussion of conservative Christian anarchism, Adams
meditates on the opposition between anarchy and order, observing pessimistically:

72
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man (EHA, 451). Anarchy
and order, he recognises, are not antinomies, because in the Hegelian sense they are
interdependent, constantly synthesising to produce new contradictions. What is at
stake in turn-of-the-century debates about anarchy and order is, ultimately, the
nature of human nature and of the cosmos itself.
Peter Kropotkin argues in Mutual Aid against the Social Darwinist slogan of the
survival of the fittest, citing the importance of cooperation, rather than competi-
tion, in the survival of all social species. Both Kropotkin and his opponents (Spencer,
Huxley) understand the social as grounded in nature, and human nature in turn as
inseparable from the environment. While Social Darwinists sought to ground capi-
talism in nature, anarchists understood capitalism as, like the state, a disruption of
the natural order, as encouraging the war of all against all rather than the pursuit of
common interests and the achievement of common goals.
Both The Education and an earlier work, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (here-
after MSMC) (1904), demonstrate that Adamss use of anarchy is not a mere
metaphor, not disconnected from awareness of contemporary anarchism. In a
chapter on Aquinas in Mont-Saint-Michel, Adams articulates the modern individu-
alist anarchist position precisely as Max Stirner does in The Ego and Its Own,
namely: Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore,
the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself .49 Adams proceeds to imply
a continuity between anarchism and nature: This principle is the philosophical
foundation of anarchism, and, for anything that science has yet proved, may be the
philosophical foundation of the universe; but it is fatal to all society and is especially
hostile to the State.50
It is also in Mont-Saint-Michel that Adams opposes science, which he aligns with
the recognition of natural chaos, to the Church. Medieval humans, he explains,
could not countenance an anarchical a dual or multiple universe and insisted on
unity.51 It is not that the past actually possessed a unity that the present lacks, but
rather that the Church provided a doctrine of order. In this, however, the Church is
mendacious, deceptive, since order is not primary, does not underlie everything, as it
does in the Christian view of creation. Medieval thought and architecture, the
Summa Theologiae and Beauvais Cathedral, Adams asserts, share the same singular
unity which he describes in explicitly political terms: The essence of it the
despotic central idea was that of organic unity both in the thought and the
building. From that time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less
reducible to a central control [italics added].52
Adams even recognises the implications of this stance for aesthetics, observing


73
that both modern science and modern art have abandoned organic unity, in practice
as well as theory. Scientists and artists are therefore anarchists, acknowledging the
multiverse and the despotism of centrality, whether the centrality of God and the
church, or of Renaissance perspective and the omniscient narrator. Adams was not
the only writer to think of this; in Chestertons The Man Who Was Thursday one
detective is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a
crusade against the Family and the State.53
Presumably, then, anarchism as an explicit politics exists at the beginning of the
twentieth century because the sea of faith has withdrawn, because the multiple
nature of the universe is no longer veiled, and because new technology the
dynamo, the bomb participates in the destruction and chaos already inherent in
nature. But in The Education it is less clear that this is the case. Adamss construction
of the natural opposition of anarchy and order is not a simple, static polarity but
Hegelian and millenarian:
Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy were one, but that
the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and Christian, he had no other
motive or duty but to attain the end; and to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate
progress; to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify
forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because
this was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but partly also
to get done with the present which artists and some others complained of; and
finally and chiefly because a rigorous philosophy required it, in order to pene-
trate the beyond, and satisfy mans destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its
ultimate contradiction.54
Adamss claim above that anarchy and order were one has a genuine anarchist ring,
but political anarchists had a different understanding of the terms. They defined the
word anarchy according to its etymology absence of political leadership not its
conventional use as a synonym for chaos. Proudhon famously remarked that order
was the daughter, not the mother, of liberty. As man seeks justice in equality, he
wrote, so society seeks order in anarchy.55 Walter C. Hart wrote in the March 1896
issue of Liberty: The common belief that disorder must necessarily ensue on the
cessation of government, is based on the erroneous assumption that order reigns in
our existing society Is this [examples of human misery and exploitation] order?
Then chaos and confusion are preferable. Yes, Anarchy is Order!56 Alexander
Berkman agrees, writing anarchy means order without government and peace

74
without violence.57 To the extent that we can correlate anarchy with the sublime and
order with the beautiful, the sublime revolution is a path to the beautiful a
harmonious, orderly, utopian future.
According to Adams, however, the true anarchists are modern scientists, hence
their persecution by society and by the Church, which burned Giordano Bruno and
condemned Galileo: as science goes on repeating to us every day it condemned
anarchists, not atheists (EHA, 484). Adams describes Curie as an anarchist bomber:
the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump from his chair
like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on this desk the metaphysical
bomb she called radium.58 New inventions, such as the telescope, microscope,
compass, and gunpowder, serve only to destroy the illusion of a unified universe, and
as a result of them the press drenched Europe with anarchism (EHA, 485). The
dawning scientific recognition that nature is not an orderly and closed system and is
therefore not analogous to an ideal Church or State poses a threat to the existing
social order, which has always depended on naturalized appeals like that of the divine
right of kings.
If heretic mystics and modern scientists are the true anarchists, the Church has
always been the party of order. Debates about the nature of good and evil and Gods
role in each posed problems that theologians and scholastics sought to solve: Good
was order, law, unity. Evil was disorder, anarchy, multiplicity. Which was truth? The
Church had committed itself to the dogma that order and unity were the ultimate
truth, and that the anarchist should be burned (MSMC, 409). Elsewhere: The
Church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order (EHA, 451).
Anarchy had flourished in the Middle Ages, whose ideological contours were,
Adams asserts, much more elastic than ours. But St Thomas Aquinas was working
for the Church and the State, not for the salvation of souls, and his chief object was
to repress anarchy (MSMC, 411).
According to Adams, the belief of contemporary anarchists that anarchy is
order is medieval, not modern; the minds of Kropotkin and Reclus belong to the
priestly class. While representing modern scientists as anarchists, Adams explicitly
distances himself from actual anarchists of the fin de sicle: To the conservative
Christian anarchist, the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of
Russian mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely in order to disguise
their innocence; and the outpourings of Elise Reclus were ideals of the French
ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia
(EHA, 407). Ironically, political anarchists, in their belief that lawlessness would
restore order, lack the modern scientific awareness of an anarchic universe, thinking


75
instead that the post-revolutionary world will be orderly and unified. For anarchists,
according to Adams, nature is orderly:
With them [Kropotkin and Reclus], as with the socialist, communist or collec-
tivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation; if anarchists needed order,
they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had enjoyed its
thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist could have no asso-
ciate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature itself (EHA, 407 italics
added).
Paul Feyerabend, who proposed an anarchistic epistemology in Against Method, also

deplored the failure of real anarchists, specifically Kropotkin, to recognise the appli-
cation of their ideas to science and nature.59 Anarchists did claim a privileged
theoretical insight into the natural, but they imagined nature differently from
Adams not as cosmic chaos, but as a world order of a more earthly sort. Both
Elise Reclus and Kropotkin were recognised geographers. Kropotkin wrote articles
on geography and natural history for the London journals Nineteenth Century and
Nature, and for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his memoirs, he not only praises
machines but also expresses aesthetic pleasure in their grace and poetry; his views
are clearly not reactionary.60 As a geographer working for the Russian Geographical
Society, Kropotkin studied the mountain ranges of Asia to determine their main
structural lines. He describes this project in the rhetoric of chaos and order that
Adams employs, and his findings are in accordance with the anarchist position that
anarchy is order:
There are not many joys in human life equal to the joy of the sudden birth of a
generalization, illuminating the mind after a long period of patient research. What
has seemed for years so chaotic, so contradictory, and so problematic takes at once
its proper position within a harmonious whole.61
Thus for the scientist-anarchist Kropotkin, order is still latent and discoverable
within the only seemingly chaotic world, whereas for Adams, order is only human,
only a dream. For Kropotkin, nature is primarily good, whereas for Adams it is cruel
and capricious. After the painful death of his sister from lockjaw, Adams sees nature
in its true light, not as beautiful, but as destructive. The unacknowledged text with
which he debates nature is Shelleys poem Mont Blanc and the buried allusion is to
Bakunins dialectic of creation and destruction:

76
For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt
itself stripped naked, vibrating on a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass,
colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created
and laboured from eternity to perfect For the first time in his life, Mount Blanc
for a moment looked to him what it was a chaos of anarchic and purposeless
forces (EHA, 289. Italics added).62
Religion has failed as an explanatory principle, a system of endowing the world

with meaning; it is replaced by modern science, which can explain that the world
means nothing. For scientists in 1900, Adams writes, the workings of the world are
a toss-up between anarchy and order. Meanwhile the new forces would educate,
he writes (EHA, 497); bombs educate vigorously (EHA, 496). Anarchist propa-
ganda by the deed is transformed into scientific theory. To Adams, as to Bely and
other writers of this era, anarchy and anarchism are tropes for the social and epis-
temological revolutions of modernity. Their imaginative appropriations of anarchy
are, as Feyerabends critique implies, more modern and more radical than anar-
chism itself.
THE EXPLOSIVE MIND

The bomb is both a form of expression and the annihilation of expression. Just as the
sublime, encapsulated in the bomb, exceeds representation, the anarchist rejects
representation, both as a form of government and in the aesthetic.
The specific Kantian language of the sublime abysses, expansion, infinity,
immeasurability is prominent in Petersburg, not surprisingly since Bely was a
student of Kant.63 In token of this, Nikolai Apollonovich, also a neo-Kantian, has a
bust of Kant in his room. True sublimity, writes Kant, must be sought only in the
mind of the judging Subject, and not in the object of nature that occasions this atti-
tude.64 The bomb in Petersburg participates in the logic of the sublime, partly
because it is terrifying and partly because its function is ultimately to explode limits,
to expand and destroy consciousness.
As such, it has an affinity with Apollon Apollonovich, of whom Bely writes:
Everyone was astonished at the explosion of the mental forces which poured forth
from this particular cranium in defiance of all Russia [P, 5]. The mind itself is
destructive; thought has material effects. Revolutionary agency is eclipsed, and revo-
lutionary consciousness comes to the fore. According to John Elsworth, the image of
explosion was always one of Belys favourite ways of expressing the idea of an apoca-


77
lyptic transformation, and the identification of the self that undergoes spiritual trans-
formation with a bomb recurs [in his] later [work], too.65
The bomb that is intended to kill Apollon Apollonovich is intimately linked
with both statist father and anarchist son. Early in the novel, when the government
minister first espies the terrorist Dudkin, his [AAs] heart pounded and expanded,
while in his breast arose the sensation of a crimson sphere about to burst into pieces
(P, 14). The bomb is already present in his own body. The dialectic of chaos and
order is therefore not only to be found externally, in the relations of father and son,
bureaucrat and terrorist, or Petersburg and the islands, but is also constitutive of the
very source of authority and order. The bomb concealed in the sardine tin eventually
becomes a mental bomb (P, 173). After Nikolai Apollonovich actually sets the time
bomb, he becomes intellectually identified with it: if his head was thinking, then it
too had turned into the sardine tin which was ticking with thoughts (P, 218).
Nikolai is dynamite. At the end of a complex symbolic dream, Apollon
Apollonovich in the guise of Saturn/Chronos converses with his son:
The chronology was running backwards.

What then is our chronology?
But Saturn, Apollon Apollonovich, roaring with laughter, replied:
None, Kolenka, none at all: the chronology, my dear boy, is zero.
Oh! Oh! What then is I am?
A zero.
And zero?
A bomb.
Nikolai Apollonovich understood that he himself was a bomb. And he burst
with a boom (P, 168).
The zero suggests Russian nihilism nihil negation, the destruction that accompa-
nies creation. The zero is a double of the bomb. As a child, Nikolai Appollonovich
would start shrieking nonsensical things: that he too was becoming spherical, that
he was a zero, that everything in him was zeroing zeroing zero-o-o (P, 158).
The zero is also the Greek letter Omega, with its promise of the End: the zero, into
which infinity is compressed, always explodes the square of matter. The personality
that recognises itself as a zero is the human bomb. A Russian contemporary of Bely,
the artist Kasimir Malevich, wrote in 1915, in view of the fact that we are preparing
to reduce everything to nothing, we are going to call the journal Zero.66
Andrei Bely develops the trope of the human mind as explosive device and

78
procreative force at length and in detail throughout Petersburg. In the following
passage, Apollon Apollonovich and Dudkin are said to have procreative conscious-
ness, in which thoughts take on material reality:
The cerebral play of the wearer of diamond-studded decorations [AA] was distin-
guished by very strange, extremely strange qualities: his cranium was becoming the
womb of thought-images, which at once became incarnate in this spectral world
Apollon Apollonovich was like Zeus: out of his head flowed goddesses and genii.
One of these genii (the stranger with the small black moustache), arising as an
image, had already begun to live and breathe in the yellowish spaces. And he main-
tained that he had emerged from there, not from the senatorial head. This stranger
turned out to have idle thoughts too. And they also possessed the same qualities.
They would escape and take on substance (P, 20).
The emphasis on procreative consciousness in Belys Petersburg may have an histor-

ical origin. As Marshall Berman puts it, [the city of ] Petersburg itself is the product
of thought in ideas of Peter I, the citys creator-God.67 Bely is an idealist, finding
the specific imaginative construct to be art. In Revolution and Culture, Bely argues
that the realm of our freedom is already here now with us; it externalizes, hidden
in the world of art.68 Consciousness, a common word in Petersburg, precedes
material reality; ideas are more real than things. The novel often refers to people as
shadows, a reference to Platos cave.
Thus Bely himself, as author and demiurge, invents characters who in turn
author events and characters. But at the same time it is not clear who is authoring
whom: once authored, the stranger disputes the authority of Apollon Apollonovich.
As author and readers spy on characters, both become secret agents: we ourselves
become this agent [of the secret police] (P, 22). For Bely, authority poses as a
voyeur, working behind the scenes.
Henry Adams writes about authorities, anarchism, and bombs not only in The
Education but also in his letters, where he maintains his identification with anar-
chists, an identification that seems more literal, although also more humorous, here.
In September of 1899 he writes of the Dreyfus affair, Thus far, all has gone to disap-
point us anarchists. We sacked a church, its true, but Paris did not care.69 A week
later he confesses: I found a tea-party in Lady Abingers ball-room Heaven pardon
me! but I wanted a bomb!70
Like G.K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday, whose fictional anarchist
exclaims that a mans brain is a bomb, Adams postulates a connection between the


79
brain and explosion. Human knowledge is increasing exponentially as new discov-
eries and concepts like the laws of thermodynamics, X-rays, and radium appear. The
universe, which had once seemed orderly and finite, has become infinitely complex
and chaotic, ruled by invisible and impersonal forces that are almost beyond human
comprehension:
If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind, on the one hand, and
the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction
so violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibrium, like the
Comet of Newton, or else suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the
earths atmosphere. If it behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover equilibrium;
if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits of growth; and even if it acted
like the earlier creations of energy the saurians and sharks it must have nearly
reached the limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling or quadru-
pling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soon succumb. An
average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could no longer understand the
problem in 1900 (EHA, 496, italics added).
In allying itself with the natural forces of chaos, the human mind will become the
ultimate source of destruction. The anarchist sublime is the ancestor or in Bely
and Adamss terms, the father of the nuclear sublime.
One of Belys poems, according to a biographer, foretells the nuclear bomb.
Adams is also such a prophet, writing to his brother Charles in 1862: the engines he
[man] will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science
may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide
by blowing up the world.71 In this passage science and anarchism are even further
identified; science takes on the role of the anarchist bomber. Writing after the inven-
tion of the atomic bomb, however, Herbert Read observed a shift in political
significance: The bomb is now the symbol, not of anarchy, but of totalitarian
power.72
Caroline V. Hamilton has published in The Journal of American Studies, Oxford

German Studies, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, C-Theory, The Paris Review,
and elsewhere. Her collection of poems is entitled Blindsight (Carnegie Mellon UP).
Her PhD is from Berkeley. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
Email: cvh@uwalumni.com.

80
NOTES
1. This information was culled from various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and
Colliers Encyclopaedia.
2. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989) 100.
3. Emma Goldman, The Drama in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover,
1969) 256. According to Elaine Showalter, this is not such an exaggeration: Produced
in London in March 1891, Ghosts provoked an outburst of horror, outrage, and
disgust unprecedented in the history of English criticism. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and
Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York: Penguin, 1990) 200.
4. David Miller, (London: J.M. Dent) Anarchism, 98.
5. Simon Karlinsky praises Belys erudition: certainly, no other twentieth-century poet
has Belyjs grasp of physical and mathematical sciences, of speculative philosophy, of
aesthetics, of linguistics, and of musical theory and practice. Simon Karlinsky,
Symphonic Structure in Andrej Belyjs Pervoe Svidanie California Slavic Studies VI,
edited by Robert Hughes and Simon Karlinsky, 1971, 61.
6. Henry Adams, The Education (New York: Library of America, 1983) 1150.
7. Leon Trotsky, 1905, translated by Anya Bostock (New York: Random House, 1971)
59.
8. Edward Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia (Syracuse. NY:
Syracuse UP, 1983) 218-37.
9. Few political assassinations, even in Russia have been greeted by society with such
general approval. Adam Ulam, Russias Failed Revolutions: From the Decembrists to
the Dissidents (New York: Basic Books, 1981) 155.
10. Judge, Plehve, 242.
11. In their footnote on Plehve, Slavicists and translators Robert A. Macguire and John
E. Malmstad write, Plehve is presented in the novel as Apollon Apollonovichs
closest friend and protector in the bureaucracy, Petersburg (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978) 308. They also note the physical resemblances small
stature, big ears shared by Apollon Apollonovich and another famous reactionary
Konstantin Pobedonostsev (299). In this article I am using Maguire and Malmstads
highly praised and scholarly translation of Petersburg rather than attempting transla-
tions of my own, but I have translated from relevant Russian texts when no
translations were available.
12. T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 296.
13. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989) 63.


81
14. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London:
HarperCollins, 1992) 163. Marshall calls On Liberty one of the great classics of liber-
tarian thought but adds that Mills belief in the guiding role of an intellectual elite
prevents him from being regarded as an anarchist, 164-65.
15. Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917
(Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, 1989) 1.
16. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and
Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 72.
17. Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson,
James, Adams and Faulkner (Wesleyan UP, 1981) 193.
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, edited by Phil Gasper,
(Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2005) 44. This sentence appears in the same paragraph
as that from which Berman took his title, all that is solid melts into air.
19. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. by Rose Strunsky (New York:
International Publishers, 1925) 47.
20. Ibid., 48.
21. John Elsworth, Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism (Cornell UP, 1987)
22. Konstantin Mochulsky, Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, translated by Nora Szalavitz
(Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1977). Of Kobylinsky, Mochulsky writes that he followed
anarchism in the spirit of Bakunin, pessimism, occultism, Steinerism, and finally,
conversion to Catholicism. (30). Leonid Semenov was a student, an anarchist and
passionate admirer of Blok, who knew Bely in 1903. He too underwent transforma-
tions: he published a collection of poetry in the style of Blok; then he became a
terrorist, and finally a follower of Dobrolyubov; he went on foot to Tolstoi and
perished tragically during the Civil War (46).
23. Quoted in Magnus Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyjs Novel
Petersburg (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982) 95 and note 333 on 152.
24. Nicholai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, An Astral Novel: Belys Petersburg in The Noise of
Change: Russian Literature and the Critics (1891-1917), edited and translated by
Stanley Rabinowitz (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), 200.
25. Ibid., 201.
26. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Penguin: New York, 1988) 96.
27. Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. James Allen Rogers (London: The
Cresset Library, 1988) 194-95.
28. Ibid., 195.
29. Irving Howe, Anarchy and Authority in American Literature in Selected Writings
(New York: HBJ) 1990.

82
30. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, translated by R.M. French (London: Lindisfarne
Press, 1992) 160-61.
31. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, translated by Jane Kentish
(London: Penguin, 1987) 207-08.
32. Richard Freeborn writes: From Turgenevs Fathers and Children to Dostoyevskys The
Brothers Karamazov the Russian novel consciously echoed and recreated not only the
conflicts between generations but also those between East and West, radicalism and
conservatism, atheistic socialism and Christian belief, metropolitan bureaucracy and
rural communism, ever-increasing industrialism and decaying agrarian ideals. The
Russian Revolutionary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 28.
33. Sharon Leiter, Akhmatovas Petersburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
1983) 5.
34. Quoted in translators introduction, Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman (Penguin:
New York, 1987), translated by Ronald Wilks, 7.
35. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Three Short Novels, translated by Constance Garnett (New York:
Doubleday Anchor, 1960) 183.
36. Cynthia Simmons, Non-Authoritarian Discourse in Petersburg in Russian Literature,
May 15, 1990, XXVII (IV), 483-502.
37. Adam Ulam, Russias Failed Revolutions; From the Decembrists to the Dissidents (New
York: Basic Books, 1981) 129.
38. Trotsky mentions the anarchists only briefly in his account of revolutionary events. In
a speech given in October of 1907, he said, We are not anarchists, we are socialists.
The anarchists call us Statists because we recognize the historical necessity of the
state and hence the historical necessity of state repression, 1905, 385.
39. Ulam, Russias Failed Revolutions, 182.
40. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1967) 43 and 56.
41. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP, 1988) 192.
42. Ulam, Russias Failed Revolutions, 153, 166.
43. Berman, All That Is Solid, 257.
44. Ibid., 269.
45. Macguire and Malmsted, Introduction, Petersburg, xiii.
46. D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 (Evanston,
lll: Northwestern UP, 1999) 449.
47. Stirner, Tolstoy, and Bakunin, whom Chulkov mentions, were anarchists; Ibsen and
Nietzsche were favourites of Emma Goldman; Georg Brandes was to some degree an
anarchist sympathiser.


83
48. My translation. Andrei Bely, Revolution and Culture (Letchworth, England: Prideaux
Press) 1971, 24.
49. Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (New York: Library of America,
1983) 685.
50. Ibid., 685.
51. Ibid., 685.
52. Ibid., 693.
53. G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Dover Books, 1986) 24.
54. Adams, The Education, 407.
55. Proudhon, What is Property? in The Anarchist Reader, edited by George Woodcock
(London: Fontana Press, 1986) 67.
56. Liberty, March 1896.
57. Alexander Berkman, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (New York:
The Vanguard Press, 1929) 173.
58. Adams, The Education, 452.
59. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975) 12-13.
60. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 93.
61. Ibid., 152. Italics added.
62. Not all anarchists were as optimistic as Kropotkin; the anarchist bomber Auguste
Vaillant, like Adams, understood history as subject to larger, ungovernable forces.
After describing the audience at his trial as atoms lost in matter, Vaillant declared:
How little a thing is your assembly and your verdict in the history of humanity; and
human history, in its turn, is likewise a very little thing in the whirlwind which bears it
through immensity, and which is destined to disappear, or at least be transformed, in
order to begin again the same history and the same facts, a veritably perpetual play of
cosmic forces renewing and transferring themselves forever. Quoted in Goldman,
Anarchism, 97.
63. John Elsworth writes, Bely turned to Kant, and between 1906 and 1908 devoted
much effort to the study of contemporary German neo-Kantian philosophy. Andrei
Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature:
Cambridge UP) 7.
64. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, translated by James Creed Meredith
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 104.
65. Elsworth, Andrei Bely: A Critical Study, 107.
66. Kazimir Malevich 1878-1935 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1988) 157. Italics
added.
67. Berman, All That is Solid 182-83.

Authors Name
84
68. Bely, Revolution and Culture (Letchworth, England: Prideaux Press, 1971). My trans-
lation.
69. Henry Adams, Letters of Henry Adams 1892-1918, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938) 239.
70. Ibid., 240.
71. Quoted in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in
America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967) 350.
72. Quoted in Marshall, 593.

Functional representation and its

anarchist origins
Jason Royce Lindsey
ABSTRACT
Recently, a number of contemporary political theorists have developed criticisms of
political representation and politics based on territory. Most of these views are a
reaction to worries over the ineffectiveness of participation in contemporary liberal
democracies. Other views on this subject stress the need to bring together citizens of
different nation states to address transnational issues. In both cases, there has been a
renewed call for exploring forms of political participation and representation based
on interest or function rather than territory. What is generally absent from these
discussions is any reflection on earlier calls for functionalist representation rooted in
the anarchist and syndicalist traditions. In this paper, I explore the similarities and
differences between these contemporary and earlier views on functional representa-
tion. Whatever the relationship of the two traditions might be, the origins of calls
for functional representation are a rich resource that we can use to sharpen our
thinking about its possible application today.
Keywords Citizenship, Class, Political Theory, Representation
I
Why do we base representation on territory? The answer is, in part, because of
historical accident. In Western Europe we can trace this artefact back to the turmoil
of religious conflict after the Reformation. The solution for this conflict was to
uncouple religious affiliation from territorial allegiance. In much of Europe this led
to partition and the drawing of new borders between Catholic and Protestant forces.
In France the problem of religious conflict was especially acute because of the urban
Jason Royce Lindsey

86
concentrations of the Protestant Huguenots inside the predominantly Catholic terri-
tory and, compared to other parts of Europe (for example the German lands),
partition was not a viable solution for the conflict. Jean Bodins argument for sover-
eignty in France transformed the problem. By having one sovereign for a whole
territory, subjects of various faiths could still show allegiance to their territorial
government. Bodin envisioned a sovereign who could stand above the religious
conflicts rather than taking one side or the other. Indeed, Bodin explicitly warns the
sovereign against partiality:
sometime it happeneth the sovereign prince to make himself a party, instead of

holding the place of a sovereign judge: in which doing for all that he shall be no
more but the head of one party so undoubtedly put himself in danger of his life, and
that especially when such dangerous seditions and factions be not governed upon
matters directly touching his estate, but otherwise, as it hath happened almost in all
Europe within this fifty years, in the wars made for matters of religion.1
Bodins political solution to religious conflict in France was sovereignty: with

one sovereign, subjects of different faiths could coexist peacefully in the same terri-
tory. Eventually, this subject became a citizen. Obligation to ones sovereign followed
from living within the territory of a ruler. Further refinements to Bodins concept of
sovereignty made it compatible with the principle of representation. In the work of
John Locke, there is a demand for consent from the governed and a principle of
popular sovereignty. It is interesting to note, however, that Locke still sees sover-
eignty and obligation connected to territory. For example, in his famous idea of tacit
consent Locke argues,
that every man that hath any possession or enjoyment of any part of the domin-
ions of any government, doth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth
obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such enjoyment, as any
one under it; whether this his possession be of land, to him and his heirs forever, or
a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely travelling freely on the highway;
and in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories of
that government.2
We can recognise in Lockes description the principle of modern sovereignty that we

experience when travelling abroad. No matter what my citizenship is, I must recog-
nise and adhere to the laws of the territory in which I reside, or pass through.

Functional representation and its anarchist origins

87
By the later 1700s we see the idea of territory and citizenship applied progres-
sively to the problem of factions other than religious sects. Madison argued that one
of the best ways to protect the new American republic from the dangers of faction
and hidden interests was to ensure that a territory was sufficiently large to include a
range of citizens and interests. As he explains in Federalist #51,
In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for reli-
gious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the
other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend
on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the
extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same govern-
ment.3
Madisons view is that different interests within one territorial unit are forced to
compromise on candidates and policies. His is a classical liberal position: without a
diverse population we risk selecting representatives from very narrow interest groups.
The assumption is that such narrow interests will fail to produce workable or healthy
policies for the broader body politic.
Thus, at a particular point in history, representation based on territory was a
progressive development. In Lockes time it was an argument for expanding political
participation. So too, in an earlier stage of history, Bodins argument for state sover-
eignty allowed a larger community to unite around a political identity and transcend
religious conflict. In Madisons time, territorial representation is a force for political
compromise and the avoidance of factional interest. The progressive nature of this
concept of political representation remained unchallenged until the rise of socialist
class analysis.
In the wake of that analysis, this concept of representation becomes one of the
major fault lines between classical liberalism and the socialist tradition. For a range of
different socialists the idea of representation based on territory risks a dilution of the
interests of the working class. From these perspectives, the liberal tradition of
diffusing interests through multiplicity appears antithetical to progressive politics. As
Marx argued in The German Ideology, all struggles within the state, the struggle
between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc.,
etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are
fought out among one another 4. From his anarchist perspective, Kropotkin attrib-
utes an even deeper dissipation of the working classs ability to organise to the rise of
nation states and their sovereignty over distinct territories. As he explains, The

Jason Royce Lindsey

88
absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of
an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism. In proportion as the obligations toward
the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations
towards each other.5 Thus, across a broad range of socialist opinion, territorial repre-
sentation and its political institutions are either an illusion that obscures the vision of
the working class, or a more insidious obstacle to the development of class-conscious-
ness and grassroots activity.
However, in contemporary political theory, this classic fault line has become
blurred. A number of recent arguments voice concern about the limits of territori-
ally-defined representation and citizenship. These calls for rethinking politics tied to
territory are coming from many quarters. For example, Jurgen Habermas has devoted
considerable efforts to try and decouple citizenship from the development of the
nation state, arguing that the two are merely historically contingent. For Habermas
this is an important theoretical step to pave the way to broader forms of citizenship
such as within the EU.6
In stark contrast to Habermass philosophical commitments, political theorists
from the post foundational (or sometimes still labelled post modern) camp
frequently attempt to distinguish between, the political and politics.7 As Oliver
Marchart points out in a recent study of this school of contemporary theory, this
distinction has radical implications since it opens up a broader range of cultural,
economic and social questions outside of mainstream politics. This turn toward
identifying a broader range of issues as political bears a striking resemblance to
earlier anarchist and syndicalist efforts, discussed below, to define a real politics as
opposed to the political institutions of the state.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that such concerns have emerged from
within different currents of contemporary liberalism. Theorists such as Walzer and
Young have explored questions of political responsibility and obligation that cross
borders.8 Perhaps most striking is that we find in one of John Rawlss late works an
attempt to expand his theory of justice beyond the boundaries of the nation state.9
Indeed, Rawls argued that he wanted to take peoples as the subject of his broader
reflections, to distinguish my thinking from that about political states as tradition-
ally conceived, with their powers of sovereignty included in the (positive)
international law for the three centuries after the Thirty Years War.10
This recent turn in contemporary theory is a marked change from the earlier
classic division between the political theory associated with liberal democracies and
progressive or critical theory associated with various forms of socialism. However,
what is generally absent from these discussions is any reflection on earlier calls for


89
functionalist representation rooted in the anarchist and syndicalist traditions. This
raises an interesting question: Is this absence because these more recent ideas about
representation are substantively different from the anarchist tradition? Alternatively,
is this an oversight that should be addressed to give us a clearer idea about the advan-
tages and disadvantages of functional representation?
II
Contemporary political theorys reassessment of representation and politics based on
territory reflects growing concerns about the relevance and efficacy of participation
in liberal democracies. In an article warning about the diminished expectations for
democracy and declining quality of democratic participation, Warren provides a
good summary of this dilemma for contemporary theorists. He explains that:
Major strains of liberal democratic thought and culture have held that political
equality requires that individuals participate in the process of collective decision
making, if not as a moral requirement and developmental opportunity, then as a
strategic necessity. But this view of democracy variously conceived by Rousseau,
Jefferson, Emerson, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and still espoused today by
progressive democratic theorists seems harder than ever to sustain given the
constraints imposed by todays large scale, complex, and pluralistic societies.11
To address these concerns, Warren argues that participation needs to be encouraged

in spheres other than formal political institutions. He also cites the need for more
devolution of decision making in modern states: issue and sector based devolution
provide targets of opportunity for democratic participation; and political associa-
tion based on territory limits the scope of participation; association based on issues
does not.12
In contrast to Warrens broad discussion we also find some very specific examples
of this trend. A good example from the United States is the idea of race-conscious
districting. One advocate of this position, Lani Guiner, argues that although some
type of institutional decision is necessary to determine who belongs in an electoral
district, the fact that some individuals live within one county line or another is not
necessarily the most relevant distinction.13 Therefore, electoral districts based on
racial identities are not in any substantive way more artificial or unfair than a territo-
rial definition of a district is. Guiner argues that districts based on minority
affiliation are potentially more relevant than so-called neutral, territorially based

Jason Royce Lindsey

90
districts, which, realistically, insure the dilution of minority votes. In some cases, this
revisionist view of representation has led to the creation of race-based districts. It has
also led to legal challenges over minority districting in the United States.14
Another example of this trend in contemporary liberal theory is in the growing
volumes of material about collective rights. The best-known proponent of this view
is Will Kymlicka. The collective rights literature challenges the assumptions of many
Western liberal states regarding individual protections. How can these be relevant
given the differing experiences and needs of individuals? Kymlicka has summed up
this position by stating that, [w]e cannot give every disadvantaged Australian the
same rights because they suffer different kinds of disadvantage and so require
different kinds of rights.15 Or, in another variation, Kymlicka argues that, providing
subsidized transportation to Aborigines will not help them achieve equality, just as
providing veto power over language policy would not help a disabled white
Australian to achieve equality.16 According to Kymlicka, there is a demonstrable
need for different rights depending on the social group in question. This need for
specificity cannot be met through the blind application of universal individual rights
to all citizens.
What is similar here to the discussion of race-based districting is the challenge to
territorially assigned citizenship. By questioning the idea that citizenship and its
accompanying rights are tied to residing in a territory, and that one set of rights fits
all, Kymlicka is challenging the status quo. His view is that within territories we find
different groups of citizens who require special considerations. As a result, Kymlicka
has called for the expansion of liberalism to include a rights theory broad enough to
incorporate collective as well as individual rights.
Kymlicka came to this position from his background in liberalism and we have
seen a broad turn toward the issues of identity among the competing schools of
liberal theory. Besides Kymlicka, theorists like Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor
have argued that all adult human beings have a right to belong to and form a cultural
group.17 Walzer also argues that liberal theory is based on a political fallacy that
subordinates cultural membership to the states existence, whereas the reverse is the
more usual experience of history.18 It was the presence of common cultural and
linguistic ties that enabled communities to later develop more abstract political iden-
tities. Thus, Walzer and other theorists have begun to think that the historical
priority of individual cultural membership may require us to rethink the philosoph-
ical priority we have given to citizenship and political activity based upon territorial
boundaries.
There is also a line of argument within contemporary liberal theory that


91
attempts to transcend territorial boundaries in an effort to confront transnational
problems. For example, Iris Young argues that we should consider our obligations to
others beyond our national boundaries, such as our global economic relationships.19
Implicit to this view is the idea that some of our relationships are more relevant than
traditional ideas of our territorial citizenship. Young argues that, global social and
economic relations today do not support the claim that such interdependencies are
confined within the borders of nation states.20 However, she also emphasises that,
this does not imply that everyone in the world has just the same obligations
regarding everyone else in the world. Instead, what determines the extent of our obli-
gations is, the scope and density of social and economic ties.21 Like Kymlicka,
Young argues that contemporary liberal political theory is incomplete. In its present
form, contemporary liberalism does not have a plausible description of obligations
that extend beyond territorial borders, or a means of weighing the moral imperatives
behind these differing obligations.
What is common to all of these cases is that contemporary theorists are ques-
tioning a number of assumptions about the state and how it prioritises and provides
representation to different group memberships. As described above, the positive case
for territorially defined representation or political membership is that it slices across
interest groups, collecting a broad overlapping segment of the population. However,
all the arguments above point to the fallacy of this idea in our contemporary setting
at different levels. The view from race-conscious districting in the United States is
that such districts tend to dilute the vote of minority groups at the local level. In this
case, the question is whether territorial representation can possibly be relevant to
individuals given continuing issues of racism and ethnic discrimination. The collec-
tive rights literature shows a similar form of dilution at the territorial level of the
nation state. How could one set of rights for all protect individuals living in such
distinct circumstances? Finally, Young and other theorists are showing us that the
same thing can happen at the international level where the global poor are excluded
from the political process of wealthy states. How could people from such disparate
economic circumstances have a chance at obtaining just outcomes if divided by inter-
national boundaries?
In each case, we see that political theorists are increasingly questioning the terri-
torial definition of the political. They are arguing that the most important aspect of
our identity for politics, and the most important memberships for political activity,
are not necessarily our citizenship defined by territory. Ultimately, they are pointing
out that the ideals of liberal democracy are not necessarily compatible with political
entities that are territorially defined. In todays global economy we may be closer in

Jason Royce Lindsey

92
our economic relationships to someone on the other side of the globe than with our
immediate neighbours. If these observations are correct, then should we persist in
defining ourselves politically by territorial boundaries? Should we continue to insist
on basing representation and citizenship on where we happen to reside?
III
Interestingly, some of the same questions raised by these recent turns in contempo-
rary theory were asked in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
parallel can be found within anarchist and syndicalist traditions that questioned the
primacy of the political and ultimately demanded functional representation. This
earlier tradition asked why representation should be based on territory; what group
memberships were most relevant for the individual; and how politics should be prac-
tised if class membership or economic function was considered most relevant to
daily life. None of the recent literature in contemporary theory cited above discusses
this earlier tradition. Before attempting to answer why this is the case, I would like to
briefly review the relevant similarities from earlier anarchist, syndicalist, and guild
socialist positions.
The idea of function providing a better guide to decision-making than political
status lies deep within the anarchist tradition. For example, consider Bakunins response
to the question of authority: Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such
a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning
houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer.22 The authority
of such specialists is limited by reason. As Bakunin explains further,
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own
reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive develop-
ments, any very large portion of human knowledge Thence results, for science as
well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour.23
This insight into where real authority lies is at the heart of the anarchist and syndi-
calist traditions.
When combined with the subject of political representation, this perspective on
authority undermines most traditions familiar to political theory. From a broad anar-
chist or syndicalist perspective on the realities of authority and power, traditional
politics within state institutions is a ruse that avoids the real struggle of class in the
economic arena. The political arena is used to inhibit the working class from fighting


93
the class struggle within the economic sphere where they have potential power to
organise. The foundational assumption of this line of thought is, of course, the kind
of membership that we believe to be most salient for politics. A good example of the
alternatives is provided in Jenningss account of the syndicalist critique of political
parties. As he explains in his history of syndicalism in France,
The class based nature of the syndicat was deemed to be in marked contrast to the
pattern of support and membership of all political parties. What distinguished the
political party (including those of the Left) was precisely that it grouped people
according to opinions and not interests 24
Thus, for syndicalists the syndicat was superior to the political party because it
understood the significance of class allegiance. Similarly, syndicat industrial action
and worker-centred activities were superior to traditional politics within the parame-
ters allowed by the state. This logic informs the syndicalist call for industrial rather
than political action. Arguably this perspective also applies to what many political
theorists would consider the cultural activities of the syndicats. Even social activities
and organization could have a role to play in this struggle if those activities
contributed to the education of the working class.
From this anarchist and syndicalist perspective, real politics is likely to take place
outside of state institutions on economic and cultural fronts. In an early attempt to
describe the ideas of syndicalism to a general audience, Bertrand Russell explained in
Roads to Freedom that syndicalism aims at substituting industrial for political action,
and at using trade union organization for purposes for which orthodox socialism
would look to parliament.25 Indeed, this is the logical strategy to pursue since, from
the syndicalist perspective, parliament is a distraction: How could a state institution
based on an idea of territorial representation based on class co-operation possibly be
effective other than as a diversion from real politics?
In contrast to continental syndicalism, the more institutionally minded
proposals of the Guild Socialists in Great Britain provide us with a slightly different
perspective. Here the focus is how to institutionalize real representation within a
broadened political sphere. As G.D.H. Cole explains:
the Guild Socialist conception of democracy, which it assumes to be good,

involves an active and not merely a passive citizenship on the part of the members.
Moreover, and this perhaps the most vital and significant assumption of all, it
regards this democratic principle as applying, not only or mainly to some special

Jason Royce Lindsey

94
sphere of social action known as, politics, but to any and every form of social
action, in especial, to industrial and economic fully as much to political affairs.26
To this end, some varieties of guild socialism eventually proposed the creation of an
alternative institution to parliament based on functional representation. Bertrand
Russell explains the idea:
Guild socialists regard the state as consisting of the community in their capacity as
consumers, while the Guilds will represent them in their capacity as producers;
thus Parliament and the Guild Congress will be two coequal powers representing
consumers and producers respectively.27
Thus, the Guild socialists in Great Britain differed from Continental syndicalists in
their attempt to take functional representation inside the states political institutions.
This move would convert (or restore) the political sphere into a functioning place of
real politics. According to G.D.H. Cole, the plan opened the possibility for the state
to truly wither away as the functional representation of society replaced the debris of
a decayed system.28 This change would happen gradually as traditional politics was
replaced with the real political action required by class or functional interest.
These anarchist and syndicalist perspectives raise several parallels to the trends I
described earlier in contemporary political theory. First, there is the question of
distinguishing real politics from more traditional political activity. As with contem-
porary theorists, real politics seems to lie closer to the economic functions
individuals perform and to the interests they hold in everyday life. Hence, we find
the argument that our contemporary political concerns are connected to more
concretely defined interests such as our economic role, our environmental needs, or
the needs of our cultural or ethnic membership. Second, both perspectives appear to
blur the boundaries between the political and the cultural. In the case of contempo-
rary political theorists, we see this trend in the growing focus on identity politics;
while in the syndicalist tradition it is more closely associated with educational
consciousness raising efforts such as the cultural initiatives of the syndicats.
IV
Given these parallels, why have recent theorists not drawn upon this earlier work for
some direction or inspiration in current debates? One obvious possibility is that the
anarchist and syndicalist tradition is one that remains even now outside main-


95
stream academic discourse.29 Many of todays theorists are unaware of the potential
presented by earlier anarchist and especially syndicalist work on the topic of func-
tional representation. Furthermore, even when contemporary theorists turn their
attention to the anarchist and syndicalist traditions, its many different schools and
paths often perplex them.30
This is an unfortunate fact given the parallels between this older tradition and
contemporary political theory. However, I think that the absence of discussion about
or use of anarchist or syndicalist thought in contemporary theory reflects an impor-
tant difference. If we compare the context of contemporary political theory to that
of the anarchists or syndicalists, then we see similar concerns leading to some (at
least superficially) parallel theoretical turns. Nonetheless, anarchist and syndicalist
views of functional representation differ from the contemporary concerns of theo-
rists on one very important point.
Most of the current turn in contemporary political theory is focused on
providing representation or recognition to ethnic, cultural, gender, and other differ-
ences. This is especially true of some of the theorists I cited earlier in this paper, like
Kymlicka and Young, who seek to expand or reform liberal thought. Yet, for the
anarchist and syndicalist traditions this was less of a priority, or, worse, yet another
distraction from real politics. Instead, the anarchist or syndicalist idea of functional
representation remained focused on class difference.
Furthermore, classes for a nineteenth-century anarchist or syndicalist were
easy to distinguish by the occupations of that time. In contrast, class differences
are harder for contemporary theorists to conceptualize. For example, Axel
Honneth has criticized our failure in contemporary society to equate attitudes
and discriminatory action toward class to racism or other forms of bigotry.31 We
can see the logical result of this development in the increasing frequency of theo-
rists to choose cultural criticism and identity politics when studying global
capitalism.
From this perspective, the concerns of the anarchist and syndicalist traditions
have more in common with the views of theorists concerned about boundaries in
the global economy. As mentioned above, Young has pointed out the anachronism
of using political borders as obstacles in disputes that bring economic participants
together across much of the world. Here the anarchist and syndicalist view that
class is paramount and that it transcends other cleavages is relevant. This is espe-
cially the case given the traditions broader view of class compared to Marxist
definitions. As Schmidt and van der Walt explain, the broad anarchist tradition
sees class as premised on the control of a range of resources and not only on

Jason Royce Lindsey

96
economic ownership.32 Increasingly, the agency behind this exploitation is difficult
to trace through contemporary global capitalisms maze of ownership, finance, and
consumer demand. Thus, this tradition of thought seems very relevant to contem-
porary theorys concerns with economic exploitation that crosses borders.
Nonetheless, we can see that, overall, the differences of class and economic
function appeared much harder and faster in the age of syndicalisms heyday than
our current period. Because of this, the literature of identity politics and cultural
criticism is the dominant terrain for political theorys contemporary critiques of
global capitalism. As De Certeau points out, this may be a tactical choice for grap-
pling with this complex system rather than a reflection of philosophical certainty.33
Indeed, tackling identity politics and engaging in cultural criticism of global capi-
talism is an easier path than an attempt to re-define class within this new,
challenging context.
For many political theorists class has become another form of identity that is just
as elusive a foundation as any other for defining the political. In contrast to the anar-
chists and syndicalists who felt economic function was a solid foundation for
political representation and a better boundary of political inclusion than citizenship,
we are much less certain of class now. Today, economic class is more flexible and
individuals more fluid in their presumed economic status. Ones economic function
is more fleeting (at least in the North) within our system of global capitalism. How
could we assign individuals representation based on something so shifting?
The slipperiness of class is similar to a problem encountered in the collective
rights literature, mentioned above, over cultural membership. How do we know
that someone belongs to a particular group other than their statement of self-iden-
tification? Would the individuals rights change if they exited that group for
another? Questions about authentic membership are difficult to resolve and there
is a tendency amongst theorists of collective rights to focus on fairly unique
cultural groups. The cases most often found in this literature are aboriginal groups
and very cohesive cultural groups like the Amish in North America.34 Since
membership in these groups seems to relatively easy to establish, advocating group
rights or special consideration for them raises fewer philosophical challenges. If we
find that many theorists have moved to a less challenging position by focusing on
groups like this in identity politics, then we should not be surprised to find even
less attention being paid to something as difficult to define as class membership
within contemporary capitalism.
There is a final issue that explains why contemporary theory has not drawn on
the anarchist and syndicalist traditions. The contemporary questioning of the polit-


97
ical moment and the foundation of political institutions raises philosophical
problems that would be very at home in the anarchist tradition. Yet, this is precisely
the challenge. A tighter comparison to the utopian elements of the anarchist and
syndicalist tradition emphasises the more troubling conclusions that could be drawn
from this recent turn.35 For example, if we turn to the cultural sphere for political
activity, do we threaten to create a totalising form of politics? In the twentieth
century we have seen the danger that totalitarian regimes present once they declare
that all cultural activity has political implications.36 If we undermine the legitimacy
of citizenship in favour of functional representation (be it class-based or rooted on
some other form of identity) do we risk losing the ground for democratic political
action? Arguably, it was by coming together as citizens and suspending our other
differences in the twentieth century that people managed to keep their governments
somewhat accountable.
Consider too the challenges highlighted in postmodern literatures. Critics of post-
modernism have sometimes obscured the subtlety of much postmodern thought and,
rather than engage with the many different trends found within it, have tended to
conflate a whole spectrum of thought into one position. For example, from a Marxist
perspective, Alex Callinicos claims that postmodern thought by which he means
Derrida and Foucault is a-historical and that it obscures important, revolutionary
events. His criticism ignores important debates about history within postmodernism.
To give two examples: Fredric Jameson draws on Marxist categories to give us a cultural
history of late industrialism based on the idea that the forces of production have
captured the cultural sphere; Zygmunt Bauman considers whether we have arrived at a
point where we have moved beyond Marxs categories of development and thus need
new ones.37 These arguments have considerable force, and it is very likely that contem-
porary political theorists searching for inspiration in anarchist or syndicalist thought
might find themselves confronted with a set of categories that seem outmoded.
Nonetheless, there is good reason for contemporary political theory to engage
more openly with both the anarchist and syndicalist traditions. The examples we do
have of such engagement suggest that this could be a rich resource for new perspec-
tives.38 Both the recent turn in contemporary political theory discussed here and this
older tradition attempt to distinguish a deeper, real politics from our everyday, state
dominated political models. In addition, both perspectives attempt to define repre-
sentation and membership in ways that go beyond territorial boundaries, though the
functional groups they focus on have shifted. Closer comparisons between these
positions could generate further progress and deflect future criticism that ignores the
significance of their differing historical contexts.

Jason Royce Lindsey

98
Jason Royce Lindsey received his PhD from Columbia University and is currently
Associate Professor of Political Science at St Cloud State University in Minnesota.
His specialization is contemporary political theory though he also studies the
politics of Eastern Europe and travels there extensively.
Email: jrlindsey@stcloudstate.edu
The author would like to thank the panel participants for comments on an earlier
version of this paper presented at the First Annual Conference of the Anarchist Studies
Network, Loughborough University September 4-6, 2008.
NOTES
1. Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweale, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae,
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p.535.
2. John Locke, The Second Treatise, from Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.348.
3. James Madison, Federalist #51, (New York: Penguin Press edition of 1961 cited here),
p.324.
4. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, from The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
Tucker, (New York: Norton and Company, second edition, 1978), pp.160-161.
5. Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, (London: William Heinemann, 1910), p.227.
6. See: Jurgen Habermas, Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the
Future of Europe, from Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner, (SUNY Press, 1995),
pp.255-281; and Habermas, Is the Development of a European Identity Necessary and
is it Possible, The Divided West, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), pp.67-82.
7. Oliver Marchart, Post Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy,
Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
8. See Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, (South
Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994; Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. John Rawls, the Law of Peoples, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
10. Ibid, p.25
11. Mark E. Warren, What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today? Political Theory,
vol. 30, no. 5, October 2002, p.678.
12. Ibid, pp.689-690.
13. L. Guiner, (1993). Groups, Representations, and Race Concious Districting: A Case
of the Emperors Clothes. Texas Law Review 71:1589-1642.


99
14. For a good discussion see: Jonathan L. Leib, Communities of Interest and Minority
Districting after Miller v. Johnson, Political Geography, vol. 17, no. 6, pp.683-699,
1998.
15. Kymlicka, The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas, Political Theory,
vol.20 no.1 (February1992), 141.
16. Ibid, 141.
17. See for examples: Will Kymlicka, (1991). Liberalism, Community and Culture.
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991); Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition.
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. A. Gutmann. (Princeton,
Princeton University Press 1994): 25-73; Michael Walzer, The Moral standing of
States, Philosophy and Public Affairs vol.9 no.3 (spring 1980).
18. Walzer, Pluralism a Political Perspective in Kymlicka Ed. The Rights of Minority
Cultures, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
19. Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
20. Ibid, p. 242.
21. Ibid, p.250.
22. Michael Bakunin, God and the State, ed. Paul Avrich, (New York: Dover Publications,
1970) p. 32.
23. Ibid, p.33.
24. Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas, (New York: St. Martins Press,
1990), p.31.
25. Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism, (first
published, 1918, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 54.
26. G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-Stated, (London: Leonard Parsons Ltd., 1920), p.12.
27. Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism, (first
published, 1918, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p.65.
28. G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-Stated, (London: Leonard Parsons Ltd., 1920), p.
188. See his discussion in the chapter Evolution and Revolution pp.174-188.
29. In a standard reference book for contemporary political theory, Richard Sylvan notes
in his article on anarchism that, Most of the seminal and interesting work on anar-
chism has come from outside universities and standard intellectual circles. Academics
have contributed histories, surveys, and usually not so sympathetic criticisms. With a
very few exceptions, however, they have contributed little original anarchist thought.
See: Richard Sylvan, Anarchism in A Companion to Contemporary Political
Philosophy, eds. Goodin and Pettit, (Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992),
pp.215-243.
30. For example, see the introduction by the editors J. Roland Pennock and John W.

Jason Royce Lindsey

100
Chapman to Nomos XIX: Anarchism, (New York: New York University Press, 1978),
pp. xvii-xlv. Here they discuss this problem and its effect on the various articles that
appear in this volume.
31. See for example, Axel Honneth, Redistribution as Recognition, Redistribution or
Recognition? Fraser and Honneth, (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 138-144.
32. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class
Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), p.109.
33. M. De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997).
34. For good examples see: James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age
of Diversity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Will Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); or Kymlicka,
Politics in the Vernacular, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
35. For example, Oliver Marchart points out in his study of post foundational political
theory (cited above) that many of the theorists who are pursuing the idea of the differ-
ence between the political and politics seem unaware of the radical implications of
their deconstruction of politics. See: Oliver Marchart, Post Foundational Political
Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau, (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp8-10.
36. Rudolf Rocker provides a thorough analysis of this danger from an anarchist perspec-
tive in his, Nationalism and Culture, (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee,
1937).
37. See: Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, (New York: St. Martins Press), 1990;
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke
University Press (December 1991); Zygmunt Bauman, Imitations of Postmodernity
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
38. For example, consider Robert Nozicks classic, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York:
Basic Books, 1974); Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism,
(University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Alex Prichards
recent engagement with Proudhon and International Relations Theory, Justice, order
and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35/3, (2007): 623-645; Kathy E.
Fergusons recent analysis of Emma Goldmans campaigns as a form of anarchist
parrhesia, Discourses of Danger: Locating Emma Goldman, Political Theory, 36/5
(2008): 735-761.

The anarchist aphorist: Wilde and

Gottesman, paradox and subversion
Kristian Williams
ABSTRACT
This article begins by comparing a selection of J.M. Gottesmans aphorisms (from his
column in Mother Earth) to those of Oscar Wilde. It then examines the structure of
the paradox, and considers the properties that make it so characteristic of Wildes
thought and so attractive to anarchists more generally. Influences on Wildes rhetor-
ical style are identified, and the subjective effect his paradoxes create in the minds of
readers is described.
PART ONE
J.M. Gottesman wrote an occasional column for Emma Goldmans paper, Mother
Earth, titled simply Aphorisms. The column usually served as filler, closing the gap
between the end of an article and the bottom of the page. However, Gottesmans
first contribution, appearing in August 1906, filled the entire page on its own. It
read, in its entirety:
[1] If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously; if you do it, it
laughs at you. Such is the stage of civilization at which we have arrived!
[2] There is nothing in the world like a good government. It is a thing nobody
knows anything about.
[3] The basis of every commercial exposure nowadays is an absolute criminal

certainty.
[4] Modern education consists in knowing everything, except what is worth

knowing.
Kristian Williams
102
[5] There is only one thing worse than a bad government, that is a good govern-
ment.
[6] Governments are so cowardly. They outrage everything that is sweet and beau-
tiful in men, and are afraid of the worlds tongue.
[7] The most obvious things in life are the most difficult things for the people to
discover.
[8] Survival of the fittest what a misleading phrase! Survival of the vulgarest
would be better.
[9] The only possible morality is to have none.
[10] The most dangerous things in life are those that have the truest intellectual
value.
[11] People believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the
people, because they have always believed in the incredible.1
I have numbered them here, for the sake of convenience.

If any of these sound familiar it is because they are, with one exception, adap-
tations of the phrases and philosophies of Oscar Wilde. Here are the originals:
[1] If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to
be bad it doesnt. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism (Lady
Windermeres Fan, Act I, page 422).2
[2] [T]heres nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. Its a
thing no married man knows anything about (Lady Windermeres Fan, Act III,
451).
[3] The basis for every scandal is an immoral certainty (The Picture of Dorian
Gray, 147).
[4] Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught (The Critic as Artist, 1114;
repeated in A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated, 1242).

The anarchist aphorist

103
[5] Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a
great deal of harm (An Ideal Husband, Act I, 518); There is one thing much worse
than no art, and that is bad art (The Decorative Arts, 932).
[6] Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of
the worlds tongue (Lady Windermeres Fan, Act III, 446).
[7] Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything
except the obvious (An Ideal Husband, Act II, 535).
[8] As for modern journalism [it] justifies its own existence by the great
Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest (The Critic as Artist, 1114).
[10] An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all (The
Critic as Artist, 1141).
[11] [D]emocracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for
the people (The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1182); The world is simply
divided into two classes those who believe the incredible, like the public and
those who do the improbable (A Woman of No Importance, Act III, 497).
The great majority of these all except the fifth, eighth, and the second part of
number eleven appeared in a single volume, which borrowed its title from Wildes
name in exile, Sebastian Melmoth. Published in 1904 by Arthur L. Humphreys, the
book included 131 pages of Wildes aphorisms, followed by his essay titled, in this
version, The Soul of Man (originally, The Soul of Man Under Socialism). It seems
very likely that Gottesman lifted the aphorisms from this volume as both misquote
Dorian Gray (in number 3, above) by adding the same word absolute.3
The missing item, number 9, which to my ear is the most Wildean of the lot, is
not Wilde at all, so far as I could discover. It may be an inversion of Pascal (There is
no shame except in having none4), or else an adaptation from Claude Bernard (the
best philosophical system is to have none at all5). On the other hand, Wilde did say,
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardon-
able mannerism of style.6
The point of this exercise is not to convict Gottesman of plagiarism, or even
simply to remark on Wildes influence among anarchists of the generation following
his own, but rather to note how readily the phrases adapt themselves to the anarchist

Kristian Williams
104
cause. One comes to suspect that there was already an element of anarchy at work in
these sayings of Wildes, both in the form of contradiction and in the tone of sheer
contrariness. Wilde wrote in De Profundis that What the paradox was to me in the
sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion7 thus linking
paradox to his dissident sexuality, to his criminality, and by implication, to his indi-
vidualism. Perhaps this comparison ought not be surprising, as Wildes aphorisms,
his sexuality and his politics were all, in their way, exercises in inversion. George
Woodcock went so far as to suggest, in the title of his study of Wilde, that the man
himself represented a kind of paradox.8
Wildes love of the paradox and his aphorist style derive from diverse influences,
which are themselves quite anarchic. Jerusha McCormack cites, on the one hand, the
Irish Bull a kind of verbal bluffing that keeps the form of logic, while outraging
reason and bringing it to a violent halt9 and on the other, the influence of the
Taoist philosopher Chuang-Tsu,10 whom Wilde described as something more than a
metaphysician and an illuminist. He sought to destroy society [and] combine[d]
the passionate eloquence of a Rousseau with the scientific reasoning of a Herbert
Spencer.11 Some of those who knew Wilde personally cited the influence of the
anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Thomas Bell commented, regarding The Soul of
Man Under Socialism, in so far as the style in it had any origin other than his
[Wildes] own genius it is surely that of the great French master of the epigram and
the paradox of the man who in reply to the query Quest-ce que la Propriet?
declared La Propriet cest le vel [sic].12 Proudhons line What is property? Property
is theft is one that, Robert Sherard tells us, Wilde was fond of quoting to justify
his own generosity.13
In Wildes aphorisms, the politics were more a matter of form than subject. In
re-writing them, Gottesman set out to better align these two aspects, to match the
means and the ends. Some he re-wrote for (usually ill-advised) stylistic reasons
inverting the meaning of at least one but others he reformulated to direct Wildes
witticism against a new target. (He was not alone in this practice: In 1906, the same
year as the first Aphorisms column in Mother Earth, Norma Lorimer wrote in By
the Waters of Carthage: The amalgamation of great powers! I wish the survival of the
fittest did not generally mean the survival of the vulgarest.14) On the whole, the
revisions are inferior to the originals. Too often, Gottesman blunts Wildes wit.
Besides which, the originals, read carefully, criticize and challenge some of the most
important assumptions and institutions of Victorian society democracy, marriage,
schooling, the press, and especially, morality. Redirecting these barbs to go against
government or commercial exposure is, it turns out, strangely redundant.


105
Yet in his first play, Vera, or The Nihilists, Wilde has one of his characters say, I
think little of pen and ink in revolutions. One dagger will do more than a hundred
epigrams.15 But the anarchist John Barlas who once fired a revolver at the House
of Commons simply to show my contempt16 flipped this ranking with a
metaphor. He compared Wildes paradoxes to a dagger whose hilt is crusted with
jewels, and whose point drips with the poison of the Borgias He has stabbed all
our proverbs, and our proverbs rule us more than our kings.17
PART TWO
As a mode of expression the paradox is almost inherently subversive. It does not
only undermine our social conventions and usual expectations, but also turns logic
against itself. The paradox inverts hierarchies and destroys dichotomies. It
explodes unitary notions or systems of thought, breaking them into inconsistent
and opposing fragments; and it resolves contradictions with nonchalance and
reconciles opposites with irony. It defies rationality, morality, and propriety; it
follows no laws but its own, and it legislates only to make transgressions possible.
It reduces common sense to uncommon nonsense, and common nonsense to
uncommon sense.
Oscar Wildes proverbs may, sometimes, be nonsensical, but they are not
gibberish. They have a grammar, a structure that produces or defeats meaning
sometimes simultaneously. They work against our usual assumptions and expecta-
tions by reversing whatever it is we feel the sentence ought to be saying. The best set
up these expectations themselves, and then knock them down, all within the course
of a couple dozen words. Some achieve this effect by altering an existing truism,
often by as little as a single word or by keeping the key phrase intact but changing
the subject. Moderation is a fatal thing, operates by the one method; Nothing
succeeds like excess, by the other.18 Many of Wildes phrases simply implode. They
take the form of bold assertions that deny the obvious or contradict themselves.
They offer no counter-truth to the orthodoxy, no new doctrine on which to stand.
For example: It is only the unimaginative who ever invents is obviously false.19 But
by its very absurdity it seems to call into question the meaning of the words, and our
usual understanding of originality and creativity. The significance of such a phrase
lies in its pure negation.
This kind of nonsense does, in a word, the unthinkable and thus produces
thought. It interrupts our catechismic recitations; it forces its audience to a place
beyond belief to outrage, befuddlement, or laughter and the only path back to

Kristian Williams
106
the world of fact, of true and false, is through thought. George Bernard Shaw said of
the audience to An Ideal Husband: They laugh angrily at his epigrams, like a child
who is coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage and
agony.20 We laugh at Wildes quips and jests, when we do, because we know he is
being silly. But we also laugh because we recognize something of the truth in what he
says. And its hard to gauge which surprises us more.
Paradox is the enemy of doctrine. Though it may be quoted or imitated, the
paradox is really the very opposite of the clich: it works for surprise, or else it fails.
Wildes do not fail. As familiar as many of his phrases have become, there is still
something in them that knocks us off-balance. They ought not to make any sense,
but then they do; or else they seem to, and then they dont quite. Ones never really
sure what he means, or whether he means anything. Its playful nonsense, a sort of
logical or illogical headstand. But also for just a moment doesnt it look as
though its the world that is upside down?
Wildes inversions and paradoxes those tiny bombs he hurls at rationality are
a little like Zen koans. And that moment when your mind turns over and the world
seems wrong, and your feet seem to dangle in the sky that is the moment of
enlightenment. [T]he way of paradoxes is the way of truth, Henry Wotton says in
Dorian Gray. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities
become acrobats we can judge them.21 Ernest Newman reversed this metaphor in his
Literary Appreciation of Wilde, describing the reading of paradoxes is a perform-
ance in which the audience is made to dance on the tight rope, while the acrobat
enjoys their unsophisticated antics . . ..22 The truth and the audience share this in
common: the paradox puts them in peril, and makes them dance.
Wilde understood the force of language, but precisely because he was its master,
he understood its dangers and its weaknesses as well. And so when he pitted his
rhetorical skills against the institutions of society, he did so in a way that was curi-
ously difficult to reverse. One might bring facts to bear against facts, or use
arguments against arguments, but how can one refute an epigram like Philanthropic
people lose all sense of humanity?23 One can contradict it, of course. But the more
shocking proposition is always the stronger. Oscar Wilde did not often argue for
anything. He did not often argue at all. ([I]t is only the intellectually lost who ever
argue;24 and, a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thor-
oughly unreasonable person25). Wilde, instead, as often as not, used the language
against itself, deflating the rhetoric of Law and Morality, and warning against
turning nomina into numina26 or names into gods.


107
Thanks are owed to Emily-Jane Dawson, Ruth Kinna, Barry Pateman, Aaron
Schlosser, and Adam Warner, for their comments on this essay. Thanks also to the
Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, for their support
of my research.
Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of
Domination (South End Press 2006). He is presently at work on a book about Oscar
Wilde and anarchism.
Email info@kristianwilliams.com
NOTES
1. J. M. Gottesman, Aphorisms. Mother Earth (August 1906), 29.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from the Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
(Glasgow, HarperCollins, 2003).
3. [Oscar Wilde], Sebastian Melmoth (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1904), 13.
4. Blaise Pascal, Against Indifference in Penses, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London:
Penguin Books, 1966), 160.
5. Quoted in Ramesh Chopra, Bernard, Claude, (1813-1878), in Dictionary of Philosophy
(Gyan Books, 2005), 47.
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 17.
7. De Profundis, 1018.
8. George Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (New York: The MacMillan Company,
1950).
9. Jerusha McCormack, The Wilde Irishman: Oscar as Aesthete and Anarchist in Wilde
the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 88.
10. Jerusha McCormack, From Chinese Wisdom to Irish Wit: Zhuangzi and Oscar
Wilde, Irish University Review 37: 2 (Autumn-Winter 2007), 302-21.
11. Oscar Wilde, A Chinese Sage, in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde,
ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1982), 222.
12. Thomas Bell, Oscar Wilde Without Whitewash [unpublished typescript] (193-?).
Clark Library, University of California-Los Angeles [Wilde B435M3 0814 [193-]?],
398.
13. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 216.
The original is from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (New York: H. Fertig,
1966).
14. Norma Lorimer, By the Waters of Carthage (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1906), 128.

Kristian Williams
108
15. Vera, Act I, 688.
16. Quoted in David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian
Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2006), 80.
17. John Barlas, Oscar Wilde, The Novel Review (April 1892), 45-6.
18. Both from A Woman of No Importance, Act III, 498.
19. Olivia at the Lyceum, 955.
20. George Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw on An Ideal Husband in Oscar Wilde:
The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1970),
176.
22. Ernest Newman, Oscar Wilde: A Literary Appreciation, Free Review, June 1, 1895;
reprinted as Ernest Newman on Wildes Genius for Paradox (1895) in Oscar Wilde:
The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1970),
204. Emphasis added.
24. A Chinese Sage, 225.
25. An Ideal Husband, Act I, 523.
26. Oscar Wildes Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith
II and Michael S. Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 141.

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globalization (p6). Globalization has tremendous power to dominate diverse
cultures: in Morocco, claims LeVine, porn movies outsell jihadi videos (p48). But
the process is not simply homogenizing and negative. In policed, conservative
Muslim societies, the Internet provides the basis for informal social networks away
from the authorities control (p88). Globalization may have brought Baywatch, late-
night German soft-core porn, and Britney Spears to the Middle East, but it has also
brought al-Jazeera, Iron Maiden, and Tupac Shakur (p7). First carried in the over-
night bags by flight attendants, Heavy Metal cassettes and CDs have entered and
circulated in Muslim societies with surprising rapidity. Here, LeVine reminds us of
some basic points: many Muslims are astonishingly familiar with some strange
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110
aspects of western culture. Are we to understand such points simply as another
variant of cultural asymmetry, whereby the poor and marginalized try to imitate the
dominant? LeVine himself has to laugh when an Egyptian metalhead walks over to
him and proudly boasts that he has just finished his thirteenth beer, just like back in
the USA. How many times in high school had friends and bandmates announced a
similarly ludicrous accomplishment? It seems that metalheads are truly the same the
world over (p98). Or as LeVine argues elsewhere does the growing Muslim
metal scene suggest something else? What does Heavy Metal sound like to a Muslim
audience?
LeVine proposes two principal answers to these questions. The first is a prag-
matic one, which says nothing about the intrinsic quality of heavy metal music. In
the Middle East and North Africa metal and rap fans are converting their musical
communities into spaces where they can carve out a bit of autonomy, if not freedom,
within which they can imagine alternatives to the status quo (p11). The musics
unusual and distinctive qualities mark it out as non-mainstream: young, critical,
discontented voices adhere to it. LeVine carefully avoids romantic glamorization: the
majority of the fans are male and relatively privileged. This musical cultures
apparent immorality makes it dangerous to young women in conservative societies.
But LeVine also proposes a second, more challenging answer. Here, he cites Reda
Zine, a veteran of the Moroccan metal scene: We play heavy metal because our lives
are heavy metal (p14). The violent, war-laden themes of the music fit easily with the
daily logic of many young Muslims lives. Moreover, the music is not simply an alien
import: the creativity and autonomy it demands from young musicians resemble the
older patterns of cultural autonomy traced out by Sufi mystics, and LeVines work
notes a criss-crossing structure of influence, inspiration and counter-influence
between Heavy Metal and Sufism in the countries he visits, exemplified in the Sufi
Rock that is growing in Pakistan (p215).
LeVines chapters present snapshot pictures of Morocco, Egypt, Israel/Palestine,
Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan, sketching out the intricate and infinitely peculiar inter-
relationship between the heavy metal underground and the general more powerful
Islamist oppositional movements. While Egyptian and Iranian metal is firmly
dismissed by the authorities as Satanic, rap curiously benefits from a certain
toleration, and can be sung in Arabic (p78). While conservative Palestinians gener-
ally disapprove of metal, and Hamas has banned hip-hop in Gaza (p128), there is a
degree of sympathy for these forms in the more cosmopolitan city of Ramallah.
Palestinian rapper Boikutt comments: Ninety percent of what I rap is political
because eighty percent of life in Palestine is political (p110). Here, LeVine identifies

Sharif Gemie
111
an intriguing synthetic spirit, as Palestinian musical traditions are grafted onto hip-
hop, and as rappers mix English and Arabic rhymes. After a moment of wall-bridging
fusion, however, Palestinian and Israeli hip-hop have tended to separate, with hip-
hop providing an aggressive, nationalist soundtrack to an Israeli working-class
audience (p126). In Iran, heavy metal is more rooted in the values of the opposition.
The mullahs celebrate violence; the metalheads critique it (p185). Yet this under-
ground movement also exists in dynamic interplay with the dominant forms of the
Islamic Republic. Their tiny, micro shows are truly disorienting, almost like religious
experiences the perfect antidote to the hyper-ritualized, formulaic, and in-your-
face Islam propagated by the Islamic state (p191).
Inevitably, these rapid, highly focused studies come to resemble some peculiar
form of alternative tourism, in which LeVine seems to seek out the grotesque and the
marginalized. But something greater also emerges from them. LeVine is a sensitive,
perceptive and genuinely interested participant-observer, who successfully manages
to communicate his enthusiasm for his subject without demanding agreement from
his reader. He is also generally quite cautious in his judgements, and always avoids
over-generalizations on the lines of so now we can see that Islam is XXX. Certainly
his method of enquiry is praise-worthy and really quite subtle: he always acknowl-
edges that he is analysing one strand within a wider constellation of forces. The
point which rightly intrigues LeVine is the sense of community that he senses in each
country he visits. While the pattern is not the same in each country, LeVine does see
similar concerns and situations. His book ends on a moment of hope, which perhaps
inevitably refers back to the great Muslim utopia itself. However fleetingly, a pan-
Islamic metal ummah had come into being; one that most metalians see little
chance of building in their home countries (p258).
LeVines Heavy Metal Islam inevitably provokes comparison with a similar study
of the fusion of cultures, this time located in the USA and concerned with Islam and
Punk. Michael Muhammad Knights The Taqwacores is a distinctive and memorable
fictional thought experiment. The work has an unusual history: Knight originally
intended it as a type of elegy, mourning the impossibility of a fusion. Yet, as Oscar
Wilde observed, life imitates art. Its probably an exaggeration to say that this book
created a movement: its closer to the truth to note that Taqwacores crystallized and
illustrated existing tensions and initiatives on the wilder edges of Islam, and gave
them a voice.
However, lets begin at the beginning. Taqwacore is an invented, portmanteau
word, taking the Islamic term taqwa (fear, awe or love for god) and fusing it with the
suffix inevitably fixed to any of a myriad of youth cultural/musical/political currents.

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But Islam and Punk? How can this be? Knights answer is wonderfully eloquent, and
worth quoting at length:
Inevitably I reached the understanding that this word punk does not mean
anything tangible like tree or car. Rather, punk is like a flag; an open symbol, it
only means what people believe it means I stopped trying to define punk around
the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They arent so far removed as youd
think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost
something along the way Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive
communities when nothing can be further from the truth.
I could go on but the most important similarity is that like punk Islam is
itself a flag, an open symbol representing not things, but ideas. You cannot hold
punk or Islam in your hands. So what could they mean besides what you want
them to? (p7).
As for the book itself: well, Knight is no Tolstoy. The work follows the recognized
tropes of alienated-youth literature that can be traced back to On the Road. It is set
in Buffalo, USA, among the coldest Muslims on the fuckin planet (p203). There is
a familiar, fin-de-sicle feel to the descriptions of filthy communal houses, where the
floor is littered with cigarette ends, used joints, empty beer cans and broken glass. As
is commonplace in such writing, shit and fuck are used almost as punctuation
marks, pock-marking every second sentence. The narrative is grindingly slow. But
the work has real power. There are a couple of excruciatingly awkward sex scenes in
the first third of the work: at first, I thought this was due to the authors incompe-
tence, but now it seems clear that these are intended as a type of anti-porn
probably a more closely realistic means for evoking young peoples first sexual experi-
ences that the monotonous superlatives of pornographic clich. And, as one
perseveres with the work, it becomes clearer that Knight really is presenting a philo-
sophical commentary on tendencies within Islam, ranging from strict Puritanism to
once again a Sufi-inspired libertarian cosmopolitanism. Within the work there is
also a serious attempt to evaluate the prospects of a Muslim feminism, and a
genuinely inspired debate between two male protagonists who question why Rabeya,
the novels burqad riot-grrrrl heroine, chooses to cover her face.
She doesnt wear it for the notion that its sunna, we know that much and she
doesnt wear it because her family is really strict and I dont think she wears it for
some Islamo-feminist gesture So I dont know why.

Sharif Gemie
113
Fasiq interrupted me only with a suddenly active, alert silence that felt as
though he would say something. He looked at me and said it. Ever have a day
when you didnt want people looking at you?
Yeah, I replied, I guess so. Is that why she wears it?
I dont know, he said with a puff then dramatic exhale. But thats why Id wear
it (p87).
Rabeya is one of the novels most memorable characters: in the narrative, but not of
it; dispensing a caustic and accurate criticism of Islamo-patriarchy, yet absent from
much of the main narrative, which is closer to an all-male, coming-of-age novel.
As the novel progresses, the households improvised Friday prayer meetings
(followed by punk-thrash orgy in the evening) grow more familiar and more
eloquent. The novel, in the best sense of the word, is profoundly educational: a
lesson in a dream. It comes with an over-abbreviated glossary of Muslim clichs to
aid the inexperienced, but unfortunately were left to ourselves when faced with the
far more bewildering cacophony of punk, neo-punk, post-punk, quasi-punk and
punk-ish musical cultures. The Taqwacores themselves finally appear towards the
end of the novel. Theres a nice reversal of the iconography of 1976: while the Sex
Pistols would occasionally sport swastikas, so the Taqwacores wear Star of David
patches. If this is Muslim punk, and our community and audience is all fuckin
Muslim, what symbols more unsettling than the Star of fuckin David? (p207). The
novel crashes to a tragic conclusion in a well-crafted explosion of sex, violence and
transgression: a scene which contains something to offend everyone, in the best
tradition of punk.
Punk, metal and Islam: neither of these works suggests a happy, comfortable,
stable, successful synthesis. But both pinpoint, with accuracy and eloquence, zones of
tension. Both provide important, useful if provisional lessons. Both argue, force-
fully, that the post-modern world is far more complex that the simple clichs of war
against terror and eternal jihad. And both suggest that marginalised Muslims will be
speaking more in the future: more frequently, more expressively and more confidently.
Sharif Gemie
School of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Glamorgan

REVIEWS
Randall Amster et al, Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory

Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy
Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2009
318 + xvi pp., paperback 24.99
ISBN: 978-0-415-47402-3
The resurgence in anarchy and anarchism during the last decade has inspired
Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the
Academy. The editors write, This anthology seeks to document the growing interest
in anarchism as it is expressed through scholarly work (p1). It is a modest objective
that this recommendable volume achieves. What distinguishes this anthology is a
critically self-conscious perspective. The contributors are intellectuals who think and
write about anarchy and anarchism while frequently engaging in a meta-analysis of
their scholarship and vocation.
The book is organized according to five themes: theory, methodologies,
pedagogy, praxis and the future. The theory section addresses power, postmod-
ernism, race, violence and economics. Alejandro de Acostas metatheoretical
interrogation of anarchist theory and Eric Bucks argument for an anarchist
economics are particularly valuable. The methodologies section is provocatively
instructive. In particular, qualitative methods, including participant observation and
ethnography, are lauded in this part. Furthermore, the importance of affinity,
emotion and relational ethics are cited as integral to any research model. Aside from
the specific methodological recommendations, the contributors speak to how intel-
lectual anarchists reconcile their values with the regimentation of social science. It is
a commendable attempt that may unsettle academics unsympathetic to anarchism
as the inclusion of a chapter by David Graeber insinuates.
The pedagogy section seeks to explore what anarchism can offer towards envi-
sioning new pedagogical forms and educational experiences (p123). This is an
important topic worthy of its own book. Several good, if general, suggestions are
proposed and discussed, including: a postmodern approach to truth, pedagogic
spaces organized according to horizontal democracy, an epistemological equality
regarding knowledge production and an overall critical pedagogy. Stevphen
Jeffrey D. Hilmer
115
Shukaitis exceptional chapter grapples with the challenge of realizing anarchist
pedagogy in the academy. He persuasively argues that all too often academic courses
on anarchy becomes an endless rehashing of the deeds and ideas of bearded nine-
teenth-century European males (p169), when they ought to be spaces for the
elaboration of ideas and knowledges useful to further developing anarchist politics
(p169). Hence Shukaitis argues against a distinct area of anarchist studies and for an
approach to education based on creating under-commons and enclaves within
multiple disciplines and spaces (p167).
The praxis section begins with Deric Shannons question: How do we exist
simultaneously as radicals and academics? (p184). His recollections on being an
anarchist scholar underscore the challenges of that vocation. Subsequent chapters
highlight consonances between anarchism and animal liberation, Christian scripture,
the alterglobalization movement, punk rock and environmentalism. Jeffrey S. Juris
essay, which explores the links between classic anarchist praxis and contemporary
anti-corporate globalization activism in Barcelona (p211), is especially effective at
connecting anarchism with contemporary politics. Each contributor struggles, with
varying success, to demonstrate the relevance of anarchist ideas to pressing political
issues. Yet Shannons question remains vexing.
The concluding section speculates about the future of anarchy and anarchism.
Uri Gordon confidently argues that the already-unfolding trajectory of global capi-
talisms collapse will continue to instigate anarchist politics (p249). Ruth Kinna
and Alex Prichard argue that Anarchists have, in the post World-War II period
accepted critiques of anarchism that are simply inaccurate (p270). Their argument
worthy of a book-length treatment seeks to disabuse anarchists of their miscon-
ceptions about anarchys historical failures that appear to foreclose on its future.
Thus they argue for a return to the theoretical and historical insights offered by the
early anarchists (p277). While there is a danger of reinforcing the problematic asso-
ciation of anarchy with utopia, Peter Seyferth and Randall Amster use their
respective concluding chapters to subvert that association by emphasizing the prac-
ticality of anarchy.
Many of the essays are briefer than their subject merits. But this is a minor criti-
cism, borne of an interested readers desire to know more. Some pertinent topics are,
however, overlooked: implications of anarchy for democratic theory; historical
evidence of anarchist societies; evolutionary evidence supporting anarchist arguments
about cooperativeness; leadership in anarchist organizations. Readers are advised to
supplement their reading of Contemporary Anarchist Studies with other comparable
volumes, including New Perspectives on Anarchism (Lexington Books, 2010).

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116
Research-scholars will find this anthology a useful departure point for further
study. Teacher-scholars will find this anthology useful for undergraduate and
graduate courses in politics, sociology and anthropology, among others. Teacher-
activists will learn some useful tactics for melding anarchist practice with academic
pedagogy. And all readers will discover that anarchy and anarchism are once again
on the world stage.
Jeffrey D. Hilmer
Northern Arizona University
Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism. An

International Comparative Analysis
Aldershot, Ashgate (Studies in Labour History) 2008, 338pp
ISBN 978-0-7546-3617-5 (hardback) 60.00
Revolutionary syndicalism had its heyday in the first two decades of the twentieth
century, but has had a lasting influence on ideas and activism within labour move-
ments around the world, particularly in southern Europe and the English-speaking
world. Ralph Darlington, whilst acknowledging the militancy and power of syndi-
calism and its authenticity as the voice of the working class of the period, views the
movement from a Marxist perspective in seeing its weakness as residing in a failure to
develop a strategy for political power.
This is a well researched book, albeit rather uneven in its coverage, with Spain
and Italy, and to some extent Ireland, receiving sketchier treatment than the better
known French, British and US movements. The first part of the book seeks to define
revolutionary syndicalism and in doing so covers ground which is already fairly well
trodden. Darlington draws heavily on the typology of syndicalist movements devel-
oped by Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Westergard-Thorpe, and builds on their
article with local contextualisation rather than reworking it.
In this account, revolutionary syndicalism is above all a militant working class
movement, and its strength lies in its authenticity as the expression of worker unrest,
as seen in the upsurge of strike activity at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Aspects which are less well covered, but treated by other authors elsewhere, are the
link between revolutionary syndicalism and antimilitarism, and the relationship
between syndicalism and specific forms of capitalist production.

Susan Milner
117
The second part of the book feels more original and closer to the authors own
Marxist perspective (as he acknowledges in the bridging prologue). Yet curiously it
also feels more telescoped and under-developed. It would have been interesting to
see a fuller exploration of the syndicalists divisions over war and the 1917 Russian
revolution. Some syndicalist leaders came to agree with the communist leaders about
the limitations of syndicalism (principally, the lack of strategies for dealing with state
repression following strikes and therefore the weakness of the central tactic of the
general strike) and joined the party, but such transitions to communism tended to be
short-lived, although they had a more lasting impact in the case of the British shop-
stewards movement. Unfortunately, discussion of such cases is very brief (twelve
pages in the last chapter).
As it is, viewing events from the Comintern perspective tends to deprive the
story of local context and the ideological, personal and organisational dilemmas that
marked the syndicalists political journeys during this period. There is a useful review
of the early years of the Comintern, in line with Richard Hymans analysis, and a
good sense of the difficult relationship between the communists and syndicalists,
through reference to original articles, speeches and minutes. The discussion of the
debates around trade unions versus workers councils or soviets is also lively, but frus-
tratingly brief this is at the heart of the debate here about the role of trade unions
as an expression of the tensions of capitalist production, or the potential basis for
workers self-organisation in a post-capitalist economy. The bulk of the analysis in
the last section consists of a review of the arguments of Comintern leaders, and
Trotsky and Gramsci, criticising syndicalism for its economism and its lack of recog-
nition of the need for political leadership. In these terms the discussion feels
relentlessly one-sided, and an opportunity to explore syndicalists dilemmas is not
taken up. There is more to say about the relationship between syndicalists and
communists during this period, although Darlingtons book makes a thought-
provoking contribution.
Susan Milner
University of Bath

Reviews
118
Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective (eds), Teaching Rebellion: Stories
from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca
Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008
In the south of Mexico lies the state of Oaxaca, poor, exploited and seemingly unre-
markable. Then, in 2006, state government forces brutally attacked striking teachers.
This outraged the populace and triggered an uprising that shows the capacity of
communities for self-organisation in the most difficult circumstances.
In Oaxaca, the government had long been both corrupt and repressive. The
peoples uprising challenged both the corruption and the repression. The initial
response was defending the teachers; support for them increased dramatically after
they were attacked. This soon evolved into challenges to government functions and
setting up peoples alternatives.
Most local government officials were pawns of the corrupt state governor. The
people set up their own organisation, a peoples assembly. The police neglected their
normal duties; many of them joined plain-clothed paramilitaries who threatened,
beat and shot at people at the barricades. So the people set up a de facto police force,
to defend protesters and deal with common criminals.
The book Teaching Rebellion tells the story of the Oaxaca peoples movement in
a highly engaging and informative fashion. The bulk of the book is two dozen
personal stories told by participants.
The editors have done a wonderful job in grouping and editing these stories so
that each individual voice is distinctive, yet the collective picture of events comes
through very clearly. The stories are grouped chronologically and thematically, with
perspectives from different sectors of the community successively presented, for
example artists, technicians, journalists and priests.
To take an example, one of the perspectives presented in the book is that of
women, who had long been oppressed in Oaxaca. The popular mobilisation empow-
ered women to oppose both state government repression and local patriarchy. On
one occasion, women were called on to join a march and bring along pots and pans
for making noise. The women spontaneously decided to take over the radio station,
which was a propaganda tool of the government. For three weeks, they occupied the
station and learned how to do broadcasting. They were assisted by many others
women and men who provided food, child care and other needs.
The story of the radio station occupation is told initially by Tonia, in a simple

Brian Martin
119
and moving fashion. The editors give a one-paragraph introduction, and then it is
Tonias story. A few excerpts:
At first I didnt sympathise with the striking teachers. On the contrary, I was
annoyed with the sit-in in the center and felt like the teachers just repeated the
same thing every year. But everything changed after the brutal repression that the
government unleashed against them. It made me put myself in their shoes For a
lot a people, the violence of June 14th was the straw that broke the camels back.
The situation in Oaxaca is unbearable. Rural communities live in extreme poverty
Yet Oaxaca is rich, full of natural resources. If it wasnt for all the money the
governors are stealing, wed be better off than the countries in the North What
really impressed me was when they started to announce the March of Pots and
Pans of August 1st. How is this possible? I asked myself. I come from a village,
and in a village, a woman is worth nothing. In a village a man drinks milk, a
woman doesnt. She doesnt have that right. The man washes himself with soap.
The woman doesnt, because she is a woman The August 1st march was organ-
ized by a group of women who were participating in a sit-in at the Finance
Department when I heard on Radio Universidad that they were inviting women
to a march, telling them to bring pots and pans and whatever they could use to
make noise, I was the first in line (pp131-133).
The text is supplemented by numerous photos of people and events. Appealing in

both content and appearance, Teaching Rebellion is a model for presenting an in-
depth treatment of a peoples movement through the eyes of participants.
The overall story is both inspiring and distressing: inspiring in showing the peoples
capacity to run their own communities without rulers and distressing in the measures
taken by rulers including arrests, frame-ups, beatings and shootings to repress the
movement. Repression was the trigger for mobilisation but also the key force restraining
it, raising the question of how to promote self-rule without repression to ignite outrage.
Given the importance of the struggle and the need to take the message to wider
audiences, I could not help reflecting on the limitations of the traditional printed
book for communication. This sort of high-quality material needs to be available on
the web as well.
Brian Martin
University of Wollongong, Australia

Reviews
120
Bernd Kast (ed.) 2009. Die Kritik Stirners und die Kritik an Stirner.
Der Einzige. Jahrbuch der Max Stirner Gesellschaft.
Leipzig, Verlag Max Stirner Archiv/edition unica. 274 pages.
ISBN 978-3-933287-85-4
Max Stirners caustic criticisms and provoking thoughts have been inspirational for
both anarchists and archists, time and again. In 2008, an international symposium on
what Stirner criticised and what he was criticised for was held in Lisbon. Now, most
of the contributions have been published (in German) in Der Einzige, the yearbook
of the Max Stirner Society. Its a pity that not all the talks were included scholars of
anarchism will especially miss G.L. Luekens thoughts on Stirners influence on Gustav
Landauers communitarianism but what made it into the book is interesting
nonetheless. The collection is framed by two musings about the destructiveness of
Stirners anthropology. At the outset, J. Barata-Moura reflects on the annihilation not
only of all external limitations, but also of the ego itself as it consumes its life. A.B.
Rukavisnikovs introduction to the Russian edition of The Ego and Its Own concludes
the collection, also concentrating on Stirners special view of humankind. In between,
five articles examine the criticism Stirner delivered, while two focus on the criticism
he attracted, and one sets out to criticise his anti-coercionism. This piece is extraordi-
nary: N. Psarros argues that both Aristotle and Stirner are anti-coercionists, since they
believe man to be able to realise the truth by himself thus man must not be coerced
into accepting morality. So far so good, but then Psarros alleges that Stirner is not
compatible with anarchy (in its prima facie weird definition as a chaotic tyranny of
possessed communists) and that his Union of Egoists is bound to fail, because
affected individuals have a twisted perspective; instead Psarros pleads for coercion
through officers free of affection, allegedly known for their objectivity and fairness!
Anarchists would rightly condemn the view that bureaucracy is less tyrannical than
anarchy, but can nonetheless gain inspiration from the concept of anti-coercionism.
Most of the articles in the yearbook deal with issues Stirner criticised. F.-C. Hansel
points at the Feuerbachian core of Stirners anti-religious stance, according to which
humans invent their own gods. He concludes that Stirner would approve of todays
tendency of individualistic religious syncretism, but speculations like that are always
problematic; in his examination of Stirners attitudes toward ancient and modern
philosophies, J. Spiessens asserts that Stirner was much more radical than Feuerbach
and viewed religion as necessarily oppressive. Thus religion, together with modern
concepts of mind and metaphysics, should be abandoned. Also, the liberal notion of

Peter Seyferth
121
freedom of press as something bestowed by the state is fiercely criticised by Stirner:
instead of asking for permission, one should appropriate the press. Approvingly read-
justing Stirners battle cry to the internet era, J.M. Silva calls for an attack on the
dominance of corporate media. An often neglected aspect of Stirners work is his occu-
pation as an editor and critic of classical economics. He translated and published the
main works of Say and Smith. G. Senft argues that the fact that their texts sanctify
power divides and economic inequalities was unbearable to Stirner, and led him to
formulate an early (i.e. pre-Marxian) theory of surplus value and to advocate workers
coalitions and cooperative economics. Stirners related thoughts on money and estate
in land influenced Tucker and Gesell. M. Schuhmann describes Stirners dismantling of
another classical economist, namely Proudhon, whom he considered possessed by the
fixed idea of common property (Psarross definition of anarchy is not so far-fetched
after all). Since the first literal anarchists understanding of property dispossesses the
egoist and refers to law, Stirner rejects it outright. In comparison, Georg Simmel, a
German sociologist who influenced Lukcs, Buber, Mannheim, Bloch and some
members of the Frankfurt School, covertly appreciates Stirners ideas and concepts. B.
Kast offers an extensive collection of passages in Simmels work that, in spite of wincing
at the radicalism, were clearly inspired by Stirner. Even more in accord with Stirner is
Paul Feyerabend, as B. Kramer argues. Both assail the scientific method of their times
that they perceive of as dogmatic: Stirner surmounts dialectics by struggling towards a
critical rationalism, which in turn is criticised by Feyerabend.
The aim of this collection is to contribute not only to the history of anarchism,
but to a history of ideas in general. It contains some of the most recent research on
Stirner and even a new portrait painting, so it is essential reading not only for the
Stirnerites among you.
Peter Seyferth
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt Munich
Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross, Labor Law For the Rank and Filer: Building
Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law
Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008. 110 pages
The American labor movement is in a seemingly endless spiral of decline and attrition
an unsympathetic political system, bickering union leadership and a full-frontal

Reviews
122
attack by corporations have been consistently (although not always) knocking big
labor over. Labor Law For the Rank and Filer is a potential antidote to these
problems, and, as such, is a ridiculously necessary book for all working people in the
United States. In fact, organized labor should be ashamed that it has not created
accessible works like this. Unfortunately, it is not surprising that large, bureaucratic
unions are uninterested in generating a militant rank and file constituency within
their ranks. Staughton Lynd, a long-time civil rights activist and labor lawyer (and a
strong supporter of the rank and file worker), wrote the first edition of this book in
1978. Since that time, many things have changed for the American labor movement,
while much has (regrettably) not changed. Lynd has joined forces with Daniel Gross
from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to update this book for the
twenty-first century.
Lynds approach to law has always been defensive. It is clear he does not have
fuzzy, liberal assumptions about the intrinsic fairness of laws and legal avenues. Nor
does he view the law as the be-all-and-end-all of labor action, as many technocratic
unionists would assert. In fact, the subtitle of the book Building Solidarity While
Staying Clear of the Law suggests that the law might be something worth
avoiding, if possible. Instead, Lynd thinks workers ought to be knowledgeable of the
law in order to avoid pitfalls when struggling against employers, and they can also
use the law as one more tactic to push back with.
Labor Law covers pivotal labor-related legislation, such as the Norris-LaGuardia,
Wagner, Fair Labor Standards, Taft-Hartley, Landrum-Griffin, and Civil Rights
Acts, in each case indicating how these laws either expanded or contracted worker
freedoms (sometimes doing both in one law). American jurisprudence is not just
built upon the written laws, however. Thus, Lynd and Gross include the many (often
nuanced and even contradictory) ways in which these laws have been interpreted by
courts and the main labor-mediation institution, the National Labor Relations
Board. Readers are offered the legal reference information for specific court deci-
sions that they could cite to convince fellow workers of their rights or, if need be,
wield them when in a conflict with an employer.
The rights offered by these laws and court decisions are described by Lynd and
Gross as the usual legal limits of worker action. A reader could then take this knowl-
edge and translate it into a specific campaign or strategy in their workplace.
However, Labor Law is uninterested in merely providing a legalistic appraisal of
worker rights and non-rights. Rather, the book provides a strong statement and
explication of what the authors call solidarity unionism. This approach to labor
struggle differs from business unionism in its emphasis upon rank-and-file control

Dana M. Williams
123
(as opposed to professionalized union staff control), direct action (as opposed to
withholding strike threats and other direct action potential), and unionists retaining
their identity and ideologies even when in non-union environments (as opposed to
tolerating de-politicized workplaces). For many audiences apart from labor mili-
tants the strategies of solidarity unionism will likely be fresh and
thought-provoking. What distinguishes this book from much IWW propaganda I
have seen is the honest critique of how and when these strategies work, as well as an
acknowledgement of possible weakness or failures in using these strategies. Work-to-
rule, secondary pressure, wage and hour claims, sit-ins, and occupations are all
discussed, along with examples of how they have worked in the past. Important, new
strategies are also developed for an age of ever-globalized capitalism, including
defense of second-class workers (i.e. immigrants) and cross-border solidarity.
One of the best characteristics of Labor Law is its clear, frank and non-conde-
scending tone. The authors understand that solidarity means mutual aid with others,
regardless of inequalities or positions of privilege, and want their book to find its
way into the hands of all manner of workers. The book is also of importance for
academics, who work with and educate millions of students annually, many of whom
come from working-class and middle-class backgrounds and will undoubtedly
continue to work in waged or salaried, non-managerial occupations. We owe it to
our students to arm them not only with a theoretical understanding of the world,
but also in a way that helps to further their practical self-defense, and, perhaps, with
the tools to create a better, self-managed world. Labor Law is an important tool in
that intellectual toolkit.
Dana M. Williams
Valdosta State University
Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out (DVD)

Directed by Clifton Ross
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008)
ISBN: 978-1-60486-017-7
As the title of this documentary, Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out, suggests,
the contemporary political process in Venezuela attempts to re-think and re-make
revolution by embedding it in the experiences, histories and theorisations of el

Reviews
124
pueblo (the people). It is not based on implementing political and ideological
models, but is rather an endogenous and diverse process whose political energy and
creativity is to be found in the popular politics that animate its soul and imagination.
Accordingly, the documentary takes us on a journey that engages with urban co-
operatives and rural peasant movements, and develops academic analysis, movement
organiser narratives and community educator perspectives. It touches therefore upon
some of the powerful dynamics, processes and forms of political creativity that mark
the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela.
The videos diversity and movement attest to the characteristics of the political
process it seeks to capture. It focuses on a number of different political experiences,
including the formation of missiones (social missions offering health and education
to the majority poor); new institutions of state power such as the Ministry of
Popular Participation; different methodologies of popular education which build
on the knowledge of local communities to break traditions of individualism and
competition and replace this with collectivity and solidarity; and the construction of
co-operatives that attempt to create a solidarity economy in which goods are
produced for community need as opposed to profit. This takes us on a journey that
manages to capture many elements of the complexity and contradictions within this
on-going political struggle.
However, the documentary could be seen as working within a traditional left
understanding of revolution that reinforces distinctions between political and intel-
lectual labour and popular practices. Illustrative of this is that much of the analysis is
made by academics (from Venezuela and outside of Venezuela) and community and
political leaders. Thus, for example, the exclusionary history of the Punto Fijo period
(1958-1998) and the explosion of popular rebellion in the caracazo of 1989 are
represented through academic eyes, as opposed to this history and analysis of its role
in the emergence of Chavez being constructed through a dialogue with its popular
class protagonists. When the people are represented visually they are often shown as
victims of the brutality of the state. This creates an image of passivity which ignores
the rich and diverse, if silenced, history of the urban and rural poor. This history is
an invaluable political and intellectual resource upon which we can begin to under-
stand the dynamics, rationalities and political cultures that animate Venezuelas
on-going revolutionary process.
When we do see el pueblo we are often presented with images of men working,
painting and organising the street or cutting in the fields, but not of them thinking
and reflecting. Thus, even though one commentator talks of the revolution as
wishing to overcome the divisions between manual and intellectual labour character-

Sara C. Motta
125
istic of capitalist social relationships and to create mass intellectuality, the films
representation of the poor seems to reinforce this division of labour in a highly
gendered manner, characteristic of a way of seeing associated with the assumptions of
workerist politics that dominated left political practices in the twentieth century.
As a result of this perspective the contradictions within the revolution focus on
the lack of consciousness and revolutionary culture of the people. Therefore there
are discussions which illustrate how co-operatives can become capitalist mini-
fiefdoms, and how state funds given for projects can be used on fiestas and not
political development. The existence of old politics, traditional culture and depoliti-
cised community present real barriers to the development of a revolution from
below. However the films focus solely on these problematics offers us a one-sided
engagement with the realities of popular class politics. It is an engagement that could
be seen as disempowering of the very people that it seeks to represent. The popular
classes have a varied and rich set of political traditions; in communities without a
history of struggle old politics may tend to dominate, but in communities with
histories of struggle then some of the most creative political practices are being
developed, often by women who are constructing new forms of self-government
based in the needs, histories and rationalities of their communities. Indeed some of
the greatest tensions in the political process are the brakes that the state is placing on
the autonomous development of such popular class forms of creativity and politicisa-
tion.
Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out takes us on a journey through the
Bolivarian Revolution that engages with some of its radical processes, dynamics and
practices. It is an important contribution to the on-going debate about the nature of
this revolution. However it is important to remember that, like any other representa-
tion, it is partial, and there are other stories, other perspectives and other histories
that need exploration if we are to develop representations which fully capture the
complexity of this new type of revolution.
Sara C. Motta
Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham

Reviews
126
Tripp York, Living on Hope while Living in Babylon: The Christian anarchists of
the twentieth century
Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2009
ISBN 978 0 7188 9202 9
Tripp York defines anarchy as a different way of being in the world (ix). The first
two chapters elaborate theologically and theoretically why the Christian church is
called to precisely such a different way of being in the world, and why its mission is
to come out of Babylon and reveal the radical alternative preached by Jesus. For
York, the church should engage with Babylon from a position of exile, staying
faithful to its calling.
The three last chapters then provide three examples which York has chosen to
illustrate this vocation, each responding to one part of what Martin Luther King
called the triple axis of evil: materialism, racism, and militarism (xvi). Those
chapters therefore narrate the story of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Clarence
Jordan, and the Berrigan brothers, stories from which York develops a variety of
personal reflections on capitalism, racism and (particularly US) militarism.
The style of the book is appealing, and the focus on exemplars makes the
journey varied and engaging. It contains plenty of interesting remarks about radical
Christian discipleship (e.g. its scriptural roots, its subversive tactics, its apocalyptic
message, its temptations, its effective failure), and should be articulate enough to
provoke mainstream Christians into reconsidering their role, as Christians, in todays
global Babylon. The book, however, is not without its weaknesses.
Firstly, although the subtitle promises an account of the Christian anarchists of
the twentieth century, only three examples are given despite the many more that
could have been discussed such as Jacques Ellul, Dave Andrews, many a Tolstoyan,
or quite a few Christian radicals living in intentional communities.
Secondly, the application of the label Christian anarchist to Clarence Jordan
(who built, in the US South, a Christian community where racism was abolished)
and the Berrigan brothers (stubborn Ploughshares activists against war and mili-
tarism) only works if the definition of anarchism is the one adopted by York. He
does warn that the posture of his examples is only anarchical in the sense that the
apparatus of the state was not necessary for their role as followers of Jesus (xiv, Yorks
emphasis). That might be so, but one could argue that a more direct denunciation of
the state is an important prerequisite for the label: anarchist. The chapters on
Jordan and the Berrigans certainly portray them as inspiring and subversive exem-

127
plars of radical Christian witness, but many might dispute their description as
Christian anarchists.
Part of the problem might stem from the fact that, thirdly, the book is actually
addressed first and foremost to a Christian (rather than anarchist) audience. The
language is Christian, the text takes traditional Christian tenets for granted, and no
attempt is made to address non-Christian anarchists or to open up avenues for
dialogue. The aim is to convert nominal Christians to the much more radical form
of being that their Christianity calls them to. That, it does well but the book is of
more limited value beyond this intended audience.
Finally, the book contains passing claims the veracity of which is far from estab-
lished such as that anarchists assume the goodness of human nature (p9), that
anarchism is an expansion of liberalism (pp11-12), that the discourse of the
Enlightenment is irredeemably racist (pp61-64), or that democratic leaders are but a
reflection of our desires (p101). Many more comments are rigorous and interesting,
but that is precisely why the few less accepted ones are unexpected.
These limitations aside, this book remains an enjoyable read and an accessible
introduction to several aspects of Christian anarchism and to the lives of certain
Christian subversives. It probably wont convert non-Christian anarchists to
Christianity, but it could go some way to converting Christians to anarchism.
Loughborough University


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Anarchist Studies 18.

2 03/11/2010 11:49 Page 1

Book reviews editor

Lawrence & Wishart 2010

ISSN 0967 3393

Typeset by E-Type, Liverpool

Editorial Ruth Kinna 7

Tolstoy, history and non-violence Terry Hopton 19

Functional representation and its anarchist origins Jason Royce Lindsey 85

The anarchist aphorist: Wilde and Gottesman, paradox and subversion

Islam.alt Sharif Gemie 109

Randall Amster et al, Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory

Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism. An

Harold Barclay (Professor Emeritus University of Alberta), anthropology

Hlne Bowen-Raddeker (University of New South Wales), Japanese anarchism,

Tom Cahill (Shifting Ground, France), social movements

Paul Chambers (University of Glamorgan), sociology of religion

Graeme Chesters (Bradford University), social movements, complexity theory and

Noam Chomsky (MIT), linguistics

Ronald Creagh (Professeur Emrite de Montpellier/Research on anarchism), history

Sureyyya Evren (University of Loughborough), art, culture and politics

Karen Goaman (Open University, London Metropolitan), anthropology, archaeology,

David Goodway (Independent researcher), history

Robert Graham (Independent researcher), history of ideas/contemporary anarchist theory

Judy Greenway (University of East London), cultural studies

Caroline Hamilton (University of Pittsburg), literature

Clifford Harper (Independent), illustration

Terry Hopton (University of Central Lancashire), classical anarchist theory

Margaert Majumdar (University of Portsmouth), Francophone studies

Brian Martin (University of Wollongong), social sciences

George McKay (University of Salford), cultural studies

Brian Morris (Emeritus Professor, Goldsmiths, London), anthropology

Alex Prichard (London School of Economics), history, international relations, politics

Richard Porton (Independent researcher), film studies

Raimund Schffner (University of Heidelberg), English literature

Ian Welsh (Cardiff University), sociology

About this issues cover

Lev Nikolai Tolstoi

You lion, you child

The wrath of your thought flames, loving and forgiving

Shepherd of feelings and ideas,

It cannot be . . . and it isnt!

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Anarchist Studies 18.2 2010 ISSN 0976 3393

Nevertheless, if Tolstoys response to oppression was in a sense introspective, it

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Anarchist Studies 18.2

GEORGES FONTENIS (1920-2010)

It is with great sadness that we learned of the death on 9 August of

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Anarchist Studies 18.2 2010 ISSN 0976 3393

Bethink yourselves or you will perish:

1. TOLSTOYS DROWNING VOICE SINCE 1910

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Bethink yourselves or you will perish

2. THE CONTINUING URGENCY OF TOLSTOYS CHRISTIAN ANARCHISM

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Bethink yourselves or you will perish

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos completed his doctoral thesis at the University of

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Anarchist Studies 18.2

Bethink yourselves or you will perish

Anarchist Studies 18.2