I thought that the following new book looked interesting, particularly given the ongoing debates about the relationship of anarchism to the Enlightenment and the possibility of a postmodern anarchism.
Illegitimate children of the Enlightenment: anarchists and the French Revolution, 1880-1914
The early years of Third French Republic (1880-1914) saw multiple political factions vying for the legacy of the French Revolution. This book examines one of those factions, the anarchist movement, and the role played by the French Revolution in its political thought and action. The French Revolution became a vital, if not well recognized, tool of the anarchist movement to popularize and legitimize its revolutionary activity while engaged in a struggle with other political forces of the Republic to claim ownership over the Revolutionary heritage. The anarchists of the Third Republic wrote histories of the Revolution that reflected their own political orientation. They asserted themselves as part of the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment, which they believed had helped spark the Revolution. The anarchists appropriated the music and popular culture of the French Revolution in their own propaganda. Moreover, they orchestrated revolutionary action and political theatre on the day most associated with the Revolution, July 14. In the Revolution, the anarchists saw glimmers of hope, precursors to their own movement, as well as an effective means to present their message to a wider audience as they also offered models for others to imitate.
The Author: C. Alexander McKinley received his Ph.D. in comparative history from Brandeis University in 2006. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at St. Ambrose University. McKinley has written on French history as well as on the history of radical movements in Europe.
One could be excused for thinking that Latin American revolutionaries were all authoritarians in the 1960s and 1970s. Leading figures like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Savlador Allende were deeply committed to a state-centered, top down approach to social change and groups like Uruguay’s Tupamaros or Brazil’s MR-8, which might have seemed more libertarian, were devoted Marxist-Leninists. It would appear that anarchists had no presence during the period.
The truth is that they were quite active and made important contributions to the battles being waged against the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. While their efforts are largely not reflected in the historical record, this omission says more about biases among historians, and the fear of disclosure that many survivors have inherited from the era, than anarchists’ real significance to the march of events during those terrifying decades.
This is why the recent publication of Verónica Diz and Fernando López Trujillo’s Resistencia Libertaria is such a good thing. Their (Spanish-language) book is the first comprehensive study of Resistencia Libertaria (RL) in any language and will hopefully help bring anarchists into the picture. RL was a clandestine Argentine anarchist organization founded shortly before the Argentine military seized power in 1976. It was active in the student, labor, and neighborhood movements of the time and also had a military wing with which it defended and financed its activities. The group had between 100 and 130 members at its peak as well as a much larger circle of supporters. The state crushed the organization in 1978 and 80 percent of its militants suffered the dictatorship’s concentration camps and torture chambers.
López and Diz qualify their work as a “first approximation” of RL’s history. Their book covers the origins of the group, some of its activities prior to the dictatorship, and the generalized crisis that erupted after the 1976 military coup. It also has five appendices which contain relevant historical documents as well as related articles.
The authors: Fernando López, a historian, is one of the few surviving RL members and author of Vidas en rojo y negro: Una historia del anarquismo en la década infame (Letra Libre, 2005). Verónica Diz is a journalist and professor of history whose work has focused on the relationship between anarchism and feminism.
Below is a short video documenting the creation of a mural in honor of disappeared members of Resistencia Libertaria. The mural was a project of Argentina’s Organización Socialista Libertaria and the muralists were known as the “Unidad Muralista Hermanos Tello,” a name evoking the memory of the three Tello brothers, who were leading members of RL and are all disappeared.
An exciting, new project recently came to my attention: The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 – Present. Edited by Immanuel Ness, this eight-volume, 5,000-page, peer-reviewed work will be published by Blackwell next year and is sure to become the definitive reference work for students of social radicalism.
The publication will be unique not only because of its length but also because of its extensive coverage of the global anarchist movement: it is scheduled to contain a total of 200,000 words (i.e., hundreds and hundreds of pages!) on the topic. It will include entries on the movement in specific countries, biographies of individual anarchists, discussions of key events and themes in the movement’s history, as well as explorations of various tendencies, tactics, institutions, and organizations. Jesse Cohn, author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, is the Associate Editor in charge of anarchist content.
Encyclopedia editors are still looking for writers to pen entries on many of the anarchist-related topics that they intend to treat in the book. I recently agreed to write entries on anarchism in Argentina, Mexico, and Puerto Rico (respectively), but many topics remain unassigned. Below is a list of unclaimed entries as of December 18, 2007. Please contact Jesse Cohn if you are interested in taking on one of them. Continue Reading »
The early years of Third French Republic (1880-1914) saw multiple political factions vying for the legacy of the French Revolution. This book examines one of those factions, the anarchist movement, and the role played by the French Revolution in its political thought and action. The French Revolution became a vital, if not well recognized, tool of the anarchist movement to popularize and legitimize its revolutionary activity while engaged in a struggle with other political forces of the Republic to claim ownership over the Revolutionary heritage. The anarchists of the Third Republic wrote histories of the Revolution that reflected their own political orientation. They asserted themselves as part of the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment, which they believed had helped spark the Revolution. The anarchists appropriated the music and popular culture of the French Revolution in their own propaganda. Moreover, they orchestrated revolutionary action and political theatre on the day most associated with the Revolution, July 14. In the Revolution, the anarchists saw glimmers of hope, precursors to their own movement, as well as an effective means to present their message to a wider audience as they also offered models for others to imitate.
One could be excused for thinking that Latin American revolutionaries were all authoritarians in the 1960s and 1970s. Leading figures like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and 
An exciting, new project recently came to my attention: The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 – Present. Edited by Immanuel Ness, this eight-volume, 5,000-page, peer-reviewed work will be published by Blackwell next year and is sure to become the definitive reference work for students of social radicalism.