Matthew S. Adams. Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism

Political assassinations, bombings, and other outrages committed by a tiny group of left-wing extremists were prominent features of the international anarchist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These isolated revolutionary outbursts generated immense publicity at the time, and they consequently help to explain why terrorism and violence have to this day been associated with anarchists and anarchism. Yet most anarchists, particularly the leading interpreters of the doctrine, have long argued that, rather than being a revolutionary creed that advocates terror, chaos, and destruction, anarchism is fundamentally a social philosophy that champions personal liberty and promotes the formation of a society in which all individuals can flourish in freedom. Two of the leading defenders of this positive view of anarchism, the Russian Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) and the British poet and renowned art critic Herbert Read (1893–1968), are the protagonists of Matthew S. Adams’s innovative intellectual history of British anarchism, Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism. The author aims to bring to light a dimension of Britain’s cultural past that has been ill served by historians. From a historiographical perspective, he is especially interested in connecting his study to the conceptual trends and methodologies currently shaping the history of political thought. Accordingly, Adams seeks to portray both Read and Kropotkin as representatives of a marginalized political tradition that, despite possessing a distinct identity and definable ideological boundaries, intersected with other forms of intellectual discourse peculiar to the British context.

Art · Art history · Literature · Romanticism · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies