Best Books on the History of Anarchism: From Proudhon to Modern Movements

The word anarchism has two meanings in common usage. The first is the political philosophy that opposes all forms of coercive authority, hierarchical government, and involuntary domination. The second is a synonym for chaos, disorder, and violence. These two meanings have almost nothing to do with each other. The confusion is not accidental. The political tradition has been misrepresented consistently since Pierre-Joseph Proudhon first declared himself an anarchist in 1840. The books below give you the actual history. ## Proudhon and the First Anarchists Proudhon's famous claim that "property is theft" shocked the Paris of 1840 and has been misquoted and misunderstood ever since. What Proudhon meant was not that all possession is illegitimate, but that a specific kind of property, the kind that generates income without labor, through rent, interest, and profit, was a system of legally sanctioned extraction. He was criticizing capitalism and the state that enforced it, not arguing that no one should own anything. Proudhon was a printer, largely self-educated, and his writing is dense and sometimes contradictory. But he established the core anarchist position: that voluntary cooperation between free individuals is both possible and preferable to government enforcing order from above. The state was not a neutral arbiter. It was a mechanism for maintaining the power of property owners over everyone else. Peter Marshall's *Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism* is the most comprehensive single-volume history of the tradition. Marshall covers Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and the twentieth-century movements that grew from their ideas. He is fair to the internal debates within anarchism, between individualists and collectivists, between those who embraced political violence and those who rejected it, without flattening those differences into a single story. The book is long, but it is structured clearly enough that you can read sections independently. ## Bakunin and the Break with Marx The conflict between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx inside the First International in the early 1870s is one of the most important and least understood splits in the history of the left. Both men were critics of capitalism. Both wanted workers to control the means of production. What they disagreed about, fundamentally, was the role of the state in achieving that goal. Marx argued that the working class needed to capture state power and use it to dismantle capitalism from above. Bakunin argued that state power could not be used as a tool for liberation because it would corrupt whoever wielded it. Any revolutionary state, however well-intentioned at the start, would reproduce hierarchy and domination. The argument proved remarkably predictive when it came to evaluating twentieth-century communist regimes. Bakunin's own life was chaotic, his writings were often unfinished, and his personal behavior was sometimes appalling. But his political instincts about power were sharper than Marx gave him credit for. Mark Leier's *Bakunin: The Creative Passion* is the best modern biography, rigorous about sources and honest about its subject's contradictions. ## Anarchism in Practice: Spain 1936 The Spanish Civil War gave anarchism its closest encounter with actual power. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist labor federation, had millions of members by 1936. When Franco's coup came in July of that year, anarchist militias were among the first to resist. In Catalonia and Aragon, anarchists collectivized factories and farms, ran their own militias, and attempted to build a stateless society in the middle of a war. It did not last. The Stalinist Communist Party, which controlled Soviet weapons, systematically attacked and dismantled anarchist power in the spring of 1937. By the time the Republic lost to Franco in 1939, the revolution that had happened inside the war was over. George Orwell's *Homage to Catalonia* remains the essential eyewitness account of this period. Orwell went to Spain as a volunteer, joined a CNT-affiliated militia, and watched the intra-left conflict unfold at close range. The book is honest about what he saw and honest about what he got wrong. It is also some of the best political writing in the English language. ## Modern Anarchism The anarchist tradition did not end in 1939. It fed directly into the New Left of the 1960s, the anti-globalization movements of the 1990s, and the decentralized organizing models of contemporary protest politics. The horizontal decision-making structures used by Occupy Wall Street and many climate movements draw directly on anarchist theory and practice. Understanding where those ideas come from, what problems they were designed to solve, and what their historical track record looks like, is genuinely useful for anyone trying to understand contemporary politics. The history is more interesting and more instructive than the caricature. ## Further Reading For more books on political history and radical movements, visit [/category/history](/category/history).