Workshops

This is obviously a narrow conception of anarchism, but also one that we will find, combined with other elements, in quite a number of the works he will examine moving forward. In 1840, for example, Proudhon will assure us that, thanks in part to his anarchistic analysis, “the despotism of the will will be succeeded by the reign of reason”—but it isn’t at all clear that the transition will be rapid or the road smooth.

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. I use speculative fiction—mostly vignettes and snippets of prose, stored safely away in notebooks or word-processing files—as a personal tool to supplement more traditional sorts of study and analysis. I have been known to share fragments from that work here in the Labyrinth, but the bits tend to […]

We’re concerned, in these early phases of the survey, with the means by which we might recognize an anarchism emerging in contexts where that term did not yet have any of its familiar associations. What are the conditions for an emerging body of thought to inspire in us the same responses we have to the sorts of anarchism we presently espouse?

As we move forward, let’s propose some distinctions between the various varieties of anarchism and near-anarchism that we might encounter. Let’s start with an ideal and probably nonexistent integral anarchism, which would represent a successful synthesis or distillation of the various attempts to express basic anarchist principles in a way that would simply allow us to apply them. That sort of anarchism might require a significant body of work to express—or it might be the sort of thing that, finally clarified, could be comfortably scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) Onward!—to the next experiment—with Scandal as our muse and encounter as our method. General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Let’s be clear: The history that we will be exploring will not be The Story of Anarchism—or anything particularly close to that. It will be a story about anarchism—and specifically about some margins and problems […]

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) Onward!—to the next experiment—with Scandal as our muse and encounter as our method. General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Let’s say that, taking inspiration from Déjacque’s bilge-rat, we decide that our present experience of anarchism is too constraining—and decide to scuttle this particular vessel. What happens next? As the anarchist past floods in, how […]

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Onward!—to the next experiment—with Scandal as our muse and encounter as our method. Lets establish some working assumptions for this new experiment: If anarchism—understood as a kind of joint enterprise—is to be useful in attaining and sustaining anarchy, then we can almost certainly anticipate at least a certain […]

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Reflections on “Constructing an Anarchism” The first phase of “Constructing Anarchisms” was an experiment—and, I think, a relatively successful one. But it was also a fairly complex experiment, for which there were not perhaps many precedents, so, despite the fact that it often felt like the commentary on […]

The best and the worst thing about anarchist history—or the anarchist past, fodder for various anarchist histories—is probably just the fact that there is so much of it. It’s no simple thing just to establish a general sense of the progression of events in time. So the first thing we’ll try to accomplish in this part of the course is to just make our way, decade by decade, from the 1830s to the 1930s, noting the general state of anarchist ideas and movements, together with some of the contexts that seem most useful for understanding the work of anarchists in each period.