I’ve just posted a translation of selections from The Philosophy of Defiance, an 1854 anarchist pamphlet published in New York and written by a French exile who signed the work “Felix P…..” Max Nettlau discovered the text, and published portions of it in La Revue Anarchiste for July, 1922. That’s fortunate, because the original text seems to be rare to the point of nonexistence, and because it’s a very interesting example of early anarchist thought.
Anarchist Beginnings
Max Nettlau, undated fragment on socialist progress
[ezcol_2third] Ever since some 150 years ago demands for social justice from isolate affirmation of thinkers or rebels, became objects of the urge of greater numbers of people who in the most various ways called […]
anarchist synthesis
On the Subject of the Anarchist Synthesis (1929)
You have sent me The Anarchist Synthesis, by Sébastien Faure, dated February 20, 1928, and I am sure that you will republish this remarkable document or at least that you will make its contents known to your readers. On that conditions, allow me to put forward some remarks on this subject, which is certainly of a capital interest for the anarchist movement in all nations.
anarchism without adjectives
Max Nettlau, “1907 and the Present Outlook” (1908)
No one can possibly guess the strength of latent revolutionary energy that will be brought to the surface by coming events. Will it be sufficient to lead to a clean sweeping away of the whole present system, or will by-and-by a greater separation of progressive from reactionary forces arise than exists already, and the next stage be that the progressive forces obtain full elbowroom at the said of the reactionary forces—just as Freethought is existing to-day side by side with the densest religious obtusity? Freethought would have preferred to demolish religion altogether, but had to be content with the success of attracting some of the best and obtaining neutrality from the rest—on its guard always against a treasonous enemy, of course. Will a similar state of things—exemption from the political State and economic independence on a co-operative basis—be the next stage of Anarchism also? Or will it remain in its present state of action by propaganda only? Or will it be able, by bridging over the gulf which still separates Syndicalist from revolutionary action, to establish a new basis—collective property—on which it could be practiced on a larger scale?