Great Anarchists - Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper

Originally published as a series of pamphlets, they have now been collected together into one book. The subjects are Peter Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Mikhail Bakunin, Louise Michel, Oscar Wilde, Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lucy Parsons, William Godwin, and Errico Malatesta.

The book was made freely available by the author and published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public Licence.

Contents

• Introduction
• Peter Kropotkin
• Voltairine de Cleyre
• Mikhail Bakunin
• Louise Michel
• Oscar Wilde
• Max Stirner
• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
• Lucy Parsons
• William Godwin
• Errico Malatesta

Introduction

These short introductions delve into the anarchist canon to recover some of the distinctive ideas that historical anarchists advanced to address problems relevant to their circumstances. Although these contexts were special, many of the issues the anarchists wrestled with still plague our lives. Anarchists developed a body of writing about power, domination, injustice and exploitation, education, prisons and a lot more besides. Honing in on different facets of the anarchist canon is not just an interesting archaeological exercise. The persistence, development and adaptation of anarchist traditions depends on our surveying the historical landscape of ideas and drawing on the resources it contains. The theoretical toolbox that this small assortment of anarchists helped to construct is there to use, amend and adapt.

Educate! Agitate! Organise!