Nicolas Walter was the son of the neurologist, W. Grey Walter, and both his grandfathers had known Peter Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter. However, it was the twin jolts of Suez and the Hungarian Revolution while still a student, followed by participation in the resulting New Left and nuclear disarmament movement, that led him to anarchism himself. His personal history is recounted in two autobiographical pieces in this collection as well as the editor’s introduction.During the 1960s...

Of all political views, anarchism is the most ill-represented. For more than thirty years, in over thirty books, Colin Ward patiently explained anarchist solutions to everything from vandalism to climate change—and celebrated unofficial uses of the landscape as commons, from holiday camps to squatter communities. Ward was an anarchist journalist and editor for almost sixty years, most famously editing the journal Anarchy. He was also a columnist for New Statesman, New...

From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. In Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. This book succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics. Goodway argues that a rec...

Lessons of the Spanish Revolution examines the many ways in which Spain’s revolutionary movement contributed to its own defeat. Was it too weak to carry through the revolution? To what extent was the purchase of arms and raw materials from outside sources dependent upon the appearance of a constitutional government inside Republican Spain? What chances had an improvised army of guerrillas against a trained fighting force? These were some of the practical problems facing the revolu...

A collection of essays from a revered member of the British Labour Party. What distinguished Cole was his distance from traditional marxist and bureaucratic labour approaches. Neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat (nowadays referred to as a Democratic Socialist a la Bernie Sanders) Cole desired a socialism that centered freedom for workers—an end to capitalist exploitation, workers’ management of production, and an expanding democracy in all realms of social life.

We published For Worker’s Power in 2004, a time when the audience for his work was somewhat limited to academics and political theorists. Today, with the massive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (with a current membership of 60,000) as well as a crop of local and national politicians calling themselves “socialist,” there is much more of an appetite for writing that explores and questions the relationship among socialism, state power, and political parties....

This collection discusses both the history and theory of anarchism and in particular examines italian anarchism, the relationship between Marxism and anarchism, the influence of Kropotkin, new social movements and the anarchist theory of history.

It was the revolutionary movement in Spain which took up Franco's challenge in July 1936, and this book soberly examines the many ways in which Spain s revolutionary movement contributed to its own defeat. Was it too weak to carry through the Revolution? To what extent was the purchase of arms and materials from outside sources dependent upon the appearance of a constitutional government inside Republican Spain? What chances had an improvised army of guerrillas against a trained fighting f...

George Orwell is regarded as the greatest political writer in English of the twentieth century. The massive critical literature on Orwell has not only become extremely specialized, and therefore somewhat inaccessible to the nonscholar, but it has also attributed to and even created misconceptions about the man, the writer and his literary legacy. For these reasons, an overview of Orwell's writing and influence is an indispensable resource. Accordingly, this 2007 Companion serves as both an...

A compelling look at the origins of British socialismThe Making of British Socialism provides a new interpretation of the emergence of British socialism in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating that it was not a working-class movement demanding state action, but a creative campaign of political hope promoting social justice, personal transformation, and radical democracy. Mark Bevir shows that British socialists responded to the dilemmas of economics ...

THE AGE OF EMPIRE is a book about the strange death of the nineteenth century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilisation. It is about hopes realised which turned into fears: an era of unparalleled peace engendering an era of unparalleled war; revolt and revolution emerging on the outskirts of society; a time of profound identity crisis for bourgeois classes, among new and sudden mass labour movements which rejected capitalism and ne...

'Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness - Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il's haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts.'