This book of magic and politics uses quotes from classic books to show the connections between the two throughout history.

A major American thinker of the 20th century muses on anarchism. Winner of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) Book, Jacket, and Journal Show - Best Scholarly Typography (2002) "That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." This quote from Henry David Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience is one of thirty quotations from which John Cage created Anarchy, a book-length lecture comprising twenty mesostic poems. Composed with the aid of a computer program to simulate the coin toss of the I Ching, Anarchy draws on the writings of many serious anarchists including Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and Mario Malatesta, not so much making arguments for anarchism as "brushing information against information," giving the very words new combinations that de-familiarize and re-energize them. Now widely available of the first time, Anarchy marks the culmination of Cage's work as a poet, composer and as a thinker about contemporary society.

The Class Strikes Back examines a number of radical, twenty-first-century workers' struggles. These struggles are characterised by a different kind of unionism and solidarity, arising out of new kinds of labour conditions and responsive to new kinds of social and economic marginalisation. The essays in the collection demonstrate the dramatic growth of syndicalist and autonomist formations and argue for their historical necessity. They show how workers seek to form and join democratic and independent unions that are fundamentally opposed to bureaucratic leadership, compromise, and concessions

Formal anarchist organizations disappeared in Mexico after the 1910 Revolution, but anarchist principles survive in the popular resistance movements against the post-revolutionary governments. In this book, Donald Hodges offers the first comprehensive treatment of the intellectual foundations, history, politics, and strategy of Mexican anarchism since the Revolution.

Hodges interviewed leading Mexican anarchists, including Monico Rodriguez Gomez, and gained access to documents of numerous guerrilla organizations, such as the previously missing "Plan de Cerro Prieto." Using both original and published sources, he shows how the political heirs of Ricardo Flores Magon, Mexico's foremost anarchist, agitated for workers' self-management and agrarian reform under the cover of the Mexican Communist party, how they played an important role in the student rebellion, and how, in the face of a labor movement that has come under government control, anarchism is currently experiencing a rebirth under another name.

John Adams said that "without the pen of Paine the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain." Yet of all the great figures of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine has been least understood. Now David Freeman Hawke has written a rich biography of the brilliant propagandist who wrote Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and The Rights of Man. Thomas Paine lived a life of great diversity, from poor beginnings through the dramatic roles he played in the American and French revolutions, his friendship with Benjamin Franklin, his imprisonment in France during the Terror, his trial and banishment from England, and the pathos of his declining years. Temperamental and jealous of his reputation, Paine was nevertheless a gentle and unworldly man. In this portrait he comes to life as one of the great revolutionary idealists.

'One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.' Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial society in 'bondage to machinery' and argued instead that the wonder and joy of culture - in particular the 'sweetness and light' of classical civilization - were essential to human life. The other pieces here, on literary criticism, schools, France, journalism and democracy, form a powerful call to arms from a writer who believed that the English needed to be taught not what to think, but how to think. Edited with an introduction by P. J. Keating.

An analyses on the radical collectives organized in Spain. "The eyewitness reports and commentary presented in this highly important study reveal a different understanding of the nature of socialism and the means for achieving it."--Noam Chomsky

Volume One of "Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas," is a comprehensive and far ranging collection of anarchist writings from the feudal era (300) to 1939. Edited and introduced by noted anarchist scholar Robert Graham, the collection will include the definitive texts from the anarchist tradition of political thought, beginning with some of the earliest writings from China and Europe against feudal servitude and authority.

The collection will then go on to document the best of the anti-authoritarian writings from the English and French Revolutions and the early development of libertarian socialist ideas, including such writers as Gerrard Winstanley, William Godwin, Charles Fourier, Max Stirner, as well as the early anarchist writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Elisee Reclus, Leo Tolstoy, and Emma Goldman.

This incomparable volume deals both with the positive ideas and proposals the anarchists tried to put into practice, and with the anarchist critiques of the authoritarian theories and practices confronting them during these years with their revolutionary upheavals.

Robert Graham has written extensively on the history of anarchist ideas. He is the author of "The Role of Contract in Anarchist Ideology," in the Routledge publication, "For Anarchism," edited by David Goodway, and he wrote the introduction to the 1989 Pluto Press edition of Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century," originally published in 1851. He has been doing research and writing on the historical development of anarchist ideas for over 20 years and is a well respected commentator in the field.

Includes original portraits of the anarchists drawn by Maurice Spira specifically for this book Spira's imagery is rooted to the political, his subject matter global. Works such as "Battle of Seattle," "Gulf," and "Refugees" are the visual equivalent of newspaper headlines.

Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer edit a collection of essays which recovers many aspects of this erased tradition. Contributors bring to light the presence and persistence of Jewish anarchism throughout histories of radical labor, women's studies, political theory, multilingual literature, and ethnic studies. These essays reveal an ongoing engagement with non-Jewish radical cultures, including the translation practices of the Jewish anarchist press. Jewish anarchists drew from a matrix of secular, cultural, and religious influences, inventing new anarchist forms that ranged from mystical individualism to militantly atheist revolutionary cells. With Freedom in Our Ears brings together more than a dozen scholars and translators to write the first collaborative history of international, multilingual, and transdisciplinary Jewish anarchism.

In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the anarchist effort to promote free thought, individual liberty, and social equality relied upon an international Spanish-language print network. These channels for journalism and literature promoted anarchist ideas and practices while fostering transnational solidarity and activism from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Barcelona. Christopher J. Castaneda and Montse Feu edit a collection that examines many facets of Spanish-language anarchist history. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the essays investigate anarchist print culture's transatlantic origins; Latina/o labor-oriented anarchism in the United States; the anarchist print presence in locales like Mexico's borderlands and Steubenville, Ohio; the history of essential publications and the individuals behind them; and the circulation of anarchist writing from the Spanish-American War to the twenty-first century.Contributors: Jon Bekken, Christopher Castaneda, Jesse Cohn, Sergio Sanchez Collantes, Maria Jose Dominguez, Antonio Herreria Fernandez, Montse Feu, Sonia Hernandez, Jorell A. Melendez-Badillo, Javier Navarro Navarro, Michel Otayek, Mario Martin Revellado, Susana Sueiro Seoane, Kirwin R. Shaffer, Alejandro de la Torre, and David Watson

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Selections from the writings of Benjamin R. Tucker.

This extended monograph examines the work of the radical journalist Kotoku Shusui and Japan's anti-imperialist movement of the early twentieth century. It includes the first English translation of Imperialism (Teikokushugi), Kotoku's classic 1901 work. Kotoku Shusui was a Japanese socialist, anarchist, and critic of Japan's imperial expansionism who was executed in 1911 for his alleged participation in a plot to kill the emperor. His Imperialism was one of the first systematic criticisms of imperialism published anywhere in the world. In this seminal text, Kotoku condemned global imperialism as the commandeering of politics by national elites and denounced patriotism and militarism as the principal causes of imperialism. In addition to translating Imperialism, Robert Tierney offers an in-depth study of Kotoku's text and of the early anti-imperialist movement he led. Tierney places Kotoku's book within the broader context of early twentieth-century debates on the nature and causes of imperialism. He also presents a detailed account of the different stages of the Japanese anti-imperialist movement. Monster of the Twentieth Century constitutes a major contribution to the intellectual history of modern Japan and to the comparative study of critiques of capitalism and colonialism.

This pathbreaking study examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, Kirwin R. Shaffer illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, speeches, and press accounts--as well as the newspapers that they published--were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Exploring the rise of artisan and worker-based centers to develop class consciousness, Shaffer follows the island's anarchists as they cautiously joined the AFL-linked Federacion Libre de Trabajadores, the largest labor organization in Puerto Rico. Critiquing the union from within, anarchists worked with reformers while continuing to pursue a more radical agenda achieved by direct action rather than parliamentary politics. Shaffer also traces anarchists' alliances with freethinkers seeking to reform education, progressive factions engaged in attacking the Church and organized religion, and the emerging Socialist movement on the island in the 1910s. The most successful anarchist organization to emerge in Puerto Rico, the Bayamon bloc founded El Comunista, the longest-running, most financially successful anarchist newspaper in the island's history. Stridently attacking U.S. militarism and interventionism in the Caribbean Basin, the newspaper found growing distribution throughout and financial backing from Spanish-speaking anarchist groups in the United States. Shaffer demonstrates how the U.S. government targeted the Bayamon anarchists during the Red Scare and forced the closure of their newspaper in 1921, effectively unraveling the anarchist movement on the island.

Volume One of "Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas," is a comprehensive and far ranging collection of anarchist writings from the feudal era (300) to 1939. Edited and introduced by noted anarchist scholar Robert Graham, the collection will include the definitive texts from the anarchist tradition of political thought, beginning with some of the earliest writings from China and Europe against feudal servitude and authority.

The collection will then go on to document the best of the anti-authoritarian writings from the English and French Revolutions and the early development of libertarian socialist ideas, including such writers as Gerrard Winstanley, William Godwin, Charles Fourier, Max Stirner, as well as the early anarchist writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Elisee Reclus, Leo Tolstoy, and Emma Goldman.

This incomparable volume deals both with the positive ideas and proposals the anarchists tried to put into practice, and with the anarchist critiques of the authoritarian theories and practices confronting them during these years with their revolutionary upheavals.

Robert Graham has written extensively on the history of anarchist ideas. He is the author of "The Role of Contract in Anarchist Ideology," in the Routledge publication, "For Anarchism," edited by David Goodway, and he wrote the introduction to the 1989 Pluto Press edition of Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century," originally published in 1851. He has been doing research and writing on the historical development of anarchist ideas for over 20 years and is a well respected commentator in the field.

Includes original portraits of the anarchists drawn by Maurice Spira specifically for this book Spira's imagery is rooted to the political, his subject matter global. Works such as "Battle of Seattle," "Gulf," and "Refugees" are the visual equivalent of newspaper headlines.

Dani Spinosa takes up anarchism's power as a cultural and artistic ideology, rather than as a political philosophy, with a persistent emphasis on the common. She demonstrates how postanarchism offers a useful theoretical context for poetry that is not explicitly political-specifically for the contemporary experimental poem with its characteristic challenges to subjectivity, representation, authorial power, and conventional constructions of the reader-text relationship. Her case studies of sixteen texts make a bold move toward politicizing readers and imbuing literary theory with an activist praxis-a sharp hope. This is a provocative volume for those interested in contemporary poetics, experimental literatures, and the digital humanities. Case Studies Jim Andrews Christian Boek Mez Breeze John Cage Andy Campbell Robert Duncan Kenneth Goldsmith Susan Howe Jackson Mac Low Erin Moure [Erin Moure] Harryette Mullen bpNichol Vanessa Place Juliana Spahr Brian Kim Stefans W. Mark Sutherland Darren Wershler

The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism. What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an (essentially benign) essence and that power is always repressive, never productive.

After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments--namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, contra Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments.

A brief analysis of September 11, and its origins, from the editors of 'Anarchist Studies' and the 'Research On Anarchism' website. The Earthquake examines the evidence, the causes and the consequences, while The State Within The State considers the attitude of the contemporary state towards terrorism. The first part of this book also looks at the media, American opinion, Islamic fundamentalism and the new American agenda. The second part of this book, The Land Of The Future, is a detailed essay on the recent history and current situation in Afghanistan, and argues for another way of understanding this country and its people - not 'the passive recipients of tyranny', but rather those who 'have tried to create new freedoms.'

Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold's "Roman Civilization" is a classic. Originally published by Columbia University Press in 1955, the authors have undertaken another revision which takes into account recent work in the field. These volumes consist of selected primary documents from ancient Rome, covering a range of over 1,000 years of Roman culture, from the foundation of the city to its sacking by the Goths.

The selections cover a broad spectrum of Roman civilization, including literature, philosophy, religion, education, politics, military affairs, and economics. These English translations of literary, inscriptional, and papyrological sources, many of which are available nowhere else, create a mosaic of the brilliance, the beauty, and the power of Rome.

The influence of anarchists such as Proudhon and Bakunin is apparent in Jean-Paul Sartres' political writings, from his early works of the 1920s to Critique of Dialectical Reason, his largest political piece. Yet, scholarly debate overwhelmingly concludes that his political philosophy is a Marxist one. In this landmark study, William L. Remley sheds new light on the crucial role of anarchism in Sartre's writing, arguing that it fundamentally underpins the body of his political work. Sartre's political philosophy has been infrequently studied and neglected in recent years. Introducing newly translated material from his early oeuvre, as well as providing a fresh perspective on his colossal Critique of Dialectical Reason, this book is a timely re-invigoration of this topic. It is only in understanding Sartre's anarchism that one can appreciate the full meaning not only of the Critique, but of Sartre's entire political philosophy. This book sets forth an entirely new approach to Sartre's political philosophy by arguing that it espouses a far more radical anarchist position than has been previously attributed to it. In doing so, Jean-Paul Sartre's Anarchist Philosophy not only fills an important gap in Sartre scholarship but also initiates a much needed revision of twentieth century thought from an anarchist perspective.

The battles between Athenian anarchists and the Greek state have received a high degree of media attention recently. But away from the intensity of street protests militants implement anarchist practices whose outcomes are far less visible. They feed the hungry and poor, protect migrants from fascist beatings and try to carve out an autonomous political, social and cultural space. Activists within the movement share politics centred on hostility to the capitalist state and all forms of domination, hierarchy and discrimination. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians, Anarchy in Athens unravels the internal complexities within this milieu and provides a better understanding of the forces that give the space its shape. -- .

In 1917 a bomb exploded in a Milwaukee police station, killing nine officers and a civilian. Days later, a trial began for eleven Italian immigrants who had already been in jail for months for an unrelated riot. The specter of the bombing, for which no one had been arrested, haunted the proceedings. Against the backdrop of World War I and amid a prevailing hatred and fear of radical immigrants and anarchists, the Italians had an unfair trial. Famed attorney Clarence Darrow led an appeal that gained freedom for most of the convicted, but his own methods were deeply suspect. The entire case left a dark, though largely forgotten, stain on American justice.

In Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, Peter Glassgold brings to the page political activist and anarchist Emma Goldman's most radical contribution, Mother Earth, a monthly journal about social science and literature. Glassgold has compiled Mother Earth's most provocative articles, with thematic categories ranging from "The Woman Question" to "The Social War" and features a diverse selection of writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Sanger, Peter Kropotkin, and Alexander Berkman.Mother Earth was published from 1906 to 1918, when birth control, the labor movement, sexual freedom, and the arts where common subjects. The supporters of the journal helped form what was the  radical left" in the United States at the turn of the century. Goldman was imprisoned and ultimately deported to her native Russia. This new edition includes the transcripts from the trial and the summations of both Alexander Berkman and Goldman.With a new preface by the editor, this book offers historical grounding to many of our contemporary political movements, from libertarianism to the Occupy! actions. Anarchy! provides unprecedented access to Goldman's beliefs, offering insight to the political activism that existed at the time.