From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939)

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.