Book Review - The Anarchists by Roderick Kedward

 The Anarchists: the Men who Shocked an Era by Roderick Kedward

London: Library of the 20th Century, 1971            ISBN 0356037215

I love this series, and the others like it such as the Pan/Ballantine History of World War II - every time I see one of these I buy it. Short, pithy histories of a concept or period of history (in this case, both), written (usually) by an academic, and profusely illustrated. They are a great introductory work on a particular topic.

Anarchism is a hard one to nail in such a format, but Roderick Kedward has done a good job to lay out the basics of the concepts and history of the movement. He explains the nature of Anarchism, emphasizing individual choice and the hatred of the idea of government. He begins with the great Russians Kropotkin and Bakunin and then describes in some detail the anarchist outrages in Europe and the ideological battle between the individualists and the anarcho-syndicalists. 

His focus is on Western Europe - France, Italy and Spain in particular, but also with mentions of Russia and England. This book was published in 1971, and Kedward implies that anarchism had died as a political movement since World War II as Europe moved to a welfare state. He doesn't really discuss the phenomenon of 1968, and of course this book was published way before the resurgence of anarchist ideas in our current century.

As a brief introduction to the concept and history of the Anarchist idea, this book isn't bad - I'm sure you could pick it up for less than the price of a cup of coffee, and it's much more fulfilling.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell