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Conspiracy theories introduce a democratic paradox, as belief in conspiracy theories predicts support for both democratic and non‐democratic political systems. In this article, we explore whether democratic and anti‐democratic attitudes, resulting from conspiracy beliefs, can be mutually exclusive. In Study 1 (United Kingdom, N = 293), we show that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with decreased support for representative democracy, and increased support for direct democracy, anarchism, and autocracy within the same individuals. In Study 2 (United States, N = 302, pre‐registered), we experimentally show that the perceived presence of conspiracies is linked to an increased preference for direct democracy, anarchism, and autocracy and decreased support for representative democracy. Mediational analyses suggest that widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo and, less consistently, feelings of political cynicism mediate the relationships between conspiracy beliefs and (anti‐)democratic attitudes. In Study 3 (United States, N = 400, pre‐registered), we experimentally manipulate (dis)satisfaction with the status quo. Results indicate that rejecting the status quo increases support for direct democracy, anarchism, and autocracy and decreases support for representative democracy. Overall, our findings suggest that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to favour both democratic and anti‐democratic political alternatives, largely attributed to citizens' desire to change the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to comments made by three commentators on the book "Labour Revolt in Britain 1910–14." The first commentator discusses the pragmatic approach of the Liberal government in resolving industrial relations issues, which the author agrees with and attributes to the growing strike momentum and the need for an industrial relations policy. The second commentator highlights the gender segregation in the labor market and labor movement during this period, and the author acknowledges the limitations in their exploration of this aspect but argues against diminishing the positive aspects of women's strikes and the support they received from men. The article provides insights into the government's response to labor unrest and the role of women in the labor revolt, discussing their unique characteristics in resistance, their involvement in strike committees, and their adoption of suffrage tactics. It also explores the relationship between the labor and suffrage movements, the role of the Independent Labour Party and syndicalism, and the negligible influence of anarchism in the syndicalist movement in Britain. [Extracted from the article]

The study "Anarchist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy" by Dominique F. Miething examines the attraction of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical work to anarchism in Germany, Great Britain, and the USA from 1890 to 1947. The study focuses on the reception of Nietzsche in Germany, the USA, and Great Britain, while leaving out the significant anarchist movements in France and Spain. Friedrich Nietzsche himself was fundamentally opposed to anarchism and was interpreted both approvingly and critically by anarchists. The study shows that the so-called Nietzschean anarchism is a variant of anarchism that uses Nietzsche's thinking to critique submissiveness. [Extracted from the article]

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has confirmed neoliberal capitalism's inability to meet critical social needs. In the United Kingdom, mutual aid initiatives based on 'solidarity not charity' blossomed in a context of state incompetence and private sector negligence – including Scrub Hub, a network of groups that autonomously produced personal protective equipment and provided it directly to health workers. Using a convergence of autonomist and anarchist perspectives, this article examines Scrub Hub as an example of emergent autonomous political economies and considers the challenges of resisting co-optation into volunteerist hierarchies and suppression by the neoliberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows up on the book The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914 (2013), by exploring some primary material uncovered since this publication, and considering the ways in which research into the history of anarchism as a transnational movement has evolved. In the years since the publication of this book, a great deal of research has furthered or challenged its findings, especially in relation to print culture and the study of global anarchist networks. The mass digitisation of periodicals (both anarchist and mainstream) and archives in the last ten years offers new tools to find detailed information about the personal and political lives of these elusive anarchists in London - and further afield, thus rectifying the original study's London-centric focus. These sources are also crucial in documenting the ways in which anarchists were perceived and portrayed in Britain, France and internationally, and constructed into a major public threat through media discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationship between early anarchism and republican/nationalist ideas. We will focus on the case of British‐based activists grouped around the journal Freedom and their engagement with Irish nationalism during the Age of the Empire. Freedom, founded in 1886, was the most important anarchist journal of the English‐speaking anarchist–communist networks at the time and was the main editorial reference for the worldwide community of anarchist activists, mostly exiled, who resided in London at that time. Extending current interdisciplinary literature on transnational anarchism, we argue that anarchist views of nations, while rejecting the novel notion of the nation‐state, were associated with anti‐colonial struggles and with republican anti‐monarchical and egalitarian notions. Based on primary sources, we discuss the intersections between these Britain‐based anarchists and anti‐colonial Irish radicals, by engaging both with their writings and their international networks of solidarity, thus exploring the complex intermingling of anarchism, anti‐colonialism, and republicanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the 'age of austerity' that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as 'pragmatic prefigurativism'. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a 'left convergence' of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain's Second Embassy to China: Lord Amherst's "Special Mission" to the Jiaqing Emperor in 1816: Caroline M. Stevenson, Canberra, ANU Press, 2021, 404 pp., $AU 65.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781760464080 For Stevenson, this rested on a belief that the Macartney Embassy had succeeded in establishing a new basis for diplomatic conduct between China and Britain. Central to Stevenson's analysis is a question on why the British believed that the Amherst mission would succeed in its objectives at the Qing court when the better-prepared Macartney Embassy failed. [Extracted from the article]

An unprecedented expansion of global anti-terrorist policing took place after 1900, although the security forces projected outside their borders by Russia, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Spain, and Argentina displayed an enormous diversity in size and effectiveness. Crucial to successful policing was how these countries improved their intelligence through recruiting and handling informers, maintained secrecy and good relations with local police, and handled the media. The British approach to anarchist control was arguably the most successful. Italian international policing was the most far-reaching, while the United States long remained the world's most under-policed large country. On examination, the view that anti-anarchist policing was a case of conservative imperial regimes versus the Western democracies loses validity. During this period, a general trend saw the transfer of anarchist surveillance from the hands of diplomats into those of interior ministry officials and the police, all in the name of greater centralization, professionalization, and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the possibility of the classroom as an exilic space of subversion in which we can pursue anarchist notions of personal transformation, relationships and society. Classroom environments in higher education institutions in Britain, particularly following the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework in September 2016, are premised upon relationships shaped by specific external standards: Employability, the instrumental pursuit of degrees, provider/consumer exchange, among others. Any notions of personal transformation are economic, and the broader goal is the pursuit of economic gain for individual, company and country. In an act of subversion of these external standards, I propose theorising the classroom as an exilic space: a temporally and spatially bracketed space in which participants and their relationships are not beholden to these various external referents. Instead, I put forward the exilic classroom as an anarchic space in which the interactions of the participants are not pre-defined but are formed in the process of the interactions themselves. In theorising the exilic classroom I draw on the work of Obika Gray, and push his notion of exilic space further by integrating the works of Michel de Certeau, Jamie Heckert and Gustav Landauer to help propose a classroom defined as a positive subversive everyday space that is not bound by its opposition to wider structures. The creation of such an exilic classroom assists the participants in stepping out of their expected roles as 'provider' and 'consumer', or 'teacher' and 'student', and allows the creation of a space of possibilities for our relationships [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colin Ward’s discourses on the Arcadian landscape of “plotlander” housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today, the forgotten history of plotlander housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending “housing crisis” in the UK and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This paper’s observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offer a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernized world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we examine three key, recently emergent sites of anti-austerity activism in Britain – Left Unity, the People’s Assembly and Occupy – in order to explore to what extent and in which ways the traditional British left is in the process of reconfiguring itself. More specifically, we explore the ‘points of contact’ being developed, or not, amongst feminist, anarchist and Marxist/socialist activists. We argue that if we are seeing a mutation of the left at present, it concerns a noticeable (if partial and contested) ‘feminist turn’ in terms of the composition, ideas and practices of these sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colin Ward (1924–2010) was an anarchist and educator who, together with Anthony Fyson, was employed as education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association in the UK during the 1970s. He is best known for his two books about childhood,The Child in the City (1978) andThe Child in the Country (1988). The book he co-authored with Fyson,Streetwork. The Exploding School (1973), is discussed in this article as illustrating in practical and theoretical terms Ward’s appreciation of the school as a potential site for extraordinary radical change in relations between pupils and teachers and schools and their localities. The article explores the book alongside the Bulletin of Environmental Education, which Ward edited throughout the 1970s. It argues that the literary and visual images employed in the book and the bulletins contributed to the powerful positive representation of the school as a site of potential radical social change. Finally, it suggests that “fleeting pockets of anarchy” continue to exist in the lives of children through social networking and virtual environments that continue to offer pedagogical possibilities for the imaginative pedagogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much work within the field of childhood studies has focused on the social discourses through which childhood is understood. This article draws on this work in developing a critical framework for considering the appeal ofBeryl the Peril. The article examines the influence of conceptualisations of childhood prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These theorised children as disruptive and requiring restraint. Approved literature for children sought to socialise them into the adult order. However, a more subversive strain, identifiable in Lewis Carroll’sAlicenovels, celebrated an anarchic vision of childhood. This article examines howBeryl the Perilnegotiated these conflicting conceptions of childhood. Beryl is an unruly force; her opponent, and representative of social authority, is Dad. Their clashes play out the tensions in these articulations of childhood. The development of Beryl over nearly 60 years provides an opportunity to examine how her subversive spirit has remained appealing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is popularly believed that British anarchism underwent a ‘renaissance’ in the 1960s, as conventional revolutionary tactics were replaced by an ethos of permanent protest. Often associated with Colin Ward and his journalAnarchy, this tactical shift is said to have occurred due to growing awareness of Gustav Landauer's work. This article challenges these readings by focusing on Herbert Read's bookEducation through Art, a work motivated by Read's dissatisfaction with anarchism's association with political violence. Arguing that aesthetic education could remodel social relationships in a non-hierarchical fashion, Read pioneered the reassessment of revolutionary tactics in the 1940s that is associated with the 1960s generation. His role in these debates has been ignored, but the broader political context of Read's contribution to anarchist theory has also been neglected. The reading of Read's work advanced here recovers his importance to these debates, and highlights the presence of an indigenous strand of radical thought that sought novel solutions for the problems of the age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sudden explosions of street violence and disorder tend to evoke simplistic responses. Echoing Victorian moralising and condemnation of urban street fighting at the end of the nineteenth century, politicians depicted England's August 2011 riots as 'mindless criminality'. Critical of such rhetoric, we maintain that the recent riots should not be misrecognised through the class politics of the advantaged. Instead, we locate this unrest in a larger historical, social, economic and political context. This context includes the progressive predominance of finance capital in the post-1970s era and related neoliberal policy agendas and ideological forms. We posit that neoliberal transformations in the economy and society have undermined many young people's capacity to lead useful and meaningful lives, and that the potential for hopelessness, resentment, frustration and outbursts of anger has significantly increased as a consequence. We argue that the alienation of young people today cannot be separated from forms of accumulation that depend on massive debt-expansion. Neither can it be separated from the proliferation of related practices and institutional supports that enable this expansion, further accelerating the deterioration of already disaffected young people's prospects and futures. We refer to the enabling elements of this process as 'Madoffization' at a time when ponzi finance has made economic collapse and ongoing social unrest inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘We teach all hearts to break’ was graffiti spray painted on a school building in London's Notting Hill Gate in 1968/69 by the Situationst-influenced group King Mob cited by two former members in Paddington Bear (1988). ‘Once upon a time there was a place called Nothing Hill Gate.’ Retrieved Sept. 30, 2011, from http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/index.php/recent/34-archivelocal/120-once-upon-a-time-in-notting-hill Education is for anarchism, and what can very broadly be termed autonomism—that is, the many different schools of non-Leninist Marxism—of paramount importance in creating a society worthy of humanity, but this is not a simple formula of countering the dominant mode of institutional indoctrination known as schooling with libertarian propaganda, though that may have its place. The importance of education can be said to be “an-end-in-itself” prefiguring free social relations of community and reciprocity, comprised of autonomous individuals capable of comprehending both themselves and the world in which they live. Such a process of learning and acquiring knowledge must also nourish intellect and other forms of intelligence, just as intellect and other forms of intelligence nourish the acquisition of knowledge. This paper will seek to critically explore some of the key issues involved in an anarcho-Marxist critique of schooling and develop the basis for what might constitute an alternative view of education which could be said to be in radical opposition to such schooling at all levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the guest editor discusses articles in the issue on topics that include an autoethnographic approach to anarchist pedagogy, resistance to the standardization of education in Great Britain, and anarchist approaches to math education.

This essay explores the intellectual biography and diverse artistic, literary and cultural production of Jeff Nuttall – a significant, if underacknowledged, figure on the British ‘underground’ scene in the Sixties. It argues that Nuttall played an important international role as a catalyst and co-ordinator of ‘countercultural’ events and activities through his involvement with small press publications, as an early instigator of ‘happenings’ and ‘performance art’ in the UK, and as a correspondent, networker and commentator. In particular, it addresses Nuttall’s understanding that ‘imagination’ and ‘affect’ could be allied with collective possibilities for emancipatory social change, as well as liberatory personal development. Finally, it briefly considers the currency of these ideas within the context of a new articulation of how a ‘politics of possibility’ may be informed by notions of embodied and transmitted affectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines experiments in communal living in Britain and Denmark in the early 1970s, using life-story interviews from seventeen members of two British and two Danish communes. It examines communal living as a fusion of radical political principles with the practice of experimental collective living. It concludes that the movement's egalitarian principles of resource-sharing, gender equality and the avoidance of hierarchies were broadly achieved, even if the movement obviously did not realize its more ambitious objective of undermining the bourgeois family. Though none of the interviewees lives communally now, most remain faithful to the principles behind the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a famous polemical article, Murray Bookchin contrasts social and lifestyle anarchisms and argues that there is an 'unbridgeable chasm' between them. This article traces a parallel debate in British anarchism at the start of the 1960s and explains how Colin Ward sought to endorse elements of both views in developing his nonutopian, pragmatic anarchism. It shows how social and lifestyle anarchist themes find expression in Ward's work more generally, and argues that Ward's work in this way implicitly and persuasively challenges the thesis that they are incompatible (without denying they can be in tension). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to highlight the contributions made to British social policy debates by thinkers working within the anarchist tradition by focusing on the writing of the post-war British anarchist Colin Ward. It will argue that Ward framed anarchism as a relevant, constructive approach to contemporary public policy dilemmas, and show how this was the basis for his contact with mainstream policy agendas, including council housing, water privatization, and education for citizenship. Ward was a regular contributor and editor for the British anarchist publishing group Freedom Press, and the author of a number of titles which approached problems of social policy in areas such as town planning and education, from an anarchist perspective. He developed a pragmatic, policy-oriented perspective on anarchism and presented it as the reasonable alternative to both bureaucratic state administration and privatization in the twentieth century. The paper will argue that Ward aimed to reclaim for the anti-market left the libertarian terminology adopted by the free-market right. In the case of housing this led Ward to defend private ownership against state ownership. In debate about water privatization, however, he presented a fierce attack on the administration of public goods as market commodities. Both arguments were driven by anarchist principles of independence and mutual aid drawn from key thinkers in the tradition. These principles guided Ward's contributions to public debates in the late twentieth century concerning education policy and public planning policy. In particular, Ward's publications for the Town and Country Planning Association concerning education policy and town planning applied anarchism to mainstream concerns about political engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on personal experience, this article examines Colin Ward's life and works, explores the nature and originality of his anarchism and argues that he was one of the great British anarchists of the last half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides a useful and dynamic framework which may be used to examine the reproduction of political practice. I use the Bourdieusian theoretical model to analyse and interpret data collected from 30 semi-structured interviews with British anti-capitalist activists from a range of anarchist and socialist political organizations and networks. The interviews reveal a clear case of political distinction between anarchists and socialists. The political history, political methods, and ideology of the activists become embodied and routinized over time. This explains why and how there is a durable ideological division which is consistently reproduced over and over again within sections of the British anti-capitalist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta is often discussed without regard for its original serialization in British independent comic Warrior in the early 1980s. This paper demonstrates how the strip was shaped by the political context of early Thatcherism, contemporary debates on the Left and within the anarchist movement, and Moore's own involvement in anti-fascist activism. It discusses Moore and Lloyd's subversion of the established conventions of the superhero genre and metatextual experimentation with comics form aimed at creating a work of cultural resistance to authoritarianism. It is argued that this was only made possible by the alternative production context of Warrior and its act as a bridge between underground and fanzine practices and the UK mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'tory Anarchism' is reasonably well known but largely unanalysed in either popular or academic literature. It describes a group of apparently disparate figures in English popular and political culture whose work has, in part, satirised key British institutions and social relations. At the same time, tory anarchists also provide interesting insights into questions of British, though predominantly English, identity, by focusing upon issues of class, empire and nation. This article examines tory anarchism by focusing upon four representative figures: Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Peter Cook and Chris Morris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy as one of a number of responses to the government and the Bank of England's disastrous campaign of forgery prosecutions in the wake of the suspension of cash payments. Many economic writers claimed that the value of money could not be secured by law but only through the operations of the free market, at the center of which was the gold standard, passed into law in Britain for the first time in 1816, but not put into practice until 1821. Radical journalists like Cobbett and Wooler, by contrast, argued that the real standard of value lay with sincere understanding and fellow feeling: any government imposed standard was tantamount to fraud. Shelley agreed in principle with both of these recommendations. But he did not recommend either a gold standard or a moral standard but rather a literary standard. The market should be regulated not by economic forces but by a collective consciousness of natural rights enshrined in the productions of imaginative geniuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, the UK government approved the commercial growing of GM maize. This article considers the legitimacy of that decision by exploring for Britain the roots of political experience in liberal society and Christian community. Through an analysis of the different popular responses to genetically based medical therapies and GM foods, the unclear status of nature in liberal thought is highlighted. From there, an account is given of roots of Christian political experience by reference to the resurrection of Christ and the rioting of the Spirit. Drawing on Arendt (1958/1998), the roots of Christian political experience are sourced to actions that are both social and ecological. The legitimacy of the decision to permit the growing of GM maize is then tested against the political authority in Christianity, and is found wanting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper distinguishes some of the main currents in British anarchism at the time of the miners' strike. It explores the influence of these libertarian movements on the conflict in the coalfield, and assesses how the strike influenced the development of British anarchisms [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the arguments concerning the ethical standards for jokes. The issue regarding the morality of jokes became interesting when the Great Britain introduces a legislation that condemns incitement to religious hatred. In response, comedian Rowan Atkinson complained that such law would have a damaging effect on comedians. Some Christians, such as Father Roger Arguile, claimed that comedy could be a tool to prevent nihilism and anarchism.

Focuses on the perspectives of anarchist feminists on marriage. Widespread agreement among anarchists that marriage contributes to the legitimation of state involvement in, and regulation of, interpersonal relations; Views of anarchists who have participated in mobility marriages in Great Britain and Canada.

This paper explores the events of September 11, 2001 through the learning optic. What lessons did an infuriated segment of the Arab world try to teach the West? Did the USA learn anything profound from these events? How should critical adult educators think about the connection between these events, mounting global anarchy and the US-UK invasion of Iraq in March 2003? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a list of archival collections relating to the history of the anarchist movement in Great Britain.

Focuses on the nature and scope of the biased image of anarchism in Great Britain in 1880 to 1914. Factors responsible for the formation of the British anarchist movement; Impact of anarchism on literature and the media; Political consequences of the image projected and upheld by the anarchist movement.