Search

This article explores the relation between politics and biology in Catherine Malabou's work, traces the origin of her recent anarchist turn, and seeks to explain how the latter influences the concept of plasticity. Whereas the relation between plasticity, neuroscience and epigenetics reflected a certain affinity with Marxism in her earlier work, Malabou's recent claim that biology and ontology are anarchist remains opaque as to its grounding in her own thought and scientific developments alike. The article argues that the origin of the metamorphosis of plasticity from a Marxist to an anarchist notion gives rise to a new metaphysics of biology that is based on the assumption that society needs to be brain-like, reflecting the networked structure of synaptic plasticity. The article also proposes a new reading of Malabou's three plasticities (negative, positive and the plasticity of the concept) in temporal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes new perspectives on anarchism, indigeneity, and Afro‐descendent struggles, by discussing the case of Brazilian anarchists' commitment to luta afroindígena. They mean by this term the intersection of indigenous and Afro‐descendant resistances for the recognition of land, against the violence of states, agribusiness, and extractivism. I argue that this case offers key insights to radical geographies, and to the broader field of decolonial scholarship, to challenge cultural and racial essentialisms by connecting different militant traditions. I also argue that, taking inspiration from indigenous thought and socio‐territorial practices of broader Latin American social movements, these cases enhance decolonial bids for "decolonising methodologies" by showing the importance of starting from practices before theory. My arguments are based on documentary work on past and present relations between anarchism and decoloniality in Latin America/Abya Yala, on personal militant work in Brazil/Pindorama, and on a sample of qualitative interviews with activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that Henri Lefebvre's Marxism had anarchistic traits, but few have tried to specify what these traits are, or what they mean. This paper argues that Lefebvre's work should be seen as first and foremost an anti‐authoritarian theory that uses space, rather than a spatial theory. Written from a position that refuses to be either just ‘Marxist’ or just ‘anarchist’, this paper makes a claim to the possibility of a radical geography that can engage with and beyond both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVIDicine, many nurses awoke to the ways that the Healthcare‐Industrial Complex (HIC) dictates the care we are able to provide. Using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality, we explore the ways that nurses participate in upholding power structures within the HIC and reproducing them in our work, contributing to a carceral culture based on hierarchy and power dynamics. We also explore the ways nurses are both agentic in this system and subject to it, reluctant to make waves and lose our place within a system that can offer nurses safety and security in, and most importantly, a paycheck. This paper articulates a prefigurative anarchist approach to nursing praxis. Through the writing of Emma Goldman, we locate a historically founded philosophical basis for practical tactics that nurses can use to actualise this praxis. Both individually and as a collective, nurses can assert their own ethic and power through direct action, micro‐insurgency and solidarity to build the world we know can be. Our only limitation is our imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Muslim anarchists in Turkey who developed an Islam-based anarchist theory opposing private property, the state, capitalism, and all forms of authority. By analyzing their online periodical itaatsiz (disobedient), published since 2013, and earlier works by Muslim anarchist writers, this study explores their perspectives on the West, Islam, the Qur'an, and Sufism. Muslim anarchists stand out for their opposition to the hegemony of Enlightenment-based, anti-theist, and positivist thought in anarchist movements in Turkey and for their encouragement to re-examine concepts such as authority, private property, capitalism, and the state within the framework of Islam-based political thought. Studying how Muslim anarchists construct a social movement in today's Turkey is essential to understanding Islam-based conceptualizations of politics in Turkey and unpacking the relationship between Islam and anarchism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, political philosophers have debated the role of religious reasons in public deliberations, such as appealing to religious convictions and religious classics. Exclusivists, such as Rawls, Quong, Hartley, and Watson, argue that democratic governments and citizens should restrict or exclude the use of religious reasons in making laws and policies, while inclusivists, such as Gaus, Vallier, and Billingham, oppose such categorical exclusion. Nevertheless, the debate mainly focuses on the role of religious reasons in public deliberation. In this paper, I will argue that religious behaviors—defined as highly altruistic actions motivated by religious beliefs, such as dedicating substantial time and effort to serving the poor and advancing the common good—can exert positive influences on public deliberation. Through this kind of altruistic action, religious believers can subtly influence non-religious citizens. While religious believers may not rationally persuade non-religious citizens through religious reasoning, the altruistic actions exhibited by religious believers could emotionally inspire admiration and motivate non-religious citizens to learn more about those religions. This enhances mutual understanding among different religious and secular sects and thus improves public deliberation. Furthermore, I argue that the improved understanding fostered by religious behaviors can facilitate exclusivism and inclusivism to overcome certain philosophical challenges, such as the problems of incompleteness and anarchy, which are among the most frequent criticisms directed at exclusivism and inclusivism. Hence, this paper highlights an aspect overlooked in the exclusivism–inclusivism debate: no matter whether the democratic government and citizens should permit or restrict religious reasons, religious behavior is still beneficial in public deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article focuses on Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia as a significant alternative to prevailing theories of justice, including utilitarianism, Marxism, and progressive redistribution. Topics include Nozick's critique of these theories, his engagement with individualist anarchism, and the less examined aspect of his work regarding the pluralism of human nature and its implications for political philosophy.

Copyright of Pravnik is the property of Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of State & Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Extending and connecting scholarship on decolonial geopoetics, critical Mediterraneanism and maritime (wet and more-than-wet) ontologies, this paper discusses Genoese folksinger Fabrizio De André’s political, poetical, and geographical work on the Mediterranean Sea. De André has been considered as a pioneer of “World Music” for his linguistic and historical research on sounds and stories of the Mediterranean. Yet, a socially and politically committed intellectual, De André fostered agendas that went well beyond the role that this author played in the history of Italian and international folksong, and should interest scholars in geography, geopolitics and geopoetics. Exploring his original texts and recollections, I argue that De André’s works open ways to connect critical studies on the Mediterranean to broader scholarship on decoloniality and relational ontologies. This emerges especially through his commitment to challenge cultural and linguistic borders, listening to “histories from below” and denouncing the colonial violence of states and other oppressive powers in North-South Mediterranean relations. Furthermore, De André’s geopoetics fosters ideas of Mediterranean entanglements between land and sea that challenge statist territorialities, enhancing different geopoetic and geopolitical imaginations to address current matters on migration, racism and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why does one become a revolutionary? And how and why do so many young bourgeois become revolutionaries? Exploring ego-documents, in particular diaries and autobiographies, this article analyses the self-portrait of the Italian revolutionary Left between the end of the nineteenth century and the First World War, and it shows how the primacy of the element of ethics and feelings was a key characteristic of the first anarchist and socialist communities. The most politically charged of these feelings was that of compassion, in an expanded concept that extends the concern for the suffering beyond purely one-to-one relationships into areas where group suffering becomes a political issue. Finally, the article explores how novels and poems helped cultivate these feelings, deeply shaping the mindset of militants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While self-sacrifice and martyrdom are considered an important component in several forms of violent extremism, including jihadism and even sectors of violent right-wing extremism, very few works have looked at the presence of these narratives and practices in today's violent left-wing and anarchist extremism. This article aims to help fill this gap, paying attention to insurrectionary anarchism, an understudied violent extremist tendency within the diverse anarchist galaxy. In particular, the paper focuses on Alfredo Cospito, a well-known and influential exponent of this transnational clandestine movement, convicted of terrorism in Italy in 2013, and his widely publicized prison hunger strike in 2022–2023, drawing upon primary and secondary sources. During his long hunger strike to protest against detention conditions, Cospito knowingly risked his life for the cause but at the same time he explicitly rejected the idea of martyrdom with scorn. Building on this emblematic case, the paper explores the reasons why contemporary insurrectionary anarchists are reluctant to accept and promote the powerful social construct of martyrdom, with an emphasis on cultural and organizational constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Brief history of modern political thought: from Machiavelli to the coronavirus" by Miguel Saralegui, published in the magazine Tópicos, analyzes modern political thought, highlighting the interaction between word and politics and the formal principles that characterize it. The author contrasts the ideas of Machiavelli and Hobbes, and explores various ideologies such as liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, totalitarianism, and feminism. The blurring of liberalism in the context of the 2020 coronavirus crisis is discussed, as well as the need to use different interpretive guidelines to approach individual modern thinkers. The article also reflects on the coronavirus crisis as a revenge of "what is given" against its scant recognition in the recent past. The article also addresses the importance of context in understanding classical texts and criticizes current liberalism, mentioning geopolitical crises and migration issues as relevant topics today. Despite points of disagreement, the value of Saralegui's text as an introduction to political thought in Spanish is recognized. [Extracted from the article]

This article relates how tropical disease ravaged the British army in the late-eighteenth-century Caribbean, using the San Juan expedition of 1780 as a case study. Based on eighteenth-century European understandings of epidemiology, martial and medicinal officials of the San Juan expedition believed that the outbreak of pestilence within the British army reflected a failure in discipline, properly provisioning troops, as well as overall leadership and planning. Thus, despite natural agents playing a significant role in stalling Britain's advance in Nicaragua, eighteenth-century military and medical authorities dictated that difficulties caused by disease and the environment could be overcome by human might. While the British ultimately could not overcome the devastating effects that tropical diseases had on the army, human agency also led to the expedition's failure. The British did not maintain good relations with their Indigenous allies, the Miskito, which resulted in their abandonment of the campaign. Consequently, they were left without crucial soldiers, guides, and labourers who were necessary to continue the invasion of Central America. Moreover, the Spaniards' stout defence of their territory also hindered the British expeditionary force, stalling their advance at the Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepción. As a result, both natural and human agency dictated the outcome of the San Juan expedition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short paper, I contend that the history and philosophy of geography should be considered as an indispensable scholarly field to nourish both theoretical speculations about geography and ongoing scholars' political and social engagement towards critical, radical, decolonial, feminist and antiracist geographies. I argue that rediscovering 'other geographical traditions' is paramount to these scholarly and political agendas. After briefly summarising my political and theoretical references, I discuss the example of the work of anarchist, feminist and anticolonial activist Louise Michel (1830–1905) to make the case for the inclusion of new figures and ideas in the field of new decolonial, multilingual and pluralist histories of geography. • Performs a militant plea for the History and Philosophy of Geography. • Discusses recent works on alternative geographical traditions and decoloniality. • Makes the case for reading geographically the work of anarchist, feminist and anti-colonial activist Louise Michel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flows over time are a natural way to incorporate flow dynamics that arise in various applications such as traffic networks. In this paper we introduce a natural variant of the deterministic fluid queuing model in which users aim to minimize their costs subject to arrival at their destination before a pre-specified deadline. We determine the existence and the structure of Nash flows over time and fully characterize the price of anarchy for this model. The price of anarchy measures the ratio of the quality of the equilibrium and the quality of the optimum flow, where we evaluate the quality using two different natural performance measures: the throughput for a given deadline and the makespan for a given amount of flow. While it turns out that both prices of anarchy can be unbounded in general, we provide tight bounds for the important subclass of parallel path graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to housing is fraught with impositions of market housing logic: our solutions to housing generally imply that people must be housed in conventional housing markets, with a goal that they contribute to an economy that sustains this housing model. Using an anarchist conceptual framework, this paper explores the shortcomings of some existing approaches, challenging the assumption that people experiencing housing precarity inherently desire to participate in market housing and an associated economy. Rather, an anarchist conceptual model for housing suggests that the right to housing that preferentiates need and agency over full participation in the housing market and capitalist economy, while arguing that the means used to address housing instability must be in line with intended ends we hope to see. Proposed alternatives highlight the potential for integrating anarchist tools into practices in the housing sector in order to centre agency, anti-colonial work, and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author animates a different kind of telling and knowing for critical scholarship. Recognizing an unknowable reality through a journey to a mythical past, the author imagines an ontology of the serpent, a radical interdisciplinary, incantation for the future. This sorcerous evocation re-animates ancient mythical practices, forging a becoming that has not been realized. The serpent rejects a Christian, Cartesian, and modernist telos, recasting a different relationship with hierarchies that subvert radical forms of resistance from emerging. This paper ends within the embrace of anarchism, evoking the anarchist's "No!", destabilizing self and pointing toward wonderous, cosmic connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the book "The Classical Liberal Case for Israel" by Walter Block and Alan Futerman, focusing on the overlooked aspects of justifying a state's existence and the classical liberal perspective. It questions why Israel's existence is constantly debated while other states are not subjected to the same scrutiny. The article also delves into the different positions within the libertarian movement regarding Israel, including anti-Zionist anarchists and pro-Zionist Objectivists. It argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeals to Libertarians due to its connection to property rights and coercion, and suggests that the book challenges the monolithic discourse on Israel within the Libertarian movement. [Extracted from the article]

A prominent position in the scholarly literature is that there is no duty to obey the law or political obligation. This is in contrast with lay opinion, which suggests widespread acceptance of political obligation. When confronted with this tension, skeptics of political obligation sometimes raise the possibility that lay belief is the product of sinister interests. Against this, I argue that, even if such a belief is false, belief in political obligation may operate as a useful fiction that advances people's interests. Drawing on empirical work in the social sciences, I suggest a belief in political obligation may contribute to effective governance. Even if political obligation skeptics are correct that there is no such duty to obey the law, lay belief in political obligation may play a valuable ideological function in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passages composed by Nietzsche around the time he spent at Sorrento reflect an engagement with the anarcho-utopian socialist milieu into which he had been introduced by Malwida von Meysenbug. The "Sorrentino politics" that appear in Human, All Too Human I and II and later works need to be understood in the context of an affirmative form of political thought that could remedy the pessimism and nihilism that he finds in the politics of all sides. Nietzsche argues that the monarchical state, modern industrialism, and the restricted ownership of capital and property all undermine the goal of creating a life-affirming culture for Europe. He also provides a criticism of a utopian teleology of equality in the future – whether religious or socialist – that imposes an objective notion of purpose. Nietzsche rejects the Schopenhauerian pessimism of resignation while affirmatively engaging with the thought of Alexander Herzen and Guiseppe Mazzini. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview about the newly released Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge Mental Health, 2023), John P. Clark and Javier Sethness explore the life and times of Count Leo Tolstoy from a queer-anarchist perspective. In this dialogue, Clark and Sethness delve into the rationale for, and the creative process of, Queer Tolstoy. They do so by comparing and contrasting the volume's highlighting of the intersection of Tolstoy's anarchism and underappreciated queerness, in biographical and literary terms, with other recent works that have explored the relationship between social revolution and sexual love. Furthermore, the interlocutors discuss the politics of androgyny and queerness, apply Freudian and Marcusean concepts of bisexuality and Eros to Tolstoy's life, analyze Tolstoyan classics from a queer-friendly lens, and place Tolstoy in conversation with contemporary and future revolutionaries, from Joseph Déjacque to Andrea Dworkin and bell hooks. This wide-ranging conversation covers gender and sexuality, LGBTQ+ experience, Russian history, the phenomenon of holy fools, radicalism, mortality, and ecology, among other important topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bounding the price of anarchy, which quantifies the damage to social welfare due to selfish behavior of the participants, has been an important area of research in algorithmic game theory. Classical work on such bounds in repeated games makes the strong assumption that the subsequent rounds of the repeated games are independent beyond any influence on play from past history. This work studies such bounds in environments that themselves change due to the actions of the agents. Concretely, we consider this problem in discrete-time queuing systems, where competitive queues try to get their packets served. In this model, a queue gets to send a packet at each step to one of the servers, which will attempt to serve the oldest arriving packet, and unprocessed packets are returned to each queue. We model this as a repeated game where queues compete for the capacity of the servers, but where the state of the game evolves as the length of each queue varies. We analyze this queuing system from multiple perspectives. As a baseline measure, we first establish precise conditions on the queuing arrival rates and service capacities that ensure all packets clear efficiently under centralized coordination. We then show that if queues strategically choose servers according to independent and stationary distributions, the system remains stable provided it would be stable under coordination with arrival rates scaled up by a factor of just e/ e−1. Finally, we extend these results to no-regret learning dynamics: if queues use learning algorithms satisfying the no-regret property to choose servers, then the requisite factor increases to 2, and both of these bounds are tight. Both of these results require new probabilistic techniques compared to the classical price of anarchy literature and show that in such settings, no-regret learning can exhibit efficiency loss due to myopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with a little-known and little-studied episode from the history of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917, the proclamation of communism by anarchist guerrillas in the state of Coahuila in 1912. A brief but vivid history of the guerrillas, organized by the Magonists from the Mexican Lib-eral Party (PLM) at one of the key moments of the revolution, is considered in the context of the general role of the anar-chist movement at various stages of the revolution in Mexico, of evolution of its ideology, strategy and tactics. An attempt has been made to assess the significance of the events under consideration for the development of the anarchist movement in the world. PLM, led by brothers Riсardo and Enrique Flo-res Magon, was in 1906-1908 the first political force that launched a rebel movement against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, and in 1910-1911 made a significant contribu-tion to the overthrow of the regime. However, after this, the leadership of the Mexican Liberal Party officially switched to the position of anarchism, and its supporters tried to organize a guerrilla movement with the aim of carrying out a social revolution in Mexico. Although the PLM rebel forces were crushed by superior government forces in 1912, and many of their members were killed, the proclamation of anarchist communism by a group of guerrillas on February 9, 1912 in the Mexican state of Coahuila, one of the traditional areas of influence of the Magonists, was the first act of this kind in the history of world anarchist movement and served as an exam-ple for anarchists in other countries.

This article delves into the theme of the death of God in Giorgio Agamben's work from a political perspective, seeking to interpret the notion of "God" in Agamben through the concepts of "government" and "transcendence". Although Agamben does not extensively address the theme of the death of God, my hypothesis is that by continually dealing with the ethical and political legacy of Western theology, it is possible to conceive the death of God as an unconsummated political horizon, but that it is yet to come. In this sense, the first two sections of the text provide a review of the theme of governance of men and governance of oneself in Agamben's work, engaging in dialogue with Schmitt, Peterson, Heidegger, Foucault, and Plato, as well as the concepts of transcendence oikonomia, technology, and care. The last two sections of the text explore Agamben's response to this diagnosis. Agamben's philosophical proposal is presented through a dialogue with Spinoza and Stoicism, with the central concept being the idea of use of oneself, which is linked to the notions of immanence, Ungovernable, and anarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationalism has always been a major strand of anarchist political thought where it works on several levels. It has described their commitment to dynamic cosmopolitanism but also dictated revolutionary strategy and structured their social alternatives. In the post-war years, however, many anarchist thinkers, confronting the implications of the atomic bomb for state power and global governance, acknowledged the need for strategic revision. Retreating from the idea of revolution as a series of national armed uprisings, they shifted, instead, towards endorsing an 'act local, think global' approach to policy. But what did it mean to think global? This article focuses on British post-war anarchists and explores their spectrum of approaches to this strategy shift. While it recognises a common move towards more permeable notions of the local-global dynamic, it also argues for a richer differentiation among their responses than is usually acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1916 the German Jewish writer, philosopher, and anarchist-activist Gustav Landauer gave a lecture on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn "The Rhine" (1802) at a women's club in central Berlin. The lecture aims to derive from Hölderlin a concept of community designed to disavow German militarism and gesture to a wholly different understanding of the social. Taking his cue from Hölderlin, Landauer thus argues that community is not a state in which self-sufficient subjects join together on the basis of certain ostensibly shared attributes (language, territory, ethnicity, etc.) but is a relationship of mutual obligation geared toward irreducible openness—a "community of love" (Liebesgemeinschaft). Accordingly, Landauer not only anticipates crucial aspects of later engagements with the concept of community but also sets the tone for an anarchistic strand of Hölderlin reception around the time of World War I that has hitherto remained relatively underexplored. [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]

This paper is a transcript of a talk given by Andy Izenson at the Jewish Left symposium at Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs on May 3rd, 2024. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the performance of the Weighted Shortest Processing Time (WSPT) rule as a local sequencing policy in a scheduling game for uniformly related parallel machines, where the social objective is the total weighted completion time. Our research aims to establish improved upper bounds for the price of anarchy in this game. We determine two bounds, incorporating parameters that characterize the instance family, such as the speed of the fastest machine ( s m ) and the number of machines (m). One bound establishes a fixed upper bound for the price of anarchy, while the other outperforms the parametric upper bound found in the existing literature. These newly derived bounds provide better insights into the performance of the scheduling game under study, proving that the price of anarchy is upper bounded by min s m 1 + 1 / 2 s m − 1 / 2 m , m , 4 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a specific case study --the issues arising from Spanish colonialism and later U.S. imperialism-- on Cuba at the turn of the nineteenth century through the lens of the working-class movement of anarchism. Anarchists in Cuba, many of whom were Spanish émigrés, argued that true emancipation came not from patriotism, nationalism and the political form of the state, but through self-organization and the transformation of "the social". Tensions arose, however, within anarchist newspapers, upon which this article draws extensively, as to whether the pursuance of nationhood was an interim stage in this development or a trap offered by the bourgeois classes to domesticate workers' demands. The state, nevertheless, was consistently rejected as a desirable medium or end destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the entangled worlds of anti-colonialism and anarchism in Weimar era Berlin. Looking particularly at Agnes Smedley and her partner in Berlin, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, as well as M.P.T. Acharya and others, the article explores the ways in which these figures approached the question of anarchism in relation to Indian anti-colonialism. While recent scholarship has focused on Smedley's– and to some extent Chatto's– communist activities, this article suggests that, in the early 1920s, they were much closer affiliated with anarchism than often admitted. Drawing on extensive correspondence and publications, it demonstrates that Smedley and the Indian anti-colonialists often challenged anarchists to devote more attention to the colonial question and, in fact, often facilitated such contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trying to address a series of large questions—e.g., when peasants rebel, clandestine forms of resistance, state "imagination," and the origin of the very first agrarian states—led me to abandon much of the standard political science "tool kit." This is an account of that intellectual journey. [James C. Scott died on July 19, 2024, just days before this short intellectual biography went live. Scott was an intellectual giant, an eloquent writer, and an inspiration to multiple generations of students and scholars. The Annual Review of Political Science is pleased to be the publisher of his latest, perhaps last, publication. His oral history is available here.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regime change in 1989 transformed nearly all elements of life in Poland, and the anarchist movement was not an exception. This article focuses on the Peoples' Liberation Front, the first post-war Polish anarchist group to use violence as its modus operandi. Their actions were rejected en masse by the rest of the Polish anarchist movement, and in particular by the Anarchist Federation, which was establishing itself as the dominant organisation within the Polish anarchist movement. The functioning of the Peoples' Liberation Front was and still is submerged in controversy. One allegation is that it was a false flag operation sponsored by the newly established civil counterintelligence service. Another view is that it was defined by a series of actions undertaken by youth fascinated by violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Criminal Anarchy Acts of 1902 and 1903 are often seen as secondary in the history of American anarchism and legal history due to their limited use in court. This article focuses on the 1902 Criminal Anarchy Act of New York State, which was enacted following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by alleged anarchist Leon Czolgosz. The paper delves into the international, national, and local circumstances that led to the passing of the law. It provides an analysis of the Act itself, highlighting its depoliticisation of anarchism, essentially criminalising it, and links its existence to America's legal approach to federalism. Furthermore, the article aims to uncover the repercussions of the Act: despite its limited use in court and the failed attempt to depoliticise anarchism, the Act left a significant mark on the anarchist movement in the United States. It also sparked debates on freedom of speech and ultimately contributed to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gitlow v. New York (1925), which initiated the incorporation doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rich history of Czech anarchism is not well-known internationally. The movement was comprised of thousands of proletarians (especially Northern Bohemian miners) and some important poets. It ended in a surprising and original way with the formation of an anarchist political party in 1914. This led to participation in national governments between 1918 and 1922. To explain the dynamics, the article narrates five separate stories of the Czech anarchism. After a summary recounting the development of the Czech anarchist movement from a temporal and spatial point of view, it examines ideas about the individual and society, organisational forms and organisations, and, finally, the national question, gender, and direct action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Recerca is the property of Universitat Jaume I and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay argues that the anarchy of Odonian society depends upon the "mediation" afforded by techne. The social organism is a tool that enables Odonians to cultivate reflective relationships on mediation, and hence with each other. Odonian society is a "mediated anarchy." Shevek's corrective to the Odonian social organism is to re-center individual existential experience in the use of tools. The essay traces the novel's roots in debates of determinism and freedom in evolutionary biology and media technologies, borrowing Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism. The essay ends with a discussion of the insights Shevek's philosophy provides into media theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note aims to establish the influence of a system's political identity on its viability. Using an argumentative analysis of evolutionary theory, organisational cybernetics and other systems traditions, this paper demonstrates the importance of identity to the adaptability of viable systems. It demonstrates how the environment shapes viable systems and how natural selection makes certain political identities viable in systems. The conclusion of the paper presents some ideas for adaptation in viable systems and asserts that these ideas are anarchist in origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal History of Latin American Education / Revista Historia de la Educación Latinoamericana is the property of Universidad Pedagogica y Tecnologica de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) dedicated several hundred pages to London. Addressing different audiences and adopting different tones accordingly, he produced travel guides, geographic treatises, and meditations (posthumously published) that recounted contemporary London in various ways. This article examines Reclus’s reflections on the city, serving as both a companion for Anglophone readers exploring Reclus’s work and an invitation to view London through new eyes—that is, those of a foreign traveller whose conflictual, yet affectional, relationship with London may still describe that of many today. As this article shows, globalisation, progress, environment, and social habits are recurrent themes in his accounts: at times they are approached with considerable scientific rigour, and at others, they immersed in a romantic indefiniteness articulated by way of a frenetic expressive tempo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores contemporary discourses of deviation in early twentieth-century Colombia. Through analysis of a presidential assassination attempt in 1906, known as the Crime of Barrocolorado, it discusses the social construction of notions of criminality and danger in the light of the history of emotions. The assault on the president triggered a series of commentaries and reactions that revolved around anarchism, medicine, and criminology, topics that are dissected and connected here in search of their emotional components. In this way, the study brings forth the importance of emotions in the construction of social and political ideas in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four centuries of precolonial diplomatic, economic, and military African–European relations have been neglected in international relations. Refuting common presumptions about European dominance, before, during, and after the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade, African rulers and merchants were generally in a position of equality or superiority in their relations with Europeans. Contrary to expectations that long-term interaction promotes homogenization via institutional diffusion from core to periphery, Africans generally eschewed European political, economic, and military models such as the Westphalian state, the corporation, and the salaried standing army. Instead, they utilized external opportunities in ways that reinforced evolving local differences, or adopted institutions from the Islamic world; Europeans in Africa were more likely to adopt African models than vice versa. That African polities held out against European dominance longer than larger, richer, and more militarily powerful Asian polities, and that stateless African societies held out longest of all, brings into question fundamental assumptions about survival under international anarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]