By clicking on a name you'll go to Anarchist's biography on Wikipedia, clicking on a picture will take you to a more detailed and less 'searchable' source...
Emma Goldman 1869-1940
When you find out that someone like her existed, it is soon clear why 'THEY' are so committed to cover up her existence and work... The author who spoke and lived Anarchism - her numerous essays and outreach work has become an indigenous and unique phenomena in the history of philosophical thought... Even when her kamarad for decades (A. Berkman) publicly distanced himself from her militant and aggressive attitudes - she remained firm in the belief that a Free man is possible only in a state of Anarchy, without government. When Emma was 16 years old, as soon as the opportunity arose, she left Russia to make her fortune sought where (she hoped) the freedom prevailed. In America, she finds a similar situation as it was 'back home'- the crowd of workers who work for a pittance while the rich gets more rich ... Only there was more industry, those industries for which Emma hoped to liberate workers from unnecessary mechanical work. So, she has been doing a variety of mechanical work all the time, including herself in each strike and protest that was close by... When she was 24 years old she led a Hunger strikes with the famous sentence: Ask the rich to give you a job if they say 'no' - try asking them for bread... If they do not provide it - TAKE THE BREAD YOURSELF! Because of these sentences and ideas about social justice she openly opposed U.S. entry into World War (1917.) and, as authorities could not wait, soon became a legal precedent as a U.S. citizen who was deported and her citizenship had been revoked... On account of that precedent the US government (in the coming days) expelled hundreds of 'unwanted troublemakers' and a man who had a major role in that later would become the first director of the FBI (and stay in charge for next to 50 years). Emma had only once returned to America, and even then it was forbidden for her to make any statements - hers three-minute interview recorded then is on youtube and I'm recommending it ...
Errico Malatesta 1853-1932
Malatesta was a descendent of the Italian family of Malatesta di Rimini, with the hereditary title of Count. He renounced the title before beginning his life as an activist. In his first revolutionary essay, Malatesta urged Romania to revolt against Turkey; he was driven back to Italy by the Turks. In 1876, he planned an insurrection in Italy, but was discovered, so he fled to Spain. Shortly thereafter, an insurrection began in Xires; the Spanish government blamed Malatesta and issued a warrant for his death. Malatesta fled to Italy where he co-led an insurrection in 1878. Was captured and exiled to the island of Lampedusa (in the Mediterranean Sea), but he escaped. Went to Buenos Aires, Argentina; authored and edited revolutionary papers and pamphlets. Went to Paris where he founded the newspaper Le Revolte. Traveled through France, Belgium and Switzerland, attempting to foment armed uprisings among workers; was banished from all three countries. In 1899, he went to Paterson, N.J., as editor of La Question Sociale; was injured there. Moved to London in 1900; later returned to Buenos Aires. Shortly thereafter, uprisings began in Argentina; the Argentine government sentenced him to death. Escaped to London. Tried to sneak back into Italy in 1914, but had to come back to London when an insurrection began in Ancona, Italy. Remained in London until 1919 when he was allowed to return to Italy under post-WWI amnesty. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Arrested for his role in inciting several minor insurrections in Italy. Under Mussolini, he was under house arrest till his death...
Peter Kropotkin 1842-1921
Peter Alexander Kropoktin was born as Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin on December 21th (December 9. old style) 1842 in Moscow, Russia. He was the son of Prince Aleksey Petrovich Kropotkin and got his education from the exclusive "Corps of pages" in St. Petersburg. Starting 1862 he was five years a army officer in Siberia, where he also studied animals and geography. There he developed his theory of the structure lines of the mountains there that changed the cartography of East Asia.
While returning to Russia he joined a revolutionary group who spread propaganda under the workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He was arrested 1874 in a police action, but managed two years later his famous escape to West Europe. His name soon became famous under the anarchist movements there. The next years he spent mostly in Switzerland until he was expelled at the demand of the Russian government after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881. After a while in France he moved to England where he stayed until the revolution 1917 in Russia made it possible again for him to enter his native country.
He was now 75 years old and spent more than 40 years in exile. The new government offers him a job as secretary of education, but he harshly refused. In Russia everywhere communes and soviets (kind of worker and soldier unions) got started which could be the foundation for a classless society. His hopes for a libertarian future were never brighter. The new government however was for him only an example how NOT to do a revolution, authority instead of liberalism. Kropotkin died in 1921 in Dmitrov, a village near Moscow. Tens of thousands joined his funeral and that was the last event when the black flag of anarchy waved over the Russian capital.
While returning to Russia he joined a revolutionary group who spread propaganda under the workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He was arrested 1874 in a police action, but managed two years later his famous escape to West Europe. His name soon became famous under the anarchist movements there. The next years he spent mostly in Switzerland until he was expelled at the demand of the Russian government after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881. After a while in France he moved to England where he stayed until the revolution 1917 in Russia made it possible again for him to enter his native country.
He was now 75 years old and spent more than 40 years in exile. The new government offers him a job as secretary of education, but he harshly refused. In Russia everywhere communes and soviets (kind of worker and soldier unions) got started which could be the foundation for a classless society. His hopes for a libertarian future were never brighter. The new government however was for him only an example how NOT to do a revolution, authority instead of liberalism. Kropotkin died in 1921 in Dmitrov, a village near Moscow. Tens of thousands joined his funeral and that was the last event when the black flag of anarchy waved over the Russian capital.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809-1865
Proudhon prided himself on being a man of the people. He was born in Besançon, capital of Franche-Comté, of Jura peasant stock. His childhood was hard, and after a brief period at the college in Besançon, he received his education largely through his work as a printer; he taught himself Greek and Hebrew and developed a prose style that eventually won the admiration of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon has been called the father of anarchism, a title that is accurate insofar as organized anarchist movements throughout the world can be traced to his teachings and to the actions of his disciples. Proudhon was also the first writer deliberately to accept the title of anarchist, which he did in 1840. Before his time the term had been used to denote one who seeks to promote social disorder; Proudhon argued that it could be used with more justice to describe one who seeks social order without authoritarian government. "As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy," he said. "Anarchy—the absence of a master, of a sovereign—such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating." Such doctrines were not entirely original; the English writer William Godwin had expounded them fifty years earlier without describing them as "anarchist," but Proudhon appears to have been uninfluenced by Godwin and to have reached his conclusions independently.His criticism of Napoleon III (Louis-Napoleon) and the Second Republic led to his imprisonment from 1849 to 1852; he later spent a period (1858–62) in exile in Belgium. His writings exercised considerable influence on the development of anarchism and socialism in Europe. He is chiefly remembered for his pamphlet What is Property? (1840), which argued that property, in the sense of the exploitation of one person's labour by another, is theft. His theories were developed by his disciple Bakunin.
Silvio Gesell 1862-1930
Silvio Gesell was born at St. Vith on the German-Luxembourg frontier of a German father and a French mother. In 1886 he migrated to Argentina, prospered as importer and manufacturer, and became interested in the currency question during the world depression of 1873-96. In his first work, "Currency Reform as Bridge to the Social State" (1891), Gesell made the celebrated proposal for unhoardable money. Further studies on the disastrous effects of deflation and the necessity for stabilizing the purchasing power of money followed. Retiring to Switzerland, Gesell brought out a periodical for currency and land reform and in 1906 wrote his main book, The Natural Economic Order. Gesell's celebrated work on monetary and social reform is a modern attempt to provide a solid basis for economic liberalism, the creed of Adam Smith and almost all the great nineteenth century economists in contrast to the twentieth century trend of collectivism and planned economy - accompanied by 'austerity', 'import restriction', 'dollar shortage', 'pegging the exchanges' and 'credit squeeze'. In 1919 Gustav Landauer, one of the chief figures of the German Revolution of 1918-19, invited Gesell to become finance minister in the shortlived Bavarian Republic. Both men were arrested and charged with treason. Landauer was murdered in prison; Gesell was acquitted.
He continued to publish his works actively in Berlin where he died.
He continued to publish his works actively in Berlin where he died.
William Godwin 1756-1836
William Godwin was born in Wisbech, into a family of religious Dissenters. He trained as a Dissenting minister, but became instead an atheist and philosopher. He earned a living as a writer, producing a series of historical and educational works. His major philosophical work, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, was published in 1793, and for a while Godwin was the most celebrated philosopher in England. In 1794 he published a successful novel, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, and Cursory Strictures, a powerful defence of twelve Radicals accused of high treason. Caleb Williams dramatizes many of the anarchistic and rationalistic beliefs that Godwin put forward in his philosophical masterpiece, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), which argues that humankind is innately good and capable of living harmoniously without laws or institutions. The influence of Godwin's writings on his younger contemporaries, including novelists, poets, economists, and philosophers, was considerable. However, Godwin's philosophical and literary reputation has declined, and he is chiefly known today as a figure of historical importance—as the husband of philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, as the father of novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and as the author of two minor Gothic novels.
Murray Bookchin 1921-2006
Murray Bookchin was a political philosopher and activist and the intellectual founder of the school of social ecology. Active in the communist movement of interwar New York City in his youth, he came to argue that the radical remaking of society would require an analysis and a politics that transcended class, and that the ultimate crisis of capitalism would not be economic, as Marxism had held, but ecological. These two insights drove Bookchin's philosophical and political program. As early as 1952 he warned of the dangers of ecological degradation in “The Problem of Chemicals in Food” (1952). A decade later he published an early book-length treatment of the ecological crisis, Our Synthetic Environment (1962). In an essay he wrote in the 1960s and 1970s he argued that the reversal of the ecological crisis would depend not on an analysis of class and exploitation but on an analysis of, and opposition to, social hierarchy and domination. Bookchin traced the historical emergence of social hierarchy, leading to humanity's domination of the natural world, in The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship he outlined his political program aimed toward the dissolution of social hierarchy and the creation of a rational, ecological society (1987). Always politically engaged, Bookchin's anarchist groups in the 1960s started the non-violent direct action tactics (later he help organizing Clamshell Alliance - the first organized anti-nuclear group).
Mikhail Bakunin 1814-1876
Mikhail Bakunin was one of the intellectual founding fathers of Anarchism. He is often considered to be Marx's historical rival. When Marx headed toward State-run Socialism, Bakunin argued for the abolition of the State as the most fundamental goal for those who want to guarantee freedom. His family were hereditary noblemen of liberal political inclinations. His father had been in Paris during the French Revolution and had taken his doctorate of philosophy at Padua. His mother was a member of the Murav'av family; three of her cousins were involved in the earliest Russian revolution, the December rising of constitutionalists in 1825. Bakunin was carefully educated under the supervision of his father, who regarded himself as a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; later he was sent to the Artillery School in St. Petersburg. He received his commission and went on garrison duty in Lithuania. An awakening taste for literature made him discontent with military life, and in 1835 he obtained his discharge from the army and went to Moscow to study philosophy. There he joined the discussion circle centered on Nicolai Stankevich, which concentrated on contemporary German philosophy. His passionate campaigning for democracy and anti-colonialism made him 'public enemy number one' in the eyes of most European monarchies. In 1848 he was expelled from France for making a speech in support of independence for Poland. The Austrian monarchy also wanted him, so he was extradited and again sentenced to death. But before the hangman could put the noose around his neck, Russia demanded his extradition and he spent the following six years jailed without trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Release from jail was followed by exile in Siberia. He fled back to Europe through Japan, Panama canal and San Francisco...
Aldous Huxley 1894-1963
The English novelist and essayist Aldous Leonard Huxley, a member of a distinguished scientific and literary family, intended to study medicine, but was prevented by an eye ailment that almost blinded him at the age of 16. He then turned to literature, publishing two volumes of poetry while still a student at Oxford. His reputation was firmly established by his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), a witty satire on the intellectual pretensions of his time. In both fiction and nonfiction Huxley became increasingly critical of Western civilization in the 1930s. Brave New World (1932), his most celebrated work, is a bitterly satiric account of an inhumane society controlled by technology, in which art and religion have been abolished and human beings reproduce by artificial fertilization. Huxley's distress at what he regarded as the spiritual bankruptcy of the modern world led him toward mysticism and the use of hallucinatory drugs. The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) portrays its central character's conversion from selfish isolation to transcendental mysticism; and in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) he describes the use of mescaline to induce visionary states of mind.Huxley, who moved to southern California in 1947, was primarily a moral philosopher who used fiction during his early career as a vehicle for ideas; in his later writing, which consists largely of essays, he adopts an overtly didactic tone. Like his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, Huxley abhorred conformity and denounced the orthodox attitudes of his time. The enormous range of his intellect and the pungency of his writing make him one of the most significant voices of the early 20th century.
George Orwell 1903-1950
Orwell's parents were members of the Indian Civil Service, and, after an education at Eton College in England, Orwell joined (1922) the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that later found expression in the novel Burmese Days (1934). His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was a nonfictional account--moving and comic at the same time--of several years of self-imposed poverty he had experienced after leaving Burma. He published three other novels in the 1930s: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939). His major works of the period were two documentaries: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a detailed, sympathetic, and yet objective study of the lives of nearly impoverished miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan; and Homage to Catalonia (1938), which recounts his experiences fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was wounded, and, when the Communists attempted to eliminate their allies on the far left, fought against them and was forced to flee for his life. Orwell's two best-known books reflect his lifelong distrust of autocratic government, whether of the left or right: Animal Farm (1945), a modern beast-fable attacking Stalinism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel setting forth his fears of an intrusively bureaucratized state of the future.Orwell's reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires but also on his marvelously clear style and on his superb essays, which rank with the best ever written. "Politics and the English Language" (1950), which links authoritarianism with linguistic decay, has been widely influential. The four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published in 1968.