Top Highlights

• the unwillingness of politicians to confront malign corporate and financial powers led to disillusionment, even in purported democracies; and all was set against a background of economies staggering from crisis to crisis, uncertain how to tame a rampant, savage capitalism.
• Framed by two revolutions, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871 and ending with that staged by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, these are years tormented by the constant fear and possibility of violent upheaval. It was an age characterised by many contemporary social commentators as decadent or degenerate, a moment of crisis, perhaps even for th...
• destruction and promulgators of terror, were often posited as the most shocking symptom of the malaise. The control, suppression and ultimate demonisation of their fiendish sect appeared to many a moral imperative, and was clearly as much a pleasure as a duty for many official defenders of law and order. For them ‘anarchism’ was a useful shorthand ...
• Peter Kropotkin’s theory of Mutual Aid, which asserted an evolutionary argument that cooperation rather than competition was the natural state of human relations, has received support from recent discoveries in the field of genetics. All that was required for mankind’s best instincts to flourish, he and his colleagues argued, was for the accreted i...
• Faced with a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, a complacent bourgeoisie craved easy explanations of anything that challenged its easeful existence. In such circumstances, the phenomenon of the all-encompassing ‘conspiracy theory’ was able to take root. The fanciful notion of an internationally coordinated anarchist revolution of whic...