An Interview with Colin Ward

SA: What makes an anarchist different from other kinds of political people?

W: Well, there was the woman who ran that library in Amsterdam that was started by Max Nettlau and has a great deal of anarchist material from the past. She always said, “I’m a socialist but the anarchists are nicer. You can have more fun with the anarchists.” And this is my view. There are plenty of politicos you cannot have fun with.

SA: What is it about anarchism that makes the anarchist more fun?

W: Anarchists by my definition are liberated people and the politicos seem to me to be enslaved to all sorts of social illusions.

SA: When did this idea of anarchism start? When did it come about?

W: It started with Even in the Garden of Eden.

SA: And you’re going to leave us hanging there?

W: Yes, indeed! No, I think its an aspect of human thought and behavior that crops up, not of course under the name of anarchism, all through history. Some anarchists delight in going back and saying the Greeks has a word for it. They talk about Zeno of Kitium whom they say was the first anarchist, but unfortunately not a word of his utterances truly survives. I think the best way of seeing it is that there are libertarian and authoritarian tendencies in human life which are always in battle and have been all through the centuries.

SA: If you, as an anarchist and a man who has given a lifetime of thought to changing social arrangements, were to write a blueprint, what would your anarchist society look like?

W: I don’t really know. I imagine it would look exactly like our present society because I am quite fond of conserving buildings and would not like the present lot to be swept out of the way. I never think about the picture of an anarchist society as such because I think this is unhistorical thinking. I think all societies are mixed societies and the example that I always use and the only thing that makes life tolerable in capitalist America is the huge unacknowledged socialist element in American life. Similarly, it is quite obvious to everyone that the only thing that makes life tolerable in communist Russia is the enormous capitalist element which means that people like me can buy razor blades and things of that sort. In other words, all societies that we can truly imagine are mixed societies, if you like, plural societies.

SA: Kropotkin, a writer you are quite fond of, argued that what anarchists have to do is have a vision of the future.

W: I prefer not to have a vision of the future. I think its self-indulgent. How far do you take it? To tastes in music? In a free society will comrades like Mahler? In having a vision of the future what we are doing is projecting personal predilections on the rest of humanity.

SA: Can we interpret your remarks as being hostile to utopian writers?

W: No, I enjoy utopian writers just as you might enjoy science fiction because they are dealing in fiction, aren’t they?

SA: We are going to try again because we are not giving up on this point. You have studied and written about housing, urban planning and community design. Now, if the mayor of Baltimore, whom you recently interviewed, had asked your opinion as to how to go about redesigning the City of Baltimore, what would you have told him?

W: I would have told him, “expropriate the landlords and leave it to the tenants.”

[Laughter]

SA: Let’s talk about that for a while. You have a faith that if we turned the housing over to the tenants something would emerge from that. Other people would say that even if they were willing to concede that people had that potential, they do not yet have that knowledge and skill. How would you reply to that?

W: On every block there will be the community technical aid sector where all those worthy people with architectural or plumbing skills could make them available to members of the group. This, after all, is what the People’s Homesteading movement is about, isn’t it? Sharing and expanding people’s own skills.

SA: Having done this, having expropriated the land and turned it over to the tenants, what kind of society do you think they would organize?

[Laughter]

W: Well, it would mean that one of these problems which has been with people ever since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden — this question of landlord and tenant — would have been solved. No tenant ever loves his landlord and no landlord ever loves his tenant. We would have, at one go, got that out of the way and then we could think about other things. We could think about diet and education and pollution and love and topics of that sort. One very crucial issue would have been got our of the way by this perfectly simple little task of expropriating the expropriator.

SA: Sitting at these microphones, we once asked Murray Bookchin what he thought was the single most significant problem preventing the realization of anarchist community and he replied, without any hesitation, “autonomy — of helping people to grow to be autonomous.” How would you reply to that question?

W: Well, I’m glad that Murray has found the answer for me. I think he is right. Now, if I were rich I would fund research to look into the libertarian personality. We have all met some absolutely liberated people who are autonomous without anybody having given them autonomy; they have taken it. And so it would be nice to know what made them tick. In the same way we need to look at this human characteristic of resourcefulness. We rejoice at it when we find it in other people. What makes people resourceful? Why are some children resourceful and independent from a very early age while others are timid and unimaginative? This is a marvelous field for research, so thinking about it, I think Bookchin is right.

SA: You have given some though children in the city. What are some of the things that make for a libertarian personality for the growing child?

W: There used to be a slogan in the progressive school movement — have them, love them and leave them alone. It is an anti-child-abuse slogan and there is a lot of sense in this. Progressive thinkers in education of the most liberal sort, as opposed to anarchist, have had the same conclusion. There isn’t an anarchist patent on this. Dewey would have said the same thing, wouldn’t he?

SA: Again, if you were helping to design a city of tomorrow, how would go about making the conditions of that city for liberated children?

W: Well, it would be one in which they weren’t, for example, herded into child ghettos like schools and playgrounds. I believe a play pundit called Herman Mattern had this slogan: “Down with playgrounds, free the child.” Meaning that a good urban environment would be as useful and acceptable to children as to adults and all of those small environmental changes which we can think about for the sake of the old would similarly be valuable for the young. You remember Paul Goodman’s novel, The Empire City, this great shambling, hulk of a book. Buried in there are all sorts of useful information where his hero, Horace (named after Horatio Alger) is using the street and the environment as a learning device. This is what cities are for as far as children are concerned. I think that the future city will be a much more dispersed city; it will be a city region simply because those very forces which have brought people together in the compact overcrowded city have been dispersed — the industries are no longer there and the technical means for decentralized, dispersed industry are there. So probably the city will be very different in that sense. It might even be Ebenezer Howard’s garden city, Now there are some people who can’t stand this because they want the drama of the street and the excitement of downtown New York or something of this sort. But I think that during the family life cycle there are appropriate cities for everybody and certainly I think that, despite the notion of the streetwise urban child who exploits the whole thing, the dispersed city with a front garden and backyard, is the right childhood environment. But when children come to be 14 or 15 they want to be in the thick of the exciting city where all the action is. Alright, they move off to the city commune. The parents back home worry just as they would if the daughter went into service in the 19^th century or the boy ran away to sea. Those city kids having worked through their teens in the city themselves become parents and they very soon want the space and so on of a suburban or a rural environment. So there is an appropriate city for most people’s different age groups. The dispersed regional city, the sort of thing that people like Lewis Mumford have been ruminating about for years, seems to me to be the pattern for the future city.

SA: Would these cities be fairly autonomous? Could they feed themselves, for example?

W: Well, now once again, the medieval city was like that. Kropotkin envisaged, as you know, that every city would have all around it its market gardening area. I’m very interested in the community gardening movement. In England such gardens are called allotments because they are land which was allotted to the poor after the enclosures of common lands. They have a very long history. The allotment movement of the “community garden” or “liberty garden” or “victory garden” movement in the United States was diminishing for years after the Second World War when people were more affluent and less interested in growing their own vegetables. Suddenly, in the 1970s came a new generation of people who put a particular value on organically grown vegetable or fresh vegetables, and saw a particular virtue in growing them for themselves. With the emptying of the cities comes the greening of the cities and the possibility for food production on a very large scale within the city region itself. You have only to think about cities like Singapore or Hong Kong in the Far East where they are surrounded by what are, in effect, community gardens — tiny, highly productive vegetable patches. Yes, the autonomous, self-sufficient city like the city-state of the Middle Ages which so appealed to Kropotkin, certainly appeals to me.

SA: How do you deal with issues of technology? I know that many anarchists seem hostile to technology and others, again to use an example from Murray Bookchin, talk about a liberatory technology.

W: Yes, a liberatory technology is precisely what we want and the decision about what kind of technology people will use will obviously be individual. We all have our romantic notions about craftsmanship in the past and there will always be, no doubt, people who want to make their own household crockery or their own tables and chairs and others who will be only too pleased to have them made of plastic extrusions they can put together. I think it was Goodman, once again, who put this beautifully in the book Communitas where, as you remember, he has his three possible cities of the future — the City of Efficient Consumption, which is exactly like Victor Gruen’s plan for Fort Worth,Texas, in the 1950s — a sort of dome over one great shopping mall. Or there is the New Commune, as Goodman puts what is his hobbyhorse, which is the small-scale community of parents and children doing their own thing. But he and his brother’s most interesting thought about the future city, I thought, was the one which he calls “Maximum Security with Minimum Regulation.” (I believe that was the title.) And what he meant was the kind of social welfare that came about in Britain during the Second World War and afterwards as well as some of the programs in America for social security. How can that be achieved with minimum regulation of people’s lives? The answer, says Goodman (it’s a non-anarchist solution) — there is a form of industrial conscription just like military conscription — everybody at 18 does their two-years on presumably the maintenance of the assembly line, turning out the plastic cups and saucers or the blue jeans or the canned whatever it is — the ordinary, basic things of life. And having spent two years in that ordinary mass production economy, the rest of their time is their own. They are entitled to the products of those machines and this double decker civilization which the Goodmans envisage answer a whole lot of the kind of questions that you might be coming on to me about.

How do you cope with the problem of luxury in an anarchist society? Answer: That is in the free market; yes, a market economy on top of the basic economy that supplies all of our needs. So the question now of who has or hasn’t got a Renoir or a 1922 Deusenberg car is something we just don’t have to worry about because that is in this free market economy. But we are concerned that basic needs are met. And there are certain Puritans, probably anarchists might be amongst them, who will take pride in wearing the basic clothes that came off that machine and not the beautifully hand-stitched, hand-woven Sea Island cotton blouses which come in the luxury economy. Using the liberatory effects of ordinary mass robotic production, our basic needs are met and then pushed out of the way simply for a couple of years of conscription. As I said, that is a non-anarchist view. We can disguise it. We can say, “No, it’s really our social obligations which make us do this. It will be the done thing. The young person who avoids it will be shunned as peculiar.” I think this is a thoughtful use of utopianism rather than a blueprint for a free society.

SA: If we have a mixed market economy, how can we be sure that we won’t once again develop a maldistribution of wealth?

W: There isn’t any guarantee about this. I think this is the whole tragedy of politics — the juggling act between liberty and equality. Probably socialists put more importance on equality than on liberty, while anarchists give much more importance to liberty than to equality. So, of course, do right-wingers and right-wing libertarians. Trying to eliminate inequality wastes a terrible amount of human effort. I don’t believe there are any political guarantees at all. I think the final struggle, as it says in the words of “The Internationale,” is really a myth. I think it was Martin Buber (of all people) who said that the day after the revolution is really the day before the revolution for all those except the ones who got bogged down in some particular point in history. And we all know, don’t we, all too well about the Iron Law of Oligarchy — the way every institution, however libertarian it is, hardens into something which then has to be rebelled against.

SA: You don’t then envision any structural means by which to break that iron law.

W: Well, a whole lot of bodies, bodies like the IWW, I would say, attempted to do this — to have temporariness and impermanence built into the system. You can make efforts to avoid oligarchy, but there is no indication that they are going to be successful. And I am not worried about this. You think of all of those institutions in our society which go on and on simply because once a thing has been started it is very hard to stop. And yet in most of the fields that I can think of it always becomes necessary to abandon the old institution and start a new one. Beside which, of course, everybody in every generation ought to have the joy and delight of starting something.

SA: Since you’re working in architecture, what is an anarchist architect?

W: (Chuckles) I don’t know. Architects are interesting people. They are more interested in people than, let’s say, structural engineers. You don’t hear structural engineers endlessly discussing the morality and ideology of their profession. I am quite fond of architects because of that. There have been anarchist architects, including some celebrated anarchists, even though their names escape me for the moment. Your real question is: Could you tell from their architecture that they were anarchists?

SA: Yes, and what do anarchist architects concern themselves with?

W: I think, if you regard architecture in that sense as a fine art, you might find that the most anarchist architects were those who adhered most rigorously to a bizarre style of architecture just as, amongst artists (there are anarchist artists) think of Courbet; there is nothing about Courbet which suggests that he had an anarchist ideology. Or Pissaro, this famous and delightful character, was an anarchist artist but you would be belittling him if you suggested that his art reflected his anarchy or else you would be sentimentalizing about it. But, quite obviously, there are architects who are primarily not concerned with externals of the building. They are concerned with who their client is and in providing a genuine service to their client. There was a very, very interesting Anglo-Swiss architect who died a year or two ago in his late seventies. His name is Walter Segal and he was brought up on an anarchist commune in Switzerland in the Ticino. It was a great embarrassment for him to be brought up amongst these free-thinking people. The other children used to laugh at the funny clothes that his mother sent him to school in and he told me he always had a double feeling about this. One was pride in that he wasn’t like all the rest of these kids and, of course, the other was desperately wanting to be like the rest of the kids. He spent years and years of his lifetime gradually simplifying his work until he designed very cheap, simply-built structures. He claimed this which would enable any poor man to build his own house much more cheaply than it could be done by anyone. And he disclaimed the title of a community architect. He simply regarded himself as a good professional providing a service to his clients. I am afraid that’s a terribly long answer to a simple question.

[Laughter]

W: Yes, there are a whole lot of topics on which it would be very nice if we had our anarchist pundits. From this point of view, Chomsky is a useful man, isn’t he? Chomsky is really an example of somebody who has made a big reputation in one field and consequently, because we’re always so willing to have our thinking done for us by a pundit, we all think that if he’s a big boy in linguistics, therefore he’s a big boy in everything else. It’s the Einstein or the Bertrand Russell syndrome, isn’t it, really? And that’s not anarchistic; that shows how we all value expertise.

SA: But you think…

W: Before we start recording again, what do we feel about Chomsky?

SA: I have very mixed feelings about Chomsky mainly because from much of his writing you would not know that he was an anarchist. There is nothing in most of his essays that would lead you to believe that this man was anything more than an angry liberal critic. So when an anarchist writer doesn’t use that frame of reference in a critique or analysis of his subject, then what is it that makes him an anarchist? Wouldn’t you feel angry or embarrassed if somebody read one of your works on housing and said, “I can’t discern any anarchist orientation or perspective in it.” Isn’t that precisely what you do — bring to bear your own anarchist ideas when you write about issues of housing and urban planning?

W: Yes, it is. But on the other hand I don’t say that every anarchist writing on housing has to refer to what Kropotkin said in The Conquest of Bread, like every Marxist writing about housing is obliged to refer to Engels on The Housing Question, nor do they have to genuflect to the Red masters of the past.

SA: Yes, but you are still applying an anarchist perspective.

W: Yes.

SA: So now let us ask you how you regard Chomsky’s writings.

W: I feel, as a matter of fact, between ourselves [chuckles] a little same about Chomsky as about Murray Bookchin. I think that they (I may be libeling them come rather late in life to anarchism and have a view of anarchism that is very much shaped by a socialist, Marxist path. But we all bear the stigma of our previous experiences so I wouldn’t criticize either of them on that account. Chomsky did, I think, write about anarchism specifically in some pamphlet or other and it seemed to me a rather poor explanation of anarchism. Though I have spoke to him on a radio hookup and he seems to me to be a very nice, engaging sort of man.

SA: How did you come to anarchism?

W: Well, I was in the army in the Second World War for over five years and that’s enough to make anybody an anarchist, I think. [chuckles]

SA: Alright. You left the army and then what happened? Surely you were an anti-authoritarian before then.

W: Well, I was young. I’m very fortunate in never having been anything else. My parents were ordinary Labor Party socialists but I was a late developer and I didn’t start thinking until I came out of the army or rather, I did start thinking when I was in the army. As soon as I came out of the army I was asked to join the editorial group of Freedom (that was in 1947) and I always make people laugh by saying that I thought that paper was at its absolute best just before I joined the editorial group.

SA: So you had encountered people from Freedom while you were still in the army?

W: Yes, indeed.

SA: You’re going to tell me they were in the army too?

W: They weren’t in the army, no. This really will amuse you. The Freedom press group, whose journal during the war was called War Commentary for Anarchism, was one of the very few political groups in Britain to be opposed to the war. Others were pure pacifists and there were presumably a few Nazis, although there was no real right-wing opposition to the war in Britain. The anarchists published their journal unscathed all through the war, but right at the end they were arrested and charged with inciting or rather “seducing” the members of the forces from their duty. A case was brought against them because of raids on the personal belongings of various people in the army. Five or six soldiers were brought at great expense to the Old Bailey, the central criminal court in London, to give evidence for the prosecution against the editors of Freedom. Naturally, we all swore on oath that we hadn’t been seduced from our duty to the army by reading Freedom Press publications except one of our number (we were not known to each other) conscientiously thought, yes he had been seduced and a jolly good thing, too. That was his particular line. And out testimony provided no evidence for the prosecution — much more for the defense. But my first contact with those people who for years became my dearest friends was as a prosecution witness against them in 1946. They were sent to prison for 9 months on charges which, in English law at the time, they could have been given 14 years. It wasn’t altogether a laughing matter.

SA: So, they still let you be on the editorial group or they were all in jail and you took over?

[Laughter]

W: No, they were out of jail by that time. In fact, when they were in jail, the paper was put together by those who were not — Marie Louise Berneri and George Woodcock — who later emigrated back to Canada in 1949.

SA: Didn’t Orwell work on Freedom Press?

W: He did write for it occasionally. He was very active in a body called the Freedom Defense Committee which was set up to provide a defense for the editors of Freedom. Orwell was very sympathetic, very friendly with the then editors. The normal body for such things was called the National Council for Civil Liberties, the equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union. It so happened that at that time in the 1940s, it was controlled by our friends in the Communist Party who weren’t going to use their resources to defend a bunch of anarchists. As you know, the Communists were a fiercely patriotic party after 1941. So the Freedom Defense Committee received a very great deal of help from George Orwell, including the very typewriter he used to write Animal Farm which has long since gone into the typewriter junk shops. It hasn’t become a holy object amongst the Orwellians.

SA: We published an article by Ruthann Robson, one of our editors, which is a satiric piece was a serious understructure — “How to Lead an Anarchist Life.” I know that when I have given talks and workshops people ask me questions of this kind and so without any embarrassment, I am going to ask you the same questions, namely, how should an anarchist live? How do you maintain your principles as an anarchist in a repressive, capitalist society?

W: Oh, I think we betray our principles every day. If I was really cynical, I would say that is what principles are for. Of course, unless you are going to be a martyr, you pay income tax. If you are actually an employed person in Britain your taxes are deducted from your pay by your employer under the PAYE (pay as you earn) system introduced during the war. Many an anarchist that I know have worked in the very margins of the economy for the usually reasons of making a living while devoting their real time, so to speak, to the production of anarchist propaganda. I have always very much admired them for it. I would suggest myself that you and your group are precisely that kind of persons who have got the work issue in perspective. I for a long time was not able to do that because I am not very clever and not very adaptable. I worked for years on the drawing board in architecture. I then, at the age of 40, took a one-year teacher training course. I actually left school when I was 15 and my teacher’s certificate is the one qualification in anything that I have ever got. I then left teaching in 1970 to work for a voluntary body producing the journal called BEE. This was the Bulletin of Environmental Education which was aimed toward showing school teachers, whatever their subject was, how the environment came into their teaching. All my friends used to laugh because they used to say that BEE was indistinguishable from Anarchy which I edited in my spare time in the 1960s.

And then finally, I gave up working for anybody and became a full-time writer. Needlessly to say, I have never been so financially insecure in my life. But, on the other hand, our eldest children had left school and the young one was making the transition from the primary to the secondary school (as we call it in England) so nowadays I work harder than ever before. I am an absolute slave to my typewriter doing journalism for pay in order to produce my books which, unfortunately, don’t pay. That’s not really the way an anarchist should live. Think of Malatesta. Malatesta determined at a very early age that he was going to be an anarchist propagandist so he learned a useful trade which would always be in demand. He became an electrical engineer just at the time when houses were first being wired for the most primitive form of electric lighting. Thus, he could travel in any country in the world, pursuing his metier as an anarchist propagandist — and he did. He was here in the United States, he was in London, he was in Latin America, very often being turned out by the police. So he was self-supporting. He wasn’t being dependent on patrons or charity or welfare handouts. He was self-supporting. His time was his own. He determined his own life.

SA: Actually, an anarchist prostitute friend advised me to take up watchmaking and told me that being a watch repair person would make me totally independent and I could travel wherever I wanted and there would always be work for me. I never took her advice.

[Laughter]

W: I do think that the attitude of the younger generation is changing shortly in this respect. While we always hear about yuppies, all the young people I know (my own children and their friends) never have any notion of actually going to work from 9 to 5. They happen to be musicians and so have been self-employed from a very early age. I live now deep in the country where the boys and girls leaving school very frequently are either with their families, friends or relations in the informal economy and have no intention of submitting to the discipline of employment in an office — still less in a factory. But as the factory system is dying they would never get the opportunity to do that. I think that young people are making these decisions themselves.

SA: One of the things you have talked about is the necessity, and I think that is a fair word to use, for anarchists to have an area of expert knowledge — punditry you call it. And you regard yourself as a housing pundit. Talk about that a little bit. Why do you think that is so important?

W: Well, because, when you say “anarchist” you almost imply anarchist propagandist because every anarchist, or every anarchist I know, is a propagandist. And they can be very bad propagandists, but nevertheless, that’s what they are and that’s what I see myself as and this means that they are using the media, whether the good, old-fashioned newspaper or books or, of course, radio and television. And because anarchism to many people’s mind is an absolutely outlandish, weirdo belief, my intention has always been to make it respectable. And by that I don’t mean respectable in the bourgeois sense, I mean worthy of respect. And the topics we have to discuss nowadays and that we continually hear about and are talked about in legislatures are immensely complicated subjects and we do need to have an alternative mastery of them than the political left and the right. In Britain, as you know, we have the Conservatives and the Labor Party. Even though from the anarchist point of view we can say they are exactly the same. I think that the human motivations that give rise to their attitudes are very different. In the case of housing, they have particular views which are sort of individualist and collectivist, And the anarchist view is, so to speak, at a tangent to all of these and I, and others like me, always say that the first principle of housing is dweller control. It is a notion which is much associated with me and John Turner and it is also quite obviously an anarchist position on housing just as workers’ control would be in industry. As a propagandist, what I want to find in British anarchist press, what we lack, are people who have the same kind of specialist but simple anarchist approach to other topics. The whole business of social medicine and the health services in most countries are in crisis and I would like somebody who had mastered this and could talk back to the free marketeers or the socialists on equal terms. I think that would make anarchism worthy of respect and would get away from the utopianism. The idea that there are no solutions to anything except one big solution has made as all anti-utopian, I think, especially in the century of Hitler and Stalin. So applications of anarchy are really what I am about.

SA: What does that mean in architecture?

W: Well, the secret is that I’m rather bored with architecture as such. I think it is a big, pompous word for the art of building and I’m one of those people who is more interested in shacks and shanties and all these poor peoples’ housing. I even have, and it sounds a bit sordid, an aesthetic of the shanty town. But this is precisely like everybody else in the architectural world. They were classic, then Gothic and then revivalist and then came along the modern movement which browbeat them all into a sort of Stalinist puritanism and gradually people said, “but we don’t like it.” Concrete isn’t a beautiful material so we have all these neo-vernacular revivalisms, post-modernisms, and so on. And the shanty style will come in and we can say that’s anarchist architecture. If anarchist architecture implies a kind of absolute randomness, well, there’s plenty of that. Isn’t there a chain of out-of-town supermarkets in America whose feature is the bricks permanently tumbling down or things of that sort. When you have what, in the pejorative sense, you’ll call anarchy in architecture, design doesn’t matter any more. It’s a matter of choice. I personally like a period when there is anarchy in design like that. So in that sense I think that what architects can give to community groups is nothing at all to do with design, which is what they are trained to do, but that purely technical knowledge of building, which they have, the stuff about U-values, vapor barriers and that kind of thing, which you cannot expect a layperson to know but which is an important contribution to the lay environment. So, in fact, as somebody said, a long time ago, let’s abolish architecture and start building.

SA: What do anarchist builder have to offer to community design?

W: Do you mean by community design, housing? The sort of thing done by self-build or homesteading movements or are you thinking about the whole layout?

SA: I was thinking about the whole layout.

W: I believe, like Walter Segal, that what they have to do is give a genuine professional service to that community. This implies, in terms of our previous conversation, that they help create an environment for all of the citizen, including the old and the young, and this probably implies that it will be a pedestrian environment just for safety’s sake. And it may very well be that there will be some reflection of anarchist ideology about the place. Maybe the place that in the medieval village was held by the parish church and will now be held by the community hall where everybody goes to anarchist meetings on a Saturday night. [chuckles] But maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe it won’t be that at all.

SA: What do you tell people who ask you what to read to learn more about anarchism?

W: Well, it’s a very funny thing. Many of the books which I find most sympathetic in persuading people to become anarchists are not anarchist books at all. One of my favorite books from that point of view is a book called Paths in Utopia by Martin Buber. Buber was a theologian, if anything, but with some very close and interesting links with anarchism. As you know, having done a radio program about Landauer, he was Gustav Landauer’s literary executor. I find Buber’s book a survey of what is known of utopian socialism — alternatives to the Marxist tradition — a very sympathetic and persuasive book. Another of the books which I am very fond of is the book by Leopold Kohr which is called The Breakdown of Nations. It is an argument for the small state, the small scale world, and is very witty. In fact, a whole number of books which seem very, very persuasive to me and tend not to be specifically by anarchists. This is very interesting, I think, how people adopt some political idea. Someone becomes a Marxist and then has to read Capital and all these great works — it’s a terrible penalty for them.

SA: But having paid that penalty, they have to stay a Marxist for the rest of their lives.

William Godwin is often recognized as the godfather of modern anarchism, and his 1793 work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, is an acknowledged classic of anarchist literature despite its age. In this essay, Art Efron attempts to re-evaluate Godwin’s work with a contemporary eye. He finds that, while not without some short-sighted flaws, Godwin’s work still provides “an extensive terrain” in which we can retrace the fundamental tenets of radical political philosophy.

Originally published in issue 24.