Anarchism
Anarchism and anarchists and anything associated with the thinking, the people, or the history generally get a raw deal from the media and even mainstream historians. It is true that anarchism is profoundly anti-authoritarian, but its popular association with violence (wild-eyed bearded men throwing bombs) is exaggerated, even fictionalized by the very forces threatened by it, namely governments and the media with vested interests in things as they are.
As with any subversive political and economic movement, some proponents became impatient and felt justified in striking out in vengeance or justice. Thus you have Alexander Berkman and his attempted assassination of Pennsylvanian Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and Leon Czolgosz and his successful assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Berkman, however, served his time in jail, wrote a deep and insightful account of his experience and went on to write more worthwhile books on the subject which possessed his life. (Czolgosz did not have that opportunity, being executed forty-five days after the death of his victim.)
Anarchism survived its dramatic beginnings in the 19th Century, however, and interested readers can find its articulate concern with agricultural reform, labor rights, and prophetic worries about the growth of the surveillance state in many excellent books. Here you will find books and a superb documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti (as well as Woody Guthrie's cd of his investigation into the miscarriage of justice). Here you will find histories, biographies, anthologies, memoirs, and fiction. It is a rich tradition, relevant to this day and to the future.
God and the State (Dialectics Annotated Edition)
God and the State (Dialectics Annotated Edition)
In God and the State, Mikhail Bakunin presents a clear and compelling argument against religion and divine authority. Bakunin looks at the ways that belief in the divine props up the temporal authority of governments, and condemns both. Finally, Bakunin addresses the theory that would give the power of government to science, demonstrating that science would become corrupted and used as a tool of power like the divine power it replaced. God and the State is an important and enduring work of anarchist thought.
The Dialectics edition includes over 50 new historical and biographical footnotes and notes on the English translation from the French text. Also included are several historic illustrations of Bakunin. These notes and illustrations help to make God and the State as relevant today as when it was first published.