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Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward David Goodway Liverpool University Press, 2006, 401 + xi pp. Paperback £20, ISBN: 1-8463 1-026-1; hardback £50, ISBN 1-84631-025-3.
Coming out as an anarchist has some similarities to coming out as gay. A life-threatening admission in some times and places; in Britain today, likely to be met with scorn, disbelief or a patronising, amused tolerance. Goodway writes feelingly of the impact of such attitudes on his own life and work as a historian. Publishers are wary of the subject, and researching anarchism is not the best way to get on in academia.1 More importantly, the political invisibility of British anarchism means, according to Goodway, that contemporary movements for change are missing out on crucial insights that anarchist example and analysis could provide. To adapt a phrase from one of his subjects, E.P. Thompson, this book attempts to rescue anarchists and anarchism from the enormous condescension of scholars and political activists.
Britain may not have had an anarchist movement as such, but, Goodway argues, it has had 'a distinguished, minority intellectual, overwhelmingly literary anarchist - and [... ] libertarian - tradition', part of 'a submerged but creative and increasingly relevant current of social and political theory and practice' (pp.10, 1 1). Acknowledging this tradition and its influences is, he believes, crucial if present-day radical activists are to learn from the past and not unnecessarily to re-invent, re-theorize, what is already there.
The book focuses on eleven writers representing a spectrum from left libertarianism to fully fledged anarchism in all its diverse manifestations. The central figures, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, Herbert Read,...