A rough guide to anarchy

There is a real need for reliable reference books about anarchism, but the latest addition to the genre is an unfortunate example of quasi-academic pseudo-scholarship. Kathlyn and Martin Gay are American authors who have little knowledge of anarchism or experience of producing serious reference books. Their Encyclopedia of Political Anarchy is not really an encyclopedia in the proper sense, consisting of only 256 pages and containing only 172 entries, with a short preface and introduction, an appendix, bibliography and index - and it is dreadfully unreliable.

The principle of selection appears almost random. A substantial minority of entries have little or nothing to do with anarchism, whereas a substantial majority of significant anarchist individuals and topics have been ignored. The level of scholarship is uneven. While the references in some entries on individuals are standard biographies, those for most entries of national movements or general topics are secondary or even tertiary sources, with little reference to the most authoritative books or primary sources.

The standards of accuracy and balance are disappointing. There are too many elementary errors and omissions. The key entry on "Anarchism" states that "William Godwin was the first person to call himself an anarchist and to use the term anarchism"; the terms had been used during the English revolution 150 years earlier, but were not used by Godwin, and the first person to call himself an anarchist was Proudhon 50 years later.

The coverage of such topics as collectivism and mutualism, federalism and municipalism, situationism and primitivism, is non-existent, as is that of communism and syndicalism, propaganda by deed and direct action, feminism and libertarianism, is inadequate.

Many references are made to websites, and more are added in the appendix on the internet. Inquirers would actually do better to go directly there than to bother with this book. The coverage by this most anarchic of media of anarchism, as of everything else, contains a great deal of rubbish, but it also includes a fair amount of reliable information. Any reference book on anarchism must work harder than ever to reach the necessary standards of authority and clarity, coverage and accuracy; this example signally fails to do so.

There is also a real need for reliable histories of specific anarchist movements and episodes, and the latest addition to this genre is a very different matter. Robert Alexander is a genuine academic scholar, a former professor of economics at Rutgers University and a specialist in Latin American politics, who has spent his retirement writing the longest English-language account of the largest anarchist movement in the world during the most significant episode in its history.

He is sympathetic to but by no means uncritical of the Spanish anarchists and is determined to redress the imbalance in their treatment by historians during the past 60 years. He has himself been studying them throughout that period, relying almost entirely on thousands of primary sources and scores of personal interviews; and, rather than merely providing an impartial narrative, he has also set out to ask and answer a series of important questions, such as the nature of the anarchist collectives, the international support for the Spanish anarchists, and anarchist violence and terrorism. The result is an extraordinarily impressive achievement which will at once become the standard work on the subject in English.

However, it is marred by two defects. One is that Alexander seriously plays down the contributions made by his predecessors to the rehabilitation of the Spanish anarchists. He ignores several crucial figures and publications in this process, and he seems to have a blind spot for material not in Spanish, ignoring most contemporary material in French and English and some of the most important subsequent books. The other defect is that Alexander has been seriously let down by his British publishers, who have produced a two-volume paperback that is relatively cheap but is rather badly produced and spoilt by too many dreadful misprints.

Nicolas Walter has been a frequent contributor to the anarchist press for 40 years.