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A "history" of "anarchism" Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Reissued with a new 40-page epilogue by PM Press, 2010, 826 pages, $28.95
This book comes with a host of excerpts from admiring reviews of its initial publication, by persons and publications far more eminent and reputable than I. It is in general well-written, attempts a comprehensive treatment on a scale not attempted since Nettlau's seven-volume work (though, Marshall's end notes suggest, with fewer linguistic resources to bring to the task), and will no doubt end up serving as a guidebook to anarchist history and ideas for many readers. I plucked it from a towering pile of books awaiting review, expecting to write a few short paragraphs commending the work. Alas, I can not recommend this postmodernist pastiche of misinformation and confusion.
The problems begin with the book's title, which promises a history of "anarchism." By this the author evidently means not the anarchist movement, but rather an intellectual history of the great men (and a few women) who can be said to have shaped anarchist ideas. He uses the term "anarchism" in a very eclectic way, including what seems like anyone who ever challenged an authority figure - a "river of anarchy" or "anarchist sensibility" that extends back to the Taoists and Buddhists; that infamous advocate for state tyranny, Socrates; the early Christians; a wide array of religious dissidents (many deeply authoritarian, and one of whom crowned himself king); Rosseau and a host of other Enlightenment figures; the Marquis de Sade; Nietzsche; John Stuart Mill; Gandhi; and a wide array of contemporary idiocies including the primitivist program for the extermination of the great majority of our fellow workers and the notorious police informer, Bob Black. Even the advocates of a vicious, unfettered reign of private property, unfettered by any social obligations and free to hire criminal gangs to terrorize and brutalize society into submission, make his list of anarchisms.
The book is largely devoted to largely celebratory explorations of the ways in which these figures contributed to the "river of anarchy" (some receive critical comment, but Marshall is willing to overlook a great many offenses, from slave-holding to the embrace of post-modernism solipsisms). His presentation of "anarchism in action" receives...