24 On the importance of the concepts of “affinity” and “analogy” to anarchist thought, see Colson, Petit lexique, 20–21 and 24–26.
25 Karen Rosenberg, “The Cult of Self-Sacrifice in Yiddish Anarchism and Saul Yanovsky’s The First Years of Jewish Libertarian Socialism,” in Yiddish and the Left, eds. Gennady Estraĭkh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2001), 179, 181.
26 I borrow the term from Sharif Gemie, “Counter-Community: An Aspect of Anarchist Political Culture,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (April 1994): 349–367.
27 For classic examples of the anarchism-as-quasi-religious-atavism argument, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 74–92, or Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 225. For classic anarchist denunciations of religion, see Bakunin’s God and the State (New York: Dover, 1970) or Peggy Kornegger’s “The Spirituality Ripoff,” in The Second Wave 4.3 (1975): 12–18. For an acknowledgment of affinities with religious antecedents on the part of atheist anarchists, see, for instance, Gustav Landauer’s paean to medieval Christianity in Die Revolution (Revolution and Other Writings [Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010], 127–137), or Peter Kropotkin’s nod to several centuries’ worth of heresies and millenialist movements in Ethics, trans. Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff (New York, London: The Dial Press, 1924), 133–134. Paul-François Tremlett’s “On the Formation and Function of the Category ‘Religion’ In Anarchist Writing,” in Culture and Religion 5.3 (2004): 367–381, provides what may be the best analysis of these discrepancies in the treatment. Demetrio Castro Alfín (“Anarquismo y protestantismo: Reflexiones sobre un viejo argumento,” Studia historica: Historia contemporánea 16 [1998]: 197–220) reconsiders this old historiographic chestnut in the Spanish context.
28 Sam Dreen qtd. in W.J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914 (London: Duckworth, in association with the Acton Society Trust, 1975), 254; Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement Anarchiste En France (Paris: F. Maspero, 1975), 1.145.
29 Isaac Klein, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1979), 213. Bloch’s hypothesis is disputed, since the Kol Nidrei seems to predate Bloch’s history, but whatever its origins, the significance of the song in Jewish life was certainly cemented by experiences of persecution, all the more so after Bloch’s 1917 interpretation, in the wake of the Shoah. See also Margaret Olin, “Graven Images on Video?,” in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, eds. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 47.
30 Blaine McKinley, “‘The Quagmires of Necessity’: American Anarchists and Dilemmas of Vocation,” American Quarterly 34.5 (Winter 1982): 507.
31 Luigi Galleani, The Principle of Organization, trans. Wolfi Landstreicher (Cascadia: Pirate Press Portland, 2006), 4. In a contemporary echo, Laura Portwood-Stacer observes that among anarchists today, “everyone can be called out at some point for not living up to anarchist principles,” since—no less than 1925—“to live in contemporary society is to be complicit with capitalism and other forms of exploitation” (130).
32 Albert Libertad, “The Joy of Life,” in Man! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries, ed. Marcus Graham (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974), 355–356. Cf. Alexandra Myrial (a.k.a. Alexandra David-Néel, 1868–1969), in Pour la Vie (1901): “Obedience is death. Each instant man submits to an alien will is an instant cut off from his life” (13).
33 The notion that anarchists were anarchists because they believed in the existence of a good human nature, repressed by social institutions such as the State, that merely awaited expression, is really a durable misreading that survives in spite of many concerted attempts to puncture it, perpetuated by political scientists, philosophers, and historians alike. See, for instance, Dave Morland’s “Anarchism, Human Nature and History: Lessons for the Future” (in Twenty-First Century Anarchism, eds. Jon Purkis and James Bowen [UK: Cassell, 1997], 8–23), David Hartley’s “Communitarian Anarchism and Human Nature” (in Anarchist Studies 3.2 [1995]: 145–164), and my own Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 56–60.
34 See, for instance, the ridicule heaped by Proudhon on Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born good … but society … depraves him” (System of Economic Contradictions: or, the Philosophy of Misery, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker [Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1888], 404), or Bakunin’s contempt for Rousseau’s conception of “primitive men enjoying absolute liberty only in isolation” (Bakunin on Anarchism, 128).
35 Kaneko Mitsuharu, “Opposition,” trans. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, in 99 Poems in Translation: An Anthology, ed. Harold Pinter et al. (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 54–55.
36 David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts, 1997), 5.
37 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 75.
38 John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Seattle: Left Bank Books, 1988), 56.
39 The term “revolutionary syndicalism” refers to the radical movement emerging in the 1890s, eclectic as to ideology but firmly internationalist and anti-statist (and harboring a substantial faction of self-defined anarchists), that saw direct action and self-organization through unions (in French, syndicats) as the means proper to workers’ emancipation. The origins of the term “anarcho-syndicalism” (and its cognates) are somewhat cloudy, but it appears to have come into use in the early 1920s, first as an epithet hurled by Communist Party members at syndicalists who resisted the assimilation of their movement, then as a self-description adopted by some of those same syndicalists (David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 152; Mintz,“Guión provisional sobre el anarcosindicalismo,” El Solidario 14 [Fall 2008]: xii–xiii). Anarcho-syndicalists specifically defined the emancipatory goal of revolutionary syndicalism as anarchy (or, in the formulation of the CNT, “libertarian communism”).
40 For a somewhat contrary view, see Allan Antliff’s Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).