More anarchism 101 stuff

 For reasons, I am reading (or trying to read) a bunch of intro-level stuff about anarchism, and to that end I read Daniel Guerin's 1970 polemic Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, originally written in French. This book is fairly short, less than 200 pages, and covers more anarchist history than anarchist theory, or at least as I read it. Its discussion of anarchist history includes a lot about the development of theory, but it's definitely not a work of theory itself, it's more like the history of the theory with occasional assertions about what is correct or incorrect thrown in.

 

I'll admit that something about this book did not quite work for me, which I'm not sure can be attributed entirely to either the translation or the fact that I was reading it on a PDF at work instead of as a proper book. It tries to pack a long history into a short book, which is something that is hard to pull off well; nevertheless, I've seen some people do it well, and I'm not sure this is an exemplary specimen of doing so. I think one of the keys to doing that sort of thing well is to make it funny, sort of to set the tone of how much you're invariably going to oversimplify; Guerin's book is very serious, and the he also seems unwilling to cut stuff for flow, so the result is a bit choppy and didactic. As a basic anarchist timeline it functions perfectly well, but I really just didn't find it either a super enjoyable or enlightening read. 

 

Fortunately, my anarchist friends have suggested some better works for the project I'm working on, so I don't have to use excerpts from this after all. I'm still happy that I read it, since it gives me a little more grounding going forward.