anarchism - book - 1964 - The Anarchists

The Anarchists
James Joll
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
1964 (2nd ed. 1979)
299 pages

One of the things I love about library books are the handwritten notes that are left in the page margins by other patrons. I know that vast numbers of library patrons hate that people make marks in these books and consider it disrespectful, but I love that each book can, over time, accumulate the specific signs of its use.  Almost every page of the copy of early sociologist George H. Mead’s Mind, Self and Society that I borrowed from UofT’s Robarts Library was so heavily underlined that it had the stippled texture of 19th century Japanese Prints. My secondhand copy of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down To This, a diary of living in Toronto’s turn-of the century tent city, includes a handmade index on the inside back cover so that a previous reader could make certain aspects of the text accessible on his or her return to the book.  

I borrowed a copy of The Anarchists by James Joll, a British historian whose career was mostly focused on the politically radical (he also wrote a book about the Socialist Second International, and a biography of the Italian Marxist leader and philosopher, Antonio Gramsci) from the UofT Scarborough Library, and includes notes by other borrowers recommending other, better books on anarchist history.  While Joll’s book can now be seen as a truncated survey of anarchist thought that has, since its publication, been eclipsed in importance by more thorough studies like Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible, at the time of its first publication The Anarchists was basically opening up the field of anarchist studies.  Joll charts a history of anarchist thought from the Gnostics of early Christendom to the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, although he focuses most of his work on the anarchists of the 19th century: in particular on the thought and deeds of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.  

Joll’s analysis takes a close look at the effects of anarchist writings and speech and the competing philosophical tendencies within the broad anarchist scene.  One of the notes written in the copy of this book that I read stated “an excellent book which, among other things, clears up many seemingly inconsistent ideas in anarchist thought is “Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis” by Alan Ritter, 1980.”  This note doesn’t dissolve the value of Joll’s history but, in its recommendation of another text, it does mark the social function of library books and their ability to communicate between patrons.