Review of Alex Butterworth THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS A true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents

[rich]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7160343.ece

>From cries of “Long live dynamite!” to arguments for vegetarianism,
the anarchist cause has been a very broad church. Often naive and
under-theorized – although it has always had highly intelligent
proponents and sympathizers, a current example being Noam Chomsky –
anarchism has also been dogged by a reputation for ill-directed
violence, leading to what Alex Butterworth describes as “the
movement’s pariah status in perpetuity”. Although The World That Never
Was is an unashamedly popular book and concentrates on the more lurid
end of the anarchist tendency, Butterworth at least tries to treat his
pariah subjects with a counterbalancing sympathy.

Kravchinsky is a key player in the book, within Butterworth’s
particular framing of anarchism. He sees it arising chiefly in the
wake of the Paris Commune and its suppression in 1871, so there is
little about slightly earlier figures such as Bakunin or Proudhon.
Instead, Butterworth follows a central group of characters including
Kropotkin; Kravchinsky; the utopian geographer [a great description of
so much of AtD] Elisée Reclus; the radical journalist Henri de
Rochefort; Louise Michel, “the Red Virgin”; and Johann Most, the
author of The Science of Revolutionary Warfare and a staunch advocate
of the grenade, the poisoned dagger and the letter bomb.

The book ends on a utopian note, envisaging a world without national
borders or divisions of class and religion: “The world as it might one
day be”.

flying towards grace no doubt

rich