Sunday

Benjamin Pauli and 'the New Anarchism' in Britain and the United States

'The New Anarchism in Britain and the United States: Towards a Richer Understanding of Postwar Anarchist Thought' is an interesting essay written by Benjamin Pauli in 2015. Pauli : "This article challenges the assumption that the post-war era was relatively insignificant in the development of anarchist thought. In fact, many of the most important figures within the post-war anarchist milieu in Britain and the US were concerned with questions of theory as well as practice, and their thought comprises a distinct and coherent ideological configuration of anarchism." Benjamin Pauli succeeds quite well in describing the ideas and informed practices of what he sees as 'the New Anarchism' taking a form after WWII. Still, I miss some things in it, like writing about the influences of other social ecologists than Murray Bookchin in Britain and the US, or the influences of anarchafeminist thinking in these countries (to mention only two of the currents that had quite some influence in the post-war anarchist movement of Britain and the USA). It would also have been interesting to find out how Emma Goldman influenced this 'New Anarchism'. Instead of that, Pauli has focused a bit too much on the political ideas of not only Murray Bookchin but also those of Herbert Read, Paul Goodman, Colin Ward and Noam Chomsky.