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The Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers
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2 Reddit comments about The Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers:

u/cristoper · 8 pointsr/Anarchism

Here's a list I'm working on:

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Online introductions:

  • The Wikipedia entry for libertarian socialism actually gives a pretty good overview.

  • An Anarchist FAQ also has good material -- it is especially good at differentiating traditional anarchism from US-style libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. You will find many references to other works in the FAQ.

  • /r/anarchy101 is a good place to ask questions. Check the sidebar for a list of recommended reading material.

  • If you're ever looking for specific works online, always check The Anarchist Library. They've archived many (mostly shorter) works, and they're available in several formats (html, pdf, epub).

    Books:

  • The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin. It is old, a classic, but it provides examples rather than formal/philosophic arguments so it is still quite readable and relevant today. It will give you a good idea of where modern anarchist communists are coming from.

  • A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. This book is not explicitly anarchist, but it presents an accessible and scholarly picture of the way anarchists tend to view and react to the world. As the title suggests, it will be most interesting to anyone interested in the history of the USA specifically.

  • A book like Paul Eltzbacher's The Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers which provides an overview of the various founding philosophers is a good idea. This is another old one [1908], but one advantage of Eltzbacher is that unlike most authors of anarchist texts, he was not an anarchist himself and offers a very unbiased introduction.

  • I think Peter Gelderloos writes clear introductory material. I've not read his latest (The Failure of Nonviolence), but you can read Anarchy Works online.

  • It's a bit outside the main thrust of the anarchist tradition (which is often focused on class struggle), but one of my favorite books is Crispin Sartwell's Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory which provides counter arguments to several justifications for states, especially the various contract theories.

    Other reading guides:

  • Phoenix Class War Council's Recommended Reading

  • Libcom.org's reading guide
u/jawaiah · 1 pointr/Anarchy101

I won't put too much in here because I have other stuff to do this morning, but you've got a lot more to cover if you want a well-rounded survey of anarchism. I tend to prefer economic/historical analyses myself so I'll leave a couple here:

AnCaps aren't anarchists but Market (aka Libertarian) Socialists are. Here's a good collection of essays available for free online from the publisher. It includes historical works by Proudhon and DeCleyre, moving forward with early 20th century thinkers like the American Benjamin Tucker, and culminates with some modern Market Anarchist essays on the origins of intellectual property, capitalism, and other modern forms of government enforced privilege.

Markets Not Capitalism

This next book is a meticulous and deeply methodological survey of a few classical anarchists according primarily to their economic philosophy. It's a great resource if you can handle the pedantic, almost-mathematical analysis it puts forth. It lays out some really semi-formal language at the beginning and proceeds to analyze the Anarchists in terms of this formality. In that regard it reminds me a bit of Marx's Capital, but we'll get back to him in a second.

The Great Anarchists

I'd suggest you take at least a couple of classes into analysis of figures and ideologies that are not traditionally thought of as anarchists but have a subversive and anti-authority message. There are TONS of these if you look around but the two I'd mention here are Karl Marx and Ted Kaczynski ("the UNABOMber"). I'll link the the Kaczynski overview here but his most famous publication was called "Industrial Society and its Future" (ostensibly written collaboratively with a whole group called FC or the Freedom Club).

Marx, theoretician of anarchism

What Marx Should Have Said To Kropotkin

Ted Kaczynski

Lastly you mentioned Catalonia, no reading on Anarchist Catalonia is complete without Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution 1936-1939 which if I remember correctly contains at least one essay on the topic from the author Leval you cited.

The Anarchist Collectives

Cheers and have fun!

edit: ohgod where did my morning go