Whatever Happened to Anarchism?: Renaissance and Adaptation in Postwar America

Ryan Thompson

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Johnson, Robert

Keywords

Anarchism, Postwar, United States, History, Intellectuals, Adaptation, Primitivism

Area of Concentration

American Studies

Abstract

This project is a multidisciplinary study of anarchism in the postwar United States.Though anarchism--�the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law�--had been declared obsolete in America in thought and movement by 1940 it would reemerge by the early 1960s. Anarchism�s classical period--the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--came with industrialization and modernity. Postwar anarchism evolved to another structural context: wealth, integration, centralization. The recovery of anarchism through historicization was contemporaneous with the renaissance. Paul Avrich was the exemplary chronicler of American anarchism. His research salvaged anarchism from distortion. The reassembly and continuity of anarchism was manifest through the work of intellectuals and the saga of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Intellectuals used anarchism to understand and resist their alienation and powerlessness and to document and reject the complacency and subservience of other intellectuals. When Kaczynski contacted the New York Times before his arrest he claimed to be part of an anarchist group, but his relationship with con temporary anarchoprimitivists revealed a creative but cynical use of anarchism. Such examples sketch out broad changes in the United States and how anarchism responded to them. For the project I conducted archival research at the Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan and the Tamiment Library of New York University and read primary and secondary sources. Throughout, I have been guided by the question of how and why anarchism could have been resilient, exploring thought and action, history and culture.

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