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Crispin Sartwell (ed.), The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren
New York: Fordham University Press, 2011, 240pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-3370-0
There exists a serious - and, in my view, embarrassing - dearth of work on the native American anarchist tradition within die contemporary anarchist studies mdieu, much of it fuelled, I suspect, by die worst kinds of lazy generalizations and uncritical Eurocentric prejudices. For example, I have often heard comrades speak of Warren, Spooner, Andrews, and Tucker as though they were a single, monocephalic being known as the 'American individualist,' a being diat was mosdy irrelevant to the international anarchist movement of its day and has since been co-opted by right-wing libertarian ideologues to justify capitalism. So, too, have I witnessed them adamantly refusing to entertain the possibdity diat the Transcendentalists or the Abolitionists were anarchists of a fashion, even though Hippolyte Havel himself claimed John Brown as one in the November 1 928 issue of The Road to Freedom. It is into this morass of dogmatism that Crispin Sartwell dares to plunge with his groundbreaking new book, The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren.
Those who are famdiar with Sartwell's work know that he has long been a voice crying in...