49 Books Like A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

When I opened this book, I knew immediately that I was among friends. This is a handbook for constructing the kind of life in which joyful effects—associated with comradeship and mutual empowerment—might flourish. Eminently practical and down-to-earth, but also informed by a philosophical tradition stretching back through the anarchists to Baruch Spinoza in which life is not reducible to the “recipes” of self-help books but is a creative search for wider possibilities, for the “capacity to participate in something life-giving.” Written in contact with Indigenous and feminist social movements, this is also a guide to avoiding the kinds of blockages and dead ends on which such movements often founder.

Bottici is another such friend at first reading, another partisan of the Spinozan current, but one deeply immersed in the feminist thought that Colson regrettably ignores. Hers is a fully intersectional feminism, attending especially to the margins of society, where its freaks and pariahs live. Like Colson, she offers opportunities for difficult thinking that reward us with new vistas, new possibilities for life.

Reading Anarcho-Blackness as a white cismale reader was an experience of discombobulation—a certain disorientation followed by a surprising re-orientation. Bey’s Black anarchism, “indebted to... Black queer and trans feminisms” dramatically reorganizes the priorities of an anarchist tradition that is sometimes still too indebted to hollow universalisms and pinched humanisms that don’t sufficiently include everyone. This is an anarchism specifically for Black queer and trans people which ends up—in a sense that is only “paradoxical” for those of us not paying enough attention—being for everyone. The prose is both philosophical and playful, inviting us to imagine a life that is by turns “ungovernable,” “unpropertied,” “uncouth,” “unhinged,” and “uncontrolled.”

Transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy’s collection of short speculative fiction stories, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, is a stark contrast to the dazzling high-tech fantasies and cinematic adventures of my first three recommendations. Most of these stories are set in disturbingly plausible and not-at-all-distant futures, and veer into the territories of dark fantasy, gritty dystopianism, and atomspheric horror. No interplanetary space opera here; Killjoy’s protagonists are earthbound, anarchistic outcasts and misfits struggling to survive on the edges of society or in society’s ruins, in worlds gone unfathomably strange. And Killjoy writes it all beautifully, with a clarity of description that often left me stunned by its simple poetic power. This one’s for you if you like your speculative fiction close to the bone.

First published in 1935, The Green Child is among the strangest books you’ll ever read. It enchanted me, forcing me to believe that Olivero, a South American dictator, could fake his own assassination, return to his roots in England, and save a speechless translucent creature, the Green Child, from her sadistic husband. I revelled in the exquisite writing – Sir Herbert Read was a renowned stylist who penned the classic English Prose Style -- and the improbable’s being made real. At one time Norton Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Read called his novel a philosophical myth to which ‘all types of Fantasy should conform’. It was his only long fiction. One reviewer called it an ‘organic fusion of thought and imagination into a crystalline beauty’.

Spanish-speaking anarchists from Spain and Latin America often circularly migrated between the United States and Latin America, especially Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Mexico. Writing Revolution’s fifteen chapters explore the transnational and print culture of these anarchists in the United States as they communicated with, learned from, and supported their colleagues across Latin America. Correspondence and newspapers from Latin America fueled their support for Cuba’s War for Independence in the 1890s, the Mexican Revolution, social justice campaigns across the Americas, and hemispheric-wide efforts to support the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in the 1930s. Again, anarchist culture and transnational politics are intimately interlinked and illustrate how these two approaches provide a wealth of material to write the histories of radical leftists who agitated for anarchism decades before the emergence of Moscow-influenced Marxist political parties.  

Soares’ very funny novel bridges my focus on anarchist culture and transnational anarchism. Soares’ title character is an anarchist born of a Brazilian woman. His anarchist politics are always on display as he sets out to assassinate tyrannous figures around the world. For those looking for a sympathetic story of anarchists, our clumsy, error-prone, would-be assassin does not fit the bill. However, his popping up around the world at times of key global events is bizarre and ultimately quite entertaining. If nothing else, Twelve Fingers is a reminder of how even the best-laid plans with noble intents can go disastrously astray.

Paradoxes—a 2010 translation of his 2001 work—was an important addition to the emerging literature on anarchist cultural politics—a literature that began with a fellow Argentinian historian Dora Borrancos, who wrote Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (1990). My book built on this emerging exploration of anarchists outside the workplace. Paradoxes explores anarchist newspapers, culture, plays, meetings, and other activities radicals used to promote anarchism while also offering entertainment and relaxation. Suriano is not myopic. He notes that in a time when other forms of entertainment like cinema emerged, workers had competing forms of commercialized amusement to pursue. This book—like other cultural histories—breathes life into old histories of anarchism that often were boring “ABC histories,” i.e., stories of one union acronym after another.

And speaking of, who better than Le Guin to inspire sci-fi and fantasy stories that are truly unexpected? Dispatches from Anarres, edited by Susan DeFreitas, is an anthology of stories by Northwest authors, all inspired by and in tribute to Le Guin, and the offerings are rich and unique. Like Michelle Ruiz Keil’s poetic war cry of ghost cats in “The Kingdom of the Belly,” Jason LaPier’s fascinating tale of the life of a bee colony—with some of the coolest names I’ve encountered in fantasy—in “Bee, Keeper,” and Stevan Allred’s clever Ib and Nib folk-story interludes. I read much of this book in an ER waiting room as my husband was being examined and then treated for a scary collapsed lung, and the uniqueness of these stories kept me beautifully distracted.