Anarchism and the American Counter-Culture

Abstract

Nine years ago George Woodcock surveyed the ‘ghost of the historical anarchist movement’ and concluded that there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of a renaissance’. History showed that ‘the movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again’. Seven years later, when identifiably anarchist tendencies re-emerged in the youth movements in England and Holland, Woodcock wondered ‘whether I had been rash in so officiously burying the historic anarchist movement’. He decided that he had not been rash because of the differences between the new anarchists and the old. The new anarchists represented no ‘knock in the coffin’ but ‘a new manifestation of the [anarchist] idea’.