Unruly Equality

Points to a growing interest in the study of American anarchist history for readers of political and social history. -- Jessica Moran Library Journal No matter how one feels about it, the current state of anarchism has represented something of a mystery: What was once a mass movement based mainly in working class immigrant communities is now an archipelago of subcultural scenes inhabited largely by disaffected young people from the white middle class. Andrew Cornell's Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century supplies the first convincing account of that transition... Cornell's analysis serves as a much-needed check against the kinds of fairy tales that anarchists too often tell themselves about themselves. With its historical backing and its determined even-handedness, Unruly Equality simultaneously delivers a well-researched account of the 'transformation of the economic Left into the cultural Left' and offers an honest and nonsectarian assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each... Unruly Equality makes a real contribution to the history of American anarchism and may - if it is widely read and carefully considered - make a contribution to anarchism's future as well. -- Kristian Williams Toward Freedom Andrew Cornell's Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century comes as a precious gift. It is a sweeping, enthralling history of anarchism's march-really, more of a shuffle-across the mid-twentieth century in the United States. Throughout eight chapters and 300 pages of storytelling and analysis-all backed by another 70 pages of notes-Cornell explicitly attempts to demystify how the classical anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin morphed into the contemporary anarchisms we now know-from today's class strugglers and insurrectionists, to the anarcho-primitivists, and especially to the more intersectional anti-authoritarian current. -- Jeremy Louzao Institute for Anarchist Studies