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AbstractGeorge Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a 'philosophical anarchism' was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of 'nation' and 'state' in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the 'anti‐nation'—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti‐state ends.

This paper is in closed access. ; Herbert Read was not a religious anarchist, but a concept of the spiritual played a significant role in his thought. Examining his relationship with the socialist and writer H.G. Wells, this chapter explores the ways in which Read offered a spiritually-infused anarchism as an antidote to what he dismissed as the piecemeal politics of the modern technocratic state, and the scientism of certain brands of utopian thinking. The chapter demonstrates that this position was essential to his aesthetic politics, and was a product of the post-First World War context in which Read developed his political thinking.

This book chapter is in closed access. ; Charles Darwin's work had an important, but complex, impact on social thinking in the nineteenth century. Although the language of evolution was integral to social thought before publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, social theorists increasingly turned to evolutionary theory to help understand human societies as the significance of Darwin's contribution to the biological sciences became more apparent. Social Darwinism encompassed a melange of competing ideas, and had appeal across the political spectrum, but it nevertheless became a crucial component of theoretical interventions that were integral to the formation of modern sociology.

This introductory book chapter was published in the book Journey Through Utopia: A Critical Examination of Imagined Worlds in Western Literature and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher. The publisher's website is at http://www.pmpress.org.

This book chapter was published in the book Anarchism 1914-18: Internationalism, anti-militarism and war [© MUP]. The publisher's website is at http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112. ; The work of Herbert Spencer was a crucial influence on the development of Peter Kropotkin's historical sociology. However, scholars have underestimated this relationship; either overlooking it entirely, or minimizing Kropotkin's attachment to Spencer with the aim of maintaining the utility of his political thought in the present. This article contests these interpretations by analyzing Kropotkin's reading of Spencer's epistemological, biological, and political ideas. It argues that Kropotkin was engaged in a critical dialogue with Spencer, incorporating many Spencerian principles in his own system, but also using this reading to articulate a distinctive anarchist politics.

This paper is in closed access. ; Drawing on the fragmentary chain of letters between George Woodcock and Herbert Read, this article uses these materials as a point of departure to consider the development of Woodcock's cultural politics. Focusing on the memories he explored in his autobiographical writing, his histories of anarchism and Canada, and his project to live off the land, it examines the ways in which Woodcock looked to anarchism's past in order to theorise afresh its future.

This book is in closed access. ; This book explores this lost history, offering a new appraisal of the work of Kropotkin and Read, and examining the ways in which they endeavoured to articulate a politics fit for the particular challenges of Britain's modern history.