Life And Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta

(Paperback)

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With the timely reprinting of this selection of Malatesta's writings, first published in English in 1965 by Freedom Press, the full range of this great anarchist activist's ideas are once again in circulation. Life and Ideas gathers excerpts from Malatesta's writings over a lifetime of revolutionary activity. The editor, Vernon Richards, has translated hundreds of articles by Malatesta, taken from the journals Malatesta either edited himself or contributed to. Through the selections Malatesta's classical anarchism emerges.

Reviews

"The first thing that strikes the reader about Malatesta is his lucidity and straightforwardness. For him anarchism was not a philosophy for a future utopia which would come about one day as if by magic, or simply through the destruction of the state without any prior preparation. On the contrary, Malatesta was, throughout his life, concerned with a practical idea. His anarchism was something concrete, to be fought for and put into practice, not in some distant future but now. It is in this aspect of practical anarchism that gives him a special place amongst anarchist theorists and propagandists."
--Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review

Author Bio

Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarchist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and more than 10 years in prison. He wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was an enormously popular public speaker in his time, regularly speaking to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Vernon Richards was an anarchist writer, photographer, editor of the periodical Freedom, and publisher at Freedom Press. Carl Levy is a professor of politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published extensively on anarchism, comparative history, and politics.