Christiebooks: 245 books

The final, revised, edition of Burnett Bolloten’s exhaustive and indispensable, 50-year-long scholarly study of Republican/revolutionary politics in the Spanish Civil War (“The Grand Camouflage:, 1961; “The Spanish Revolution”, 1979; “The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution”,...

José Peirats’s La CNT en la revolución española is the history of one of the most original and audacious, and arguably also the most far-reaching, of all the twentieth-century revolutions. It is the history of the giddy years of political change and hope in 1930s Spain, when...

A portrait of Melchor Rodríguez García (also known as El Ángel Rojo - Red Angel; 1893, —February 14, 1972), a former bullfighter, was a Spanish anarcho-syndicalist of the CNT - FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), and the Director-General of Prisons in Madrid during the Spanish...

A study of Richter’s output as an artist, and the role of anarchism within it. “Anarchism is at its best when it goes beyond its analysis of the state and other social institutions to uncover an authoritarian consciousness which is not only shaped by authoritarian institutions, but also expresses...

Some thoughts on Niccolò Machiavelli, 'The Prince' and 'The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius'.

This book —  a fascinating and learned account of the Pope’s Jihadis, the ‘Assassins of Christendom’ and the shock-troops of the Catholic counter-revolution — seeks to substitute historical dialectics for theology or archaeology as the chief clue to the investigation of the great medieval...

The Guillotine At Work Vol 1 develops the theme that the Stalinist terror of the 1930s-1950s, the bureaucratisation of Russian society, the imperialist escapades, through to the total disregard for human rights in the Soviet Union and other East European countries under its dominion were not aberrations...

Kropotkin’s Ethics: Origin and Development is, in a sense, a continuation of his well-known work, “Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution.” The basic ideas of the two books are closely connected, almost inseparable, in fact: — the origin and progress of human relations in society. Only, in the...

In this essay, Tolstoy maintains his theory of great men as the myths and tickets of history. History, he asserts, must give up the idea that great men rule us, and busy itself with the discovery of the idea of humanity. One looks for the overthrow of the French Empire not in this or that decision...

Bakunin's classic and highly influential atheist text setting out the anarchist critique of religion as bound up in legitimising the state. The keynote of God and the State is Bakunin’s repudiation of authority and coercion in every form. In a withering passage he vents his fury, on “all...

"In 1793, William Godwin, the first philosopher of anarchism, published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. This three-volume work gives evidence of being strongly influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution and argues that the rational being, the human, must be given complete freedom...

The anarchist ideas of renowned French geographer, writer and activist Élisée Reclus (5 March 1830 – 4 July 1905) who produced his 19-volume masterwork La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes ("Universal Geography"), over a period of nearly 20 years...

Dissatisfied with traditional schooling, with its lack of freedom, democracy, and self-determination, A. S. Neill began searching for a place to establish his own school and to experiment with his developing ideas, gathering what was best in the educational systems of various nations. In 1921 he became...

One day when re-reading A Dominie's Log, its author decided that a book is out of date five minutes after it is written. In other words, he was in doubt—terrible and perplexing doubt. Do I really understand children? he asked himself. Are my ideas upon education right or wrong ? He decided that...