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"Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations. Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences. Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the “logic” of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West."

Is it possible to abolish coercion and hierarchy and build a stateless, egalitarian social order based on non-domination? There is one political tradition that answers these questions with a resounding yes: anarchism. In this book, Carissa Honeywell offers an accessible introduction to major anarchist thinkers and principles, from Proudhon to Goldman, non-domination to prefiguration. She helps students understand the nature of anarchism by examining how its core ideas shape important contemporary social movements, thereby demonstrating how anarchist principles are relevant to modern political dilemmas connected to issues of conflict, justice and care. She argues that anarchism can play a central role in tackling our major global problems by helping us rethink the essentially militarist nature of our dominant ideas about human relationships and security. Dynamic, urgent, and engaging, this new introduction to anarchist thought will be of great interest to both students as well as thinkers and activists working to find solutions to the multiple crises of capitalist modernity.

Includes "Law and Authority," arguing social control through custom and education, and "Prisons and Their Moral Influence on Prisoners," expressing the evils of the prison system, and other documents.

Activist, economist, geographer, evolutionary theorist, and philosopher Peter Kropotkin remains one of the most important and progressive anarchist theorists, pushing anarchist thought beyond an individualist model to a theory of communal anarchism. Kropotkin and the Anarchist Intellectual Tradition seeks to rescue Kropotkin's philosophy of anarchism from the neglect that it has suffered at the hands of mainstream histories of the social and environmental sciences. Jim Mac Laughlin provides a sustained and critical reading of Kropotkin's extensive writings on the social, historical, and scientific basis of modern anarchism, giving a thorough examination of a number of key themes in Kropotkin's philosophy, including his concerted efforts to provide anarchism with an historical and scientific basis; the role of mutualism and mutual aid in social evolution and natural history; the ethics of anarchism, including the ethics of scientific research; and the anarchist critique of state-centered nationalism and other expressions of power politics.