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A thrilling history of the rise of anarchism, told through the stories of a number of prominent revolutionaries and the agents of the secret police who pursued them.
In the late nineteenth century, nations the world over were mired in economic recession and beset by social unrest, their leaders increasingly threatened by acts of terrorism and assassination from anarchist extremists. In this riveting history of that tumultuous period, Alex Butterworth follows the rise of these revolutionaries from the failed Paris Commune of 1871 to the 1905 Russian Revolution and beyond. Through the interwoven stories of several key anarchists and the secret police who tracked and manipulated them, Butterworth explores how the anarchists were led to increasingly desperate acts of terrorism and murder.
Rich in anecdote and with a fascinating array of supporting characters, The World That Never Was is a masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, taking readers on a journey that spans five continents, from the capitals of Europe to a South Pacific penal colony to the heartland of America. It tells the story of a generation that saw its utopian dreams crumble into dangerous desperation and offers a revelatory portrait of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.
- Sales Rank: #1711820 in Books
- Published on: 2010-06-15
- Released on: 2010-06-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.55" h x 1.55" w x 6.43" l, 1.82 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 528 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Historian Butterworth (Pompeii: The Living City) makes a first-rate addition to the growing list of books dealing with terrorism's origins and history. His focus is the alienated young men and women who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, turned to anarchist and nihilist terrorism. This gripping and unsettling account depicts the movement's rise from the failed Paris Commune of 1871 through the abortive 1905 Russian revolution and its decline into the 1930s. Alternating among Russia, Europe, and America, the author produces a narrative packed with colorful figures, plots, assassinations, and bombings, betrayals, persecution, heroism, and martyrdom. Despite inflicting great damage (including assassinating a czar, an American president, and many European leaders), it failed. Successful attacks produced only more oppression. However, the first war on terror also failed. Police wreaked havoc among plotters (and many innocents), but the terror declined only after WWI, when rising communism and fascism attracted a new generation of disaffected idealists. Delivering a virtuoso performance, Butterworth adds the hope that history will not repeat itself and that a successful new bloody ideology will not create the next scourge. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Apr. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Reports that al-Qaeda operatives were studying Bakunin have encouraged journalists to explain twenty-first-cenutry Jihadists by quoting nineteenth-century anarchists. Butterworth fears that ignorance of anarchist principles often makes these explanations misleading. And it is genuine understanding of this forgotten tradition that he here offers. Readers learn of the piquant personalities of prominent anarchists (including the volatile Bakunin, the passionate Kropotkin, and the peripatetic Rochefort) and of the diverse settings (from the steppes of Russia to the stockyards of Chicago) in which they pursued their political dreams. But it is finally ideas that trump character and geography. Very far from the religious principles of Jihadists, these ideas promise a secular world of free individuals finding social justice without institutional coercion. Though Butterworth represents these hopes sympathetically, we witness their dark transformation, as frustrated idealists turn to violence and terrorism. We also detect an even more troubling metamorphosis in the government agents charged with ferreting out these subversives. Okhrana officers serving the czar set the tone, but soon police commissioned by Western democracies follow suit, trampling on the rights of ordinary citizens in the name of the law. Butterworth urges his readers to recognize the alarming contemporary parallels. A narrative taut with intrigue and freighted with contemporary significance. --Bryce Christensen
Review
“Vivid . . . In its thorough, compelling examination of anarchism, The World That Never Was is not a chronicle of isolated violent acts committed by deranged individuals. Rather, it convincingly portrays anarchism as the product of an inexorable human impulse. And it leads one to ask if anarchism might again (or, perhaps, still) be lurking at the fringes of society.”
—John Smolens, The Washington Post
“Stocked with vivid characters. . . . Butterworth shows how political violence committed by disorganized cells of anarchists, socialists, and nihilists fuelled fears of an international conspiracy and justified reactionary crackdowns. . . . [He] brings these figures to life without romanticizing their followers, who claimed the lives of a Russian tsar, an American president, and, most consequential, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”
—The New Yorker
“Stimulating, provocative . . . Butterworth’s deeply knowledgeable, exceedingly well-written text does not airbrush the weakness inherent in anarchism’s belief that a perfect society could arise only from mutual cooperation among enlightened individuals free of constraining hierarchies. Our knowledge of the terrible history of trying to create utopias by coercive means helps us share the author’s empathy for the anarchists’ desperate insistence on the primacy of individual conscience and liberty. Our knowledge of the polarizing political consequences of unfettered individualism and rote invocation of the word ‘liberty’ may help us judge more gently anarchism’s destructive romance with violence, chronicled here with such intelligence and moral clarity.”
—Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times
“Fascinating . . . A historical pot-boiler . . . Butterworth charts the odyssey of these European revolutionaries as they fought to build a new society, and the furious maneuvers by security services to thwart them.”
—Matthew Price, The Boston Globe
"Chillingly familiar . . . As the author of a political history, Butterworth strikes a rare balance; he doesn’t flinch from moral judgment, but he’s not about to succumb to the propagandizing instinct himself by glossing over the radicals’ many flaws and impracticalities. He has also mastered a staggering amount of material . . . The World That Never Was has much of value to impart, from the understanding that today’s radicals may be tomorrow’s sensible visionaries to the unanticipated perils of both terrorism and counterterrorism."
—Laura Miller, Salon
"A timely tale of a vicious cycle in which violence begets violence—and innocence, idealism and justice are the victims . . . [Butterworth] brings to life the social and intellectual ferment of the late 19th century."
—Glenn C. Altschuler, Kansas City Star
"Painstakingly researched . . . Butterworth charts this tangled terrain with authority and rigor . . . [His] tale crosses paths with most of the era’s most important figures, from monarchs to literary giants, while presenting some of the fascinating characters in the anarchist movement. Many of the latter couldn’t have been dreamed up by the most inventive novelist."
—Chris Foran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Gripping and unsettling . . . A first-rate addition to the growing list of books dealing with terrorism’s origins and history . . . Delivering a virtuoso performance, Butterworth adds the hope that history will not repeat itself and that a successful new bloody ideology will not create the next scourge.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Reports that al-Qaeda operatives were studying Bakunin have encouraged journalists to explain twenty-first-century Jihadists by quoting nineteenth-century anarchists. Butterworth fears that ignorance of anarchist principles often makes these explanations misleading. And it is genuine understanding of this forgotten tradition that he here offers . . . Butterworth urges his readers to recognize the alarming contemporary parallels. A narrative taut with intrigue and freighted with contemporary significance.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“An amazing book full of incredible people, all of whom turn out to be real, and unbelievable stories, all of which turn out be true. Against a backdrop of late nineteenth century Europe and America . . . Butterworth brilliantly teases out the paths and plots of the dedicated revolutionaries, deadly dilettantes, spies, informants, agents provocateurs, false counts and femmes fatales who made up the international anarchist movement, and its enemies. A genuine tour de force.”
—David Aaronovitch, author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
PRAISE FROM THE UK:
"Alex Butterworth’s exhilarating book is a headlong gallop through the history of anarchism from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Russian revolution in 1917. Almost any paragraph packs more action than an entire Dan Brown novel, though one suspects that even he might reject many of the incidents and characters as too outrageous to be credible . . . The globe-girdling energy of these itinerant schemers is dizzying."
—Francis Wheen, Financial Times
"Alex Butterworth writes lucidly, in fine detail, seeking answers that must sometimes prove elusive . . . He has to try to separate the bad from the true believers, to put the terror of decades into a frame of understanding that even those in the thick of it couldn't always discern. He can't escape the resonances of our post-9/11 world, but he has to set the reader free to think for himself. It's a formidable task, formidably (and entertainingly) accomplished."
—Peter Preston, The Observer
"In a lengthy and well-nuanced study of [the] period Butterworth presents an intelligent political and social overview of violent democracies reacting to perceived external threats and creating internal instabilities."
—Iain Finlayson, The Times (London)
"The World That Never Was conveys the labyrinthine coils of conspirators and spies with graphic panache . . . Butterworth has created an impressive work which will captivate those unfamiliar with anarchist history and teach even specialists much that they did not know before."
—Sheila Rowbotham, The Independent (London)
"Butterworth, in this wide-ranging account of nineteenth century anarchist activity, does justice to both sides of the picture—the glowing ideal, its shady enactment . . . His ingenious narrative is not a line but net . . . a net slung from the starting point of the Paris Commune to the end point of the Bolshevik Revolution."
—Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Telegraph "Book of the Week" (London)
"Exceptionally astute . . . One of the most absorbing depictions of the dark underside of radical politics in many years . . . Butterworth has opted to present the anarchists in a mode that emphasises narrative over analysis. The result is a riveting account, teeming with intrigue and adventure and packed with the most astonishing characters."
—New Statesman
"In this rich and passionate account of the world’s first international terrorist campaign . . . the disquieting echoes of our times are impossible to ignore . . . Underpinned by impressive research and a genuine argument . . . this is a thrilling and important book—not least for its unmasking of the forces of reaction."
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Intriguing, provocative and written with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book is an engrossing journey into a murky subterranean world—the dark underbelly of the Belle Époque.” —BBC History Magazine
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
An informative read.
By Nasty Nauseous Nick
I not only enjoyed reading this book but it has led me to again read the works of Joseph Conrad in light of the historical era they were written in.
Secondly I was also enlightened of the role in which police agencies steered the nihilistic/anarchist movements into crafted roles of violence and public's forming a false concept of these movements through state sponsored propaganda and the infiltration of the movement's newspapers.
It was of interest that the views of Marx and Engels were in conflict with the majority of anarchists, that there was a struggle for dominance within the movement and were in fact supported by those same police agencies in order to keep the movement divided and manipulated. Thus the birth of the Communist Party that shaped world politics and policies in the twentieth century was actually and secretly supported police organizations within Tsarist Russia.
Lastly that the police agencies involved with protecting the various governments were artificially creating a need/demand for their services. Job security.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Period, Bad Writing
By W. Speers
The Paris Commune is a fascinating topic, and Butterworth gives it several chapters. Then he goes through the next fifty years, ending with 1932, when Hitler and Roosevelt came into power, almost glossing over the period in the nearly 400 pages left. Cons: he introduces a new person about every three paragraphs, then spends little time filling out the details on most of them; anarchists (and those who were called anarchists) during this period committed many notable crimes that are mileposts of recent history, but does Butterworth spend any time building anticipation for and understanding of the significance of the these acts? No. Where is the discussion of the ideals and philosophy of anarchism and socialism? Where are the Internationals? He talks about them a little, not much. Where's the elder Ulyanov brother and the attempts on the life of Alexander III? He and they are mentioned in passing. There's almost no discussion of the idealism of anarchism, namely, the assumption that people are Rousseauvian, capable of attaining socio/political paradise, and not much discussion of the reaction to anarchistic plots to blow people up. There are occasional morsels of moral philosophy as the foundation for anarchism and anarchistic violence, but very little, just enough to whet your appetite then leave you unrewarded. Butterworth talks about explosives as the anarchists became acquainted with them, but he doesn't say much about them, although he starts to as he discusses more and more explosive substances, so he neither avoids that subject nor deals with it in any detail, so there's not much to the nuts and bolts of the bomb-throwing aspect of anarchism. Some important moments in anarchism are neglected: Haymarket is quickly glossed over; where's the Siege of Sidney Street? Where are the great strikes? Homestead is in the book, but there are no conclusions drawn, historical, philosophical, political, or otherwise. There's nothing about the IWW or the Lawrence and Paterson anarchosyndicalist strikes. Henry Frick is there, but very little about his role in the history of the American labor movement. Butterworth talks a bit about the narodniki, but he doesn't say much about what their ideas were or their motivation to assassinate the tsar, although he talks about the frustration following the emancipation of the serfs. And the book is so densely written (not in any good sense, be advised) that it's a struggle to read through it. You would think that a book that deals with a multitude of vivid personalities and their high-profile crimes, carried out with alleged high ideals in mind would tell one engrossing story after another. Afraid not; the book clanks with long, convoluted, compound sentences that require more than one reading in many cases, but fails to provide the reader with a motivation to read them more than once. Pluses: the book deals with the shadows thrown in the dark corners of the Gilded Age and it talks in interesting detail about the Paris Commune, although once you've finished the book, if you didn't know what happened, you'd never know that the Prussians invaded France in 1870. There's a bit of interesting information about socialist communes in Kansas in the 1870s and anarchist exile in French New Caledonia; you get to know a bit more about some of the famous anarchists such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Louis Lingg, and so on. But Butterworth spends an inordinate amount on the police infiltrators. Poor Louise Michel, with that bullet in her head. But where are Emma Goldman (given short shrift), Louise Bryant, Mother Jones, the founders of the IWW before they were the IWW, Big Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon? Where are the famous English anarchists? No Fabians discussed? Not much to see of them. Where's Edouard Bernstein? Lenin, Leibknecht, Rosa Luxemburg? Look for them in vain.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A disappointment
By T. Nicholas
Giving up on this one after slogging through a little over half of it. Might come back to it at some point but it's been frustrating me for so long now that I feel I have to move onto something else or I'll go mad.
It's a shame, really, since I feel like it fills a niche in the literature on anarchist history that confoundingly has never quite been filled. This is the only book I know of to focus specifically on 19th century anarchist terrorism. On top of that, it manages to tell the story of the terrorists themselves alongside the story of their pursuers in the various national intelligence agencies and secret police forces. This interweaving two-part structure is especially valuable for this topic, as it gives clear insight into how the movement was manipulated by the governments it opposed, undercover agents pushing the movement further and further toward violence which could then be used to justify even more violent repression.
Also interesting is the fact that Butterworth is an outsider to the ideology he's discussing (another rarity in anarchist lit being intelligent and evenhanded appraisals of the movement by non-anarchists). Because of that, he's able to cut straight through the thick cloud of sanctity and fawning reverence with which too many anarchist texts shroud their pantheon of saints and martyrs. Some of the portraits he paints are refreshingly critical. Malatesta, for instance, is depicted as somewhat of a bumbling revolutionary wannabe with a comically unshakable optimism and an "unblemished record of failed insurrections." Likewise, Bakunin at the tail end of his life is described as a "corrupt husk," burning through a young acolyte's inheritance in order to refurbish his estate. The credulous Malatesta only leaves the old man, writes Butterworth, after the "belated realization that hiring picturesque milkmaids and excavating an artifical lake was not wholly essential to the creation of a revolutionary headquarters". Kropotkin (along with Communard exiles Elisee Reclus and Louise Michel) is given probably the most sympathetic treatment. That's not to say Butterworth isn't sympathetic in general. One gets the sense he agrees with the goals of the anarchists but abhors their violent methods (which, he convincingly demonstrates, ultimately led to their downfall).
None of the positive features of this book can make up for its deficiencies, though. For one, Butterworth's accuracy is highly suspect. He freely admits that a paucity of records on certain figures and events has led him to do a little bit of papering over the gaps in his narrative. But some inaccuracies, such as the bewildering mistake of conflating Bakunin's "The Revolutionary Catechism" with Nechayev's "Catechism of a Revolutionary," can only be explained by sheer laziness and poor research skills. Written 4 years apart, the former is an anarchist manifesto, the latter a highly authoritarian manual for the formation of secret societies. Though Bakunin may have had input in Nechayev's text (the two had a tempestuous relationship), and despite the fact that it was reprinted in anarchist periodicals, its strong emphasis on hierarchy was in direct opposition to everything Bakunin stood for, and for Butterworth to think for an instant that it was a true collaboration between the two revolutionaries is enough to make me severely question everything else he has to say in the book. Oh and to top it off, the companion website where Butterworth claims his footnotes are located doesn't actually exist!
There's also the problem of the book's scope and complexity. Though placing the events in a general historical context is appreciated, Butterworth does a horrible job deciding which details to include, often selecting things because they're bizarre or funny rather than essential to plot or analysis. The title and cover of the book goes a long way in describing its tone - constantly invoking an atmosphere of a STRANGE AND OTHERWORLDLY TIME, even when completely inappropriate to do so. As you can imagine, it gets old fast. Far too much time is spent discussing the failed French Commune and a few other political situations, and the cast of characters is simply too large. Many of them could have avoided mention entirely. And why on earth is Henri Rochefort, who has only a tangential relationship with anarchism, a major character whose life is followed closely throughout? At times it seems as if Butterworth began writing a book about the fallout of the Paris Commune, only later decided to focus more concretely on anarchism, and then just left in all the superfluous chapters. The book probably would have benefited too from more photographs of the people involved (would have helped keep them straight in my head) and perhaps a timeline. It's simply too much info to keep track of.
The biggest issue is far simpler though: Butterworth is a bad writer. To be more specific, he's a pretentious, ostentatious writer. Others here have said it better than I can so I'll just quote them. One reviewer points out his "constant use of ten dollar words when fifty cent ones will do" - BINGO! Another writes, "the book clanks with long, convoluted, compound sentences that require more than one reading in many cases, but fails to provide the reader with a motivation to read them more than once" - BINGO AGAIN! I'm willing to bet Butterworth has read George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" but what he probably should have been reading was George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"!!
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