5: Anarchism and Social Transformation

Reclus is the anarchist geographer par excellence. The term “anarchist geography” captures perfectly the idea of his work: writing (graphein) the history of the struggle to free the earth (Gaia) from domination (archein). Yves Lacoste calls the work of Reclus, and above all his book Man and the Earth, the “epistemological moment,” indeed the “epistemological turning point,” in the history of geography. Before Reclus, he says, geography “was linked essentially to the state apparatus, not only as a tool of power, but also as an ideological and propagandistic representation. Reclus turned this tool against the state apparatus, the oppressors and the dominant classes.”[210] For Reclus, social geography and the social philosophy grounded in it become part of the process of the planetary history of liberation.

It is reported that Reclus once exclaimed to the Dutch anarchist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, “Yes, I am a geographer, but above all I am an anarchist.”[211] Quite early in life he developed a deep faith in human freedom and solidarity that increasingly defined his existence and later received full development in his libertarian political theory. His anarchist vision of social freedom is also the mature expression of his enduring belief in moral autonomy. For Reclus, and as anarchist ethics from William Godwin on has so often stressed, moral responsibility is impossible without moral autonomy. In his early manuscript “Development of Liberty in the World,” he asserts that “laws must appear before the tribunal of our conscience and we must not submit to them except when they are in perfect accord with the moral law that dwells within us.”[212] If these laws conflict with “eternal justice,” it is our moral obligation to disobey them. Respect for human laws in disregard for the higher moral law is no virtue and indeed amounts to no more than “moral cowardice.”[213] While Reclus later dropped the rather abstract, idealist language of “moral law” and “eternal justice” in favor of a more historical and naturalistic depiction of morality, an emphasis on free commitment to the greater good of humanity and nature remained fundamental to his anarchism.

For Reclus, though “anarchy,” aims at the greatest possible realization of freedom and justice and the establishment of a universal community based on freedom, justice, solidarity and love, it is never merely a vague and distant future utopia. It is capable of immediate realization wherever these values are embodied in existing human relationships and social practice. “Anarchy” is the entire sphere of human life that takes place outside the boundaries of arche, or domination. He states in the preface to the 1892 French edition of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread that “anarchistic society has long been in a process of rapid development,” for it can be found “wherever free thought breaks loose from the chains of dogma; wherever the spirit of inquiry rejects the old formulas; wherever the human will asserts itself through independent actions; wherever honest people, rebelling against all enforced discipline, join freely together in order to educate themselves, and to reclaim, without any master, their share of life, and the complete satisfaction of their needs.”[214] In effect, the entire history of the struggle for human collective self-realization constitutes anarchy, though it is often “unaware of itself.”[215]

Although “anarchy” thus has a larger historical meaning for Reclus, he also uses the term to refer more specifically to a future society that is free from institutionalized forms of domination and that will attain an unprecedented synthesis of liberty, equality, and community. For Reclus, as for the anarchist tradition in general, anarchism means much more than anti-statism, opposition to coercion, or rebellion against authority. In its most sophisticated forms, it proposes a practice of social transformation and reorganization based on nondominating mutual aid and cooperation.[216] Reclus believes that the most deeply rooted social order arises out of the greatest possible freedom and voluntary association, and that evergrowing social disorder results from coercion, oppression, and domination. Thus, he sees “an abyss between two kinds of society,” one of which is “constituted freely by men of good will, based on a consideration of their common interests,” whereas the other “accepts the existence of either temporary or permanent masters to whom [its members] owe obedience.”[217] The former has “authentic organization, spontaneous, attractive association that constantly adapts to the changes in persons and things,” while the latter consists of “a forced juxtaposition that is opposed by continual tendencies to disjoin the parts. The former ... is precisely the kind that by the very fact of its liberty remains centripetal, while the latter, held together only by regulations, is made up of centrifugal elements.”[218] Reclus’ goal is to develop a positive vision of such a future society of “ordered anarchy.”[219]

However, in examining Reclus’ reflections on the nature of anarchist society, one is often struck by the generality of many of his statements and the lack of specific content. In this, he is typical of the classical anarchist theorists and rather different from utopian writers, who often present highly imaginative depictions of a free and just society. Anarchy constitutes for him an inspiring social ideal that could give direction to presentday struggles; however, the details of future social organization must be arranged “after the revolution.” In his essay “Anarchy,” he summarizes the ideal as “equality of rights and reciprocity of services,” and the basis of anarchist morality as the familiar principle “to each according to his needs, from each according to his powers.”[220] The achievement of anarchy thus means simply the creation of a free, egalitarian, and cooperative society to replace the existing oppressive, hierarchical, and competitive one.

Reclus does at times discuss in general terms some of the institutions that might exist after the social revolution. At the Berne Congress of the League for Peace and Freedom in 1868, he proposes that a future society should be one in which all previously existing political divisions are replaced by workers’ associations. In his view, the existing subdivisions, from the province down to the local district, are nothing but “tools of despotism” created by those who wish to centralize power.[221] He goes so far as to say that there is no such thing as a “natural border,”[222] for natural features must be given a social meaning through human action. Free individuals, he argues, will look beyond all artificial territorial boundaries and achieve “ideal justice” by reorganizing society through “productive associations and groups formed by these associations.”[223] The boundaries of the free associations of the future may or may not correspond to existing borders, depending on the decisions of their members in their pursuit of justice and mutual aid. “Anarchy” in the sense of a fully realized anarchist society will consist of a large voluntary federation of these free associations existing at the local level.

In Reclus’ view, such a free, cooperative society can only emerge out of a social revolution, but this revolution will itself depend on a long history of liberatory thought and practice. He observes that anarchism has spread “where minds have long been liberated from religious and monarchical prejudices, where revolutionary precedents have shaken faith in the established order, where the practice of municipal liberties has best prepared men to become their own masters, where disinterested study has developed thinkers free from all sectarianism.”[224] There are thus a great many spheres of thought and action in which anarchists can contribute to social progress and lay the groundwork for the future libertarian society. In order for successful revolutionary change to take place, a long history of evolutionary change must prepare the way.

Reclus distinguishes himself from his historically more influential ally Bakunin in his deeper analysis of the preconditions for social transformation. While Bakunin made an important contribution to a critical theory of libertarian social transformation, he also succumbed to a fetishism of revolution and often exaggerated the liberatory potential of reactive social movements, vague popular discontent, and unfocused rebellion. For Bakunin, such amorphous social conditions could be given a revolutionary direction when shaped by an “invisible dictatorship” of conscious revolutionaries. Such views led to an exaggerated emphasis on revolutionary will and a vanguardism that has decidedly nonanarchistic and, indeed, authoritarian implications. The historical anarchist movement has often been influenced by a Bakuninist insurrectionism, and it might have done well to follow consistently Reclus’ more balanced view of the relationship between evolution and revolution.

Reclus’ idea of the complementary roles of evolution and revolution is one of the central themes in his political writings. “In every sphere,” he says, “we are not only evolutionists, but also just as much revolutionists, since we realize that history itself is but a series of achievements that follows a series of preparations. The great intellectual evolution that emancipates minds has a logical consequence in the emancipation of individuals in all of their relationships with other individuals.”[225] The potential contribution of any phenomenon to evolutionary change is not easy to ascertain, according to Reclus, because all phenomena have both positive and negative moments, and both progressive and regressive aspects in relation to the larger milieu. Each phenomenon is “two-sided, for it is at once a phenomenon of death and a phenomenon of revival; in other words, it is the result of evolution toward decay and also toward progress.”[226] The challenge to those with a critical faith in historical progress is to preserve and develop the positive moment while rejecting and eliminating the negative.

Reclus applies this analysis to specific social institutions and phenomena. For example, he has enormous confidence that many advances of modern science and technology can be used for such progressive purposes as the increase of knowledge, freedom, health, and beauty, but nevertheless he also sees within them the potential for unprecedented levels of regimentation, domination, malaise, and degradation of society and nature. This forthright recognition of the dual nature of social realities distinguishes Reclus from many other modernist thinkers of his age, who focused one-sidedly on the possibilities for progress but neglected the dangers, costs, and self-contradictions of seemingly progressive historical developments.

From Reclus’ dialectical perspective, revolution itself partakes of the dual nature characteristic of all social phenomena. There is no absolute revolutionary break with history, as idealist and voluntaristic revolutionary theorists would contend. Revolution is an integral part of the movement of history and reflects the complexity and contradictory nature of all the other historical phenomena that interact with it and condition it. Reclus points out that although a given revolutionary movement may be authentically liberatory in many ways, the revolutionaries have been shaped by the conditions existing prior to the revolution. These conditions do not disappear absolutely on the great day of revolt but rather leave traces on the personalities, practices, and institutions of the relatively transformed society.

Consequently, the exercise of revolutionary power often becomes a convenient tool of aspiring authoritarians, who transform revolutionary ideals into authoritarian ideology. In Reclus’ words, “there is often a most shocking disparity between the revolutionary circumstances that accompany the emergence of an institution and the manner in which it functions, which is completely opposed to the ideals of its naïve founders.”[227] In a prescient commentary on many later revolutionary regimes, Reclus notes the danger of “the routine, the hierarchy, and the spirit of regression that gradually encroach on every institution”[228] once a new system of concentrated power is established.

These reservations did not, however, deter Reclus from actively supporting revolutionary movements and seeking to help them transcend their limitations. He was dedicated to the First International, which he saw as an advance of historic dimensions in the direction of unifying humanity for the cause of justice and progress. He contends that “since the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the earth, no achievement was more important in the history of man,” and that “the future normative unity that the philosophers desired” only began to be realized when “the English, French, and German workers, forgetting their different origins and understanding one another in spite of their diversity of languages, joined together to form a single nation, in defiance of all their respective governments.”[229] Although the practical results of that organization might hardly seem to justify such extravagant claims for its importance, his point relates more to its symbolic significance as the first modern embodiment in practice of the ideal of the unity of all of humanity and the example that it created for future efforts at global solidarity. In a sense, Reclus was saying that the First International ushered in the still rather incipient movement of “globalization from below.”

Reclus’ views concerning social transformation were profoundly affected by his participation in the International and by the influence of his close ally Bakunin. While Reclus and Bakunin opposed one another at various times on some important issues, including the role of secret societies in the revolutionary movement, the influence of the charismatic revolutionary was responsible in part for Reclus’ development of a firm belief in the necessity of social revolution. He participated in the Bakuninist Alliance for Social Democracy and in Bakunin’s efforts to move the nonrevolutionary League for Peace and Freedom in a more radical direction. He was also a member of Bakunin’s International Brotherhood (a secret society of dedicated Bakuninist revolutionaries) from 1865 on. He attended the meetings of the General Council of the First International in 1869 and defended the anarchist (majority) position in the world’s first great working-class organization.

A strategy of the international workers’ movement that Reclus enthusiastically supported, and for which he had great hopes, was the general strike. He contends that “English, Belgian, French, German, American, and Australian wage workers understand that it is up to them to withhold all labor from their bosses on the same day,” and he asks why they would “not carry out tomorrow what they understand today, especially if a soldiers’ strike is added to that of the workers?”[230] From this passage it would seem that Reclus believed that the working classes of the major industrial countries of his time both understood clearly the strategy of the general strike and were committed to it in principle. If these two assumptions were indeed correct, it was reasonable for him to hope that a revolutionary situation on an international scale was imminent.

Unfortunately, such expectations exhibit some of the same kind of unrealistic revolutionary optimism that plagued Bakunin. While Reclus was right about the general strike not being in principle impossible, he overestimated the existing level of consciousness of the European working class. The kind of the careful analysis he applied to other issues might usefully have been devoted to the nature of the barriers confronting the expansion of popular critical consciousness. Although he has some important insights in this area, especially interspersed among his geographical writings, in his most explicitly political (and most widely reprinted) works, edifying revolutionary rhetoric often takes the place of probing analysis of the actual state of workers’ consciousness, of the material, ideological, and imaginary processes that shape that consciousness, and of the factors that might transform it into an effective revolutionary force.[231]

Reclus’ assessment of “propaganda by the deed,” a subject of much controversy within the anarchist movement of his day, also presents certain problems. During the 1880s and 1890s, attacks on political officials, bankers, and industrialists, and even random victims in places judged “bourgeois,” became increasingly common. The names of terrorists like Ravachol, Vaillant, and Henry became well known to the public. Many of those carrying out violent attacks on the established order began to invoke anarchist principles to defend their deeds, causing a crisis of conscience for anarchist theorists. Such actions would seem to be in direct contradiction to Reclus’ ethical values and his humanitarian sensibilities. Indeed, in a letter of 1883, he asserts that “from the revolutionary point of view, I am very careful not to recommend violence, and I am distressed when friends carried away by passion allow themselves to resort to the idea of vengeance, which is so unscientific and sterile.”[232] In another letter of 1889 he states that “the secret” is “to love everyone always, including even those whom one must fight with unflagging energy because they live as parasites on the social body.”[233] And finally, in a letter of 1903 he goes so far as to assert that “it is necessary to resist evil without hating the evildoers, but rather even while loving them.” Reclus was consistent in his rejection of hatred and vindictiveness both as a matter of general principle and in his own personal practice.[234]

Nevertheless, his refusal to advocate violence and vengeance did not in his mind require condemnation of those who come to see individual violence as a legitimate response to oppression and who act on these views. Although some well-known anarchists disassociated themselves from all terrorist acts and others, like Kropotkin, adopted an ambiguous position, Reclus steadfastly refused to condemn the propagandists of the deed. In his opinion, violence in society is the necessary result of a cruel and inhumane system of oppression, and blame should not be directed at those victims who in desperation lash out against their own oppression. Rather, in his view, those who control the unjust system and benefit from it should be held guilty for both the injustices that they inflict on society as a whole and the violent acts to which they drive some of the oppressed.

At times, Reclus came even closer to explicit approval of terrorist acts. In a letter of 1892, after expressing admiration for Ravachol for his “high character,” he states that he considers “all revolt against oppression to be a good and just act.”[235] Though he reaffirms his belief in the gradual growth of enlightenment through the effect of “words and feelings,” he notes that anger “has its raison d’être, its day and its hour.”[236] In another letter of the same month, he praises Ravachol for “his courage, his goodness, his greatness of soul, and the generosity with which he pardons his enemies, and indeed those who informed on him.” He says that he knows “of few men who surpass him in nobility” and judges him “a hero of uncommon magnanimity.”[237]

Reclus’ considered opinion of all social phenomena in general is that they should be assessed carefully for their positive and negative aspects and that their effect on the overall course of social progress should be the final criterion for judgment. However, in the case of propaganda by the deed, he veers in a strongly deontological direction. In this instance, he stresses that the perpetrators of such acts should be judged by the nobility of their actions—perhaps even by the beauty of their souls—rather than strictly by their effects on the course of history and on the revolutionary movement they claimed to represent.

Reclus overlooks a number of crucial points concerning propaganda of the deed. First, the deterministic arguments that he invokes in order to excuse the terrorists have certain implications that he ignores. By the same reasoning, he should have focused more on the innocence of the terrorists’ victims, for to whatever degree they participated in an unjust social system, they did not personally and intentionally create it and were certainly themselves products of that system. Second, whatever determinants may have been present, his refusal to hold the terrorists responsible for their actions denies them the status of moral agents capable of choosing between alternative methods of protesting against injustice. Instead, they are treated as no more than links in a chain of causality. Finally, the acts of desperation that the terrorists committed were, in any case, miserable failures that did little promote authentic social transformation and often only contributed to promoting reaction and repression. As “propaganda” they were a disaster for which anarchists are still unjustly suffering, stereotyped as they are as terrorists and “bomb-throwers.”[238]

However, despite the many problems with his position on this issue, Reclus presents one quite powerful argument that should not be overlooked. He points out that to condemn the relatively rare violent acts of desperate individuals crying out for justice while at the same time complacently accepting the enormous system of day-to-day violence embodied in such social institutions as state domination, capitalist exploitation, institutionalized racism, and patriarchal oppression constitutes the worst form of ideological distortion. It is his concern for the widespread moral insensitivity to the horrors of entrenched, institutionalized injustice that leads Reclus to emphasize terrorism as a symptom of greater evils, rather than as an evil in itself.

Another of Reclus’ most controversial views is his acceptance of the right of the workers “to partial recovery of the collective products” of society by means of the individual’s “personal recovery of his part” of that property.[239] He means by this the sort of activity that is usually labeled “theft.” Reclus believes that theft, like violence, is a great evil. But in his opinion, those who are outraged by this evil should direct their indignation above all toward the capitalist, statist system that institutionalizes theft rather than toward exploited individuals who informally use theft as a means of striking back at that system. According to his analysis, the thief is a “restorer” who seeks to reappropriate a small part of the wealth that has been extracted from his or her labor. In a letter of 1887 he writes that since private property is itself theft, “if a repossessor infringes on it, inspired by a spirit of justice and solidarity, I find no fault with it.”[240] He adds that he is not inclined “by nature, by habit, or by personal tendency” to act similarly but that he has no right to “speak as a model for others.”[241]

While some were shocked by this gentle man’s advocacy of such activity, he argues that their horror is misplaced. Why, he asks, should we echo the dominant culture’s hypocritical condemnation of the efforts of the oppressed to improve their miserable position in society through such reappropriation? First, he argues that under the existing exploitative order, theft is universal. He explains in a letter to Jean Grave that “in the society of injustice and caprice in which we live, we are, in spite of ourselves, implicated in all the evil that takes place.”[242] And in a letter to the anarchist journal La Révolte, he asserts that “it is true beyond doubt that in this iniquitous society in which everything rests on inequality and hoarding, in which money alone provides one’s bread, we are all, without exception, forced by the very conditions of our existence into a life of outright theft.”[243] The truly abhorrent form of theft is that practiced by the rich and powerful, who are highly successful in their efforts to confiscate the product of the labor of others. Reclus’ sense of justice was outraged by a system that exalts the biggest and most successful thieves and holds them up as models of virtue and of success in life while condemning to misery, disdain, and imprisonment those who seek to recover at best a small portion of what has been stolen from them.

There are some obvious problems with this analysis. First, there is the troubling question of the possible corrupting effects of this “reappropriation” process on those who carry it out in sovereign moral isolation.[244] While his communitarian ideas imply a collective process of seeking justice, he apparently sees the “restorers” as justified in appropriating individually what they personally believe to be due to them. To expect objectivity in such a process seems unrealistic at best. Furthermore, Reclus’ contention that so-called theft should not be condemned because everything is theft has rather disturbing implications. On the one hand, it demonstrates an awareness of the manner in which all become implicated in systems of domination and injustice. On the other hand, it implies a moral equivalency for all actions “before the revolution” that threatens to create a nihilistic, rather than an anarchistic, ethos. If everything is theft, everything is deceit, and everything is exploitation (since we participate in corrupt systems in which these evils are ubiquitous), then “everything is permitted.” However high Reclus’ own moral standards may have been, he advocates on this issue a kind of moral laissez-faire that might justify egoistic self-interest as effectively as it would inspire liberatory social practice.

It should be stressed that Reclus’ concept of anarchist politics does not focus on such isolated acts of defiance. Rather, it overwhelmingly emphasizes the importance of collective and communal organization and the growth of a culture of freedom and solidarity. He undertakes an investigation of the history of libertarian and communitarian achievements going back as far as the Athenian polis and ancient tribal societies, presenting an imaginative vision of the possibilities for embodying this experience in a transformed society. He wishes to reclaim the history of free community over the ages and to show how this tradition can be reinvigorated through the creation of a new libertarian and communitarian society.

Reclus differs markedly from other radical political theorists of his time in his claim that many elements of this long history were of more practical significance than the prevailing strategies of his own era. In his view, “the names of the Spanish comuneros, of the French communes, of the English yeomen, of the free cities in Germany, of the Republic of Novgorod and of the marvelous communities of Italy must be, with us Anarchists, household words: never was civilized humanity nearer to real Anarchy than it was in certain phases of the communal history of Florence and Nuremberg.”[245] Despite his strong commitment to the contemporary workers’ movement, he refused to narrow his vision of social transformation by limiting it to the model of the struggle of labor against the modern state and capitalism. For him, humanity must self-consciously seek selfrealization by drawing on its long and expansive history of struggles for liberation and experiments in freedom.

Reclus attributes special significance in the history of human emancipation to the Athenian polis and to the achievements of Greek democracy.[246] He notes that in the polis, “the political unity [ensemble politique] of the social body was as simple, as undivided and as well-defined as was the unity of the individual himself,” and that it “is in this sense that one must, like Aristotle, consider the human being to be par excellence the zoon politikon: the ‘urban animal,’ the participant [le part-prenant] in the organic city [la cité organique] (and not merely the ‘political animal,’ as it is usually translated).”[247] Thus, the “political animality” of the citizens does not mean merely that they were socialized or educated to possess “civic virtue” or that they achieved self-realization through the political community (though it certainly encompasses both of these). Reclus stresses the more holistic dimension of Aristotle’s conception. When a being attains its end (telos) within a larger whole, it is an organic part of that larger whole. However, the citizens are not mere structural cells or organs in the body politic but rather dynamic participants in the larger organic unity. Reclus’ use of the language both of life [organique] and of social action [prendre part] is significant. The free and democratic political community is a unity in which organic solidarity and spontaneous, voluntary activity are synthesized.

Reclus situates the development of the democratic polis within the larger scope of Greek history. He notes that the age of democracy coincided with a growing economic equality, as the aristocratic landowners lost some of their holdings and the lower classes of citizens gained wealth through the vicissitudes of war. Many of the old prerogatives were eliminated, and positions were increasingly opened to the electors. Political democracy thus coincided with other important economic and social reforms. The political, in turn, accelerated changes in other spheres. Reclus attributes the success of the Athenians in trade and commerce and the vast achievements of Greek culture in this period to the effects of growing political equality and democratization, which fostered creativity and initiative in all areas.[248]

Another epoch that Reclus recognizes as a milestone in the history of human liberation is early Icelandic democracy. He greatly admires the Icelanders for exhibiting a spirit of independence and for creating strong democratic traditions during a period in which Europe was mired in monarchical despotism and feudal hierarchy. He claims that they “succeeded completely in maintaining their dignity as free men, without kings, feudal princes, hierarchy or any military establishment.”[249] Instead, they made decisions through a process in which “the common interest was discussed in the open air by all the inhabitants, who were dressed in armor, the symbol of the absolute right of personal self-defense belonging to each individual.”[250] These assemblies took place at a volcanic gorge called the Almannagja, or “the Gorge of All the People,” where the Lögmadr, or “Reader of the Law,” proclaimed the decisions of previous assemblies. Any decisions that were not announced and reaffirmed by the assembly for three successive years were annulled. Reclus notes that judicial processes were subject to the same popular supervision. At the end of the gorge was “the Mound of the Law,” where “the judge and the accused met face to face, under the vigilant eye of the armed multitude.”[251]

Like Kropotkin, Reclus also looks to the era of the medieval free cities and their federations for inspiration for future social transformation.[252] He notes that these cities had two principles of association—one grouping citizens according to “professional interests, ideas, and pleasure,” the other according to “neighborhood, district, and small territorial units that were supposed to be in no way sacrificed for the sake of the city center.”[253] Rural communities had a similar dual organization, and both “joined together in leagues,” some of which endured for hundreds of years.[254] For Reclus this presents an admirable model for future federations of local communities.

Despite the great achievements of medieval cities, Reclus also finds them instructive because of their shortcomings. He argues that a weakness of these communes was their lack of sufficient concern for the liberty of other communities, and their tendency to become absorbed with their own interests. As a result, they were susceptible to destruction by powerful economic and political interests.[255] He concludes that anarchists must devote as much attention to such principles as federation, mutual aid, and solidarity as they do to the goals of freedom, justice, and decentralization of power, if efforts to transform the larger society are to succeed.

Reclus also expresses great admiration for the independent Basque communities that “retained for centuries their administrative autonomy.”[256] He comments that these communities have been distinguished by their love of freedom and their hostility toward all centralized authority. Since Reclus grew up in the southwest of France (Orthez is in the shadow of the Pyrenees), he knew the Basque culture well and found in it many affinities with his own anarchist sensibilities. He remarks that the Basques “have always preferred to live in isolation at some beautiful site in their land of hills and mountains, in the shadow of a great oak, symbolizing the tribe and its ancient liberty.”[257] He takes this phenomenon as a good example of the interaction between aspects of culture and nature. In his view, the natural milieu encouraged the group’s quest for cultural autonomy and individual freedom. He asks, “Where does the Basques’ fine confidence in themselves come from, if not from that nature which has always protected them?”[258] Reclus is not implying any geographical determinism here, for he also notes the fact that the Basques knowingly sought out those aspects of nature that resonated most with their own yearning for independence. He is pointing out the sort of dialectical interaction between natural and cultural factors that can play a part in the quest for human liberation.

Reclus expresses a similar admiration for communities that had preserved traditions of communal property and cooperative labor. He celebrates the fact that there was in his day still abundant evidence of “the spirit of full association” in Switzerland, where “two-thirds of the alpine prairies and forests belong to the communes, which also own peat bogs, reed marshes, and quarries, as well as fields, orchards, and vineyards.”[259] He describes these communities as exhibiting a joy in collective labor that contrasts markedly with the degraded conditions of contemporary industrialized manufacture and agriculture. He observes that “on many occasions when the co-proprietors of the commune have to work together, they feel as though they are at a festival rather than at work.”[260] These small communities are important to him as evidence that the members of society can still work together cooperatively and that social organization based on solidarity is a viable alternative to the political and economic regimentation of an atomized society. As Reclus states it, such social cooperation persists “despite all the ill will of the rich and the state, who have every interest in breaking apart these tightly bound bundles of resistance to their greed or power and who attempt to reduce society to a collection of isolated individuals.”[261]

It is not surprising that as Reclus surveys European history, he finds the French Revolution to be a great chapter in the history of human liberation.[262] It is noteworthy, however, that he also discovers that even this great landmark in the progress of humanity exhibits in a striking manner the dual aspect that he finds in all historical phenomena. On the one hand, it was a progressive step away from the absolute monarchy, the religious authoritarianism, and the cultural conservatism of the past. But it was also a regressive step in the direction of the authoritarian state and the concentration of political power.

For Reclus, the political unification and centralization that emerged from the Revolution were achieved at the expense of local liberties, and many of the most progressive features of traditional French society were destroyed: “Thus, the free communities, the ‘universities’ of the mountain people, lost their uncontrolled management of their own interests and their sovereign assemblies, in which each man and woman had the absolute right to presence, speech, and initiative.”[263] The traditional leftist interpretation of the revolution has been that it was unequivocally progressive in destroying the traditional feudal and monarchical society and creating a republican system founded on the rights of the citizen—albeit in the form of a bourgeois republic. To Reclus, it is equally important to see how the revolution helped establish the modern nation-state that has progressively annihilated an invaluable legacy of decentralized, communal institutions.

An important epoch in the history of liberation that Reclus witnessed firsthand, and to which he personally contributed, was the Paris Commune. Not only did he spend years of his life in prison and then in exile as a result of defending it, but he also pondered deeply its political significance. He looked to this great social experiment as evidence of the growing historical efficacy of the principles proclaimed by the First International and the anarchist movement, but he also criticized the Commune for failing to live up to some of its own ideals. His critique is fundamentally a radically democratic, municipalist, and federalist one. In his view, “the principal error of the Commune, an unavoidable error, since it derived from the very principle on which power was constituted, was precisely that of being a government, and of substituting itself for the people by force of circumstances.”[264] Its flaw was that rather than becoming a fully developed experiment in municipal liberty, and thus a model for other such experiments, it began to reinstitute the form of the state. The problem was that the necessary “evolution” had not taken place prior to the “revolution.” The revolutionaries were still too much under the influence of traditional centralist, authoritarian politics to create a new, radically libertarian regime. “The natural functioning and intoxication of power led it to consider itself a bit like the representative of the entire French state, of the entire Republic, and not simply the Commune of Paris calling for a free association with other communes, towns and rural areas.”[265]

Another expression of Reclus’ radical municipalist outlook is his admiration for the great cities of history, his appreciation of the ethos of each city as a unique cultural expression. “Each city,” he says, “has its unique individuality, its own life, its own countenance, tragic and sorrowful in some cases, joyful and lively in others.”[266] Such a generalized depiction of the city only begins to capture the full complexity of the urban milieu, for the city constitutes not only a distinctive whole but also a sum of distinctive parts. It must be understood both as “a collective personality” and also as “a very complex individual” in which each neighborhood “is distinguished from the others by its own particular nature.”[267] The culture of cities thus exemplifies the concept of a dialectical interrelationship between unity and diversity.

Reclus believes that although the city can be studied as a distinct social phenomenon, the life of cities and urban problems can be understood only in relation to the institutional structure of society as a whole. As he puts it, the “urban question” cannot be separated from the larger “social question.” As long as a system of economic injustice and political domination exists, cities cannot develop freely and fulfill their destiny as centers of human self-realization. Thus, a century ago, Reclus had already presciently announced an intensifying crisis of the city and diagnosed this crisis as only a symptom of the larger crisis of society. He notes the multitude of “vices,” such as poverty, crime, and ecological degradation that infest the modern city. He predicts that the continuing centralization of population in urban areas, with all its attendant problems, will continue to accelerate. Indeed, he foresees the rise of the gigantic megalopolis, and predicts that urban areas of ten and twenty million inhabitants will be “a normal phenomenon of social life” in the future.[268]

Reclus’ comprehensive, critically holistic approach to urbanism made him an early critic of “urban renewal” schemes, which he attacks as based on a superficial view of urban questions. He points out that poor housing and bad health conditions are merely displaced when they are addressed through a problematic of renewing a certain delimited area rather than one of renewing the larger society and its natural environment. He notes pointedly that “in a society in which people cannot depend on having enough bread to eat, in which the poor and even the starving make up a large part of the population of every large city, it is no more than a halfway measure to transform unhealthy neighborhoods if the unfortunate people who previously inhabited them find themselves thrown out of their former hovels only to go in search of new ones in the suburbs, merely moving the poisonous emanations a certain distance away.”[269] Most urbanists have yet to come to grips with this inescapable problem that was quite clearly diagnosed by Reclus at the dawn of the twentieth century.

For Reclus, cities cannot be fundamentally renewed so long as they remain an integral part of a corrupt and oppressive society. He admires creative and energetic attempts to improve the city and points to them as inspiring examples of what can be achieved in the future. However, he believes that true renewal can only result from reclaiming the city’s rich heritage of personal freedom and vibrant local community that extended across a long history from the Greek polis down to the revolutionary democratic communities of the modern period. It is only when cities become expressions of the collective self-realization of all the citizens that they can possibly be renewed and regenerated. Only then can they become “perfectly healthy and beautiful organic bodies.”[270] In short, the city can attain freedom, justice, beauty, and cooperation only when the social revolution achieves these goals for society as a whole.

Although the concept of mutual aid has been closely associated with the political philosophy of Kropotkin, Reclus deserves recognition for making this concept central to anarchist social theory at about the same time. Reclus declares mutual aid to be “the principal agent of human progress.”[271] Like other revolutionary theorists, Reclus sees history as a struggle between the powerful and the masses who are oppressed and exploited. As a theorist of mutual aid, he also sees this struggle as a conflict between those who look upon society as an arena of competition in which some inevitably triumph over others, and those who envision a society in which social solidarity and cooperation prevail. He attacks the Social Darwinist idea that “the fittest,” in the sense of the most effective individual competitors, must always triumph. He sees this theory as no more than an ideology aimed at legitimating the dominance of those with economic power.

Reclus contends that those who join together in the liberatory struggle to create a cooperative community will ultimately show themselves to be both the fittest and the most powerful. This, he thinks, will be demonstrated when their solidarity, combined with their superior numbers, allows them to overturn the prevailing economic and political system. “The law of the strongest will not always benefit the industrial monopoly,” he predicts, for “the day is coming when might will be at the service of right.”[272] The defenders of the status quo proclaim the eternal rule of “the law of the blind and brutal struggle for existence,” but it will be succeeded by another law, that of “the grouping of weak individualities into organisms more and more developed, learning to defend themselves against the enemy forces, to recognize the resources of their environments, even to create new ones.”[273] Thus mutual aid, allied with human intelligence, will once again show itself to be a force for social evolution.

Such creative self-organization was beginning to take place in Reclus’ time within the cooperative movement. Both Elisée and his brother Elie participated very actively in that movement, helping to establish the first cooperative in Paris and collaborating to produce the journal La Coopération. However, Reclus’ views began to change markedly after several disappointing experiences with cooperative efforts, and as he began to ally himself more closely with Bakunin and to participate actively in anarchist revolutionary organizations and the First International. He came to see a preoccupation with the creation of worker self-managed cooperatives and intentional communities as a diversion from the more crucial struggle against capitalism and the state. “As for us anarchists,” he concludes, “never will we separate ourselves from the world to build a little church, hidden in some vast wilderness.”[274]

Reclus’ negative judgments concerning the cooperative movement and communal experiments seems to contradict his desire to transform human values and relationships in order to “make ready for the day” in which the new society will be achieved. Despite his strong emphasis on the importance of a dialectic between evolution and revolution in the process of social transformation, his ideas still retain some elements of the fetishism of revolution that was long endemic to the Marxist and anarchist left. His belief in evolutionary change as a precondition for revolutionary transformation was applied consistently to many areas, including personal life, educational efforts to spread progressive ideas, and the creation of anarchist organizations. On the other hand, he seemed to have much more limited faith in the development of counter-institutions that would put into practice his libertarian and communitarian values before the social revolution. The forms of organization that he promoted were primarily oppositional ones, such as revolutionary unions, revolutionary political groups, and radical political alliances. He did not seem to grasp fully the importance of developing a “pre-revolutionary” practice of libertarian and communitarian social life in areas like production, consumption, and cooperative living that would prepare the way for a more thorough transformation of society.

Nevertheless, one cannot deny the strength of Reclus’ critique of cooperative experiments. He incisively points out the danger of economic cooperatives that are divorced from a larger movement for social emancipation. “One tells oneself that it is especially important to succeed in an undertaking that involves the collective honor of a great number of friends, and one gradually allows oneself to be drawn into the petty practices of conventional business. The person who had resolved to change the world has changed into nothing more than a simple grocer.”[275] This astute diagnosis has been verified in a multitude of cases since Reclus’ time and points out a danger inherent in many strategies for reform. Just as those who enter the dominant political system with radical goals often end by sacrificing those goals for the sake of success within that system, so those who participate in the dominant economic system with far-reaching goals often sacrifice their radicalism for the sake of success in that sphere.

It should also be noted that even as Reclus came to stress the greater importance of other forms of social transformation, he continued to see value in cooperative experiments. While they are, in his view, incapable of thoroughly changing present-day society, they are a good source of experience in the practice of the mutual aid that will form the basis of the future cooperative society. He believes that “studious and sincere anarchists” can learn much from those cooperatives that have “joined with one another to form ever larger entities in such a way as to encompass the most diverse functions, such as those of industry, transportation, agriculture, science, art, and entertainment,” thereby developing a “scientific practice of mutual aid.”[276] But despite these contributions, he believes that it is impossible for them gradually to expand and peacefully replace the existing system. He therefore concludes that rather than working in cooperatives, anarchists can better spend their time organizing a revolutionary movement that will seize power and quickly apply the principles and lessons of cooperation to the new social order.

Reclus subjects intentional communities to the same critique as he applies to other forms of cooperative endeavor. He contends that while these social experiments may indeed be remarkable achievements in themselves, they present no serious challenge to the dominant system of power. At best, they create a sphere of relative freedom on the fringes of that system without threatening it; at worst, they merely function as a part of the system and help stabilize it. He comments that intentional communities in the United States often succeeded materially, “only to allow themselves to be once again reabsorbed by the environment of allpowerful capitalism.”[277]

This criticism of the “utopian” nature of intentional communities seems in some ways to be rather shortsighted. According to Reclus’ own principles, an indefinite period of evolutionary change must precede the qualitative, revolutionary transformation of society. The potential of communitarian experiments had certainly not been exhausted in his time, and neither has it been today. In fact, it is quite clear that oppositional movements have directed only a minute fraction of their efforts into such experiments, while enormous efforts have gone into electoral activity, labor struggles, and revolutionary organization, none of which has effected the kind of transformation envisioned by Reclus. Thus, his argument against communalism can be leveled at all strategies for social change (including his own) that have not succeeded in overturning the prevailing system.

But if some of Reclus’ arguments regarding intentional communities and cooperatives seem facile, some of his points are very well taken. He notes that some communitarians are “utopians” in the pejorative sense, in that they do not have a good grasp of the obstacles—especially the internal, psychological ones—that stand in the way of cooperation: “The persons who come together in order to form one of these societies with new ideals are themselves by no means completely rid of prejudices, old practices, and deeply rooted atavisms; they have not yet ‘shed the old man.’”[278] Although the members of the community may physically leave the old society behind, they carry with them traces of the institutions that formed their character. Thus, “in the ‘anarchist’ or ‘harmonist’ microcosm they have created, they must always struggle against the dissociative and disruptive forces produced by habits, customs, the ever-powerful bonds of family, tempting advice from friends, the return of worldly ambitions, the need for adventure, and the obsession with change.”[279] This is a very perceptive analysis. The problems Reclus points out are not, however, unique to cooperative or communal experiments. A similar critique can usefully be applied to any attempt to create new social relationships, including the revolutionary organizations and postrevolutionary institutions that Reclus himself advocated.

It should be noted that in his letters, Reclus sometimes expressed a much greater enthusiasm for intentional communities than is evident in his published writings. In a letter of 1902, he discusses his visit to an intentional community, the “International Brotherhood” community in Blaricum, Holland. He comments:

What brave souls! With what courage they devote themselves to their work! With what nobility of language they discuss questions related to morality and humanity! How happy one feels in their good company! I took from them one of the most lasting impressions of my life. I felt myself truly to be among my brothers and your brothers, part of our great family.... Are these people “born again,” to use your language? I believe so; I am confident of it. And if they are not born again, the zeal they exhibit today, their ardent desire for justice, will certainly have an influence on the imminent birth of those who will complete their work.[280]

In a letter of the next year he mentions several other intentional communities of varying tendencies and judges that despite their frequent difficulties in surviving in hostile environments, they “always have great importance in raising the level of morality around them.”[281]

Although Reclus had mixed feelings concerning the potential of intentional communities and cooperative enterprises, he had a strong belief in the importance of the personal realm to the process of social transformation. As early as 1859, when he was still in his twenties, he writes to his sister Louise: “Let us found little republics within ourselves and around ourselves. Gradually these isolated groups will come together like scattered crystals and form the great Republic.”[282] Later, in 1895, he elaborates on the nature of these “republics.” The anarchist, he says, should “work to free himself personally from all preconceived or imposed ideas, and gradually gather around himself friends who live and act in the same way. It is step by step, through small, loving, and intelligent associations, that the great fraternal society will be formed.”[283] One finds in this idea of small republics of everyday life the essence of what became widely known in later radical theory and practice as the “affinity group.” Reclus made extraordinary efforts in his own personal life to apply his principles of mutual aid, freedom, and egalitarianism in this way. Some other prominent anarchists (most notably, Bakunin) preached equality and cooperation while often engaging in self-promotion, manipulation, and cabal. Reclus, on the other hand, sought consistency between his ideals and his practice. It was important to him that his own circle of family, friends, and coworkers constituted a small cell in the emerging organic community of freedom that he heralded in his theoretical writings.[284]

A final area in which Reclus made a strong positive conception to anarchist thought is the sphere of education. It is surprising that he has not been more widely recognized as one of the most important figures in the history of libertarian education, for many concepts often associated with Bakunin, Tolstoy, Ferrer, and other libertarian educational theorists were also proposed, and developed with at least as much originality, in his writings.[285] Reclus’ conception of education focuses on the ideal of the free self-realization of the child. His ideas are in some ways reminiscent of Rousseau and also prefigure Montessori, Dewey, and other later reformers. He sees the primary objective of education as being to “help the child develop in conformity with the logic of its own nature. There is no need for any goal other than drawing forth in the young intellect that which it already possessed in an unconscious form, and to assist religiously with the interior labors of that intellect, without any hurry, and without drawing premature conclusions.”[286] He sees this process of creating the conditions conducive to such natural unfolding as involving more than merely the intellect. Here, as in other areas, Reclus’ approach is dialectical and holistic. He recommends that practical, physical endeavors always be combined with intellectual ones and stresses the fact that education must involve both the body and the mind. He says that if both intellectual abilities and “skill and muscular energy” are given due attention, there will be a “natural balance of power” in the developing human being.[287] The child’s development also requires adequate motivation, so his or her interests, imagination, and “passion” must be encouraged. Fortunately, Reclus says, the educator has a powerful ally in pursuing this end—play. In his words, “free amusement is one of the great educators of man.”[288]

Reclus’ critically holistic and libertarian approach to learning demands a restructuring of education in accord with the child’s stages of development. He believes that the practical faculties should be developed first, through more active and experiential forms of learning, combined with the use of stories and forms of play that develop the imagination. Throughout the educational experience “the direct study of nature and the consideration of its phenomena should become one of the principal elements.”[289] For the young child, such study should avoid the mere assimilation of information and focus rather on the child’s concrete experience of his or her natural surroundings. In Reclus’ opinion, logic, science, and all fields stressing abstraction and generalities can be approached later with more success. He fears that an education that begins with the abstract will “deflower the imagination” and render the child “skeptical and blasé.”[290] The direct experience of the natural world is the great educational resource not only for the instruction of children but for education in general. In the same spirit as Thomas Berry, who states that “the natural world itself” is “the primary educator,” Reclus asserts that “the true school should be free nature, including not only the beautiful landscapes that one contemplates, and the laws that one studies in the field, but also all the obstacles that one must learn to overcome.”[291]

Reclus argues against any kind of coercive or authoritarian methods of education. He contends that such means are entirely unnecessary if the needs, capacities, and interests of the child are considered carefully and subject matter is introduced at the appropriate time. When attempts to impose premature or unsuitable studies on a child result in failure, it is often concluded that coercion, rather than better education, is what is needed. In many cases, coercive methods are imposed before more effective noncoercive ones are even tried.

Reclus contends that a powerful noncoercive instrument in the educational process comprises the personal qualities of a skilled teacher. He notes that the capable educator has a kind of natural authority over the young child based on “greater size and power, age, intelligence, scientific knowledge, moral dignity and life experience.”[292] This “authority of competence” (as it is often called in anarchist theory), combined with the natural activity and curiosity of the child, offers more than adequate stimuli to learning. Moreover, Reclus recommends a kind of Socratic method of helping draw out what is implicit within the student, combined with the Aristotelian assumption that human beings have a natural desire for knowledge: “The child wants to know and the educator wants to teach, that is, to show the child that he already knows unconsciously, and needs only to pay attention to things in order to know consciously.”[293] In this sense, the educator only assists the student in the free realization of his or her intellectual potentialities.

Reclus stresses heavily the social dimension of education. He observes that the nature of the educational experience has a powerful influence on a child’s development as a social being and on his or her future capacity to participate cooperatively in the life of the community. The character of the learning group is therefore crucial. On the one hand, it must be large enough to create a spirit of collective endeavor as the students pursue their interests. They will thereby learn lessons in cooperation that they can later apply in their personal lives, their work, and their communities. On the other hand, the group must be small enough for a close relationship to exist between all the students and the instructor. Such a group will form “a veritable family for the joys of work and play.”[294] The instructor will be “both a father and a brother,” having the natural authority that comes from age and competence, but will always consider the students’ needs, interests, and developing autonomy.[295] In effect, the libertarian educational group will combine certain qualities of the affinity group with others of the cooperative workplace. It will therefore help the child develop into a person who can participate successfully in both these realms.

Reclus’ analysis of educational methodology stresses, in a quite Deweyan spirit, the distinction between education arising out of direct experience and engaged understanding, and education based on abstract dogmatism and sterile abstractions. In a letter of 1881 he proclaims: “I hate textbooks. Nothing is more detrimental to the intellectual health and the morale of the students. They present science to the student as something ready-made, finished, signed and approved, made almost into a religion and on the way to becoming a superstition. It’s a diet that is dead and that kills.”[296] He adds that “for science to come alive, it is necessary that [the student] live it himself, that he create it, and so to speak, renew it constantly.”[297]

It must be added that for Reclus, formal education is only one aspect of a larger process of libertarian education—education for social selfrealization—within society as a whole. He explains that “the ideal of the anarchists is not to eliminate the school, but rather to enlarge it, to make society itself into a great body for mutual instruction, where all will be at once pupils and professors, where each child, after having received ‘the basics’ in primary education will learn how to develop himself integrally, according to his own intellectual capacities, in the existence that he has chosen for himself.”[298]

Reclus’ ideas concerning formal education are thus an application of his more general theory of the development of liberatory consciousness and practice within society. They reflect what has often been seen, with good reason, as one of the great strengths of his political thought: his analysis of the close relation between revolutionary change at the level of social institutions and prior evolutionary change at the level of personal life, values, and social practices. In view of the perceptiveness and originality of much of his analysis of social evolution and revolution, Reclus deserves greater recognition than he has usually been given, not only as one of the major figures in the history of anarchist thought but as a significant figure in modern European social and political theory in general.