Abraham Bluestein

He may not rank with Proudhon, Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin and other giants of anarchism who saw government as the inevitable enemy of freedom and freedom as the indispensable element of social harmony, but Mr. Bluestein was a believer, and over the better part of a half-century he turned out anarchist tracts.

In the 1930's he was an editor of the newspapers Vanguard and The Challenger, and long after anarchism had become archaic he was still at it, as a Libertarian Book Club editor in the 1970's and as coeditor of News From Libertarian Spain until 1980.

Along the way and afterwards, he worked as director of the Sidney Hillman Health Center, as executive director of the New York Diabetes Association and as business manager of Co-Op City and of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx.

But for Mr. Bluestein those were merely jobs. Anarchism was his life.

If Mr. Bluestein wasn't a born anarchist, he came pretty close. His parents, immigrants from the disputed Russian-Polish borderland, had fled to the United States and settled in Philadelphia after his father killed a czar's soldier and anarchist literature was found in the Bluestein house.