Each year, UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
During his recent Postdoctoral fellowship at UVic, Adam S. Matthews published the book Kropotkin, Read and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism. His book will delight historians and philosophers alike!
About the Book
Although marginal as a political force, anarchist ideas developed in Britain into a political tradition. This book explores this lost history, offering a new appraisal of the work of Kropotkin and Read, and examining the ways in which they endeavoured to articulate a politics fit for the particular challenges of Britain’s modern history.
Praise for the Book
“The strength of Adams’ interesting and intelligent book is that it gives us a view of anarchism as a dynamic tradition of thought that is integral to any wider intellectual history.” – Peter Ryley, European Review of History 23:1, 297-298
“In a well-argued, contextualised account, Adams succeeds in restoring Kropotkin to the centre of socialist and anarchist debates in Britain in the late Victorian period. He also provides an admirably lively account of the intellectual inheritance of these engagements in subsequent decades through the lens of Herbert Read’s life and ideas, restoring a sense of the vibrancy and sophistication of left-wing political theory through this period.” – Greg Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
“Adams’s book is a welcome addition to a growing number of studies aimed at recapturing the largely lost tradition of British anarchism and plugging a significant hole in our understanding of anarchist history and ideas.” – Benjamin J. Pauli, New Political Science 38:2, 292-294
About the Author
Matthew Adams took up his position as Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria in 2013, under the mentorship of Allan Antliff. His postdoctoral project, The Ideas Factory: Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Anglo-Canadian Anarchism, 1936-1970, explores the attempts of Herbert Read, George Woodcock, and Alex Comfort, to articulate a distinctively anarchist cultural politics in the mid-twentieth century. He has published in a number of journals, including History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Anarchist Studies, and European Review of History. He currently has an essay collection under contract with Manchester University Press, Anarchism 1914-1918: Internationalism, Militarism, and War, that he is editing with Dr Ruth Kinna (Loughborough University). In July 2016, Matthew will be leaving the University of Victoria to take a position with Loughborough University.
