Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: "The Truth of a Few Simple Ideas": Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Read and the Tradition of Anarchist-Communism in Britain, 1886-1968.
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Prof. Stuart Jones
Prof. Kevin Morgan |
About
Main interests: modern British intellectual and cultural history; history of anarchism.
Ph.D thesis – successfully defended July 2011:
‘The Truth of a Few Simple Ideas’: Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Read and the Tradition of Anarchist-Communism in Britain, 1886-1968.
My Ph.D thesis offers an intellectual history of the British anarchist movement. Pursuing a close textual and contextual analysis of two of its central protagonists, Peter Kropotkin and Herbert Read, it interrogates three central narratives. Firstly, it questions the assumption that Kropotkin was a deterministic thinker expounding a mechanistic theory of society, human history and revolution. Secondly, it contests the division of Read’s political and cultural theories, asserting that his aesthetic philosophy was supported by a libertarian world-view. Thirdly, it shows that Read’s anarchism was based on a deep engagement with Kropotkin’s anarchist-communism that sought to reinvent aspects of this tradition to maintain its analytical power. It is therefore argued that Read was engaged in both the articulation and creation of anarchist-communism as a tradition of political thought, as fundamental principles were inherited and adapted to fit changing contexts. His project delineated what it meant to be Kropotkinian before the general resurgence of anarchism in the 1960s, demonstrating that Read should occupy a more important place in the intellectual history of British anarchism.
I am currently a Research Assistant at the University of Manchester.
