Editor’s Introduction

Welcome to the first issue of our 11th year of JSR. In this issue, we include a collection of articles focusing first on different aspects of anarchism and revolutionary violent movements. Anarchism and revolutionary violence, of course, sometimes overlap but are not contiguous. And we include a group of articles focusing on radicalism as it appears in literature, beginning with a theoretical approach, followed by analyses of how radicalism appears in some Greek and Indian literature, with a final article on the nonfiction author Christopher Lasch.

Our first three articles in this issue include Alice Poma and Tommaso Gravante’s “Beyond the State and Capitalism: The Current Anarchist Movement in Italy” and Choonib Lee’s “Women’s Liberation and Sixties Armed Resistance,” which focuses on the Weatherman or Weather Underground revolutionary movement and its women members in particular, looking through a feminist lens at this dramatic period in American history. We also include Mark Grueter’s “Red Scare Scholarship, Class Conflict, and the Case of the Anarchist Union of Russian Workers, 1919” in this first section that considers together the themes of anarchism, revolutionary violence, and fear of violence.

The second four articles can be grouped under the broad theme of radicalism in literature. The first of these is Dani Spinosa’s “Postanarchist Literary Theory and the Experiment: Some Preliminary Notes,” an article that considers the academic as radical, underscoring the extent to which the contemporary academic world, at least in the humanities, can take for granted perspectives based in political activism at one end of the political spectrum. Vasiliki Petsa’s “Memory, Revenge, and Political Violence: Two Case Studies in Greek Fiction” looks at how left-wing radical violence in Greece is refracted through and reflected in two works of recent fiction, while Aruna Krishnamurthy, in “The Revolutionary Man in Naxalite Literature,” looks at the Naxalite movement in Indian literature and, in particular, at how in fiction a Maoist revolutionary perspective manifests itself, perhaps even presenting itself as a kind of (fallen?) “angel of history.” The last of these articles is Duncan Moench’s “Freud over Marx: Christopher Lasch’s Antiradical Evolution,” which looks closely at Lasch’s well-known critiques of left-wing political ideologies with an eye to contemporary American populism and the rise of Donald Trump.

Finally, we include six book reviews, among them reviews of Ann Larabee’s The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society, of Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich’s Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, of Morgan Shipley’s Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America, of Justin Wadland’s Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound, of Robeson Frazier’s The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination, and finally, of Brenda Plummer’s In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974. As you can see, this is a rich and full issue.

As always, JSR seeks to provide a forum for the scholarly and dispassionate analysis of radicalism of many kinds and from many different perspectives. We continue to welcome a steady stream of excellent articles, and JSR remains the only journal in the world that focuses on the full range of political, social, and religious forms of radicalism. In future issues, we expect authors to explore themes including environmental radicalism, racially motivated forms of radicalism, and antimodern forms of radicalism—we are planning issues now more than a year ahead!

Thank you for supporting our journal, and we hope you enjoy this issue.