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Art, education, and revolution: Herbert Read and the reorientation of British anarchism

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-07-20, 10:01 authored by Matthew AdamsMatthew Adams
It is popularly believed that British anarchism underwent a ‘renaissance’ in the 1960s, as conventional revolutionary tactics were replaced by an ethos of permanent protest. Often associated with Colin Ward and his journal Anarchy, this tactical shift is said to have occurred due to growing awareness of Gustav Landauer’s work. This article challenges these readings by focusing on Herbert Read’s book Education through Art, a work motivated by Read’s dissatisfaction with anarchism’s association with political violence. Arguing that aesthetic education could remodel social relationships in a non-hierarchical fashion, Read pioneered the reassessment of revolutionary tactics in the 1940s that is associated with the 1960s generation. His role in these debates has been ignored, but the broader political context of Read’s contribution to anarchist theory has also been neglected. The reading of Read’s work advanced here recovers his importance to these debates, and highlights the presence of an indigenous strand of radical thought that sought novel solutions for the problems of the age.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

History of European Ideas

Volume

39

Issue

5

Pages

709 - 728

Citation

ADAMS, M.S., 2012. Art, education, and revolution: Herbert Read and the reorientation of British anarchism. History of European Ideas, 39 (5), pp. 709 - 728.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2012-11-01

Publication date

2012

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in History of European Ideas on 19 Nov 2012, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2012.736220

ISSN

1873-541X

Language

  • en

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