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Art, education, and revolution: Herbert Read and the reorientation of British anarchism
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 IdeasVolume
39Issue
5Pages
709 - 728Citation
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 & FrancisVersion
- 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
2012-11-01Publication date
2012Notes
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/10.1080/13825585.2012.736220ISSN
1873-541XPublisher version
Language
- en