From terrorists to Groucho-Marxists ... the story of one of the most daring political currents of the age

The first suicide bomber in English literature is a crazed anarchist professor in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent who stalks around London wired up with explosives. Entranced by a vision of pure nothingness, he has only to squeeze a rubber ball in his pocket to annihilate the present and clear a space for a utopian future. His political comrades are a bunch of sinister continental freaks who succeed in blowing up a young boy with learning difficulties.

Anarchism, in short, has something of an image problem. Even Ruth Kinna, in this sympathetic, impressively well-informed history of the movement, has to admit that it has had its fair share of bombers and assassins. Yet she also illustrates its extraordinary creativity. Born in the 19th century, a brainchild of the Unholy Trinity of French libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Russian revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, anarchism rejected what it saw as Karl Marx’s narrow economic and proletarian viewpoint. Nevertheless, the two creeds have a lot in common. Both believe in class struggle, the abolition of private property and the overthrow of the state. Both see the role of the state as defending private property, a view that you can also find in Cicero. Marx thinks that the state will eventually wither away, while anarchists believe in helping it on its way as soon as they can.