Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta

by Errico Malatesta, Errico Malatesta, Vernon Richards (Editor)

With the timely reprinting of this selection of Malatesta’s writings, first published in 1965 by Freedom Press, the full range of this great anarchist activist’s ideas are once again in circulation. Life and Ideas gathers excerpts from Malatesta’s writings over a lifetime of revolutionary activity.

The editor, Vernon Richards, has translated hundreds of articles by Malatesta, taken from the journals Malatesta either edited himself or contributed to, from the earliest, L’En Dehors of 1892, through to Pensiero e Volontà, which was forced to close by Mussolini’s fascists in 1926, and the bilingual Il Risveglio/Le Réveil, which published most of his writings after that date. These articles have been pruned down to their essentials and collected under subheadings ranging from “Ends and Means” to “Anarchist Propaganda.” Through the selections Malatesta’s classical anarchism a revolutionary, nonpacifist, nonreformist vision informed by decades of engagement in struggle and study. In addition there is a short biographical piece and an essay by the editor.

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2015

About the author

Errico Malatesta (December 14, 1853 – July 22, 1932) was an Italian anarchist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and in total spent more than ten years in prison. Malatesta wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of Mikhail Bakunin. He was an enormously popular figure in his time. According to Brian Doherty, writer for Reason magazine, "Malatesta could get tens of thousands, sometimes more than 100,000, fans to show up whenever [he] arrived in town." (Wikipedia)