Kropotkin’s meeting with Lenin in 1919 shows how contemporary concepts of vanguardism and prefiguration rely on concepts of revolution that have been historicised through the experience of the Russian Revolution. This fleeting single encounter also draws out a contrast between anarchist and Bolshevik ideas. The risk of returning to Russian r…[Read more]

This paper explores the ways in which radical utopian themes have been taken up in contemporary anarchist thought and, in particular, the relationship between utopianism and prefiguration. Prefiguration has become a definitional concept in anarchist political thinking, though the meaning of the term is not always clear and it is used to describe a…[Read more]

This chapter discusses two early anarchist conceptions of utopianism, a romantic conception associated with Gustav Landauer and a rationalist ideal linked to Peter Kropotkin. I argue that the differences have been exaggerated. Landauer and Kropotkin followed different paths, but they formulated their responses to utopianism in the same context,…[Read more]

This chapter discusses William Morris’s rejection of anarchist communism as individualistic. The first discusses his treatment of anarchist communism as a generic form. It
examines his motivations for advancing the critique and sets out the key concepts on which he later relied to develop his analysis of decision-making. The relationship between…[Read more]

What does it mean to re-imagine the state? In political theory the exercise has involved telling and re-telling the story of the contract. Accounts of this foundational agreement establish the basis for the state’s just constitution and define the limits of legitimate protest, empowering those who are purported to agree, namely the citizens, to a…[Read more]

This chapter examines anarchist feminism as a politics that has emerged through critical engagements with both anarchism and non-anarchist feminisms. As a current within anarchism, anarchist feminism is rightly linked to the writing of leading anarchist women, typically neglected in anarchist canons. Yet in different historical moments anarchist…[Read more]

This article provides the first comparative reading of the minutes of the General Assemblies of three iconic Occupy camps: Wall Street, Oakland and London. It challenges detractors who have labelled the Occupy Wall Street movement a flash-in-the-pan protest, and participant-advocates who characterised the movement anti-constitutional. Developing…[Read more]

In this article we recover the classical anarchist deployment of republican tropes of non-domination, tyranny and slavery, to expose the conservative limits of the contemporary neo-Roman republican revival. For the anarchists, the modern nation state and the institution of private property are antithetical to freedom as non-domination, acting as…[Read more]

This paper examines a relationship between heresy and utopianism forged in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist histories to reveal a significant and pervasive fault-line in the ideological construction of anarchism. I look at Marxist narratives which trace the lineages of socialism to medieval religious dissent and show how the…[Read more]

THEATER OF THE PEOPLE:
SPECTATORS AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT ATHENS

Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas…[Read more]

Review of Kings, Countries, Peoples: Selected Studies on the Achaemenid Empire, by Pierre Briant, translated by Amélie Kuhrt. Oriens et Occidens, vol. 26. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017. Pp. xxv + 633. €99.

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

Evidence for some ephemeral, Roman, ritual practices, particularly using organic materials, is lost to us. This paper will introduce a case study which has not been previously considered as a platform to explore the material relationships between invertebrates and their use in magical or medicinal practices. Through a combination of discussing the…[Read more]

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2019, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

This chapter will deal with the origin of the people known as the Britons as defined under the headword ‘Briton, n.1. A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany’ in the OED, rather than the neologistic sense…[Read more]

Over the last four decades of the 18th century, the image of Sparta began to include a few characteristic elements that later became an important point of reference for 19th-century writers, philosophers and historians. Issues of Spartan equality of citizens, fully responsible for their country, and also soldierly honour and Sparta’s military c…[Read more]

Whenever we think of “literary travel,” or “travel literature”, we are liable to encounter the history and poetics of genres forming an essential part of what we call literary history.
In this paper I seek to explore the “great literary voyages” that were to substantially contribute to the Western canon. The travels and trials of Odysseus in…[Read more]

This paper contains two poems by Sappho discovered on papyrus in 2014, in the Greek original with a facing Hungarian translation by the author, along with an essay on Sappho and her historical and cultural context.

This paper contains two poems by Sappho discovered on papyrus in 2014, in the Greek original with a facing Hungarian translation by the author, along with an essay on Sappho and her historical and cultural context.

Workshop presentation about reconstruction of sounds preserved only in marginal daughter languages attested later than the earliest daughters