Anarchism and Other Essays
Glossary
A
- Alexander Berkman and the Homestead Attentat
- Goldman's fellow anarchist and companion, who in 1892 attempted to kill Henry Clay Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel, during the Homestead strike after the company organized a violent campaign to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Chapter 4 presents Berkman as almost the only person who "actively responded" to the Homestead violence, driven by an anarchism that made an otherwise unbearable discord between his ideals and the world bearable.
- Related: The Attentat, Propaganda by the Deed
- Anarchism (as Goldman defines it)
- Goldman's own definition, given early in the title essay: "the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary." She insists this is a positive vision of voluntary association, not the chaos or bomb-throwing the word conjured in the popular press of her day.
- Related: Direct Action, The State
- Anthony Comstock and Comstockery
- The anti-vice crusader whose federal and state statutes criminalized distributing information about contraception and "obscenity," invoked across several essays as the personification of Puritan moral policing. Chapter 8 compares him to the Inquisition's Torquemada, "the autocrat of American morals," dictating standards of purity and vice by law.
- Related: The Hypocrisy of Puritanism, The Traffic in Women
D
- Direct Action
- Goldman's term, drawn partly from Max Stirner's claim that "man has as much liberty as he is willing to take," for anarchism's method of "open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral" rather than working through electoral or legislative channels. She treats such defiance as illegal by definition and, for that reason, as the actual mechanism of human liberation.
- Related: Anarchism (as Goldman defines it), Max Stirner
É
- Élisée Reclus
- The French anarchist geographer whose book L'Homme et la Terre Goldman cites in Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 as part of the same current of emancipating ideas as Kropotkin's writings and Ferrer's teaching — evidence, for Goldman, that no government censorship can prevent thinkers like Reclus from spreading ideas of justice and liberty.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin, Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School
F
- Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School
- The Barcelona educator executed by the Spanish government on October 13, 1909, whose Modern School (Escuela Moderna) taught children without religious dogma or rote discipline. Chapter 7 defends Ferrer against the charge that he incited the 1909 Barcelona uprising, arguing his real crime was teaching children to think freely rather than obediently.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus
J
- John Most
- The German-American anarchist orator Goldman credits, in the collection's opening lines, with being "the first great Anarchist speaker" she ever heard — an early influence whose eloquence made her want to "speak with the tongue of John Most" and reach the masses as he did.
- Related: The Haymarket Affair
L
- Leon Czolgosz and the Assassination of McKinley
- The self-declared anarchist who shot President William McKinley in 1901; the press and public falsely blamed Goldman for "inciting" him, a charge Chapter 4 dismisses with biting irony ("has she not incited violence even before her birth"). Goldman uses the case as her central example of how political violence gets pinned on ideology rather than understood through the psychology of the individual who commits it.
- Related: The Attentat, Propaganda by the Deed
M
- Marriage as Institution vs. Love as Freedom
- "Marriage and Love" draws Goldman's sharpest distinction of the collection: marriage is a legal and economic contract insuring a woman's dependency, "as far apart" from love "as the poles," while love is a spontaneous, un-ownable force no ceremony can create or guarantee. Chapter 12 argues the two are frequently opposed rather than identical, against the popular assumption that they spring from the same source.
- Related: The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation, The Traffic in Women
- Max Stirner
- The German individualist philosopher Goldman cites for the maxim that "man has as much liberty as he is willing to take" — a formulation she folds into her definition of Direct Action, representing the individualist strand of the anarchist tradition alongside the communist strand she draws from Kropotkin and Bakunin.
- Related: Direct Action
- Mikhail Bakunin
- The Russian anarchist Goldman invokes in Chapter 2 for repudiating the State as inherently coercive — synonymous, in his account, with the surrender of individual and minority liberty, the destruction of social relationship, and, at its extreme, the denial of life itself. He is one of the anarchist tradition's foundational anti-statist thinkers Goldman draws on throughout.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin, The State
- Minorities Versus Majorities
- Goldman's Chapter 3 essay arguing that meaningful progress has always come from independent, often persecuted minorities — inventors, reformers, radicals — rather than from the mass or "quantity" she sees dominating modern production, politics, and education. She treats the tyranny of numbers as itself a threat to individuality and quality.
- Related: Anarchism (as Goldman defines it)
P
- Patriotism as Manufactured Loyalty
- "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" names patriotism a conditioned reflex bred by school, church, and press — not natural love of one's birthplace and childhood — that trains ordinary people to kill and die in defense of rulers' commercial interests. Chapter 6 opens by distinguishing genuine affection for a homeplace from this manufactured, militarized loyalty.
- Related: The State
- Peter Kropotkin
- The Russian anarchist-communist theorist Goldman quotes on the degrading effects of law and punishment on humanity, and whose Great French Revolution she cites (alongside Élisée Reclus's L'Homme et la Terre) as part of the intellectual milieu Francisco Ferrer worked within. Kropotkin's mutual-aid, anti-statist anarchism underlies much of Goldman's own political vocabulary.
- Related: Mikhail Bakunin, Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- The French anarchist Goldman quotes for his famous formula "Property is robbery" in Chapter 2 — the claim that private property monopolizes the accumulated efforts of humanity and turns the dispossessed into "a pauper and an outcast," a foundational premise for Goldman's own critique of capitalism as organized theft.
- Related: Mikhail Bakunin, Anarchism (as Goldman defines it)
- Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure
- Goldman's Chapter 5 essay arguing prisons do not reform but manufacture habitual criminals, punishing poverty and desperation while leaving intact the economic conditions that produce crime in the first place. She opens with a Dostoyevsky prison-cell parable about a priest and the devil to frame punishment itself as a kind of manufactured hell.
- Related: The Political Criminal
- Propaganda by the Deed
- The tactic of dramatic political violence meant to awaken public consciousness through a single act, examined in "The Psychology of Political Violence." Goldman explains, without simply endorsing, why figures like Czolgosz and Berkman turned to it — tracing the ATTENTATER's act back to the prior violence of the state and economic system that provoked it.
- Related: The Attentat, Leon Czolgosz and the Assassination of McKinley, Alexander Berkman and the Homestead Attentat
T
- The Attentat
- The German-derived term (rendered "ATTENTATER" for the one who commits it) Goldman uses for an act of political assassination or violent protest. Chapter 4 opens by noting how dangerous it is even to analyze such acts with sympathy or understanding, since doing so risks being read as endorsement or complicity.
- Related: Propaganda by the Deed, Alexander Berkman and the Homestead Attentat
- The Drama as Disseminator of Radical Thought
- Goldman's closing essay, treating modern playwrights (Ibsen among them) as more effective vehicles for radical social ideas than pamphlets or lectures, because drama reaches audiences who would never read political theory directly. Chapter 13 frames the theater as a covert schoolroom for the "conscious expression" of the unrest Goldman traces through the rest of the book.
- Related: Anarchism (as Goldman defines it)
- The Haymarket Affair
- The 1886–87 Chicago labor bombing and its aftermath, in which several anarchists were tried and executed on November 11, 1887 despite thin evidence connecting them to the bomb. Chapter 4 calls their trial a "judicial murder," the product of "a lying, bloodthirsty press and... a cruel police conspiracy," and treats it as a formative event radicalizing the American anarchist movement Goldman belonged to.
- Related: John Most, The Attentat
- The Hypocrisy of Puritanism
- Goldman's Chapter 8 argument that inherited Puritan sexual morality does not suppress desire but drives it underground into shame, secrecy, and cruelty toward those who transgress it — citing sculptor Gutzon Borglum's complaint that Puritanism made Americans "self-centered and hypocritical," incapable of sincerity or truth in art or life.
- Related: Anthony Comstock and Comstockery
- The Political Criminal
- A category Goldman draws from Havelock Ellis's fourfold division of crime (political, passional, insane, occasional) and from Cesare Lombroso's claim that the political criminal is "the true precursor of the progressive movement of humanity." She uses it to argue that today's condemned radical is often tomorrow's "hero, martyr, saint" — that criminality is frequently a judgment history reverses.
- Related: Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure
- The State
- Goldman's consistent target across the collection: the organized apparatus of law and coercion she holds responsible for war, poverty, and the suppression of individual liberty. Following Bakunin, she treats every form of government as resting ultimately on violence, making reform of the State a contradiction in terms rather than a genuine remedy.
- Related: Anarchism (as Goldman defines it), Mikhail Bakunin, Patriotism as Manufactured Loyalty
- The Traffic in Women
- Goldman's Chapter 9 essay arguing that the "white slave traffic" moral panic of her day served to distract the public from the deeper economic causes of prostitution — low wages and limited options for working women — rather than to actually address them. She treats reformers' outrage as performative, aimed at symptoms rather than the economic "traffic" that produces them.
- Related: Anthony Comstock and Comstockery, Marriage as Institution vs. Love as Freedom
- The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation
- Goldman's Chapter 11 critique of the mainstream women's movement for winning formal rights — the vote, education, careers — while leaving women internally unfree, still bound by convention, jealousy, and fear of love and motherhood outside marriage. For Goldman, emancipation without inner freedom is only half won.
- Related: Woman Suffrage as "Fetich", Marriage as Institution vs. Love as Freedom
W
- Woman Suffrage as "Fetich"
- Chapter 10's central claim: that the vote has become a modern superstition, believed to hold transformative power it does not actually have — Goldman argues formal political rights change little about women's economic dependency or social convention, comparing faith in suffrage to older forms of "fetich worship."
- Related: The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation