Journalist Colin Ward (1924-2010) believed anarchism was ordinary with its roots firmly in the small, everyday acts of improvised co-operation that made living together possible. For him, cultivating these capacities, expanding them until they infused all aspects of daily life, was the real revolution. In fact, he argued, most revolutions failed not for any want of desire for change but from a lack of understanding over what to do next. The job for anarchist ‘pundits’, as he described himself, was to show people the potential for action already at hand.

Adopting this view in the late 1940s and 1950s set him on collision course with some of his fellow Anarchists, especially those clustered around the Freedom newspaper (set up by Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson in 1886). Some among this group thought him naïve to believe revolution possible without a violent class-based uprising. To insist otherwise was either naïve or a betrayal of the cause. By contrast, for others, like Herbert Read (1915-1968), and Alex Comfort (1920-2000), gradual, peaceful revolution was logically necessary and perfectly possible but only when guided by a scientific understanding of human psychology translated into social designs for harmonious co-existence.

Ward, however, persisted and Anarchy: A Journal of Anarchist Ideas (1961-1970)became the vehicle for this ordinary, unfinished anarchism. While the journal appeared throughout the sixties, its real genesis lay firmly in those earlier fifties’ debates. My article, ‘Inventing Ordinary Anarchy in Cold War Britain’, examines the arguments and uses Ward as a lens into a neglected chapter of radical political thinking in a much-maligned decade.

The piece makes three claims. First, that the long 1950s (roughly the period covering the consecutive conservative administrations, 1951-1964) was a distinctive political moment which saw a unique convergence of factors: the Cold War, Britain’s expanding nuclear programme, an acceleration of decolonization, Khrushchev’s discreditation of Stalin followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the end of austerity, the beginning of affluence, and rapid socio-cultural change across the country. One effect of this was to fracture confidence in traditional forms of politics, especially in terms of over-determined ideologies and the role of the Party in both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary contexts.

This leads to my second point that some thinkers—most famously Isaiah Berlin—responded by reframing democracy as an ethos and practice rather than a specific historical system, set of institutions, or social mechanics. My final contention is that Ward, through Anarchy, directly intersected with this renovation of democratic theory. By connecting it with Kropotkin’s account of the social individual, he was able to dissolve some of the contradictions that Berlin and other liberals could not, especially those arising from too strong a division between negative and positive forms of liberty.

Inventing Ordinary Anarchism in Cold War Britain by Sophie Scott-Brown