David Goodway begins Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left Libertarian Thought and Brit ish Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward with a striking anecdote about the obstacles on the road to its publication. While readers heartily endorsed the manuscript, publishers hesitated; the hesitation, he surmises, can only be the emotive and “passionate opposition” that the subject matter, anarchism, evokes (1). The book—as it charts the long, submerged cultural history of anarchism in Britain through an authorial genealogy—attempts to mitigate such knee-jerk opposition to anarchism while carefully retaining the radicalism and political power of the concept. He begins with a broad and inclusive definition of the anarchist tradition (“notorious for its diversity”), which enables him to locate within it writers as disparate as William Morris, John Cowper Powys, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell (3). This characterization forms the cornerstone of his genealogical scaffolding, so it bears citing in full: “The anarchist tradition is characterized by such concepts and practices as autonomy, both individual and communal; mutual aid, or co-operation; organization from the bottom up; opposition to hierarchy; direct management; decentralization; anti-statism; anti-parliamentarianism; spontaneity; resistance to war; and increasingly, although with deep roots in the tradition, sustainability and ecology” (2). I would add to this characterization sexual and gender subversion in the case of some of the earlier anarchist writers in Goodway's British tradition—Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and, to an extent, John Cowper Powys. Goodway traces, in nuanced detail, the various striations of anarchist thought in the personal and public writings of prominently male British writers (but more on this later) who are self-proclaimed anarchists or anarchist sympathizers. They range from William Morris's libertarian socialism; Herbert Read's educational anarchism; Powys's individualist anarchism; Edward Carpenter's, Oscar Wilde's, and Aldous Huxley's sexual-political anarchism; Christian anarchism; George Orwell's Tory anarchism; and E. P. Thompson's libertarian communism to Aldous Huxley's and Alex Comfort's anarcho-pacificism.

While the first chapter, “Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism in Britain: William Morris and the Background, 1880–1920,” delineates the background against which anarchism emerged in the British cultural, political, and social tradition, it is the following chapter, on the delightful and underappreciated Edward Carpenter, that really galvanizes the book. While queer theorists are in the process of recuperating Edward Carpenter's work and life within a queer tradition, Goodway argues that Carpenter's articulation of a theory of subversive sexuality with alternative social and political organization is centrally constitutive of his anarchist “art of everyday living.” Although Carpenter along with Oscar Wilde, his contemporary and a self-proclaimed anarchist, politicized sexuality, their profound radicalism lies in their intertwining of sexual subversion with a theoretical, activist engagement in a socialist-inflected anarchism (or what Goodway refers to as “left-libertarianism” when the anarchist tradition is at its broadest).

Like Carpenter, Powys also stressed the importance of simplifying everyday life. Though Goodway argues that Powys's eclectic anarchism is integral to his destabilization of gender hierarchies, Goodway does not delve into much detail on this score. This is a pity, since it would have been worthwhile to pursue Powys's myth-inflected utopianism and ideal of self-liberation as underwritten by an attack on the gender scripts that overdetermine the constitution of the self. Nevertheless, despite this lacuna, the two-chapter treatment of Powys delivers on the full scale of his eccentric, anarchist call to an individualist unshackling from the hierarchical structures of community, class, family, and nation. In a series of linked readings of Powys's letters, lectures, and fiction, Goodway analyzes the evolution of Powys's “life philosophy,” predicated on “a contemplative, spiritual anarchism” through the “enjoyment of ‘every single physical sensation’” (174).

In contrast to Powys's solitary libertarianism, Goodway posits Read's commitment to revolutionizing society through educational means—a testament to the diversity within British anarchist tradition. Read is a contradictory figure, who despite anarchist proclamations accepted a knighthood in 1953, much to the chagrin of fellow anarchists and the derision of revolutionaries on the Left. Goodway argues that in spite of such seeming hypocrisy, Read's anarchism integrated his aesthetic theory (both visual arts and industrial design), for which he is best known, his poetry, and his theories of pedagogy. Likewise, George Orwell predictably emerges as contradictory and rather recalcitrant, since his anarchist sympathies jostled his distaste for any ideology or person that did not fit into his paradigm of “common sense” comprising “justice, liberty and decency” (137). Goodway focuses on Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia (indeed, the case for George Orwell is made in a chapter whose primary focus is the Spanish civil war, the event that electrified anarchists across Europe and the United States) but pays scant attention to Orwell's views on empire, which helped shape his socialist/anarchist ideas.

Indeed, while analyses of political events in Europe, the United States, and Britain are necessarily intertwined with the examination of the various writers in question, Goodway does not mention how the fact of empire contributed to, altered, or disrupted their various theorizations of anarchism. How was the anarchist tradition inflected by imperial possession and disintegration? As empire contrapuntally structured British culture and nationhood, as we now know, how did colonial independence movements or the British responses to them structure any resistance to hegemonic ideas of culture and society? Though Goodway reiterates the adoption of Gandhi's ideas of civil disobedience and nonviolence by writers such as Huxley and Comfort, he does not theorize or elaborate on this adoption/appropriation. Second, given Goodway's particularly inclusive and broad definition of left-libertarianism, I am surprised that he did not include any women writers in his anarchist tradition. He includes an analysis of the American anarchist and activist Emma Goldman, but the absence of British women writers is puzzling. If there were indeed no women writers who were libertarians/anarchists, does the gendered nature of this tradition reveal something about British anarchism? This blindness to issues of gender becomes even more glaring since he does examine sexuality as potential anarchist terrain, especially in his earlier chapters. Goodway mildly gestures toward the gender question, especially in his discussion of Powys, but I kept hoping for a more sustained analysis of it. Despite these failings, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow succeeds in its twin purposes: as a fairly straightforward, albeit conventional “scholarly contribution to cultural history of Britain” and as “an intervention in current politics” through its demonstration of an “indigenous” anarchist tradition (337).