Tom Goyens’s biography, Johann Most: Life of a Radical, offers a lived and multidimensional history of a figure often known by historians as a founder of U.S. anarchism and by contemporaries as an incendiary. Based on deep archival research, the book is more than an act of recovery of a misunderstood or misrepresented figure. Goyens adeptly follows transformations in Most’s social and political thought, beginning with anticlericalism and expanding to socialism and anarchism, alongside his journeys, forced and free, across borders. In doing so, Goyens manages to introduce readers to political events, workers’ movements, socialist ideological fissures and factions, censorship regimes and juridical systems of Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, France, Britain, and the United States.

The opening chapter recounts Most’s youth in Augsburg, where severe illness and surgery left his jaw skewed and ambitions for a career in theater dashed, and imparted a lifetime sensitivity about his bodily disfigurement (only hidden once he could grow a full beard). Following his expulsion from a competitive industrial and commercial high school, Most apprenticed to a bookbinder and spent much of the 1860s as a journeyman wandering through German-speaking Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and northern Italy. It was during this time that he first encountered socialism via exposure to Ferdinand Lassalle’s thought among workers’ associations in the environs of Frankfurt. Chapter two begins with Most’s time in the Swiss Jura region, deepening his socialist education, honing his rhetorical fire and wit, and affiliating with the International Workingmen’s Association. He would bring these skills and beliefs into action in Vienna, linking up with a mass movement and eventually undergoing a trial for treason. Forced out of Austria-Hungary in 1871, Most entered newly unified Germany, taking up the editorship of a socialist newspaper in Chemnitz (Saxony), a center of the machine industries and a burgeoning workers’ movement. Chapter three treats his popularization of the socialist press through his use of satire and publishing a summary of Marx’s Capital reorganized around questions facing workers. Following a major metalworkers’ strike and his prosecution for libel and incitement, Most was banned from Saxony. And yet, Most was elected a member of the Reichstag representing Chemnitz. Chapter four addresses his time in the Imperial German parliament and socialist newspaper editorship in Berlin, where he envisioned a revolution of minds leading peacefully to a revolution of things. Most initiated a leave-your-church campaign (Kirchenaustritt) in opposition to antisemitic Adolf Stöcker’s Christian Social Workers’ Party. In the wake of the 1878 Anti-Socialist Laws, Most found himself exiled again. Chapter five describes Most’s time in London, where he embraced immediate social revolutionary politics, engaged with anarchist thought among an international community of radicals, and was incarcerated again for publishing. Chapter six recounts Most’s arrival in New York in 1882.

In the final four chapters, Goyens shows how “Herr Most” became a household name in the United States, despite struggling with the English language and publishing the anarchist journal Freiheit solely in German. Most embraced the concept of propaganda by the deed in the early 1880s. In 1886, The New York Times blamed the Haymarket bombing in Chicago on Most, who was soon arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. In the Red Scare that followed the Haymarket Affair, Illinois passed a conspiracy law against advocating revolution, and the press debated revising immigration and naturalization laws to pursue ideological exclusion. During his incarceration, Most concluded that anarchists and socialists must set aside factional disputes and unite. Most would later disavow the terror strategy of assassinations, promoting self-defense and mass action by the working class instead. By the time of the Homestead Strike in 1892, Most celebrated workers’ actions, but deplored Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick. This disavowal, of course, did not prevent the bourgeois press and civil authorities from continuing to brand Most a violent firebrand (though it did inspire Emma Goldman to horsewhip him in the face). With Most in and out of prison or touring as an orator for the cause, Goyens emphasizes the role of Helen Minkin, Most’s collaborator, spouse, and mother of his two surviving children, in materially ensuring the continuity of Freiheit, one of the longest-running anarchist publications. Initially, Most doubted the revolutionary potential of the U.S. working class, frustrated with American culture’s shallow materialism and Americans’ boundless certainty in the righteousness of the national experiment. Nevertheless, Goyens shows that Most came to develop a historical theory akin to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis (a few years before Turner), anticipating rising class-consciousness with the narrowing availability of land.

Goyens’s accessible writing makes the work suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses on radicalism, U.S. social and intellectual history, and transatlantic history. Goyens mainly engages with other biographies of Most and the historiography of anarchism in the U.S., leaving readers to infer broader arguments or significance. This restraint contributes to the immersive, at times cinematic, quality of the narrative. Nevertheless, Goyens’s analysis of Most’s life and work sheds light on many subjects in the fields of nineteenth-century European and U.S. history. The book will be of significant interest to scholars of German-speaking Europe, who have traced the transnational legacies of nineteenth-century continental social movements and political actors in the United States and beyond. While historians of the Civil War-era United States have explored the influence of German ’48ers, Most is a figure of the following generation, at a time when further fractures had already emerged among republican forces in Europe. Born a year before the Revolutions of 1848 and dead a year after the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, Most offers the opportunity to rethink multiple transitions in transnational perspective. If, as Leon Fink has argued, radical movements of the Long Gilded Age were youth movements “coming of age in internationalist times,” Goyens explains how Most mentored them and shaped the internationalism of the times.Footnote ¹ To scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Goyens’s contribution lies not only in more accurately recapturing a major figure in anarchist politics. Within socialist and anarchist milieus, Goyens shows how Most bridged the transition from a primarily German-American movement to one composed of Russian Jewish and Italian immigrants and their children by actively contributing to Yiddish-speaking organizations in New York and asserting, beyond baseline internationalism, that immigrant radicals must band together in the United States to have any chance at winning over the conservative, native-born working class.

Regarding policies of repression, the repeated prosecutions and incarcerations of Most in New York provide crucial pre-history and context for histories of ideological exclusion and the role of radicals in the struggle for civil liberties, such as Julia Rose Kraut’s Threat of Dissent (2023) and Ahmed White’s Under the Iron Heel (2022). On the subject of political violence in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Goyens revives and extends critiques made by radicals themselves. He underscores the double standard of Most’s prosecutions for incendiary speech while industrialists, politicians, and the bourgeois press regularly called for violence against him and other critics of Gilded Age capitalism. Goyens juxtaposes the vast scale and scope of contemporaneous Ku Klux Klan violence and lynching, concluding that primarily associating terrorism with Most and fellow anarchists and the “selective application of justice” reveal “a broader, disturbing pattern: radical violence was vilified as foreign and dangerous, while state-sanctioned or vigilante violence was rationalized as necessary for maintaining order. Most and other anarchists became convenient scapegoats, allowing the capitalist system to deflect attention from its own structural injustices” (10).

Leon Fink invited us to no longer shy away from the overseas origins of figures and ideas and to fully engage with the circulation and reinterpretation of radical thought during the First Globalization. Working at the level of individual biography, Goyens takes up this task. With references to prior debates and struggles, whether invoked by Most himself in his memoirs or interpolated by the historian, Goyens makes clear that it is impossible to understand Johann Most, his assessment of social conditions in the United States, and his strategies of activism without reconstructing his European experiences.