Many historians usually interpret the Spanish Civil War as a confrontation of great collective movements. Looking back into the trenches of the Iberian Peninsula, they see the organized forces of nationalism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and socialism clashing along battle lines as much ideological as military. In these standard accounts, such movements, whatever their sharp political differences, commanded popular support based on an ethos of heroism, sacrifice and devotion to a larger cause.

In Republic of Egos, Michael Seidman scuttles this conventional framework of collective heroism and organized militancy. He doesn't dispute the presence of militancy and commitment, only that these factors don't make up the whole picture. Instead Seidman makes a persuasive argument that what he labels popular individualisms (the plural is intentional) straddling ideological divides played as much a role, sometimes decisively so, in the Spanish conflict as the actions of parties, unions and other mass organizations. Rather than behaving as ideal militants sacrificing for a greater good, many wage-workers, conscripts, and peasants acted rather as individualists, subsuming the political to the personal.

In the introduction, “Bringing Back the Individual,” Seidman shows why studying these various expressions of individualism makes a difference for scholars grappling with the complexity of social history. By inserting the individual in the record only as part of a larger whole made up of class, gender or political identities, historians assume such collective identities decide actions, thus setting up a commonality more imagined than real. Lost in this view, Seidman says, is recognition of the ways in which individuals only sometimes and imperfectly adhere to the expectations implied by collective labels and roles. Without such acknowledgment, historians risk ignoring actions differing from the expected behavior, thus narrowing the scope of inquiry. Rather than the social clarifying subjectivity, Seidman argues the reverse: the social can't be understood without crediting the individual and unique.

As evidence for his argument, Seidman then introduces three archetypes of popular individualisms at work in Spain during the 1930s: the acquisitive, entrepreneurial and subversive. The first category, acquisitive individualism, describes those workers, soldiers and peasants striving to increase their personal consumption of goods at the expense of sacrifice for the larger war effort. Entrepreneurial individualism, the second, accounts for the actions of proletarians exploiting overtime and opportunities for speculation to circumvent plummeting currency rates. Finally, Seidman groups under subversive individualism, the third and in many ways the most interesting category, acts like work evasion, violation of production quotas, and insubordination towards army superiors and factory supervisors. He recognizes too that these labels are not mutually exclusive categories and sometimes overlap. But for workers and peasants employing popular individualist tactics, the personal stakes in a period of civil war and state collapse were often severe: many were shot, jailed or suffered loss of jobs and income.

The backdrop of Civil War Spain offered both limits and possibilities restricting or strengthening the space for expressions of popular individualism to flourish. The rebellion of Franco's Nationalists soon fragmented the country, leaving many regions separated from the central government in Madrid. Although the Republican government tried to uphold national authority and rally the masses towards its defense, the Republican side was plagued from the beginning by a chronic shortage of basic supplies, a lack of experienced military leadership and friction within the ruling coalition. With Spain already at the outbreak of the Civil War almost a century behind the rest of Europe, the constant struggle for food and basic needs steadily eroded collective support for the war effort as the war dragged on.

In light of this struggle for basic needs, Seidman argues that collective forms often evolved in response to experienced scarcity rather than out of a commitment to abstract solidarity. And as he notes, “Just as the individual or personal realm took precedent over party or class, the local dominated the national” (54). Both the agrarian collectives and factory committees, for instance, often expressed group egoism. Despite their professed revolutionary objectives, committees and collectives defined themselves against outsiders and expropriated the collective product for the immediate group's needs.

Even the mass influx of workers into the anarchist or socialist unions can be seen as another example of calculating behavior: workers knew that a union card brought extra food and access to jobs. In response to the demands of waging war, the organizations of the revolutionary left tried, often in vain, to impose discipline, sacrifice and increased productivity on increasingly apathetic masses. One of the more interesting threads running through Republic of Egos in fact is the series of complaints vetted by militants against the unheroic behavior of the masses.

The situation in factory and field was repeated on the military front. Rank-and-file soldiers ignored ideological divisions and defied officer's orders by socializing with their counterparts on the opposite side. Recruits injured themselves to avoid fighting. Others deserted or switched sides. “Quiet Fronts,” where soldiers on both sides only put up desultory resistance to the enemy and established informal truces were much more the norm than daring combat.

The emphasis the revolutionary left placed on idealized productivist images of the worker also marginalized working class women, whose concerns with the household and immediate family provision sat poorly with the virtues of collective revolutionary sacrifice. Forced to use whatever means at hand to feed their families, women patronized the black market, thus reinforcing the suspicion of male comrades that women were unreliable allies in the revolutionary effort. With some honorable exceptions, the revolutionary left generally consigned women to performing traditional behind the lines support work for men.

Throughout the Civil War, material deprivation only heightened the tendencies for individual or small group survival at the expense of larger political loyalties. In one of the more interesting twists in Republic of Egos, Seidman, who mentions anarcho-individualist Max Stirner approvingly, consistently uses materialism to criticize the idealism of Marxist and anarchist inspired collective bodies, a reversal of Marx's well-known criticisms of Stirner in The German Ideology.

This book's thesis will obviously create controversy. Perhaps expecting objections, Seidman backs his arguments with a wealth of documentation obtained from local party committee minutes, officers' reports, soldiers' diaries and other previously unmined sources. Some would say that as a result, he has buried the broader historical picture under an avalanche of small details. But as unsettling as some of its conclusions may be to those shaped by the very different image of Spain given in Ken Loach's film, Land and Freedom, Republic of Egos is a useful counterweight to one-sided views of Spanish Civil War history written from the perspectives of organizations. It breaks new ground for analyzing labor history, the contradictions in workers' consciousness and the frequent divide between workers and their official organizations. Seidman's constructs of popular individualism, for instance, also can be fruitfully extended to Russia in 1917, Germany 1918 and other revolutionary and near-revolutionary situations.

Whether you agree with its underlying arguments or not, this alone makes Republic of Egos one of the more striking and thought-provoking labor and military history books to come out in recent years.