Freedom, 1886–2014: an Appreciation. Issue 1 (11th March 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Goodway, David
• Is Part Of: History workshop journal. Volume 79:Issue 1(2015)
• Page Start: 233
• Page End: 242
• Publication Date: 2015-03-11
• Subjects: History -- Periodicals; Social history -- Periodicals; 905
• DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbv001
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1363-3554

Abstract

Abstract : The anarchist monthly Freedom, which announced its closure early in 2014, traced its origins to 1886, when Freedom: a Journal of Anarchist Socialism was launched by a group including Peter Kropotkin, newly arrived in Britain. This Freedom – the sub-title was changed to A Journal of Anarchist Communism in 1893 – was hit by the decline of anarchism internationally after World War One and petered out in 1932. The editor Tom Keell withdrew from London to the Cotswolds with the stock of Freedom Press; but when in 1936 the youthful Vernon Richards began to publish Spain and the World Keell anointed it the true successor to his paper. Richards gathered around him an energetic and talented group, including his companion, the brilliantly gifted Marie Louise Berneri, George Woodcock and Colin Ward, with Herbert Read and Alex Comfort contributing articles from outside the collective. The journal fared relatively well during the Second World War as War Commentary, taking the famous old title of Freedom in 1945. Yet as Berneri was to comment before her death in 1949: 'The paper gets better and better, and fewer and fewer people read it'. Freedom nevertheless went weekly in 1951, leading Ward to begin to urge the case for another, more reflective, monthly publication. Eventually he was given his head in 1961 with Anarchy, which ran until 1970. Coincidentally, a new audience receptive to anarchism had come into existence with the formation of the New Left and the nuclear disarmament movement of the late 1950s, culminating in the student radicalism and general libertarianism of the 1960s. This appreciation considers that the nurturing of Ward's gifts was possibly Freedom 's greatest achievement.