"Mutual Cooperation Among Enlightened Individuals Free of Constraining Hierarchies"

"Kropotkin and such comrades as Errico Malatesta and Paris Commune veteran Elisée Reclus, who had all served jail terms, knew that authorities would defend the status quo with every weapon at their disposal. The 1887 execution of four anarchists dubiously connected to a bombing in Chicago's Haymarket Square grimly reinforced their belief that the capitalist democracies were also owned by the ruling class. They stood by, unable to distance themselves from a series of increasingly lunatic attacks in the 1890s that culminated, in 1900-1, with the assassinations of Italy's Umberto I and U.S. President William McKinley. Propaganda by deed had become, in Butterworth's cogent summary, 'no more than envious arbitrary retribution; the last resort of the hopeless, the damaged and the dispossessed.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Wendy Smith reviews Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents.