Occult Features of Anarchism
Subtitle: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples
By: Erica Lagalisse
Series: Kairos
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Oakland, USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 138
ISBN-13: 9781629635798
Copyright date: 2019
Description: In the nineteenth century anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century various “conspiracy theories” suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of intellectuals who argued for self-government and against private property, yet the public is now often told that they were (and are) the very group that controls governments and defends private property around the world. Intervening in such misinformation, Lagalisse works with primary and secondary sources in multiple languages to set straight the history of the Left and illustrate the actual relationship between revolutionism, pantheistic occult philosophy, and the clandestine fraternity.

Exploring hidden correspondences between anarchism, Renaissance magic, and New Age movements, Lagalisse also advances critical scholarship regarding leftist attachments to secular politics. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork within today’s anarchist movements, her essay challenges anarchist atheism insofar as it poses practical challenges for coalition politics in today’s world.

Studying anarchism as a historical object, *Occult Features of Anarchism* also shows how the development of leftist theory and practice within clandestine masculine public spheres continues to inform contemporary anarchist understandings of the “political,” in which men’s oppression by the state becomes the prototype for power in general. Readers behold how gender and religion become privatized in radical counterculture, a historical process intimately linked to the privatization of gender and religion by the modern nation-state.

(Source: [PM Press](https://pmpress.org.uk/product/occult-features-of-anarchism/))
Table of contents: title: Foreword
pagenum: XV; title: Introduction
pagenum: 1; title: First Premises: The Theology of Politics
pagenum: 16; title: A Heretical Account of the Radical Enlightenment
pagenum: 19; title: Freemasonry, Pantheism, and the Hermetic Tradition
pagenum: 36; title: The Revolutionary Brotherhoods
pagenum: 44; title: Illuminism in the IWA
pagenum: 52; title: Theosophy and Other Esoterica of Nineteenth-Century Socialism
pagenum: 57; title: Occult Features of the Marxian Dialectic
pagenum: 64; title: Coda
pagenum: 70; title: Anarchism as a Historical Object: Attending to Questions of Race, Class, and Gender
pagenum: 75; title: The Conspiracy of Kings: Attending to the "Conspiracy Theory" Phenomenon
pagenum: 89; title: Acknowledgments
pagenum: 115; title: Bibliography
pagenum: 118; title: Index
pagenum: 131; title: About the Authors
pagenum: 137