Luigi Galleani

by Antonio Senta

Born in Vercelli in 1861, Luigi Galleani is considered, with Errico Malatesta, the most influential militant of Italian-speaking anarchism. A tireless thinker, agitator, and public speaker, he attracted large numbers of workers to the revolutionary cause in Italy and the United States. This book, the result of a fruitful collaboration between Antonio Senta, a scholar of anarchist history, and Sean Sayers, a philosopher and Galleani’s grandson, is the biography of one of the most charismatic exponents of workers' struggles in Europe and the United States between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Genres: History

265 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2019

About the author

Antonio Senta (Fiesole, 1980) insegna storia e filosofia nelle scuole superiori. Membro del comitato scientifico dell'archivio Famiglia Berneri-Chessa di Reggio Emilia e della collana editoriale OttocentoDuemila promossa dall'associazione di ricerca storica Clionet, ha lavorato come archivista all'Istituto internazionale di storia sociale di Amsterdam e come ricercatore al Dipartimento di studi umanistici dell'Università di Trieste. Ha scritto numerosi saggi tra cui Luigi Galleani. L'anarchico più pericoloso d'America, Nova Delphi (2018, tradotto in inglese e in spagnolo); Gli anarchici e la rivoluzione russa (1917-1922), Mimesis (2019). Per elèuthera ha scritto Utopia e azione, per una storia dell'anarchismo in Italia (1848-1984), La pratica dell'augestione a quattro mani con Guido Candela e ha contribuito al testo collettivo Lezioni di anarchia (elèuthera-edicola 518).

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn, Galleani is very misunderstood and misrepresented, and unfortunately under appreciated.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Obviously well-researched but also rather dry, gives what feels like a quick overview of Galleani's life without getting into a whole lot of particulars. This may be due to a lack of extant documents or narratives from his contemporaries about some of the more interesting parts of his life but even so, given how prolific he was as a writer, it would have benefited from more direct quotes and perhaps a little dramatization. As it is, it's an okay overview and a relatively quick read which unfortunately doesn't merit the somewhat provocative title - nice try AK but LBC does it better.

The author seems to think I'm concerned about his stance on organizations and as such spends a fair amount of time explaining how despite speaking critically about them in fact agreed with them in spirit, something I'm sure its target audience of avid AK Press readers will appreciate but others may be left scratching their heads. There's also a chapter focused on his criticism of the IWW (of which he was apparently very critical) which spends a fair amount of time padding these opinions with sources who were not him talking about how the IWW and other unions were good. He apparently liked Stirner (something which merits a few sentences) and disliked Nietzsche (which gets mentioned multiple times) but it would have been nice to hear more about this as well as the influence he had on others such as Sacco and Vanzetti.