Despite their aptitude for arcane ideological quarrels, the lines between anarchists, socialists, and communists were not clearly drawn in the 1880s. Those calling themselves anarchists, for example, were not necessarily followers of the Russians Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, whose competing versions of anarchism came to epitomize the movement. Most anarchists embraced neither bomb talk nor propaganda of the deed, as terrorism was called. Their enemies collapsed the radical rainbow into a single hue, and the radicals themselves were not particularly clear about what divided one group
...more
