Chapter 7: Anarchism Introduction In the epilogue to his 1962 history of anarchism, George Woodcock concluded that anarchism as a movement was all but dead. “During the past forty years,” he wrote the influence [the movement] once established has dwindled, by defeat after defeat and by the slow draining of hope, almost to nothing. Nor is there any reasonable likelihood of a renaissance of anarchism as we have known it.... History suggests that movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again. Within only a few years of Woodcock’s interment of anarchism in the cemetery of defunct social theories, Bookchin was breathing life back into it. With the emergence of the ecological issue and the new potentiality for post-scarcity in the postwar period, anarchism ceased to be merely a utopian fantasy and seemed, on the contrary, to be a logical conseq...