A René Fugler miscellany

Links:

• The Anarchist Question
• Selected writings (pdf)
• “Fear of Freedom” — Review of Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1963) (pdf)

Back in 2020, I shared a translation of René Fugler’s pamphlet The Anarchist Question, as part of the Constructing Anarchisms project. At the time, I made a start at translating The Forms and Tendencies of Anarchism, another of his pamphlets, but never found the time to finish the work. 

This week, I found the time to complete that translation and to supplement it with a odd assortment of other texts by Fugler under his various pseudonyms — René Furth, René Forain, etc. Together, it seems to me that they form another interesting glimpse of the kind of anarchist studies — “recherches libertaires,” in the language of that time and place practiced by anarchist activists in the 1960s and 1970s in France. As with my recent translations from the works of Charles-Auguste Bontemps, I’m struck by the mix of familiar and unfamiliar concerns — but that is, I think, what we should expect from a literature concerned with what needed to be done to keep anarchist theory current and timely, in a time that was neither our own nor that of the 19th- and early 20th-century anarchist pioneers.

I hope these works will encourage folks to explore this literature.