Introduction by George Woodcock. Chapter 1: The Situation Today. Chapter 2: The Breakdown of the State. Chapter 3: The Inevitability of Revolution. Chapter 4: The Coming Revolution. Chapter 5: Political Rights. Chapter 6: To the Young. Chapter 7: War! Chapter 8: Revolutionary Minorities. Chapter 9: Order. Chapter The Commune. Chapter The Paris Commune. Chapter The Agrarian Question. Chapter Representative Government. Chapter Law and Authority.
Chapter Revolutionary Government. Chapter All of Us Socialists! Chapter The Spirit of Revolt. Chapter Theory and Practice. Chapter Expropriation. Paroles d'un Revolte was Kropotkin's first book, published in Paris in , and this is its first complete English version. A very different work from the more familiar books of the mature Kropotkin, like Mutual Aid ; Fields, Factories and Workshops ; and Memoirs of a Revolutionist , it is the product of an anarchist agitator rather than a libertarian savant.
And it derives its interest as much from what it reveals about an important transitional phase in the development of anarchist doctrines as it does for what it shows us of Kropotkin himself during a transitional period for him as well, an activist interlude between his escape from Russian prisons and his long refuge in the productive exile of London suburbia.
The forcing house of early anarchism was the First International, the International Workingmen's Association that was founded in London in by a heterogenous group of rebels and reformers, including the mutualist followers of the early anarchist Proudhon, some English trade unionists, a handful of German socialists led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and a scattering of the neo-Jacobin followers of August Blanqui and the Italian nationalist followers of Giuseppe Mazzini.
The designation "anarchist" was not much used by any faction at this period though Proudhon had proclaimed himself an "anarchist" in but an essential division existed between those, like Marx and his followers, who wished to proceed by governmental means towards the social revolution with the State perhaps withering away, as Engels put it -- in the far future , and those, soon to be led by Michael Bakunin, who believed that the State and the revolution were incompatible entities and that the revolution should lead immediately to the libertarian society based on the federation of communes and workers' associations.
