Making Sense of Anarchism Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900

Davide Turcato makes the relevance of history dynamically clear. Through a biographical account of Errico Malatesta’s revolutionary exploits over a decade, Making Sense of Anarchism is simultaneously a critique of how history is written and an outline of political tensions and debates that continue to this day. An antidote to studies that equate anarchism with disorder and irrationality.

“This volume is an essential read not only for anarchists eager to deepen their knowledge of one of their greatest men, but also for intellectual historians interested in nineteenth-century political thought and socialist history. Indeed, the most important lesson to be learned from Turcato’s book, and one that deserves more attention, is that anarchism is, as he puts it in his concluding chapter, “a complex, rational business” that defies easy categorizations and broad generalizations.”
—Marcella Bencivenni, Hostos College of The City University of New York

“Filling an undeniable historiographic gap, Davide Turcato has produced a meticulous and engrossing English-language biography of Errico Malatesta and, at the same time, a thought-provoking reassessment of the nature of classical anarchism (both as a movement and an ideology).... Through the erudite use of interpretive sociology and a determined, cogent central argument the monograph also delivers an ambitious re-examination of late nineteenth-century anarchism, with contemporary ramifications.”
—Constance Bantman, University of Surrey

Davide Turcato is a computational linguist with an interest in history. He is the editor of The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, and of Malatesta's collected work published by AK Press.