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Making anarchism respectable? The social philosophy of Colin Ward

Anarchism suffers from a respectability deficit, a problem of achieving a threshold level of credibility in the eyes of non-anarchists. One anarchist thinker who has grappled persistently with this problem over 60 years of activism is the influential post-war British anarchist, Colin Ward. Responding directly to the respectability deficit, Ward helped to develop a ‘pragmatist’ anarchism characterized by direct engagement with urgent social problems. The paper explains the nature of this pragmatist anarchism, and places it in its historical intellectual context. It discusses how far Ward has indeed succeeded in producing a social philosophy that is at once genuinely anarchist and ‘intellectually respectable’. My theme in this symposium … is ‘are we respectable enough?’, and in asking this question I am not concerned about the way we dress, or whether our private lives conform to a statistical norm, or how we earn our living, but with the quality of our anarchist ideas: are our ideas worthy of respect? (Colin Ward, Anarchism and Respectability, 1961)