Abstract

Anarchist aesthetics are virtually unheard-of today. As a reflection of the birth of a new anti-authoritarian sensibility, as well as of the somewhat mechanical application of the general theses of the philosophy of anarchism to the problems of literary and artistic creation, these aesthetics did, however, know an hour of glory in the 19th century. But at the turn of the century anarchism lost its sense of immediacy when it no longer held its position as the ideology of the international worker's movement. Its fortune, like the fortune of any “political” aesthetic, depends very closely on the successes and failures of the ideology of which it is a point of reference.