Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Ely, Christopher

Abstract

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), anarchist groups were able to exert a significant influence in revolutionary politics through agricultural and industrial collectivization, communes, militia resistance, and participation in government. Many historians have explained anarchism through the lens of ideology, a doctrine based upon a structure of authority. This thesis, however, explains anarchist power and unity during the Spanish Civil War as a matter of identity, as a meaningful sense of self. Spanish anarchists defined themselves through the process of negation – the act of defining who you are by defining what you are not – by their opposition to authority, to religion, to feudalism, to capitalism and fascism, to communism, and to anarchism. The anarchists also affirmed who they were as individuals and as communities through three values: yearning for absolute freedom, the capacity for absolute fraternity removed from centralized authority, and absolute egalitarianism – the unreserved equality of all individuals.

Comments

Includes bibliography.

Extent

72 p.

Identifier

FAUHT00012

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