“Revolution Is Not What the Revolutionaries Believe It to Be”: Gustav Landauer (1870–1919)

Abstract

Between 1890 and 1919, Gustav Landauer played an important role in the German and European socialist world. Opposed to all forms of oppression and exploitation in the name of an ethics aimed at emancipating people from human dominion, his engagement was marked by the effort to combine politics and culture. A frontier intellectual, he was convinced that anarchism and socialism were not mutually exclusive but, on the contrary, needed to be integrated. In the initial post-war period, he dedicated his life to the hope of finally contributing to the foundation of a new era characterized by profound intellectual and moral regeneration. He viewed such regeneration as the grounds on which people could begin constructing a new world, a world he imagined would be structured as a network of “community of communities”.