Forms of Freedom

My latest book, Forms of Freedom, is now published and available – full details are available on the Winter Oak website.

As I say in the introduction, there is an obvious difference between this book and the others I have written. While The Anarchist Revelation, The Stifled Soul of Humankind and Antibodies are all packed full of quotations from other writers, here there are none at all.

The reason for this lies in the nature of what I am attempting to describe. Elsewhere, it has been the history and interrelatedness of ideas that has been of primary interest to me. Describing where and how they had been expressed in various contexts was therefore a key aspect of my task.

Here, on the other hand, it is not so much the history of the ideas that concerns me as the ideas themselves. I wanted to look clearly at these ideas without the clutter of the context in which they have previously been expressed.

While the blurb on the Winter Oak page does give you some idea of what the book is about, it is of course just a very abbreviated version. It has to be! That’s the nature of blurb!

For more of an insight into what lies within, I would suggest reading the list of chapter headings further down the page.

But that will not tell you the whole story, of course, merely hint at what it might involve. The argument I am making in the book is multi-layered, though hopefully the step-by-step way in which I have presented it will make it easy enough to grasp.

I did not set out to write a book, but rather an essay. The argument as presented in the book is as succinct as I could make it without jettisoning anything important.

I would like to be able to explain what I am saying in Forms of Freedom in half a dozen paragraphs here on my blog, but I would just the replicating the inherent problem with the blurb, in a slightly extended fashion.

In other words, if I could sum up the contents of Forms of Freedom as a blog post, I would have written a blog post and not a book!

Ideas are important. They need to be aired, shared, explored.

I hope people will take the time to read Forms of Freedom and consider what I am saying. I also hope people will react to what I am saying and, if they don’t agree with me, tell me why. (Having actually read the book, preferably! )

There’s an imminent opportunity for discussion at my workshop on the meaning of freedom at Bristol Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday April 25, at 2pm. Hope to see you there.