I expect that anyone who has made the experiment—on any scale, really—can attest that it is often much easier to venture out into the wilderness than it is to find our way home again. There is undoubtedly a lesson here for historians of what we call “the anarchist tradition,” and particularly for those of us whose researches have taken us deep into the interior, in search of the more-or-less mythic headwaters of that tradition. But perhaps the difficulties are not quite as great as some critics of broadly, deeply inclusive anarchist history can make them seem.

There is a critique that seems to run something like this: Of course, the critics acknowledge, you can keep tracking elements of influence back and back into history, but at some point you are simply talking about something other than anarchism, at least as we understand it now. And if you make the experiment of taking these early forms as a starting point, there is no trail back to the present that leads directly to the anarchism of the present day. Either you encounter insuperable obstacles, which force a detour to some really distinct path, or else you end up somewhere else, arriving at some ideological alternative to modern anarchism. This critique will be familiar to those who have followed the modern debates about mutualism, which has often either been treated as an anachronism—an ideology of the past, that has somehow outlived its moment—or as something outside the envelope of anarchism—a current, returning to one of our metaphors, separate from the main stream.

And, ultimately, there is a part of me that sympathizes with this critique. There really is a persistent unease that comes with the kind of historical work I’ve done, which really boils down to a realization that you can’t go home again when certain traditional narratives are stretched beyond a certain point. But may suspicion is that the unease may ultimately have as much to do with our uncertainty about what anarchism really is in the present as it is about any aspect of the past. And I’ve attempted to address that critique in a couple of different ways in recent years: first, through the suggestion that many of the problems that haunt the modern movement could be largely addressed by some attention to the long-neglected question of synthesis (as Voline described in in his 1924 essay, not in the sense of organization fusion) and, second, through the recognition of the possibility of real alternatives, of, for example, a neo-Proudhonian anarchism that would arise directly from the works of Proudhon (without the detours through the inherited anarchist tradition that have shaped the existing neo-Proudhonian mutualism.)

In terms of the metaphor of the braided channel, it is a question of whether the braided river-system is itself anarchism—in which case a general anarchist history needs to account for both the various individual channel and those dynamics of avulsion that create and destroy individual channels—or whether the that braided river system is something larger, in the context of which the anarchism we have inherited is, properly speaking, one or more of the channels—and then anarchist history has to decide which channels are non-anarchist tendencies, which might be anarchistic alternatives (like the proposed neo-Proudhonian anarchism), etc.

Moving forward, and through the course of Our Lost Continent, I want to keep this question open to some extent, using the possibility of a genuine alternative like the neo-Proudhonian anarchism as a foil for the synthesist premise that most of the narrative will rather boldly defend. But all that really means is that, instead of providing one alternative to those accounts of anarchist history that would try to solve our ideological conflicts with history, I would like to provide at least two.