Emma Goldman: “The Psychology of Political Violence”

From 1893 to 1917 Emma Goldman delivered numerous and controversial lectures regarding anarchism, women’s rights, patriotism, and labor conditions. In addition to her efforts on the lecture circuit, in 1906 Goldman established the anarchist journal Mother Earth, which she edited in New York City’s bohemian center of Greenwich Village. In 1910 several of Goldman’s Mother Earth pieces were collected in the anthology Anarchism and Other Essays.

In one of the essays in that anthology, “The Psychology of Political Violence,” Goldman enunciates her complex views on the means by which anarchists must challenge the economic exploitation and violence of capitalism. Many opponents of anarchy were appalled by its association with the violent “propaganda of the deed.” They believed her to have been party to the labor-related 1892 attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, a steel plant manager for Andrew Carnegie, and with the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Goldman never voiced approval of the assassination of McKinley, but she defended the ideals behind such actions and believed them to be a consequence of repressive institutions. The influential anthology of Goldman’s political writings Anarchism and Other Essays was republished in 1917.