Drawing on decades of research, Skirda traces anarchism as a major political movement and ideology across the 19th and 20th centuries. Critical and engaging, he offers biting and incisive portraits of the major thinkers, and more crucially, the organizations they inspired, influenced, came out of, and were spurned by. Bakuninist secret societies; the Internationals and the clash with Marx; the Illegalists, bombers and assassins; the mass trade unions; and of course, the Russian and Spanish Revolutions are all discussed through the prism of working people battling fiercely for a new world free of the shackles of Capital and the State.