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Peter Ryley's book recovers the history of a badly neglected, valuable tradition of anarchist thinking that is richly inventive, refreshingly irreverent and fiercely defiant. His carefully documented defence is affectionate yet critical; and breathing life into an extraordinary set of activists, Ryley not only shows why historical engagement is relevant to contemporary politics he also challenges some radical orthodoxies in the process. -- Ruth Kinna, Loughborough University, UK, editor of the Continuum Companion to Anarchism (2012) Peter Ryley's Making Another World Possible is a well-researched, superbly written guide to forgotten alternatives to the capitalism of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. With humor and some empathy (but never veering into naive hagiography), Ryley takes seriously the contributions of a set of thinkers who have been treated with condescension by orthodox historians with eyes on the purveyors of establishment views or more well-known alternatives. A significant contribution to the history of political ideas, this is a book worth spending time with. -- Dr Michael Tyldesley, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and author of No Heavenly Delusion? (2003) Quite apart from the durable purpose this book will surely serve for its long-overdue reconnaissance of some of the most neglected terrain in Victorian-era British radical thought, Peter Ryley's Making Another World Possible arrives as a work of immediately urgent relevance in the current moment of tear gas, financial implosion, austerity shock, and the preeminent ecological challenge of global climate change. In his resolve to reassert the importance of history against the arrogance of the present, Ryley succeeds splendidly in showing that we have been here before, not least in the work of imagining human progress against the contradictions of economic growth and the limits necessarily imposed by environmental sustainability. No mere polemic, Making Another World Possible is history of the most serious kind, but it's told in the most lively and refreshing sort of way. Ryley situates the young hipsters of the Occupy Movement, the direct-action cadres of the Zapatistas and the Indignados and the anti-globalization protesters of the 1990s within the same conversation as the sophisticated politicians of the Green Party and even free-market utopians. This is a conversation with perhaps its deepest roots in the raucous and cosmopolitan radical milieu of 19th century Britain, perhaps most noticeably in the early ecological anarchism of Patrick Geddes and Elisee Reclus. To that milieu, Ryley helpfully reclaims the overlooked Victorian individualists Herbert Spencer, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Joseph Hiam Levy and others as upstanding contributors to schools of thought most closely associated with the likes of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. In the contemporary rediscovery of a broadly-defined anarchism as a doctrine of hope, with all its idiosyncrasy and utopianism and its individualist, communist, pragmatic, libertarian, and even Christian variants and foundations, Making Another World Possible serves as both an indispensable resource and a generous and engaging companion. -- Terry Glavin, columnist at the Ottawa Citizen, and author of The Lost and the Left Behind: Stories from the Age of Extinctions and Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan Peter Ryley's Making Another World Possible arrives as a work of immediately urgent relevance in the current moment of tear gas, financial implosion, austerity shock, and the preeminent ecological challenge of global climate change. In his resolve to reassert the importance of history against the arrogance of the present, Ryley succeeds splendidly in showing that we have been here before, not least in the work of imagining human progress against the contradictions of economic growth and the limits necessarily imposed by environmental sustainability. -- Terry Glavin Ottawa Citizen

Peter Ryley's book recovers the history of a badly neglected, valuable tradition of anarchist thinking that is richly inventive, refreshingly irreverent and fiercely defiant. His carefully documented defence is affectionate yet critical; and breathing life into an extraordinary set of activists, Ryley not only shows why historical engagement is relevant to contemporary politics he also challenges some radical orthodoxies in the process. -- Ruth Kinna, Loughborough University, Uk, Editor Of The Continuum Companion To Anarchism (2012) Endorsement Peter Ryley's Making Another World Possible is a well-researched, superbly written guide to forgotten alternatives to the capitalism of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. With humor and some empathy (but never veering into naive hagiography), Ryley takes seriously the contributions of a set of thinkers who have been treated with condescension by orthodox historians with eyes on the purveyors of establishment views or more well-known alternatives. A significant contribution to the history of political ideas, this is a book worth spending time with. -- Dr Michael Tyldesley, Senior Lecturer In Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK And Author Of No Heavenly Delusion? (2003) Endorsement

Peter Ryley's book recovers the history of a badly neglected, valuable tradition of anarchist thinking that is richly inventive, refreshingly irreverent and fiercely defiant. His carefully documented defence is affectionate yet critical; and breathing life into an extraordinary set of activists, Ryley not only shows why historical engagement is relevant to contemporary politics he also challenges some radical orthodoxies in the process. -- Ruth Kinna, Loughborough University, Uk, Editor Of The Continuum Companion To Anarchism (2012) Endorsement

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Peter Ryley worked for more than thirty years in adult and higher education before taking early retirement from the University of Hull's Centre for Lifelong Learning. After a spell teaching history part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University, he is now fully retired from lecturing and is an independent researcher and writer.

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