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This chapter offers a sweeping historical overview of misotheism. The major stopping points along this compelling history of ideas are: the Book of Job, Epicurus, Ovid, St. Augustine, Thomas Paine, James Mill, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, Naomi Goldenberg, Rosemary Ruether, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, William Empson, and Gore Vidal. The author documents the genealogy of God-hatred from the trial-of-God theme in the Book of Job, to Epicureanism, deism, utilitarianism, anarchism, feminism, and secular humanism.

Contrasting Swinburne’s carefree misotheistic candor, Zora Neal Hurston remained cryptic about her conflicted relationship with God. Partly because she was black and female, readers tend to overlook indications of misotheism, even when they seem plain. Few, if any, critics have taken the words “all gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason” in Their Eyes Were Watching God as potentially targeting Yahweh as well as any other gods. Instead, critics have either ignored such passages in her work or tried to explain them away. This chapter offers fresh readings of Hurston’s acclaimed works, and it draws on private writings, letters, and memoirs to fill in the picture of Hurston’s latent misotheism. Finally, the author reveals a surprising web of concealed references to writers ranging from Epicurus to Proudhon and Nietzsche, to bolster his claim that Hurston was indeed as hostile to God as the thinkers who influenced her.

This chapter reveals the misotheistic core of Rebecca West’s ethos of heroism and rebellion. It also shows how carefully West mediated her private misotheism as if dreading to admit the full implications of this view even to herself. Historically, one of the most searing indictments of God is her unpublished manuscript, written during World War I, in which West rails against God as a “master criminal.” Traces of misotheism can be found throughout her fiction and non-fiction, if one looks for them. Indeed, just like Hurston, West has not heretofore been known as an opponent of God. By connecting the dots, the author reveals a tortured spiritual journey. Indeed, West went from being a fervent misotheist in her twenties, to trying to convert to Catholicism in middle age in an attempt to stop wrestling with God; but the reconciliation failed, and she became again hostile to God toward the end of her life.

Ricardo Flores Magón, a prominent opponent of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship in late nineteenth-century Mexico, was raised in Oaxaca by a Zapotec father and mestiza mother with Spanish heritage. This chapter sheds light on a little-known aspect of the transnational anarchism that Flores Magón developed in the Mexican Liberal Party, which played a prominent role in the Revolution and was influential among Yaqui Indians in the northwest: its appropriation of real and imagined aspects of rural indigenous culture and heritage in an effort to popularize anarchist ideology in the Mexican context.

Adopting a novel approach to Peruvian anarchism rooted in the regional study of braceros or sugar plantation workers in the northern sierra, this chapter analyzes the role of worker intellectuals in developing trust networks and establishing their influence among rural workers, as well as in urban areas. It discusses issues of immigration, indigenous and mestizo politics, racial and ethnic diversity in the movement, and solidarity, as well as mobility and transnational connections.

Drawing from the case of a Spanish-born immigrant raised in Chile and deeply committed to working-class and social movements in his country, this chapter analyzes how alterity, or the emphasis on “essential” differences (such as “foreignness” or “placelessness”) were mobilized by nationalists and state actors to marginalize and justify the expulsion and persecution of labor activists on the left. It underscores the difficulty of categorizing individuals as belonging to a single ideological orthodoxy and reflects on the ways in which the intentionality of stigmatization by its enemies affected how anarchism was defined in Chile.

Adopting a gendered, relational approach to anarchist ideology and practice in Argentina during the heyday of the movement, this chapter analyzes dialogues and controversies between anarchist men and women on the question of sex and sexuality—viewing it as a central, rather than a tangential, component of the anarchist agenda of human emancipation.

This chapter underscores both the unity and diversity of the various nodes that made up the transnational network of tobacco workers and anarchist activists in Cuba and Florida in the second half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the independence of Cuba from Spain in 1898.

The independence of Panama from Colombia and the construction of the Panama Canal created countless transatlantic movements of goods, peoples, information, and ideas, including a vibrant anarchist movement in the early twentieth century. Cuba played an important role in this network, as did Spain, and, in its efforts to contain working-class radicalism in the zone that it controlled, the United States. This chapter examines the influence not just of anarcho-communists, syndicalists, and individualists, but also of “anarcho-naturists” who advocated vegetarianism, alternative lifestyles, and resistance to urban capitalist development. Racial ideology, anti-clericalism, and the incidence of the Mexican Revolution are some of the topics covered, as well as the role of individual leaders in dividing and undermining the movement on the eve of the First World War.

This chapter examines the role of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), a global, transnational revolutionary movement born in Chicago and present throughout Latin America, and particularly of its press in advancing anarchist and syndicalist agendas throughout the hemisphere. In addition to industry-based unions such as the Marine Transport Workers Union in the United States, the I.W.W. directed its activities to immigrants, blacks, Chinese, rural and unskilled workers, and developed strong movements along the northern Mexican borderlands, in Chile, and was present in port cities in Puerto Rico, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

This chapter analyzes the role of militants involved in Argentine Anarcho-Communist Federation (FACA) in the 1930s—some of whom were veterans of the better-known FOR A—in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. It stresses transnational linkages and reciprocal influences as shedding light on developments in both countries, and outlines the biographies of some of the most important figures in the movement.

While most histories of anarchism emphasize the movement's aversion to electoral politics and representative liberal democracy, this chapter tells the story of a small but influential group of Uruguayan militants who became sympathizers of President José Battle, a populist politician with a reformist agenda that addressed many of the demands of the organized labor movement. It analyzes instances where legislative proposals clashed and coincided with unions' interests and traces the tactical compromises that caused some leaders to embrace an eschatological approach to the coming social revolution and seek accommodation with political forces without becoming subservient to them.

The Cuban anarchist movement, one of the most influential in the western hemisphere, was cosmopolitan and internationalist but also influential in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain. Focusing on the writings of prominent figures of the movement, this chapter stresses the cultural impact of anarchist activism on the fledgling island-nation, in particular anarchists' efforts to appropriate the symbolism of José Martí's legacy for themselves. It also analyzes the anarchist role in promulgating alternative approaches to health, education, and gender roles.