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Chapter 1 highlights the continuity between the Risorgimento and Italian anarchist activities during the movement’s formative years. Specifically, it describes how anarchist violence based on insurrections, guerrilla warfare and tyrannicide was an amalgam of two revolutionary ideologies and traditions inherited from the Risorgimento: the revolutionary democracy of Carlo Pisacane (specifically his articulation of “propaganda of the deed,”) Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi along with lesser known republicans, and the anarchist socialism introduced into Italy by Mikhail Bakunin.

This chapter provides a short history of anarchism and the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, giving an overview of the origins and ideas of anarchism and its impact on Spain. It discusses the turbulent late nineteenth century in Spain, the growth of the Spanish Regional Federation, and the beginnings of immigration to Argentina, demonstrating the movement of people between these two countries. By 1890, Spain's anarchist movement had become fractured and weak. By the end of the decade, the federation officially dissolved. But while the movement ebbed in Spain, it began to achieve importance in Argentina, in part as a consequence of the immigration of Spanish anarchist militants.

Chapter 3 treats the fact that from the very start, literary Satanism has had a pronounced political dimension. It provides an overview of the radical Romantics who made Satan a symbol of rebellion against oppressive religious structures, and how socialists later appropriated this strategy of resistance to religious mores. Special attention is given to Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1817), perhaps the first piece of Satanic feminism. Later, anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin took the Devil to heart and integrated the figure into their respective endeavours. Rounding off the chapter, a number of reasons why Satan was strategically attractive to Romantics and socialists are suggested.

Customarily both in Europe and the United States, government officials, the press and historians have described late 19^th century anarchists as murderous, bloody thirsty, irrational and wretched individuals The introduction details how the book will show that “propaganda of the deed,” as conceived and carried out by Italian anarchists, was the product of the revolutionary tradition of the Risorgimento; the influence of Russian anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin; the role of government repression in Italy, France and Spain; along with the experiences of Italian migrant laborers at home and abroad. Finally, the introduction described how the book will also provide biographical portraits and analysis of the major Italian perpetrators of political assassinations in fin-de-siècle Italy, France, and Spain.

This chapter looks at arguments concerning the ‘Jewishness’ of Jesus, the Otherness of his ‘background’, the apparently radical Jesuses, and the idea of Jesus the Great Man. It suggests that such arguments are typical of the rhetoric of contemporary liberal multiculturalism and liberal capitalism while masking a range of reasons for historical change. This chapter suggests alternative ways of approaching the quest for the historical Jesus/earliest Palestinian tradition. It develops ideas of how perceptions of socio-economic changes can generate protest movements which mimic and replicate power structures. This chapter looks at how the perceptions of socio-economic change in Galilee and Judea contributed to the rise of a ‘protest’, anti-imperial, or even ‘revolutionary’ movement while simultaneously reinscribing the language of empire and dominance. It looks at how ideas generated in contexts of social upheaval can be ignored, embraced, remain dormant, misinterpreted, or reapplied in a range of contexts.