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100-423: Before becoming a free-thinker , Faure was a seminarist . He engaged in politics as a socialist before turning to anarchism in 1888. In 1894, he was prosecuted in "The Trial of the thirty " ("Procès des trente"), but was acquitted. That same year, he became the guardian of Sidonie Vaillant after the execution of her father, Auguste Vaillant . In 1895, he cofounded "Le Libertaire" with Louise Michel , taking

200-479: A " dictatorship of the proletariat ", which he considered to be inherently reactionary and counter-revolutionary . Instead, he upheld the autonomy and self-organisation of the workers, which he saw expressed during the June Days uprising , against the representative politics of governmentalism. Opposed not just to government, but to all forms of oppression , Déjacque advocated for a social revolution to abolish

300-412: A "broader umbrella" than atheism "that embraces a rainbow of unorthodoxy, religious dissent, skepticism, and unconventional thinking." The basic summarizing statement of the essay The Ethics of Belief by the 19th-century British mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford is: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The essay became

400-406: A Congress of the defunct International's Jura Federation adopted Carlo Cafiero 's programme of Anarchy and Communism , which outlined a clear break with Guillaume's collectivist programme. Cafiero rejected the use of an exchange value and the collective ownership of industry, which he believed would lead to capital accumulation and consequently social stratification . Instead Cafiero called for

500-721: A bitter struggle with the Stalinists , who controlled the distribution of military aid to the Republican cause from the Soviet Union . The events known as the Spanish Revolution was a workers' social revolution that began during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and resulted in the widespread implementation of anarchist and, more broadly, libertarian socialist organizational principles throughout various portions of

600-499: A founding member of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), summarized this as follows: too much influence in it of Marxism , it erroneously divided and reduced anarchists between individualist anarchists and anarcho-communist sections, and it wanted to unify the anarchist movement along the lines of the anarcho-communists. He saw anarchism as more complex than that, that anarchist tendencies are not mutually exclusive as

700-486: A free-thinker." Freethinkers hold that knowledge should be grounded in facts, scientific inquiry , and logic. The skeptical application of science implies freedom from the intellectually limiting effects of confirmation bias , cognitive bias , conventional wisdom , popular culture , prejudice , or sectarianism . Atheist author Adam Lee defines free thought as thinking which is independent of revelation, tradition, established belief, and authority , and considers it as

800-516: A label previously adopted by Proudhon and Déjacque and later accepted by the anti-authoritarians themselves. Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the IWA split over questions of socialist economics and the means of bringing about a classless society . Karl Marx , who favoured the conquest of state power by political parties, banned the anarchists from the IWA. The anarchist faction around

900-540: A landmark in the era of modern free thought. It was the year of the execution in Italy of Giordano Bruno , a former Dominican friar, by the Inquisition . Prior to World War II , Australia had high rates of Protestantism and Catholicism. Post-war Australia has become a highly secularised country. Donald Horne , one of Australia's well-known public intellectuals , believed rising prosperity in post-war Australia influenced

1000-612: A notion to be considered true it must be testable, verifiable , and logical. Many freethinkers tend to be humanists , who base morality on human needs and would find meaning in human compassion , social progress , art, personal happiness, love, and the furtherance of knowledge . Generally, freethinkers like to think for themselves, tend to be skeptical, respect critical thinking and reason, remain open to new concepts, and are sometimes proud of their own individuality . They would determine truth for themselves – based upon knowledge they gain, answers they receive, experiences they have and

1100-485: A rallying cry for freethinkers when published in the 1870s, and has been described as a point when freethinkers grabbed the moral high ground. Clifford was himself an organizer of free thought gatherings, the driving force behind the Congress of Liberal Thinkers held in 1878. Regarding religion , freethinkers typically hold that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena. According to

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1200-436: A retrial. Though he would claim to have been falsely persecuted, he was viewed with suspicion in anarchist circles and avoided political activity until December 1919. However, on 15 March 1921 he was again arrested along with two accomplices, accused of sexually abusing two girls aged 11 and 12. Through the investigation it was revealed that he was known to local children as "Monsieur Fontaine", and had abused five more victims. He

1300-617: A secular " confirmation " ceremony, and atheist funeral rites. The Union of Freethinkers for Cremation was founded in 1905, and the Central Union of German Proletariat Freethinker in 1908. The two groups merged in 1927, becoming the German Freethinking Association in 1930. More "bourgeois" organizations declined after World War I , and "proletarian" free thought groups proliferated, becoming an organization of socialist parties. European socialist free thought groups formed

1400-477: A transitional stage between capitalism and communism, instead calling for immediate communisation through the direct cessation of commerce . Following the French Revolution of 1848 , Joseph Déjacque formulated a radical form of communism that opposed both the revolutionary republicanism of Auguste Blanqui and the mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon . Déjacque opposed the authoritarian conception of

1500-566: Is an unorthodox attitude or belief. A freethinker holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority , tradition , revelation , or dogma , and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic , reason , and empirical observation . According to the Collins English Dictionary , a freethinker is "One who is mentally free from the conventional bonds of tradition or dogma, and thinks independently." In some contemporary thought in particular, free thought

1600-689: Is included as a member in the umbrella organization of free humanists. In 1881 in Frankfurt am Main , Ludwig Büchner established the Deutscher Freidenkerbund ( German Freethinkers League ) as the first German organization for atheists and agnostics. In 1892 the Freidenker-Gesellschaft and in 1906 the Deutscher Monistenbund were formed. Free thought organizations developed the " Jugendweihe " (literally Youth consecration ),

1700-426: Is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favour, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. A freethinker, according to Russell, is not necessarily an atheist or an agnostic, as long as he or she satisfies this definition: The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of

1800-449: Is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems. The cognitive application of free thought is known as "freethinking", and practitioners of free thought are known as "freethinkers". Modern freethinkers consider free thought to be a natural freedom from all negative and illusive thoughts acquired from society. The term first came into use in the 17th century in order to refer to people who inquired into

1900-876: Is the Fédération nationale de la libre pensée , created in 1890. In Germany, during the period 1815–1848 and before the March Revolution , the resistance of citizens against the dogma of the church increased. In 1844, under the influence of Johannes Ronge and Robert Blum , belief in the rights of man, tolerance among men, and humanism grew, and by 1859 they had established the Bund Freireligiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands (literally Union of Free Religious Communities of Germany ), an association of persons who consider themselves to be religious without adhering to any established and institutionalized church or sacerdotal cult. This union still exists today, and

2000-631: Is widely regarded a symbol of the victims of Christian religious intolerance ; La Barre along with Jean Calas and Pierre-Paul Sirven , was championed by Voltaire. A second replacement statue to de la Barre stands nearby the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris at the summit of the butte Montmartre (itself named from the Temple of Mars ), the highest point in Paris and an 18th arrondissement street nearby

2100-557: The American Secular Union inaugurated its usage in the late 1800s. The reasoning behind the pansy as the symbol of free thought lies both in the flower's name and in its appearance. The pansy derives its name from the French word pensée , which means "thought". It allegedly received this name because the flower is perceived by some to bear resemblance to a human face, and in mid-to-late summer it nods forward as if deep in thought. In

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2200-944: The Anarchist encyclopedia , as well as the namesake of the Sébastien Faure Century , the French-speaking contingent of the Durruti Column during the civil war in Spain . The discussion about the Anarchist Synthesis arises in the context of the discussion on the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists , written by the Dielo Truda group of Russian exiles in 1926. Two texts made as responses to

2300-579: The Argentine Libertarian Federation . The Fédération Anarchiste (FA) was founded in Paris on 2 December 1945 and elected the platformist anarcho-communist George Fontenis as its first secretary the following year. It was composed of a majority of activists from the former FA (which supported Volin 's Synthesis ) and some members of the former Union Anarchiste, which supported the CNT-FAI support to

2400-566: The Church , and the literal belief in the Bible . The beliefs of these individuals were centered on the concept that people could understand the world through consideration of nature. Such positions were formally documented for the first time in 1697 by William Molyneux in a widely publicized letter to John Locke , and more extensively in 1713, when Anthony Collins wrote his Discourse of Free-thinking, which gained substantial popularity. This essay attacks

2500-478: The Freedom from Religion Foundation , "No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed , or messiah . To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth." and "Freethinkers are convinced that religious claims have not withstood the tests of reason. Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice

2600-559: The Jura Federation resolved to reconstitute as their own Anti-Authoritarian International , which was constructed as a more decentralised and federal organisation. Two of the IWA's largest branches, in Italy and Spain , repudiated Marxism and adopted the anti-authoritarian platform. As a collectivist , Bakunin had himself opposed communism, which he considered to be an inherently authoritarian ideology . But with Bakunin's death in 1876,

2700-452: The Sacré-Cœur is also named after Lefebvre de la Barre. The 19th century saw the emergence of a specific notion of Libre-Pensée ("free thought"), with writer Victor Hugo as one of its major early proponents. French Freethinkers ( Libre-Penseurs ) associate freedom of thought, political anti-clericalism and socialist leanings. The main organisation referring to this tradition to this day

2800-642: The Unitarian Universalist Association ) in 1955. D. M. Bennett was the founder and publisher of The Truth Seeker in 1873, a radical free thought and reform American periodical. German freethinker settlements were located in: Communist anarchism Anarchist communism is a political ideology and anarchist school of thought that advocates communism . It calls for the abolition of private property but retention of personal property and collectively-owned items, goods, and services. It supports social ownership of property and

2900-608: The Vrije Universiteit Brussel , along with the two Circles of Free Inquiry (Dutch and French speaking), defend the freedom of critical thought, lay philosophy and ethics , while rejecting the argument of authority . In 1873, a handful of secularists founded the earliest known secular organization in English Canada , the Toronto Freethought Association. Reorganized in 1877 and again in 1881, when it

3000-458: The universal access to education . It was the entry of Mikhail Bakunin into the IWA that first infused the federalists with a programme of revolutionary socialism and anti-statism , which agitated for workers' self-management and direct action against capitalism and the state. By this time, the Marxists of the IWA had begun to denounce their anti-authoritarian opponents as "anarchists",

3100-399: The "Oracle of The Div(in)e Bottle", he learns the lesson of life in one simple word: "Trinch!" , Drink! Enjoy the simple life, learn wisdom and knowledge, as a free human. Beyond puns, irony, and satire, Gargantua's prologue- metaphor instructs the reader to "break the bone and suck out the substance-full marrow" (" la substantifique moëlle "), the core of wisdom. The year 1600 is considered

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3200-778: The 1880s, following examples set by freethinkers in France, Belgium, Spain and Sweden, it was proposed in the United States as "the symbol of religious liberty and freedom of conscience". Critical thought has flourished in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, in the repositories of knowledge and wisdom in Ireland and in the Iranian civilizations (for example in the era of Khayyam (1048–1131) and his unorthodox Sufi Rubaiyat poems). Later societies made advances on freedom of thought such as

3300-404: The 1917 case the anarchist Second Casteu wrote a letter reporting the testimony of his daughter-in-law Marguerite, who had lived at La Ruche, accusing Faure of molesting the children there. After 1921 there are no further documented cases of sexual predation by Faure. He is recognized for his pedagogy and his qualities as a speaker, and is the author of several books: He was also the founder of

3400-611: The 19th century, free thought in the Netherlands has become more well known as a political phenomenon through at least three currents: liberal freethinking, conservative freethinking, and classical freethinking. In other words, parties which identify as freethinking tend to favor non-doctrinal, rational approaches to their preferred ideologies, and arose as secular alternatives to both clerically aligned parties as well as labor-aligned parties. Common themes among freethinking political parties are "freedom", "liberty", and " individualism ". With

3500-429: The 19th century. François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre (1745–1766) was a young French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary . La Barre is often said to have been executed for not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession, but the elements of the case were far more complex. In France, Lefebvre de la Barre

3600-683: The Chinese (note for example the seafaring renaissance of the Southern Song dynasty of 1127–1279), on through heretical thinkers on esoteric alchemy or astrology , to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation pioneered by Martin Luther . French physician and writer Rabelais celebrated "rabelaisian" freedom as well as good feasting and drinking (an expression and a symbol of freedom of

3700-743: The Dielo Truda Group achieved making their platform more popular and so they made the UAF change its name into Revolutionary Anarcho-Communist Union (UACR). Sébastien Faure led a faction within the UACR that decided to separate themselves from this organization and form outside it the Association of Federalist Anarchists (AFA), thinking that traditional anarchist ideas were being threatened by the Dielo Truda platform. Shortly later in his text "Anarchist synthesis" he exposes

3800-548: The FCL and thus produced the end of the organization. A group of militants who disagreed with the FA turning into FCL reorganized a new Federation Anarchiste established in December 1953. This included those who formed L'Entente anarchiste, who joined the new FA and then dissolved L'Entente. The new base principles of the FA were written by the individualist anarchist Charles-Auguste Bontemps and

3900-685: The FCL in December 1955, disagreeing with the decision to present "revolutionary candidates" to the legislative elections. On 15–20 August 1954, the Ve intercontinental plenum of the CNT took place. A group called Entente anarchiste appeared, which was formed of militants who did not like the new ideological orientation that the OPB was giving the FCL seeing it was authoritarian and almost Marxist. The FCL lasted until 1956, just after participating in state legislative elections with ten candidates. This move alienated some members of

4000-463: The French delegates that founded the IWA and lay the groundwork for the growth of anarchism. Among the French delegates were a more radical minority that opposed Proudhon's mutualism, which held the nuclear family as its base social unit. Led by the trade unionist Eugène Varlin , the radicals advocated for a "non-authoritarian communism", which upheld the commune as the base social unit and advocated for

4100-519: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) in 1925. Activists agitated for Germans to disaffiliate from their respective Church and for secularization of elementary schools; between 1919–1921 and 1930–1932 more than 2.5 million Germans, for the most part supporters of the Social Democratic and Communist parties, gave up church membership. Conflict developed between radical forces including

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4200-552: The Nazis until the mid-1930s. In the 19th century, received opinion was scandalized by George Ensor (1769–1843). His Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments (1835) argued that, far from being a source of moral teaching, revealed religion and its divines regarded questions of morality as "incidental"--as a "mundane and merely philosophical" topic. In

4300-514: The Netherlands, free thought has existed in organized form since the establishment of De Dageraad (now known as De Vrije Gedachte ) in 1856. Among its most notable subscribing 19th century individuals were Johannes van Vloten , Multatuli , Adriaan Gerhard and Domela Nieuwenhuis . In 2009, Frans van Dongen established the Atheist-Secular Party, which takes a considerably restrictive view of religion and public religious expressions. Since

4400-530: The Platform, each proposing a different organizational model, became the basis for what is known as the organisation of synthesis, or simply "synthesism". Volin published in 1924 a paper calling for "the anarchist synthesis" and was also the author of the article in Sébastien Faure's Encyclopedie Anarchiste on the same topic. The main purpose behind the synthesis was that the anarchist movement in most countries

4500-493: The Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, as well as some young Resistants. In 1950 a clandestine group formed within the FA called Organisation Pensée Bataille (OPB), led by George Fontenis. The new decision-making process was founded on unanimity : each person has a right of veto on the orientations of the federation. The FCL published the same year Manifeste du communisme libertaire . Several groups quit

4600-795: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless and Social Democratic forces in Western Europe led by Theodor Hartwig and Max Sievers . In 1930 the Soviet and allied delegations, following a walk-out, took over the IPF and excluded the former leaders. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, most free thought organizations were banned, though some right-wing groups that worked with so-called Völkische Bünde (literally "ethnic" associations with nationalist, xenophobic and very often racist ideology) were tolerated by

4700-623: The Spanish Revolution, which historian Sam Dolgoff claimed was the closest any revolution had come to realizing a free, stateless mass society. Stalinist-led troops suppressed the collectives and persecuted both dissident Marxists and anarchists. Anarcho-communism entered into internal debates over the organization issue in the post-World War II era. Founded in October 1935, the Anarcho-Communist Federation of Argentina (FACA, Federación Anarco-Comunista Argentina) in 1955 renamed itself

4800-457: The Toronto association, T. Phillips Thompson , became a central figure in the city's labour and social-reform movements during the 1880s and 1890s and arguably Canada's foremost late nineteenth-century labour intellectual. By the early 1880s scattered free thought organizations operated throughout southern Ontario and parts of Quebec , eliciting both urban and rural support. The principal organ of

4900-798: The Turks read the Quran and think about it, they will leave Islam. Atatürk described Islam as the religion of the Arabs in his own work titled Vatandaş için Medeni Bilgiler by his own critical and nationalist views. Association of Atheism ( Ateizm Derneği ), the first official atheist organisation in Middle East and Caucasus, was founded in 2014. It serves to support irreligious people and freethinkers in Turkey who are discriminated against based on their views. In 2018 it

5000-597: The United States declined in the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, most freethought congregations had disbanded or joined other mainstream churches. The longest continuously operating freethought congregation in America is the Free Congregation of Sauk County, Wisconsin, which was founded in 1852 and is still active as of 2020 . It affiliated with the American Unitarian Association (now

5100-552: The United States were in Yiddish, German, or Russian. However, the American anarcho-communist journal The Firebrand was published in English, permitting the dissemination of anarchist communist thought to English-speaking populations in the United States. According to the anarchist historian Max Nettlau , the first use of the term "libertarian communism" was in November 1880, when a French anarchist congress employed it to identify its doctrines more clearly. The French anarchist journalist Sébastien Faure , later founder and editor of

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5200-471: The abolition of all wage labour , which he saw as a relic of capitalism , and for the distribution of resources " from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs ". As anarcho-communism emerged in the mid-19th century, it had an intense debate with Bakuninist collectivism and, within the anarchist movement, over participation in the workers' movement, as well as on other issues. So in Kropotkin's anarcho-communist theory of evolution,

5300-463: The abolition of slavery. The " Golden Age of Freethought " in the US came in the late 1800s. The dominant organization was the National Liberal League which formed in 1876 in Philadelphia. This group re-formed itself in 1885 as the American Secular Union under the leadership of the eminent agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll . Following Ingersoll's death in 1899 the organization declined, in part due to lack of effective leadership . Freethought in

5400-462: The abolition of the division of labour through integrating the proletariat and the intelligentsia into a single class. In order to achieve this vision of a communist society, he proposed a transitionary period of in which direct democracy and direct exchange would be upheld, positions of state would undergo democratization , and the police and military would be abolished. Déjacque's communist platform outlined in his Humanisphere preceded

5500-403: The anarchist territories during the Spanish Revolution . In Spain, the national anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo initially refused to join a popular front electoral alliance, and abstention by CNT supporters led to a right-wing election victory. In 1936, the CNT changed its policy, and anarchist votes helped bring the popular front back to power. Months later,

5600-461: The anarchist territories of the Makhnovshchina during the Russian Revolution , and those of the Spanish Revolution , most notably revolutionary Catalonia . The modern current of communism was founded by the Neo-Babouvists of the journal L'Humanitaire , who drew from the "anti-political and anarchist ideas" of Sylvain Maréchal . The foundations of anarcho-communism were laid by Théodore Dézamy in his 1843 work Code de la Communauté , which

5700-399: The anarchists began to shift away from his theory of collectivism and towards an anarchist communism. The term "anarchist communism" was first printed in François Dumartheray 's February 1876 pamphlet, To manual workers, supporters of political action . Élisée Reclus was quick to express his support for anarchist communism, at a meeting of the Anti-Authoritarian International in Lausanne

5800-438: The balance they thus acquire. Freethinkers reject conformity for the sake of conformity, whereby they create their own beliefs by considering the way the world around them works and would possess the intellectual integrity and courage to think outside of accepted norms , which may or may not lead them to believe in some higher power . The pansy serves as the long-established and enduring symbol of free thought; literature of

5900-412: The basis of traditional beliefs which were often accepted unquestioningly. Today, freethinking is most closely linked with agnosticism , deism , secularism , humanism , anti-clericalism , and religious critique . The Oxford English Dictionary defines freethinking as, "The free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief, unrestrained by deference to authority; the adoption of the principles of

6000-596: The clergy of all churches and it is a plea for deism . The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881; it continued in print until 2014, and still exists as a web-based publication. The freethought movement first organized itself in the United States as the "Free Press Association" in 1827 in defense of George Houston, publisher of The Correspondent , an early journal of Biblical criticism in an era when blasphemy convictions were still possible. Houston had helped found an Owenite community at Haverstraw, New York in 1826–27. The short-lived Correspondent

6100-637: The country for two to three years, primarily Catalonia , Aragon , Andalusia , and parts of the Levante . Much of Spain's economy was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy Communist Party of Spain influence, as the Soviet -allied party actively resisted attempts at collectivization enactment. Factories were run through worker committees, and agrarian areas became collectivized and ran as libertarian communes . Anarchist Gaston Leval estimated that about eight million people participated directly or at least indirectly in

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6200-410: The decline in church-going and general lack of interest in religion. "Churches no longer matter very much to most Australians. If there is a happy eternal life it's for everyone ... For many Australians the pleasures of this life are sufficiently satisfying that religion offers nothing of great appeal", said Horne in his landmark work The Lucky Country (1964). The Université Libre de Bruxelles and

6300-439: The distribution of resources " From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs ". Anarchist communism was first formulated as such in the Italian section of the International Workingmen's Association . The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organizationalist and insurrectionary anti-organizationalist section. Examples of anarchist communist societies are

6400-493: The economic question, the two factions were also divided by the question of organisation. While the collectivists upheld trade unions as a means for achieving anarchy, the communists considered them to be inherently reformist and counter-revolutionary organisations that were prone to bureaucracy and corruption . Instead, the communists preferred small, loosely-organised affinity groups , which they believed closer conformed to anti-authoritarian principles. In October 1880,

6500-416: The fight to make access to abortion free and legal in Canada. In France, the concept first appeared in publication in 1765 when Denis Diderot , Jean le Rond d'Alembert , and Voltaire included an article on Liberté de penser in their Encyclopédie . The concept of free thought spread so widely that even places as remote as the Jotunheimen , in Norway , had well-known freethinkers such as Jo Gjende by

6600-563: The first national freethinkers organization, the "United States Moral and Philosophical Society for the General Diffusion of Useful Knowledge". It was founded on August 1, 1836, at a national convention at the Lyceum in Saratoga Springs with Isaac S. Smith of Buffalo , New York, as president. Smith was also the 1836 Equal Rights Party 's candidate for Governor of New York and had also been the Workingmen's Party candidate for Lt. Governor of New York in 1830. The Moral and Philosophical Society published The Beacon , edited by Gilbert Vale. Driven by

6700-429: The following month. James Guillaume 's August 1876 pamphlet, Ideas on Social Organisation , outlined a proposal by which the collective ownership of the means of production could be used in order to transition towards a communist society . Guillaume considered a necessary prerequisite for communism would be a general condition of abundance , which could set the foundation for the abandonment of exchange value and

6800-420: The former ruling class responded with an attempted coup causing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). In response to the army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and industrial workers, supported by armed militias, took control of Barcelona and large areas of rural Spain, where they collectivized the land. However, even before the fascist victory in 1939, the anarchists were losing ground in

6900-713: The four-volume Anarchist Encyclopedia , started the weekly paper Le Libertaire ( The Libertarian ) in 1895. In Ukraine , the anarcho-communist guerrilla leader Nestor Makhno led an independent anarchist army during the Russian Civil War . A commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine , Makhno led a guerrilla campaign opposing both the Bolshevik "Reds" and monarchist "Whites". The Makhnovist movement made various tactical military pacts while fighting various reaction forces and organizing an anarchist society committed to resisting state authority, whether capitalist or Bolshevik . The Dielo Truda platform in Spain also met with strong criticism. Miguel Jimenez,

7000-425: The free distribution of resources. This program for anarcho-communism was adopted by the Italian anarchists , who had already begun to question collectivism. Although Guillaume had himself remained neutral throughout the debate, in September 1877, the Italian anarcho-communists clashed with the Spanish collectivists at what would be the Anti-Authoritarian International's final congress in Verviers . Alongside

7100-538: The free thought movement in Canada was Secular Thought (Toronto, 1887–1911). Founded and edited during its first several years by English freethinker Charles Watts (1835–1906), it came under the editorship of Toronto printer and publisher James Spencer Ellis in 1891 when Watts returned to England. In 1968 the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) formed to serve as an umbrella group for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers, and to champion social justice issues and oppose religious influence on public policy—most notably in

7200-482: The indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition. Most freethinkers consider religion to be not only untrue, but harmful." However, philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote the following in his 1944 essay The Value of Free Thought : What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought

7300-475: The individual right to development of the individual, seeking to please them in every way." Sebastian Faure had strong contacts in Spain and so his proposal had more impact with Spanish anarchists than the Dielo Truda platform even though individualist anarchist influence in Spain was less strong than it was in France. The main goal there was reconciling anarcho-communism with anarcho-syndicalism. Free-thinker Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought )

7400-558: The introduction of cantonal church taxes in the 1870s, anti-clericals began to organise themselves. Around 1870, a "freethinkers club" was founded in Zürich . During the debate on the Zürich church law in 1883, professor Friedrich Salomon Vögelin and city council member Kunz proposed to separate church and state . In the last years of the Ottoman Empire , free thought made its voice heard by

7500-406: The latter would inevitably lead to capital accumulation . He thus advocated for all property to be held under common ownership and for "unlimited freedom of production and consumption", subordinated only to the authority of the "statistics book". In order to guarantee the universal satisfaction of needs, Déjacque saw the need for the abolition of forced labour through workers' self-management , and

7600-450: The mind) in defiance of the hypocrisies of conformist orthodoxy in his utopian Thelema Abbey (from θέλημα: free "will"), the device of which was Do What Thou Wilt : So had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because free people ... act virtuously and avoid vice. They call this honor. When Rabelais's hero Pantagruel journeys to

7700-582: The name of the earlier journal by Joseph Déjacque . At the time of the Dreyfus affair , he was one of the leading supporters of Alfred Dreyfus . In 1904, he created a libertarian school, La Ruche ("The Hive"), close to Rambouillet , which closed in February 1917. In 1916, he launched the periodical "Ce qu'il faut dire" . Faure also co-founded (with Volin ) the Synthesis , or also known as synthesis anarchism which

7800-515: The name, he must be free of two things: the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker. Fred Edwords , former executive of the American Humanist Association , suggests that by Russell's definition, liberal religionists who have challenged established orthodoxies can be considered freethinkers. On

7900-438: The nature of God can only be known from a study of nature rather than from religious revelation. In the 18th century, "deism" was as much of a 'dirty word' as "atheism", and deists were often stigmatized as either atheists or at least as freethinkers by their Christian opponents. Deists today regard themselves as freethinkers, but are now arguably less prominent in the free thought movement than atheists. Among freethinkers, for

8000-406: The non-platformist anarcho-communist Maurice Joyeux which established an organization with a plurality of tendencies and autonomy of groups organized around synthesist principles . According to historian Cédric Guérin, the new Federation Anarchiste identity included the unconditional rejection of Marxism , motivated in significant part by the previous conflict with George Fontenis and his OPB. In

8100-522: The other hand, according to Bertrand Russell , atheists and/or agnostics are not necessarily freethinkers. As an example, he mentions Stalin , whom he compares to a " pope ": what I am concerned with is the doctrine of the modern Communistic Party, and of the Russian Government to which it owes allegiance. According to this doctrine, the world develops on the lines of a Plan called Dialectical Materialism , first discovered by Karl Marx , embodied in

8200-489: The platformists saw it and that both individualist and communist views could accommodate anarchosyndicalism. Sébastian Faure had strong contacts in Spain, so his proposal had more impact on Spanish anarchists than the Dielo Truda platform, even though individualist anarchist influence in Spain was less intense than it was in France. The main goal there was reconciling anarcho-communism with anarcho-syndicalism. The most extensive application of anarcho-communist ideas happened in

8300-515: The practice of a great state by Lenin , and now expounded from day to day by a Church of which Stalin is the Pope. […] Free discussion is to be prevented wherever the power to do so exists; […] If this doctrine and this organization prevail, free inquiry will become as impossible as it was in the middle ages, and the world will relapse into bigotry and obscurantism. In the 18th and 19th century, many thinkers regarded as freethinkers were deists , arguing that

8400-490: The program of the Paris Commune , and would anticipate the anarcho-communism later elaborated by Errico Malatesta , Peter Kropotkin and Luigi Galleani . The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) was established in 1864, at a time when a formalised anarchist movement did not yet exist. Of the few individual anarchists that were influential at this time, it was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's conception of federalism and his advocacy of abstentionism that inspired many of

8500-504: The revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw an immigration of German freethinkers and anti-clericalists to the United States (see Forty-Eighters ). In the United States, they hoped to be able to live by their principles, without interference from government and church authorities. Many Freethinkers settled in German immigrant strongholds, including St. Louis , Indianapolis , Wisconsin , and Texas , where they founded

8600-597: The risen people themselves are meant to be the rational industrial manager rather than a working class organized as enterprise. Between 1880 and 1890, with the "perspective of an immanent revolution", who was "opposed to the official workers' movement, which was then in the process of formation (general Social Democratisation ). They were opposed not only to political (statist) struggles but also to strikes which put forward wage or other claims, or which were organised by trade unions." However, "[w]hile they were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed to trade unions and

8700-490: The state, as well as religion, the nuclear family and private property. In their place, Déjacque upheld a form of anarchy based on the free distribution of resources. Déjacque particularly focused his critique on private commerce, such as that espoused by Proudhon and the Ricardian socialists . He considered a worker's right to be to the satisfaction of their needs, rather than to keep the product of their own labour, as he felt

8800-675: The struggle for the eight-hour day . This anti-reformist tendency was accompanied by an anti-organisational tendency, and its partisans declared themselves in favor of agitation amongst the unemployed for the expropriation of foodstuffs and other articles, for the expropriatory strike and, in some cases, for ' individual recuperation ' or acts of terrorism." Even after Peter Kropotkin and others overcame their initial reservations and decided to enter labor unions , anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists remained, such as Sébastien Faure 's Le Libertaire group and Russian partisans of economic terrorism and expropriations. Most anarchist publications in

8900-555: The town of Comfort , Texas, as well as others. These groups of German Freethinkers referred to their organizations as Freie Gemeinden , or "free congregations". The first Freie Gemeinde was established in St. Louis in 1850. Others followed in Pennsylvania, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other states. Freethinkers tended to be liberal, espousing ideals such as racial, social, and sexual equality, and

9000-425: The view that "these currents were not contradictory but complementary, each having a role within anarchism: anarcho-syndicalism as the strength of the mass organisations and the best way for the practice of anarchism; libertarian communism as a proposed future society based on the distribution of the fruits of labour according to the needs of each one; anarcho-individualism as a negation of oppression and affirming

9100-463: The works of distinguished people such as Ahmet Rıza , Tevfik Fikret , Abdullah Cevdet , Kılıçzade Hakkı, and Celal Nuri İleri . These intellectuals affected the early period of the Turkish Republic . Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – field marshal , revolutionary statesman, author, and founder of the secular Turkish nation state , serving as its first President from 1923 until his death in 1938–

9200-544: Was again convicted of public indecency and sentenced to eight months in prison. He again claimed to have been falsely accused and was able to convince his contemporaries, and subsequent analyses of his life tended to dismiss the charges. The case files for his 1917 conviction were not released to the public until 2018, which led to a comprehensive compilation of documents and testimonies published in 2021. This evidence disproved allegations of police manipulation and also revealed previously unknown earlier cases. On 9 September 1903 he

9300-501: Was an influential form of conceiving anarchist federations. On 23 September 1917 Faure was caught sexually assaulting young girls in a Parisian flea market. Accused by multiple witnesses in the crowd, he evaded the police and was sentenced to two years of prison time for public indecency . Discovered and arrested in Marseille in January 1918, his sentenced was reduced to six months following

9400-621: Was caught molesting three young girls, but released as the parents did not press charges. On 19 November 1907 he was identified as the client of a 14-year old prostitute, but no action was taken. He was again caught on 28 September 1916 while molesting two young girls, but the police commissioner opted to use the case as blackmail to curb his pacifist activism amidst the First World War . It is also likely that he used his school La Ruche for his sexual predation, where he had taken in 20 to 30 orphaned children throughout its 13 years of operation. During

9500-536: Was divided into three main tendencies: communist anarchism , anarcho-syndicalism , and individualist anarchism and so such an organization could contain anarchists of these three tendencies very well. The platformists wanted to push their ideas forward through organizing an international anarchist congress on 12 February 1927. Shortly later in the National Congress of the French Anarchist Union (UAF),

9600-404: Was formulated as a critique of Étienne Cabet 's utopian socialism . In his Code , Dézamy advocated the abolition of money , the division of labour and the state , and the introduction of common ownership of property and the distribution of resources " from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs ". In anticipation of anarchist communism, Dézamy rejected the need for

9700-557: Was renamed the Toronto Secular Society, the group formed the nucleus of the Canadian Secular Union, established in 1884 to bring together freethinkers from across the country. A significant number of the early members appear to have come from the educated labour "aristocracy", including Alfred F. Jury, J. Ick Evans and J. I. Livingstone, all of whom were leading labour activists and secularists. The second president of

9800-510: Was reported in some media outlets that the Ateizm Derneği would close down because of the pressure on its members and attacks by pro-government media, but the association itself issued a clarification that this was not the case and that it was still active. The term freethinker emerged towards the end of the 17th century in England to describe those who stood in opposition to the institution of

9900-783: Was superseded by the Free Enquirer , the official organ of Robert Owen 's New Harmony community in Indiana, edited by Robert Dale Owen and by Fanny Wright between 1828 and 1832 in New York. During this time Robert Dale Owen sought to introduce the philosophic skepticism of the Free Thought movement into the Workingmen's Party in New York City. The Free Enquirer' s annual civic celebrations of Paine's birthday after 1825 finally coalesced in 1836 in

10000-597: Was the practitioner of their ideas. He made many reforms that modernized the country. Sources point out that Atatürk was a religious skeptic and a freethinker. He was a non-doctrinaire deist or an atheist , who was antireligious and anti-Islamic in general. According to Atatürk, the Turkish people do not know what Islam really is and do not read the Quran . People are influenced by Arabic sentences that they do not understand, and because of their customs they go to mosques. When

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