Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy The Impossible Argument

In the spring of 2013, a wave of urban riots swept across Sweden after police shot an elderly man in his own home. When community residents from his marginalized city-district demanded an official apology, they were ignored. The anti-police insurgences that followed addressed deep problems of the Swedish welfare state, and the official responses revealed glitches built into democracy itself.

In this updated edition of Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument, sociologist and historian Markus Lundström explores the boundaries of Swedish democracy. He probes in-depth interviews with community residents to explain how the 2013 riots intensified a profound democratic conflict: the social divide between the governors and the governed. Resistance to this divide is then traced through the defiance of governance and approaches to democracy in the history of anarchist thought.

This book offers an original introduction to anarchism. It relates the diversity of anarchist thought to anti-police riots and the radicalization of democracy.

Markus Lundström is a political sociologist focused on anarchist, fascist, and social movement studies. He is the author of The Making of Resistance: Brazil’s Landless Movement and Narrative Enactment (Springer, 2017) and coeditor of Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History (Routledge, 2022).