By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Voltairine de Cleyre was an essayist, educator, poet and advocate of  anarchy without adjectives. Voltairine’s anarchism bore the hallmarks of  free-thinking and abolitionism: the distrust of government and  authority, sensitivity to injustice, anti-clericalism and confidence in  power of individual reason. Carried into her anarchism, these ideas ran  through her critique of government as tyranny, her calls to revolt and  her view that social transformation depended on constantly challenging  accepted standards of justice, or what she called collective  consciousness.