Community, communion, and communism: Religion and spirituality in Herbert Read’s anarchism

Herbert Read was not a religious anarchist, but nevertheless a sense of the spiritual played an important role in his thought. Through a comparison with the work of H.G. Wells, who Read treated as a representative of a particularly arid form of social theory, this chapter reconstructs Read’s argument that spiritual unity was integral to any functioning society, and would therefore also be important to any successful anarchist community. The truth of the lesson was revealed for Read in the centrality of spiritual vibrancy to historical moments of particular artistic creativity. With cultural effervescence his measure of the successful realisation of meaningful freedom, he theorised a utopian anarchist community defined by both its economic communism and spiritual communion.