A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Anarchist

Luis Juan Guerrero and the Argonauta Publishing House

Abstract

The central aim of this research is to reconstruct the work that Luis Juan Guerrero (1899-1957) carried out during his youth in the Editorial Argonauta, on the basis of his correspondence with Diego Abad de Santillán between 1922 and 1925. Using as guiding thread the editions, prologues and translations that the Argentinian philosopher was commissioned to write, the present paper examines the catalog and projects of this small but well reputed anarchist publishing house that emerged from the Liga de Educación Racionalista (League for Rationalist Education),
and which was the first to publish texts in Spanish
by Errico Malatesta, Luigi Fabbri, Rudolf Rocker, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Piotr Archinoff, Volin, Pierre Ramus and Piotr Kropotkin. Through Guerrero’s philosophical and political concerns, it explores the positioning of Argonauta within the anarchist movement in Argentina and traces its links with revolutionary groups in Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States.