Blackwell Reference Online

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Born in Athens to a wealthy noble family, Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty (a.k.a. Plotinos Rodokanakes) popularized the ideas of Charles Fourier and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in colonial-era Mexico, effectively founding the anarchist tradition there. Trained as a doctor in Vienna and Berlin and influenced by Hungarian nationalist struggles as well as by a personal encounter with Proudhon, Rhodakanaty was an eclectic and prolific philosopher, attracted to Fourier's utopian socialism and Proudhon's anarchism. Arriving in Veracruz, Mexico in 1861, drawn by the possibilities for social experimentation afforded by colonization, Rhodakanaty became a journalist, contributing to labor periodicals such as El socialista, La Comuna Internacional, El Hijo del Trabajo , and La Internacional , as well as a schoolteacher, organizing a series of institutions that would foster the first generation of the Mexican anarchist movement, notably, in 1865, the Escuela del Rayo y el socialismo (school of Light and socialism) in Chalco. students of his were instrumental in the Chalco peasant revolt of 1868, a precursor of later Magónista and Zapatista movements. In 1876 a secret organization Rhodakanaty had founded a decade earlier, called simply La social (originally “a philanthropic and humanitarian association for communal colonization for the poor and deprived classes of society”), was revived as a Bakuninist ... log in or subscribe to read full text