Johann Most

Johann Most (Augsburg, 1846 – Cincinnati, 1906) was a German-born anarchist, active mainly in London and New York, and one of the chief promoters of the idea of "propaganda of the deed" in the libertarian movement of the late nineteenth century. His career matters because it shows how a socialist politician moved toward anarchism, and how that shift split the movement.

He was born out of wedlock and grew up in poverty, under harsh treatment and after a childhood illness that left him permanently disfigured in the face. He was expelled from school after organising a student strike, and he then worked as a bookbinder, moving from town to town across central Europe for several years. By the late 1860s he had embraced socialism, edited newspapers in Chemnitz and Vienna, and in 1874 was elected to the Reichstag as a deputy of the Social Democratic Workers' Party.

His increasingly radical views brought repeated arrests and eventually exile. Settling in London, he founded the newspaper Freiheit in 1879, using it to promote anarchism and to applaud the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for which British authorities jailed him for about a year and a half. After emigrating to the United States in 1882, he resumed publishing the paper in New York. His pamphlet The Science of Revolutionary Warfare (1885), a manual on making explosives, earned him the nickname "Dynamost".

Over time he softened some of his rhetoric and came to favour worker organisation and education over senseless violence, though he never fully abandoned his combative tone. His influence reached figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who later broke with him. He died in 1906 in Cincinnati, falling ill while there to give a lecture. His legacy is that of an agitator whose press and writings left a mark on German-speaking anarchism and on the debate over political violence.