[1] The history of anarchism in Norway can be traced back to the beginning of the labor movement in 1848, when Marcus Thrane started the country's first workers' union in Drammen.
The magazine brought extensive excerpts from the writings of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the utopian socialism of the tailor Wilhelm Weitling, the communist creed of Etienne Cabet, references to Henri de Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, and the works of other early socialists.
The peasant friends stood for a communist or localist tendency, with emphasis on decentralization and local self-government.
[5] Garborg's interest in anarchism is based on Døleringen, which arose in the environment around Aasmund Olavsson Vinje and Ernst Sars and was a counterpart to the political and cultural nationalism that prevailed in Norway in the 1860s.
[6] The student and newspaper man Rasmus Steinsvik was one of Garborg's apprentices, and in 1887 he established the radical target magazine Vestmannen in his hometown of Volda.
The anarchists in Norway were convinced that behind the shaky contemporaries there was a separate Norwegian form of society with an underlying message of equality, justice and the right to self-determination.
[7] The Federation of Anarchist Youth (FAU) started up in Kristiansund in 1966/67, but it was only after the student uprising in Paris in 1968 that interest in anarchism was really revived.