Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward explores anarchist thought and practice.

[2] He explained, in its Introduction, that his book 'is simply an extended, updating footnote to Kropotkin's Mutual Aid.

Ward based his book on evidence from sociology, anthropology, cybernetics, industrial psychology, and from the experience of housing, town planning, education, work, play and social welfare.

Ward argued for anarchist alternatives to the universal governmental and hierarchical systems of social organisation, including the welfare state.

[4] "The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.