Politically, Read considered himself an anarchist, albeit in the English
quietist tradition of
Edward Carpenter and
William Morris. Nevertheless, in the
1953 New Year Honours he accepted a
knighthood for "services to literature"; this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement. Read was actively opposed to the
Franco regime in Spain, and often campaigned on behalf of political prisoners in Spain. He was the chairman of the
Freedom Defence Committee founded in 1945. In 1964 Read joined the
Who Killed Kennedy? Committee set up by
Bertrand Russell. Dividing Read's writings on politics from those on art and culture is difficult, because he saw art, culture and politics as a single congruent expression of human consciousness. His total work amounts to over 1,000 published titles. Read's book
To Hell With Culture deals specifically with his disdain for the term
culture and expands on his anarchist view of the artist as artisan, as well as presenting a major analysis of the work of
Eric Gill. It was republished by
Routledge in 2002. In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by
Friedrich Schelling,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believing that reality as it is experienced by the human mind was as much a product of the human mind as any external or objective actuality. In other words, the mind is not a camera recording the reality it perceives through the eyes; it is also a projector throwing out its own reality. This meant that art was not, as many
Marxists believed, simply a product of a bourgeois society, but a psychological process that had evolved simultaneously with the evolution of consciousness. Art was, therefore, a biological phenomenon, a view that frequently pitted Read against Marxist critics such as
Anthony Blunt in the 1930s. Read, in this respect, was influenced by developments in German
art psychology. His Idealist background also led Read towards an interest in
psychoanalysis. Read became a pioneer in the English-speaking world in the use of psychoanalysis as a tool for art and literary criticism. Originally a Freudian, Read came to transfer his allegiance to the
analytical psychology of
Carl Jung, eventually becoming both publisher and editor-in-chief of Jung's collected works in English. As early as 1949, Read took an interest in the writings of the French
Existentialists, particularly those of
Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Read never described himself as an existentialist, he did acknowledge that his theories often found support among those who did. Read perhaps was the closest England came to an existentialist theorist of the European tradition. == Views on education ==