Francesco Saverio Merlino was active as a militant anarchist in Italy between 1877-1897. During the 1890s he was imprisoned for “conspiracy” and spent most of three years in jail. A prolific writer, he produced several pamphlets and books on anarchism, along with editing newspapers and essays. As a lawyer he defended anarchists throughout his life, including the Matese Band insurgents (which included Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta) and Gaetano Bresci, the assassin of King Umberto I. Merlino's courageous defence of Bresci argued that his act was a necessary outcome of the state's own cruel repression and violence.

Despite this history, Merlino broke with anarchism over what he saw as its turn towards individualism. During the late 1890s, in an ongoing public debate with Malatesta, Merlino had concluded that he no longer saw himself as an anarchist, preferring to call himself a “libertarian socialist” who, furthermore, had come to approve of parliamentarism. Merlino proposed to nominate Galleani, then imprisoned on the island of Pantellaria, as a Socialist Party candidate as a means to win his release. Galleani refused the offer. Following this break Merlino joined the Socialist Party and devoted himself more fully to his legal work.

In 1907, at the time of a national anarchist conference in Rome, Merlino granted the request of the bourgeois press to assess the dangers posed by anarchism at the time. The interview, published in the Turin daily La Stampa, under the provocative title, “The End of Anarchism," gives Merlino's pessimistic assessment of anarchist prospects: “For me, the anarchist movement has no importance today.” His view was that the useful aspects of anarchism have been adopted by socialism, while the utopian elements have been recognized as useless. The result, for Merlino, is that the best in anarchism has been incorporated and advanced by socialism. Anarchism remains as a vehicle for socialist propaganda but international and local conventions of anarchists are nothing more than futile attempts to resurrect the dead. Merlino laments that anarchism is fatally divided by partisans of two tendencies, individualists and organizationalists. To make matters worse, in his view, the organizationalists did not know how to organize, while the individualists were beginning to realize that their very survival depended upon organization. Ironically Merlino's views are remembered largely through Galleani's refutation, published in the book The End of Anarchism? (1925), which defends anarchism and presents debates over organization and individualism as evidence of anarchism's intellectual vitality.