Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (33 page)

Nietzsche did not restrict his criticism only to the Prussian State, for he attacked the whole conception of politics and political parties. Once they have been attained, he argued that liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal and subsequently nothing is more harmful to freedom. Liberalism comes to mean the
‘reduction to the herd animal’.
³⁸

As for the relationship between culture and the State, Nietzsche insisted that the two are antagonists. Those who gain political power pay heavily for ‘power
makes stupid
’. Culture and the State live off each other, one thrives at the expense of the other: ‘All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even
anti-political.
’
³⁹

Certainly Nietzsche was no egalitarian. He despised the ‘rabble’ and saw his contemporaries as superfluous in their pursuit of wealth and status. They were utterly corrupted by
decadence
and
ressentiment
in their ethics of material comfort and envy. In thinking that there had been only a few truly developed human beings in the past, Nietzsche however was an elitist rather than an aristocrat. Ability is not related to blood. Even the slave can show nobility by rebelling. Humanity is not condemned forever: the earth still remains free for great souls who can lead free lives. In the final analysis, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a song of freedom and creativity for the individual to make himself or herself anew. The individual and the moment have infinite value: ‘so live that you must wish to live again.’

It cannot be denied that Nietzsche’s extreme individualism leaves little room for community. His own experience of community was that it crushed individuality; he felt that a free life in his own time could only be possible for solitaries or couples. It is not unreasonable however to infer that his ideal of transformed humanity could exist like Stirner’s union of egoists, a voluntary association of individualists who meet to fulfil their particular
desires. Human beings for Nietzsche may not be equal in the sense of being uniform, but this does not mean they are not equally capable, regardless of race and sex, of creating themselves and society anew. He would have man fit for intellectual war and woman fit for bearing children, ‘but both fit for dancing with head and heels’.
⁴⁰
The dance for Nietzsche epitomized the union of creative energy with form, a joyful affirmation against all those who would renounce living in gloomy abstractions under moribund rules and regulations.

Emma Goldman, who was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, rightly insisted that he should not be decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the
übermensch
: ‘It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of the giant mind that his vision of the
übermensch
also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.’
⁴¹
His ‘aristocracy’, she pointed out, was neither of birth nor of wealth but of the spirit: ‘In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.’
⁴²
Because of this, Nietzsche still speaks directly and eloquently to all those who wish to develop their full individuality, overthrow accepted values and received ideas, and to transform everyday life. He remains an inspiration, offering the hardest task of all, to create a free work of art out of oneself.

W
ITH
ITS
STRONG
LIBERAL
tradition, Britain has produced many great libertarian thinkers. With their Protestant background, they are suspicious of authority and wish to defend the right of private judgement. They celebrate individuality and are fearful of the individual being lost in the community or overwhelmed by the oppressive State. They follow John Locke in seeing a negative role for government in guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty and property. With Adam Smith, they believe that if all people are allowed to pursue their own interests in the long run it will result in the general good.

Amongst the great nineteenth-century libertarians, only William Godwin extended liberalism to anarchism. Nevertheless, the philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer both persuasively defended the individual against the State while retaining a faith in limited government. Towards the end of the century, the writers William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde all condemned private property and envisaged a world without government. Although they remained on the fringes of the organized anarchist movement, their libertarian vision, combining a love of beauty with a concern for personal freedom, remains one of the most inspiring and far-sighted.

John Stuart Mill in his essay
On Liberty
(1859) insisted that individuality is one of the essential elements of human well-being. To this end, he quoted the German libertarian Wilhelm von Humboldt that ‘the end of man … is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole’ and that the two requisites for individuality are ‘freedom, and variety of situations’.
¹
He further acknowledged his debt to the ‘remarkable American’ individualist anarchist Josiah Warren for the use of the phrase ‘the sovereignty of the individual’.
²

But while being a great libertarian and individualist, Mill was no democrat. He dreaded the ignorance of the masses and was fearful of the tyranny of the majority which socialism might involve. He seems to have mistaken Bakunin for the whole of the First International, and associated its socialism
with general revolutionary destruction. Of the socialists, he was most impressed by Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier who retained a degree of inequality in their systems.
³

Nevertheless, Mill was not a complete believer in
laissez-faire
and he wanted a fairer distribution of wealth. He came very close moreover to the anarchist goal of communal individuality in his famous formula:

Mill has played an important part in the philosophical and the practical defence of individual and social freedom. He defended liberty on the grounds of utility, truth and individuality. He opposed the tyranny of government, of the majority, and of opinion. In his essay
On Liberty
, one of the great classics of libertarian thought, he insisted on an unbridled freedom of speech and thought. He did not, like Godwin, think that truth always triumphs over error, but he argued that free enquiry is best in pursuing truth. No one is infallible and can be sure that the opinion they are suppressing is true. Truth is most likely to emerge in the clash of opposing opinions. And only by defending and explaining our views can we have ‘a living apprehension of a truth’.
⁵
Mill stands beside all those anarchists who believe that people should question authority and think for themselves.

Mill insists that ‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.’
⁶
It was on these grounds that he defended the liberty of conscience, of thought and feeling, of tastes and pursuits, of expression, and of association. In personal terms, he defined freedom in a negative way as doing what one desires -’all restraint,
qua
restraint, is an evil.’
⁷
He even went further than most anarchists in pointing out the dangers of public opinion and social pressure in trying to make people conform, a tyranny which could be more oppressive than political authority. He celebrated individuality and diversity as good in themselves, and encouraged eccentricity and different ‘experiments of living’.
⁸

Making a distinction between self- and other-regarding actions, Mill argues that ‘self-protection’, either individual or collective, is the only legitimate reason for coercing anyone into doing something he or she does not want to do. People should only be interfered with when they intend definite harm or suffering to others; their own good does not offer sufficient grounds. We all have a right to be left alone: ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’
⁹

Mill presents human beings as self-reliant and capable of responding to rational argument. On these grounds, he opposed ‘a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.’
¹⁰
All this is admirably libertarian.

Although Mill often appears almost anarchistic, ultimately he remains, like Humboldt, in the liberal camp. He advocated women’s suffrage and argued for proportional representation for minority voices. He was opposed to excessive regulation and centralization. He wanted to restrict government to the regulation of contracts and provision of public works. Yet in arguing his case for representative government, he called for plural voting in which the educated would have more votes than the ignorant. Above all, he followed Rousseau in arguing that ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,’ thereby justifying colonial rule.
¹¹

It is Mill’s belief in the guiding role of an intellectual elite which prevents him from being regarded as an anarchist. He may have been a great libertarian in his defence of the freedoms of thought, expression and individuality, but he frequently stresses the need for intellectual authority rather than ‘intellectual anarchy’.
¹²
He often pictured the happy society as one in which the people are voluntarily led by an elite of wise guardians. In the long run, the elitist in Mill gets the better of the democrat and the libertarian.

Herbert Spencer, a father of modern sociology, developed a very different organic and evolutionary philosophy from Mill’s, but he shared the same concern for individual freedom and fear of excessive government. In two classics of Victorian political thought,
Social Statics
(1851) and
The Man versus The State
(1884), he took up the defence of individuality and severely restricted the legitimate limits of the State. They were sufficiently libertarian to impress Kropotkin, who suggested that he had arrived at the same conclusions as Proudhon and Bakunin; and Emma Goldman, who thought that Spencer’s formulation of liberty was the most important on the subject.
¹³

Spencer tried like his contemporary Social Darwinists to ground his moral and political beliefs in a philosophy of nature. He was one of the first to apply Darwin’s theory of natural evolution to social life and coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’. In his view, just as in nature the ‘fittest’ survive in the struggle for existence, so in society competition enables the best to emerge. But where Darwin defined the ‘fittest’ to be those most
adapted to their environment, Spencer saw fitness in terms of the most successful individuals. The fittest societies are those of the fittest individuals.

At the same time, Spencer argued that societies operate like living organisms, growing more complex as their parts become more mutually dependent. Since they are inherently self-equilibrating, they need the struggles of their members for their further evolution. But where struggle took a military form in feudal society, Spencer would like to see the combination of competition and co-operation prevalent in industrial society take its place. In addition, he was confident that evolution operated as a kind of ‘invisible hand’ transforming private interest into the general good.
¹⁴
The long term direction of evolution was from egotism to altruism. In the process, social life would achieve the greatest development of individuality together with the greatest degree of sociability.

Drawing on contemporary anthropology, Spencer argued like Kropotkin that societies originally regulated their affairs by custom. On the other hand, ‘Government is begotten of aggression and by aggression.’
¹⁵
A state of war established the authority of a chief who eventually developed into a king. Subsequent history was the record of aggressive war between States, and of class war within States. While all progress has depended on the efforts of individuals to achieve their private ends, governments have always thwarted the growth of society and never been able to enhance it. Rather than establishing rights, as Bentham argued, governments have merely recognized existing claims, especially the claim to property. Spencer concludes from all this that the future function of true liberalism will be that of ‘putting a limit to the power of Parliaments’.
¹⁶
Like Mill, but from his own evolutionary perspective, he prophesized ‘that form of society towards which we are progressing’ is ‘one in which
government
will be reduced to the smallest amount possible, and
freedom
increased to the greatest amount possible.’
¹⁷