Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (38 page)

Thoreau did not therefore reject all the achievements of so-called civilization. He not only condemned in
Walden
a ‘Life without Principle’
but called for a life according to ‘Higher Laws’ (the second name chosen for the same chapter). In the section on ‘Reading’ he recommended a study of the oldest and best books, whose authors are ‘a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind’.
²⁰
Thoreau was for the simple life, but not for a life without learning and manners.

He stood half-way between heaven and earth, the civilized and the wild, the railroad and the pond, a Transcendental savage who gloried in the primitivism of the lost race of American Indians and who sought the ‘Higher Laws’ of oriental mysticism. He was well aware of the dualism in his character and he found ‘an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.’
²¹
But he went beyond the alternative of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ to make a creative synthesis of the two. He wanted the best in nature and culture for himself and his fellow citizens.

While Thoreau was a great rebel, he saw rebellion largely in personal terms. But his individualism was not the rugged or narrow individualism of capitalism, but one which wished to preserve individuality in the face of the coercive institutions and conformist behaviour of modern civilization. Neither did he reject society nor the companionship of his fellows. In
Civil Disobedience
, he insists that he is ‘as desirous of being a good neighbour as I am of being a bad subject’.
²²
He served American society by trying to reveal its true nature to its citizens.

In place of the hectic and anxious life of commerce and the interfering force of the State, Thoreau recommended a decentralized society of villages. If people lived simple lives as good neighbours they would develop informal patterns of voluntary co-operation. There would then be no need for the police or army since robbery would be unknown. Such a society moreover need not be parochial. Like Kropotkin after him, Thoreau called for the leisure to develop our full intellectual and social potential: ‘It is time that villages were universities … To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions … Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.’
²³

Apart from a brief foray into the campaign against slavery, Thoreau made no attempt to become involved in any organized political movement. He was exceptionally jealous of his personal freedom and felt that his connection with and obligation to society were ‘very slight and transient’. He considered what is normally called politics so superficial and inhuman that ‘practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all’.
²⁴
He derided politics and politicians for making light of morality and considered voting merely ‘a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon,
with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions’.
²⁵

But while practising the ‘one-man revolution’, Thoreau did not deny his wider bonds with humanity. He called for acts of rebellion, of resistance and non-cooperation: ‘let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine’ – the machine of government, of war and of industrialization.
²⁶
Despite his influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he was not an absolute pacifist and defended direct action in
A Plea for Captain John Brown
(1860), after the famous abolitionist had seized Harpers Ferry in 1859 as a protest against Negro slavery.

Thoreau was fully aware of the coercive nature of the State. He met his government, he said, once a year in the person of the tax-gatherer, and if he denied the authority of the State when it presented him its tax bill, he knew it would harass him without end. But he did not try to overthrow it by force. He simply refused allegiance to the State, withdrew and stood aloof from it if it performed acts he did not agree with.

In fact, Thoreau was a gradualist and ‘unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but
at once
a better government.’ He might not like the government and the State, but this did not mean that he would have nothing to do with it: ‘I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can.’
²⁷
While he refused to pay tax to finance war, he was willing to pay tax for roads and schools. Like the Greek Stoics whom he admired, he considered himself beyond politics, and however the State dealt with his body, his mind would always be free: ‘If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free … unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.’
²⁸

Although Thoreau shares the ultimate anarchist goal of a society without a State, he is willing to make use of it in the present and believed that a long period of preparation would be necessary before it eventually withered away. Nevertheless, he anticipates modern anarchism by envisaging a world of free and self-governing individuals who follow their own consciences in a decentralized society. He is also a forerunner of social ecology in recognizing that by preserving the wilderness of nature, we preserve ourselves.

Our destiny is to arrive at that state of ideal perfection where nations no longer have any need to be under the tutelage of a government or any other nation. It is the absence of government; it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.
E
LISÉE
R
ECLUS

Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.
W
ILLIAM
G
ODWIN

Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice …
Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
M
ICHAEL
B
AKUNIN

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best
ideal is anarchy.
L
EO
T
OLSTOY

Mind your own business.
B
ENJAMIN
T
UCKER

W
ILLIAM
G
ODWIN
WAS
THE
first to give a clear statement of anarchist principles. In his own day, his principal work
An Enquiry concerning Political Justice
(1793) had an enormous impact. ‘He blazed’, his fellow radical William Hazlitt wrote,

The Prime Minister William Pitt considered prosecuting the author, but decided against it on the grounds that ‘a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare.’ In fact, the
Political Justice
was sold for half the price, and many workers banded together to buy it by subscription. Pirated editions appeared in Ireland and Scotland. There was sufficient demand for Godwin to revise the work in 1796 and 1798 in cheaper editions. It not only influenced leaders of the emerging labour movement like John Thelwall and Francis Place, but obscure young poets like Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge.
²

The very success of Godwin’s work, despite its philosophical weight and elegant style, shows how near the Britain of the 1790s was to revolution. The war declared by Pitt on revolutionary France however soon raised the spectre of British patriotism. His systematic persecution of the radical leaders and the introduction of Gagging Acts in 1794 eventually silenced and then broke the reform movement for a generation. Godwin came boldly to the defence of civil liberties and of his radical friends in a series of eloquent pamphlets, but by the turn of the century he too had fallen into one common grave with the cause of liberty. Thrown up by the vortex of the French Revolution, he sunk when it subsided. Most people in polite
society, De Quincey wrote, felt of Godwin with ‘the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre’.
³

But not all was lost. It was with ‘inconceivable emotions’ that the young Percy Bysshe Shelley found in 1812 that Godwin was still alive and he went on not only to elope with his daughter but to become the greatest anarchist poet by effectively putting Godwin’s philosophy to verse.
⁴
Robert Owen, sometimes called the father of British socialism, became friendly soon after and acknowledged Godwin as his philosophical master. In the 1830s and 1840s, at the height of their agitation, the Owenites and Chartists reprinted many extracts from Godwin’s works in their journals, and brought out a new edition of
Political Justice
in 1842. Through the early British socialist thinkers, especially William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin, Godwin’s vision of the ultimate withering away of the State and of a free and equal society began to haunt the Marxist imagination.

Godwin at first sight appears an unlikely candidate for the tide of first and greatest philosopher of anarchism. He was born in 1756 in Wisbech (the capital of North Cambridgeshire), the seventh of thirteen children. His father was an obscure independent minister who moved to the tiny village of Guestwick in northern Norfolk soon after William’s birth. But a strong tradition of rebellion existed in the area. There had not only been a peasants’ revolt against the land enclosures in 1549, but during the English Revolution East Anglians had formed the backbone of the Independent movement. Godwin’s father would sit in his meeting-house in ‘Cromwell’s chair’, so named because it was said to have been a gift from the leader of the English Revolution.

Godwin moreover was born into a family of Dissenters who rejected the Church of England and its articles of faith. They defended at all costs the right of private judgement. Although officially tolerated since 1689, the Dissenters were unable to have their births registered, to enter the national universities, or to hold public office. The result was that they formed a separate and distinct cultural group and made up a permanent opposition to the State of England. Godwin was steeped in this tradition: his grandfather had been a leading Dissenting minister, his father was a minister, and he aspired from an early age to follow in their footsteps.

As a boy Godwin was deeply religious and intellectually precocious. It was decided to send him at the age of eleven to become the sole pupil of a Reverend Samuel Newton in the great city of Norwich. It was to prove the most formative period of Godwin’s life. Newton’s harsh treatment of Godwin left him with a hatred of punishment and tyranny. But Newton was also an extreme Calvinist, a follower of the teachings of Robert Sandeman, and the pious Godwin soon adopted his new tutor’s creed.

Sandeman lay great stress on reason: grace was to be achieved not by
good works or faith, but by the rational perception of the truth, the right or wrong judgement of the understanding. The Sandemanians interpreted the teachings of the New Testament literally: they sought to practise brotherly love and share their wealth with each other. They were also democratic and egalitarian, both rejecting majority rule in favour of consensus and annihilating the distinctions of civil life within the sect. All men and women, they affirmed, are equally fit to be saved or damned.

Godwin went on to pull the Calvinist God down from the heavens and to assert the innocence and perfectibility of man, but he retained much of the social and economic teaching of the Sandemanians. He not only traced his excessive stoicism and condemnation of the private affections to his early Calvinism, but specifically held Sandemanianism responsible for his belief that rational judgement is the source of human actions.

On leaving Newton’s intellectual and emotional hothouse, at the age of seventeen Godwin entered the Dissenting Academy at Hoxton — one of the best centres of higher education in eighteenth-century England. Here he received a thorough grounding in Locke’s psychology, which presented the mind as a blank sheet; in Newtonian science, which pictured the world as a machine governed by natural laws; and in Hutcheson’s ethics, which upheld benevolence and utility as the cornerstones of virtue. At the same time, Godwin formed a belief in ‘necessity’, that is to say, that all actions are determined by previous causes, and in ‘immaterialism’, that is, that the external world is created by the mind. These twin pillars of his thought underwent little subsequent change.