Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (78 page)

The lawyer and linguist Stephen Pearl Andrews adopted Warren’s notion of the sovereignty of the individual and his principle that cost should be the equitable limit of price. Throughout the universe, Andrews asserted, ‘Individuality is the essential law of order’.
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At the same time, he argued that the cost principle underlies individuality, or the ‘disconnection of interests’, since it ensures that I take as much of your labour for my benefit, as you take from me for your benefit.

But Andrews was not content to accept these principles merely in theory. He consistently opposed slavery and tried to free the state of Texas by raising money to buy off all of its slaves but the war with Mexico intervened. He also argued that sexual behaviour and family life should be matters of personal responsibility beyond the control of Church and State. Above all, he applied Warren’s principle of the ‘sovereignty of the individual’ to both sexes, advocating the ‘complete emancipation and self-ownership’ of women as well as men.

Another American individualist, Lysander Spooner, turned Lockean arguments to anarchist conclusions. In
Natural Lam; or the Science of Justice
(1882), he asserted that justice requires each individual to respect the inviolability of person and property. Since in the state of nature men are at war when they forget justice, in civil society ‘it is evidently desirable that
men should associate, so far as they freely and voluntarily can do, for the maintenance of justice among themselves, and for mutual protection against wrong-doers.’
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Such a voluntary association to maintain justice is nothing like a minimal State, but resembles more an insurance policy against fire or commercial loss. It is wholly a matter of contract.

As a lawyer, Spooner at first accepted the American Constitution. In his early writings, especially in a treatise on slavery, he recognized that it could not be reconciled with the right of private judgement. He also came to believe that trial by jury is more likely to bring about justice than government statutes. The Civil War finally convinced him that it is wrong for a people to be compelled to submit to, and support, a government they do not want. In his series of
No Treason
pamphlets, he argued ‘if a man has never consented or agreed to support a government, he breaks no faith in refusing to support it. And if he makes war upon it, he does so as an open enemy, and not as a traitor.’
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Consent must be unanimous, requiring the separate consent of every individual who is required to contribute, either by taxation or personal service, to the government.

Spooner was consistent, if nothing else: with irrefutable logic he demolished the contractual theory of the State in general, and the US Constitution in particular, on the grounds that it is impossible to say that every citizen has made a contract with government. People can contract for nobody but themselves; it is absurd to say that they can make political contracts binding on subsequent generations as the founding fathers tried to do. Any government that claims authority on the basis of an invalid social contract is clearly illegitimate. Indeed, all the great governments of the world, Spooner insists, have been

Unfortunately the ‘tyrant-thief’ of government dupes its subjects by convincing them that they are free simply because some of them can vote for a new master every few years. Voting is nothing more than an act of self-defence made in the vain hope that one will remain free while others are enslaved.

In his pamphlet
Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure
(1846), Spooner traced crime to poverty and fear of poverty which in turn is itself a sign of pernicious inequality and the unjust distribution of wealth. The remedy for crime is therefore to turn the present ‘wheel of fortune’ into ‘an extended surface, varied somewhat by inequalities, but still exhibiting a general level,
affording a safe position for all, and creating no necessity, for either force or fraud, on the part of any one, to enable him to secure his standing’.
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To this end he recommends that every man should be his own employer, and he depicts an ideal society of independent farmers and entrepreneurs who have access to easy credit. If every person received the fruits of his own labour, the just and equal distribution of wealth would result.

Although he did not call himself an anarchist, Spooner invariably traced the ills of American society to its government and argued that civil society should be organized as a voluntary association. Contemporary right-wing libertarians in the United States like Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick have been impressed by Spooner’s arguments, but his concern with equality as well as liberty makes him a left-wing individualist anarchist. Indeed, while his starting-point is the individual, Spooner goes beyond classical liberalism in his search for a form of rough equality and a community of interests.

Benjamin Tucker was the first American thinker to call himself an anarchist with pride. He was influenced by Warren (whom he called his ‘old friend and master’), but he further developed American individualist anarchism by drawing on Proudhon, Bakunin and Stirner. He was, a friend declared, ‘an all-round man — Atheist, Anarchist, Egoist, Free Lover — not, like so many reformers, radical in one direction and reactionary in another’.
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Although he was not an original thinker, Tucker was the most influential in spreading anarchism in America, arguing that it was not a system of philosophy but ‘the fundamental principle in the science of political and social life’.
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In 1878 he founded the
Radical Review
and, three years later,
Liberty
, which adapted from Proudhon the rubric: ‘Not the Daughter but the Mother of Liberty’. It became the best anarchist periodical in English, celebrated for its aggressive and controversial tone. Tucker not only made pioneering translations of Proudhon and Bakunin into English, but published a whole series of books on anarchism and related topics over thirty years. Bernard Shaw admired him as a controversialist, and himself contributed to
Liberty.
Walt Whitman, who subscribed to
Liberty
, also said of its editor: ‘I love him: he is plucky to the bone.’
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Despite his hostility to Tucker’s individualism, Kropotkin still applauded his criticism of the State as ‘very searching’ and his defence of the individual as ‘very powerful’.
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Tucker came from a family of wealthy liberals and radical Protestants in New Bedford, inheriting from his parents their Painite individualism and formality of dress and manner. His experience of the best qualities of Quakerism made him confident that people could govern themselves without
elected leaders, each following his or her light of reason in a community of fellowship. He went on to develop
laissez-faire
liberalism to its extreme and to express the aspirations of the small entrepreneur. ‘The most perfect Socialism’, he insisted, ‘is possible only on the condition of the most perfect individualism.’
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When he published his own translation of Bakunin’s
God and the State
, Tucker advertised it as ‘Paine’s “Age of Reason” and “Rights of Man” Consolidated and Improved’, a novel way of grafting Left Hegelianism onto the American individual tradition of natural rights.

Although personally timid and a man of thought rather than of action, Tucker was no less iconoclastic than Bakunin. His greatest fear was of inconsistency, and a friend described him as ‘a glittering icicle of logic’.
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He called for the destruction of every monopoly, including that worst of all monopolies and the mainstay of all privilege — the State. He rejected government as an invasion of the individual’s private sphere, and the State as a monopoly of government in a particular area. All government, he recognized, is based on aggression and therefore tyrannical. By contrast, anarchism is ‘the doctrine that all the affairs of men shall be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished’. Anarchists are simply ‘unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats’ who believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least, and that which governs least is no government at all.’
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Even the police function of protecting persons and property could be done by voluntary associations and co-operatives for self-defence. Tucker was confident that the powers of every individual would be limited by the exercise of the equal rights of all others and equal liberty would eventually prevail. The fundamental law of social expediency for anarchism, he claimed, is ‘the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty’.
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No code of morals should be imposed on the individual. In Tucker’s view, the only moral law is ‘“Mind your own business” and the only crime is interference with another’s business’.
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Not surprisingly, Tucker asserted that anarchists should not only be utilitarians pursuing their own self-interest but egoists in the fullest sense. Yet he did not deny that individuals should influence their neighbours through the influence of reason, persuasion, example, public opinion, social ostracism and the influence of unhampered economic forces.

Although Tucker recognized that property is a social convention and labour is the only basis of the right of ownership, he believed strongly in competition and called anarchism ‘consistent Manchesterism’.
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He followed Warren in wanting prices to be fixed by costs of production and measured in labour time. But where Warren looked to ‘equitable’ individuals to work out the cost, Tucker relied on their self-interested conduct in a free market (that is, one which has abolished money, tariffs and
patents). He also believed that absolute equality is not desirable: people should enjoy the results of their superiority of muscle or brain. But while retaining private property and admiring certain aspects
of laissez-faire
capitalism, he was critical of the ‘system of violence, robbery, and fraud that the plutocrats call “law and order”’.
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Although Emma Goldman complained that his attitude to the communist anarchists was ‘charged with insulting rancor’, he remained a left- rather than a right-wing libertarian.
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Like Godwin, Tucker looked to the gradual spread of enlightenment to bring about change. He made a plea for non-resistance to become a universal rule. But he distinguished between domination and defence, and accepted that resistance to encroachment from others is acceptable. Like Warren, he considered the use of violence as justified in enforcing contracts, and argued that individuals and groups have the right to any violence, including the use of capital punishment, in order to defend themselves. As Kropotkin observed, such a position opened the way to re-introduce in the name of ‘defence’ all the traditional functions of the State.
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Tucker saw like Proudhon the need for alternative institutions like schools, co-operative banks and trade unions, and hoped that, ultimately, massive civil disobedience and general strikes would bring about the collapse of the State. But he would refuse to be drawn on the exact nature of a free society beyond saying that natural patterns of organization would emerge. It was absurd, he argued, to predict ‘A Complete Representation of Universal Progress for the Balance of Eternity’.
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Tucker was undoubtedly more effective in his critique of the State than in his alternative proposals. Indeed, he once confessed that it was easier to demonstrate why he was not anything else than to say why he was an anarchist: ‘Archy once denied, only Anarchism can be affirmed. It is a matter of logic.’
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While he kept individualist anarchism alive whilst anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism were growing in strength, he became increasingly disillusioned. He spent the last thirty years of his life in silence in France, where his family lived an anarchistic life. His only daughter described him as a ‘born nonteacher’ who always considered himself right.
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He endorsed, with Kropotkin, the cause of the Allies in the First World War, being anti-German from the outset. Still uncertain whether humanity had yet discovered the path to the goal of anarchy, he died in 1939 aged eighty-five.

Although individualism dominated American indigenous anarchism, there was a communitarian tradition which was largely of Christian inspiration. Adin Ballou, for instance, had sought freedom with community in the
1830s. Admired later by Tolstoy, he insisted that the absolute authority of God must guide the life of humanity: ‘The
will of man
(human government) whether in one, a thousand, or many millions, has no intrinsic authority — no moral supremacy — and no rightful claim to the allegiance of man. It has no original, inherent authority whatsoever over the conscience …’
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While divine government is nurtured by persuasion and love, human government depends on cunning and physical force, expressed in its corruption, jails and wars. The Christian should therefore behave as though the millennium had already come, and refuse to support the secular authority by voting, legislating or fighting. In place of human government, Ballou proposed a ‘neighbourhood society by voluntary association’ like town meetings, in which public opinion would be enough to reform the disorderly individual. He tried to realize these ideals in the model community of Hopedale.