Demanding the Impossible

The Ranters in fact went beyond the Puritan sexual revolution which sought to replace property marriage by a monogamous partnership. Coppe declared ‘give over thy stinking family duties’, argued that fornication and adultery were no sin, and advocated a community of women.44 The Ranters asserted the right of the natural man to behave naturally.

Without birth control, this call for freedom tended to be for men only. Nevertheless, many women, who had formed an important part of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, were quick to accept the arguments of the radicals who maintained that the soul knows no difference of sex. The Quaker George Fox asked: ‘May not the spirit of Christ speak in the female as well as in the male?’45 Winstanley had insisted that ‘Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love.’46 The Ranters however advocated and practised free love and refused to be possessive; they were notorious for their celebration of wine, women and song. Coppe felt that sex had a divine power: ‘by wanton kisses, kissing hath been confounded; and external kisses, have been made the fiery chariots, to mount me swiftly into the bosom of him whom the soul loves, [his excellent Majesty, the King of glory].’ 47

The Ranters offered a unique opportunity for women to become independent and voluntary beings with a right to sensual pleasure. Not surprisingly, the Ranter teaching which seemed to offer such a lively and joyful affirmation of life and freedom attracted many women. A description of a female Ranter in the hostile tract The Routing of the Ranters (1650) conjures up wonderfully their Dionysian exuberance:

she speaks highly in commendation of those husbands that give liberty to their wives, and will freely give consent that she should associate her self with any other of her fellow creatures, which she shall make choice of; she commends the Organ, Viol, Symbal and Tonges in Charterhouse-Lane to be heavenly musick[;] she tosseth her glasses freely, and concludeth there is no heaven but the pleasures she injoyeth on earth, she is very familiar at the first sight, and danceth the Canaries at the sound of a hornpipe.48

The most celebrated Ranter was Abiezer Coppe who was born in Warwick in 1619. He left university at the outbreak of the Civil War and became an Anabaptist preacher in the Warwick area. He felt he was at one with humanity, especially the wretched and the poor. He recounts how he once met a strange, deformed man on the road, and his conscience – the ‘wel-favoured harlot’—tempted him to give this man all he had, take off his hat and bow seven times to the beggar. Coppe was no elitist, and felt the greatest privilege was to be able to give and to share.

His first important work Some Sweet Sips of Some Spirituall Wine (1649) was extremely critical of formal Christianity. But it was A Fiery Flying Roll (bound together with, A Second Fiery Flying Route), dated 1649 but published in 1650, within a year of the execution of the king, which brought him notoriety. Subtitled ‘A Word from the Lord to all the Great Ones of the Earth’, in it Coppe not only attacked organized religion but presented a vision of a purged society in which property was to be held in common. Where the Levellers had excluded servants and others from their notion of equality, Coppe extended it to embrace all men and women. Like the Diggers, he also advocated a form of voluntary communism which echoes the early Apostolic Church and the visions of John Ball: ‘give, give, give, give up your houses, horses, goods, gold, Lands, give up, account nothing your own, have ALL THINGS common’.49

Like most Ranters, Coppe was a pacifist, rejecting ‘sword levelling, or digging-levelling’.50 He insists that he never drew a sword or shed one drop of blood: ‘we (holily) scorne to fight for any thing, we had as live be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’th market place, and account these as good actions as taking the poor abused, enslived plough-mans money from him.’51 Nevertheless, he warned the wealthy and powerful: ‘Kings, Princes, Lords, great ones, must bow to the poorest Peasants; rich men must stoop to poor rogues, or else they’l rue for it.’52 He was adamant that it was necessary to chop at one blow ‘the neck of horrid pride, murder, malice and tyranny, &c.’ so that ‘parity, equality, community’ might bring about on earth ‘universall love, universal] peace, and perfect freedome’.53 Coppe joined a group of Ranters who believed that all humanity was one and that we should recognize our brotherhood and sisterhood. He joyously declared the death of sin and called for a life beyond good and evil: ‘Be no longer so horridly, hellishly, impudently, arrogantly wicked, as to judge what is sinne, what not … sinne and trangression is finisht, its a meere riddle.’54

Coppe was not content to preach merely but turned himself into a surrealistic work of art. He became a master of happenings. In London, he would charge at carriages of the great, gnashing his teeth and proclaiming the day of the Lord had come. He wanted to make his listeners’ ears ‘tingle’. But it was always with a subversive aim: ‘ I am confounding, plaguing, tormenting nice, demure, barren Mical with Davids unseemly carriage, by skipping, leaping, dancing like one of the fools; vile, base fellowes, shamelessely, basely, and uncovered too, before handmaids.’55 His supreme confidence was based on his conviction that his message came from ‘My most Excellent Majesty [in me] who is universall love, and whose service is perfect freedorne’.56

It was all too much for the government and the Protestant Establishment. It was not enough merely to dismiss Coppe as mad; he and his fellow Ranters posed a real threat to Cromwell’s rule. The publication of the Fiery Flying Rolls prompted the government to pass an Act of Parliament against ‘Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions’. They were condemned by Parliament to be publicly burned. Coppe was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate prison. When brought before the Committees of Examination, he apparently feigned madness, talking to himself, and ‘throwing nut-shells and other things about the room’.57 Obliged to recant he issued in 1651 A Remonstrance of the sincere and zealous Protestation and Copps Return to the wayes of Truth. Written in his best ranting manner, Coppe replied to his accusations, although he remained true to his social message.58 The Wings of the Fiery Flying Roll were not entirely clipped. While denying the belief that there is no sin, he declares that all men are equally sinful in the eyes of God. Again, he reasserts that he will call nothing he has his own: ‘As for community, I own none but that Apostolical, saint-like Community, spoken of in the Scriptures … I own none other, long for none other, but the glorious (Rom. 8) liberty of the Sons of God. Which God will hasten in its time.’59

For all their enthusiasm and originality, the Ranters never developed into a coherent or organized movement They mainly formed loose associations or affinity groups, probably with a dozen or score of people. They drew support mainly from the lower strata of the urban poor who shared the aspirations of John Ball. The Ranters became quite numerous for a time, especially in London, and at their height there was no part of England which did not feel their influence. But their leaders were picked off in 1650 and 1651; five years later they were in serious decline. But their influence lingered on and was still strong enough in 1676 for the respectable Quaker Robert Barclay to publish an attack on The Anarchy of the Ranters and other Libertines. Fox also reported that Ranters were at work in New England in 1668.

The exact nature and influence of the Ranters is still open to dispute. The term ‘Ranter’ like anarchist today was often used in a pejorative way to describe anyone with extreme or dangerous opinions; Ranterism came to represent ‘any anti-social manifestations of the light within’.60 To a large extent, the image of the Ranter as an immoral rascal was developed by sensationalist pamphleteers working on behalf of established Protestantism who wanted to suppress its ‘lunatic fringe’. In a similar vein, the Marxist historian A. L. Morton called them ‘confused mystical anarchists’ who drew support from ‘the defeated and declassed’ groups after Cromwell had crushed the Levellers.61 But men like Coppe and Clarkson were far from despairing and for a time after the execution of the king it seemed possible in England that true levelling could lead to a genuine commonwealth of free and equal individuals. In the event, as in so many later revolutions, the military dictator Cromwell crushed the extreme left which had helped to bring him to power.

For all their mystical language, the Ranters expressed a wonderful sense of exuberant irreverence and earthy nonconformity. They are not only a link in the chain that runs between Joachim of Fiore and William Blake, but from peasant communism to modern anarcho-communism. They looked back to the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit of the Middle Ages and anticipated the counter-culture of this century.

9 The French Renaissance and Enlightenment

ONE OF THE CONSEQUENCES of the Renaissance, with its interest in antiquity, and the Reformation, with its stress on the right to private judgement, was a revival of anti-authoritarian tendencies in secular matters. Of all the countries in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, it was France that produced the most powerful libertarian thinkers. This was doubtless a response to the centralizing tendencies of the French monarchy and the growth of a strong Nation-State.

François Rabelais

The most colourful and rumbustious French libertarian was the incomparable Francois Rabelais. An ex-Franciscan and Benedictine monk who practised and taught medicine, Rabelais came to hate monks and scholasticism. In his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) he delighted in satirizing the religious, political, legal and social institutions and practices of sixteenth-century France. The work contains a wonderful mixture of bawdy humour, sharp satire and zest for life.

At the same time, there is a serious side to Rabelais. He adopted a form of naturalistic optimism which led him to anarchist conclusions. He believed that human nature is fundamentally good and only corrupted by our education and environment. He therefore called for the full development of our faculties ‘because free people, well-born and well-educated, keeping good company, have by nature an instinct and incentive which always encourage them to virtuous acts, and hold them back from vice.’1 It follows that if people are left to themselves their ‘honour’ or moral sense is sufficient to govern their behaviour without the need for any external rules or laws.

Rabelais gave flesh and blood to these abstract principles in Book I of Gargantua and Pantagntel (1534) where he describes the founding of the abbey of Thélème. Gargantua gives the abbey to Friar John (Frère Jean des Entommeures: Friar John of the Hearty Eaters) for his help in the war against the power-mad despot Picrochole, who has a ‘bitter bile’ (the meaning of his name in Greek). Friar John has all the faults of monks but none of their vices. He is ignorant, dirty and gluttonous, but also brave, frank and lusty. His abbey is built like a magnificent and luxurious country house without walls, the very opposite of a convent or monastery. Its name Thélème in Greek means ‘will’ or ‘pleasure’. The gifted and well-bred members are free to leave whenever they choose. There is no chastity, poverty and obedience: they can marry, be rich, and live in perfect freedom. They have no need for laws and lawyers, politics, kings and princes, religion, preachers and monks, money and usurers. All their life is spent ‘not in laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure’. The only rule is ‘fais ce que voudras!’ (Do what you will!).

Rabelais’s ideal commonwealth anticipates the exuberant licence of Fourier’s phalansteries in which the satisfaction of all desire is considered positive and healthy. But it is primarily a Utopia for the new aristocrats of the Renaissance like Rabelais himself who looked to a society based on intelligence and knowledge rather than on power and wealth. His rebellion remains an individual and imaginative one and does not translate itself into action against the structure of society. While he opposed tyranny in all its forms, in the real world Rabelais hoped for nothing more than a peaceful and benevolent monarchy. He might have called for the freedom of noble men and women in his chivalric Utopia, but it was not until the eighteenth century that philosophes asserted the natural nobility of all free men and women. Nevertheless, Rabelais, for his exuberant and joyful celebration of freedom, deserves an honourable mention in any history of libertarian thought.

Etienne de la Boétie

Unknown to Rabelais, there was another writer in France at the same time asking why free-born people should so readily accept their servitude. His name was Etienne de la Boétie, and he was born in 1530, the son of a judge with powerful connections in Church and State. He went on to study law and became a counsellor in the Bordeaux parliament (assembly of lawyers) where he called for religious toleration for the persecuted Protestant Huguenots. A poet and classical scholar, he also was a friend of the great humanist Montaigne. In his short life, la Boétie appeared a devout member of the Catholic Church and a loyal subject to the king but as young man he wrote sometime between 1552 and 1553 a Discours de la servitude volontaire, one of the great libertarian classics. He undoubtedly admired all his life those classical writers who had defended liberty in ancient Greece and Rome. After his death in 1563, Montaigne, who was his literary executor, was too prudent and timid to publish the manuscript, although he admitted it was written ‘in honour of liberty against tyrants’. He dismissed it as a youthful folly, a mere literary exercise, yet he admitted that la Boétie had believed in every word of it and would have preferred to be born in the liberty of Venice than in France.

The first full version of the essay appeared in Holland in 1576 and was used as propaganda by the Huguenots against the Catholic regime. It went largely unnoticed until the eighteenth century when it was read by Rousseau and reprinted at the beginning of the French Revolution. Since then it has been recognized as a minor classic of political theory for asking the fundamental question of political obligation: why should people submit to political authority or government?

La Boéne’s answer contains not only a powerful defence of freedom but his bold reasoning led him to conclude that there is no need for government at all. It is only necessary for humanity to wish that government would disappear in order for them to find themselves free and happy once again. People however choose to be voluntary slaves: ‘liberty alone men do not want, not for any other reason, it seems, except that if they wanted it, they would have it. It is as if they refuse to have this fine acquisition, only because it is too easy to obtain.’2

Although the style is rhetorical and repetitive, it is possible to discern three stages in la Boétie’s argument. In the first part he argues that government exists because people let themselves be governed, and dissolves when obedience ends. In the next part he asserts that liberty is a natural instinct and a goal, and slavery is not a law of nature but merely a force of habit. Finally, it is shown that government is maintained by those who have an interest in its rule.

La Boétie bases his case on natural right theory. He believes that ‘if we lived with the rights that nature has given us and with the lessons it teaches us, we would naturally obey our parents, be subjects to reason, and serfs of nobody’.3 There is simply no point discussing whether liberty is natural since it is self-evident; one cannot keep anyone in servitude without harming them. This is even true of animals, whether they be elephants or horses.

Although he does not accept the social contract theory of government, he suggests that people do behave as if there were a ‘contract’ to obey their rulers. But since their obedience is voluntary, they are equally able to act as if there were no contract, and thus disobey their rulers. The crucial point is that the people are the source of all political power, and they should choose to allocate this power to rulers or to remove it as they see fit. As such, la Boétie clarifies the nature of political obligation and develops the notion of popular sovereignty.

In his essay, he celebrates that ‘liberty which is always such a pleasant and great good, that once lost, all evils follow, and even the goods which remain after it, lose entirely their taste and savour, corrupted by servitude’.4 He then condemns tyrants and bad princes in swelling rhetoric full of classical allusions. In his view there are three types of tyrant: those who possess a kingdom through the choice of the people; those by force of arms; and those by hereditary succession. Although he thinks the first kind of tyrant is the most bearable, he nevertheless believes that all three types have the same effect: they swallow people up and hold them in servitude. And once enslaved, people forget their freedom so quickly and profoundly that ‘it seems impossible that they will awake and have it back, serving so freely and gladly that one would say, to see them, that they have not lost their liberty, but won their servitude’.5

The principal reason for this voluntary servitude according to la Boétie is custom: ‘the first reason why men serve voluntarily is because they are born serfs and are brought up as such.’6 The support and foundation of tyranny moreover is not the force of arms but rather the self-interest of a group of people who find domination profitable: ‘they want to serve in order to have goods’.7 The result is that ‘these wretches see the treasures of the tyrant shine and look in amazement at the rays of his boldness; and, attracted by this light, they draw near, and do not see that they put themselves in the flame which can only burn them.’8 But there is a way out. Just as people give power to their rulers, they can take it back. Although he does not say as much, the whole drift of la Boétie’s essay is to imply the need for political disobedience.9

Not long after the publication of Machiavelli’s handbook for unscrupulous statecraft The Prince (1532), la Boétie brilliantly demonstrated the economic and psychological grounds for voluntary servitude. Human beings are born free and yet put chains on themselves and their children. They could cast them off if they so wished, but they do not. As a result, voluntary slaves make more tyrants in the world than tyrants make slaves. Montaigne rightly recognized the subversive message of la Boétie’s essay – and wrongly tried to suppress it.

This highly original work does not easily fit into any one tradition of political thought. Its analysis of political power lay the groundwork for the concept of civil disobedience, and as such it can take an honoured place within the pacifist tradition. Emerson knew of it and wrote a poem to its author. Tolstoy was the first important anarchist to recognize the importance of the essay and translated it into Russian. Max Nettlau is correct to include la Boétie in his list of early thinkers who envisaged a society without laws and government.10 Since then the anarchists Gustav Landauer, Rudolf Rocker, Bart de Ligt, and Nicolas Walter have all recognized its honourable place within any history of anarchist thought. More recently, it has also appealed to libertarians of the Right like Murray N. Rothbard who appreciate its emphasis on personal initiative and improvement.11 There can be no doubt that the Discours de la servitude volontaire reveals a profound anarchist sensibility and orientation.

Gabriel de Foigny

In France in the seventeenth century, the process of creating a nation out of the many regional communities gathered momentum. Louis XIV in particular struggled to unite the country in a strongly centralized State symbolized in the person of the monarch. He proudly announced: ‘L ’État, c’est moi’. But not all were impressed by his passion for luxury and war which led to the neglect of agriculture and the misery and ignorance of the peasants.

Since it was too dangerous to express radical views directly, libertarian thinkers used the device of an imaginary voyage to a Utopia to criticize existing society and suggest alternative institutions and practices. Gabriel de Foigny for one knew only too well how difficult it was to entertain radical ideas and to act independently. Born in Ardennes in 1630, he entered a monastery of the Order of the Cordeliers (Franciscans) and became a Catholic preacher. His unruly behaviour however led him to be unfrocked. He changed his religion and moved to Calvinist Geneva, but again he soon fell into difficulties with the authorities because of his penchant for girls and wine. On one occasion, he is said to have vomited in front of the altar while taking the service in a Temple. With little chance of becoming a solid French or Swiss citizen, he published anonymously in 1676 Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte de la Terre Australe, translated in a truncated version in 1693 as A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis. The work landed him in jail, although he was eventually released on indefinite bail.

It is easy to see why the authorities of Geneva should be disturbed. In his Utopia set in Australia, Foigny attacks all the foundations of religion. Although the inhabitants believe in God, they never mention him and spend their time in meditation rather than prayer. They are born free, reasonable and good and have as little need for religion as they do for government. They have no written laws and no rulers. Private property does not exist. Even sex amongst the ‘hermaphrodite’ Australians is no longer necessary and the family has no role. The imaginary traveller Jacques Sadeur, a hermaphrodite himself, never found out how they reproduced but reports:

I have only observed, that they loved one another with a cordial love, and that they never loved any one more than another. I can affirm I neither saw quarrel nor animosity amongst them. They know not how to distinguish between mine and thine and there is more perfect sincerity and disinterestment amongst them than exist between men and women in Europe.12

Education takes place in communal houses like monasteries from the age of two to thirty-five. They spend the first part of each day at school or in scientific research, the second part gardening, and the third part in public exercise. Since they only eat fruit, they have no need for agriculture beyond gardening, and since they wear no clothes and have little furniture there is no need for industry. The society is entirely egalitarian. As an Old Man explains to Jacques Sadeur: ‘we make a profession of being all alike, our glory consists in being all alike, and to be dignified with the same care, and in the same manner.’13

But the most interesting thing about Foigny is that he is the first utopian to conceive of a society without government. The Old Man expounds what might be called a philosophy of anarchism:

It was the Nature of Man to be born, and live free, and that therefore he could not be subjected without being despoiled of his nature … The subjection of one man in another was a subjection of the human Nature, and making a man a sort of slave to himself, which slavery implied such a contradiction and violence as was impossible to conceive. He added that the essence of man consisting in liberty, it would not be taken away without destroying him … This does not signify that he does not often do what others desire, but he does not do so because others compel or command him. The word of commandment is odious to him, he does what his reason dictates him to do; his reason is his law, his rule, his unique guide.14