Demanding the Impossible

I had no Occasion of bribing, flattering or pimping, to procure the Favour of any great Man, or his Minion. I wanted no Fence against Fraud or Oppression: Here was neither Physician to destroy my Body, nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune: No Informer to watch my Words and Actions, or forge Accusations against me for Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, Housebreakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, Spleneticks, tedious Talkers, Controvertists, Ravishers, Murderers, Robbers, Virtuoso’s; no Leaders or Followers of Party and Faction; no Encouragers to Vice, by Seducement or Examples: No Dungeon, Axes, Gibbets, Whipping-posts, or Pillories.9

At the same time, there are some strongly negative aspects to this anarchist utopia. The unit of society is a strongly patriarchal family and the economy is based on the labour of the Yahoos. The rational Houyhnhnms have no human warmth or passion and are strongly ascetic. They have no love in the sexual sense, or partiality for their own children. The economy is that of the stone age. No apparent interest exists in science and technology: there are no wheels or metals in the land. It would even seem that yet again Swift was being slyly ironic in presenting the Houyhnhnms as supposedly ideal beings. But it remains the case that when Gulliver returns home to England he comes to prefer the smell and company of his horse to his family, and tries to apply the ‘excellent lessons of virtue’ he had learnt among the Houyhnhnms.

George Orwell claims that Swift was intermittently ‘a kind of anarchist’ and that Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels is a picture of an anarchistic society. But for him it also illustrates the totalitarian tendency which he claims is explicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of society. The only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion which can be less tolerant than any system of law: ‘When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not”, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason”, he is under continuous pressure to make himself behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.’

It certainly is the case that the Houyhnhnms are unanimous on almost all subjects, have no word for ‘opinion’ in their language, and express no difference of sentiments in their conversations. But Orwell goes too far in suggesting that this is ‘the highest stage of totalitarian organization’.10 He uses the example of the Houyhnhnm society to attack anarchism and pacifism in general. Yet the Houyhnhnms do not persecute dissidents or force people to conform in thought or action.

Orwell’s point about the potential tyranny of reason is more telling. In the rational society of the Houyhnhnms there would be no room for personal idiosyncrasies or bizarre tastes; no one would be able to stick out their tongue or tell their neighbours to go to hell. But Orwell overlooks the point that unlike Yahoo humanity, the Houyhnhnms are genuinely governed by reason. For them, there is no conflict between reason and passion, conscience and desire. Since truth for them is universal and self-evident it inevitably happens that as purely rational beings they recognize it and act accordingly. Godwin was to make a similar point at the end of the century.

Swift’s position is undoubtedly ambivalent and paradoxical. He is a Tory Dean who appears at times as a rational anarchist. The son of English settlers in Ireland, he called for Irish economic independence. He despised the human race and yet was at great pains to improve it. Orwell catches the ambivalence of his position when he calls him ‘a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible’.11 Nevertheless, Swift’s picture of the country of the Houyhnhnms is genuinely libertarian, however flawed. Its view of the ‘state of nature’ in which spontaneous order prevails without government may well be more accurate than Hoboes’ romantic myth of universal war. It is for this reason that the first great anarchist thinker William Godwin described the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms as ‘one of the most virtuous, liberal and enlightened examples of human genius’.12

Edmund Burke

Since most literary historians cannot understand the feasibility of anarchism, they invariably suggest that works by great authors advocating a free society must be ironic. This is the case with Swift, and Edmund Burke. Burke has been best remembered for his attack on all innovation in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), but it is often forgotten that as a young man he was a liberal Whig who supported American Independence and advocated economic reform. In addition, he wrote A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) which offers one of the most powerful arguments for anarchist society made in the eighteenth century. His starting-point, which he shares with the Taoists and the French philosophes, is a confidence in nature which ‘if left to itself were the best and surest Guide’.13

Human beings in a state of nature originally lived ‘with their Brethren of the other Kinds in much equality’ and were wholly vegetarian. In the ‘natural’ society in which they lived, they followed their ‘natural Appetities and Instincts, and not in any positive institution’. Governed by reason, they had no need for external government: ‘We begin to think and to act from Reason and Nature alone.’14 Unfortunately, human beings invented artificial rules to guide nature. They created a political society held together by laws which became a violation of nature and a constraint on the mind. Since religion and government are closely connected, once government is considered to be necessary, it draws in an artificial religion and ‘Ecclesiastical Tyranny under the Name of Church Government’.15

Political regulations, Burke further suggests, create social conflict, and political society is responsible for war since in the state of nature it is impossible to form armies; thus ‘All Empires have been cemented in Blood.’ The artificial division of mankind into separate groups further produces hatred and dissension. And while in the state of nature man acquires wealth in proportion to his labours, in the state of artificial society with government it is an invariable law that ‘those who labour most, enjoy the fewest things; and that those who labour not at all, have the Greatest Number of Enjoyments.’16

Burke examines the different forms of government – despotism, aristocracy, and democracy – but finds them all wanting. Although democracy is preferable, he argues that all governments must frequently infringe justice to support themselves. He therefore draws the anarchist conclusion: ‘In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! The Thing itself is the Abuse!’ Rejecting all artificial laws and the alliance of Church and State, Burke declares at the end of his eloquent and penetrating work: ‘We should renounce their “Dreams of Society”, together with their Visions of Religion, and vindicate ourselves into perfect liberty.’17

When Burke became a Tory after the French Revolution and thundered against all improvement, he disowned his Vindication of Natural Society as a youthful folly. Most commentators have followed suit, suggesting that he was trying to parody the manner of Bolingbroke. But Godwin, while recognizing Burke’s ironic intention, took him seriously. He acknowledged that most of his own arguments against political society in An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) may be found in Burke’s work—‘a treatise, in which the evils of the existing political institutions are displayed with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence’.18 In the following century, the radical secularist George Holyoake reprinted Burke’s work under the tide The Inherent Evils of all State Governments Demonstrated (1858). The editor declared enthusiastically that it was ‘one of the soberest productions ever-written’ and referred in an appendix to the anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Josiah Warren for further clarification of Burke’s ‘great truth that State governments will never give real freedom to their subjects’.19

Thomas Paine

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 sparked off one of the greatest political debates in British history. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) fell as a bombshell amongst radicals like Thomas Paine, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake. Wollstonecraft made one of the first replies to Burke, in her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and then went on to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which established her reputation as the first great feminist. She made a powerful plea that mind has no gender and that women should become independent and educated beings. But although she attacked hereditary distinctions and economic inequality, she still looked to a reformed government to protect natural rights.

Paine also used the language of natural rights in his celebrated Rights of Man (1791–2), but his libertarian sensibility took him to the borders of anarchism. The son of a Quaker staymaker of Thetford, Norfolk, he had tried his trade in London before becoming an excise-man in Lewes, Sussex. His Quaker background undoubtedly encouraged his plain style and egalitarian sentiments, as well as his confidence in the ‘inner light’ of reason and conscience to lead him to truth and virtue. He liked to boast that ‘I neither read books, nor studied other people’s opinions. I thought for myself.’20 He believed that man was fundamentally good, and saw the world as a garden for enjoyment rather than as a valley of tears. Above all, he valued personal liberty: ‘Independence is my happiness,’ he wrote in his maturity, ‘and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’21

Paine was a man of his industrial age. He adopted Newton’s view of the world as a machine governed by universal laws. Applying the same analytical method to society and nature, he felt that both could be refashioned according to reason. Just as he spent many years designing an iron bridge, so he tried to redesign society on the same simple and rational principles. He was a mechanical and social engineer: ‘What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers’, he wrote, ‘may be applied to Reason and Liberty: “Had me”, he said, “a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.”’22

Dismissed from service in Lewes, Paine decided to try his luck in the American colonies. On his arrival, he rapidly threw himself into the social and political struggles of the day. He wrote articles in a direct and robust style which advocated female emancipation and condemned African slavery and cruelty to animals. In 1775, he called eloquently for an end to the legal and social discrimination against women:

Even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy [women are] constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods; robbed of freedom and will by the laws; slaves of opinion which rules them with absolute sway and construes the slightest appearances into guilt; surrounded on all sides by judges who are at once tyrants and their seducers … for even with changes in attitudes and laws, deeply engrained and oppressing social prejudices remain which confront women minute by minute, day by day.23

It was however only in the following year that Paine came to prominence with his pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the first work to argue for the complete independence of the thirteen colonies from England. He advocated a people’s war to throw off the English yoke and hoped America would become a land of freedom, thereby offering an inspiration to the peoples living under European tyrannies. His internationalism and love of freedom come across in his rousing call:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyrrany, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is over-run with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her.—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.24

The experience of the American Revolution had a marked effect on Paine. He was deeply impressed by the orderly nature and decorum of American society after the dissolution of the colonial government before the establishment of a new constitution. In his famous opening to Common Sense, Paine like later anarchists distinguished between society and government. He felt that they are not only different, but have different origins:

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worse state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver.25

But despite the example of the American colonists organizing their own affairs peacefully without government, Paine believed that it was necessary for the people to make a social contract in order to set up a minimal government on the secure basis of a constitution which would guarantee the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

After the successful outcome of the American War of Independence, Paine returned to England with hopes of building his iron bridge. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 renewed his revolutionary fervour and Burke’s apostasy led him to write his Rights of Man. It was, he recognized, ‘an age of Revolutions, in which every-thing may be looked for’.26

Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, had maintained that government and society are complex, fragile and organic entities based on the wisdom of ancestors and could only be interfered with at great peril. He dismissed the ‘clumsy subtlety’ of a priori political theorizing (which he had indulged in boldly in his Vindication) and suggested that if scholars no longer enjoyed the patronage of the nobility and clergy, learning would be ‘trodden down under the hoofs of the swinish multitude’.27

Paine spoke on behalf of and to the ‘swinish multitude’, rejecting Burke’s apology for ‘the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’.28 He was not a particularly original thinker and adopted the liberal commonplaces of eighteenth-century political theory developed from Locke. But he developed them in a more libertarian and democratic direction. If what he said was not particularly new, how he said it undoubtedly was. Where the accepted language of political discourse was elegant and refined, Paine chose to write in a direct, robust, and simple style which all educated working people could understand. He refused to be ‘immured in the Bastille of a word’ and threatened the dominant culture by his style as well as the ruling powers by his arguments.29

The First Part of the Rights of Man principally consists of a history of the French Revolution and of a comparison between the French and British constitutions. Paine is mainly concerned here to assert the rights of man against arbitrary and hereditary power. He bases his doctrine of natural rights on the alleged original equality and unity of humanity and argues that they include ‘intellectual rights’ and ‘all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness’.30 But Paine suggests like Locke that in the state of nature the individual does not have the power to enjoy these rights in security. He therefore recommends that individuals deposit their natural rights in the ‘common stock’ of civil society and set up a government which will protect them. The government itself has no rights as such and must be considered only as a delegated ‘trust’ which the citizens can always dissolve or resume for themselves. The only authority on which a government has a right to exist is on the authority of the people. The end of government is to ensure ‘the good of all’ or ‘general happiness’.31 As for engendering the Church with the State, as Burke recommended, Paine dismisses such a connection as ‘a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying and not of breeding up’.32

While these arguments were part of the common eighteenth-century liberal defence of government, in Part II of the Rights of Man Paine broke new theoretical ground which brought him to the verge of anarchism. At the end of Part I he acknowledged: ‘Man is not the enemy of Man, but through the medium of a false system of government.’33 He now returns to his distinction between society and government made at the opening of Common Sense and insists that:

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of a civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connexion which holds it together … Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.34

In a Rousseauist vein, Paine further maintains that man is naturally good but depraved by governments: ‘man, were he not corrupted by governments, is naturally the friend of man.’ Human nature therefore is not itself vicious.

Not only is a great part of what is called government ‘mere imposition’, but everything that governments can usefully do has been performed by the common consent of society without government. Indeed, ‘The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.’35 Looking back on the riots and tumult in English history, Paine argued, like modern anarchists, that they had not proceeded from ‘the want of government, but that government was itself the generating cause; instead of consolidating society it divided it … and engendered discontents which otherwise would not have existed.’36 But Paine does not look backward to some mythical golden age of social harmony, rather forward to a more civilized society. He suggests as a general principle that ‘the more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself.’37 Since all the great laws of society are laws of nature, it follows for Paine that civilized life requires few laws.

But unlike his contemporary William Godwin, Paine did not carry his bold reasoning to the anarchist conclusion that government is always an unnecessary evil. He felt as long as the natural wants of man were greater than his individual powers government would be necessary to ensure freedom and security. He therefore proposed a minimal government – no more than a ‘national association’—with a few general laws to protect the natural rights of man. Its end is limited and simple, to secure ‘the good of all, as well individually as collectively’. Paine had a definite preference for republican and representative government based on majority rule, and he wished to anchor it firmly in a constitution. He even praised the American Constitution as ‘the political bible of the state’.38

By calling on the British people to follow the American and French to form a new social contract and set up a limited government based on a constitution, Paine ultimately departs from the anarchist tradition. At the end of the Rights of Man, he even gives a distributive role to government by proposing that it helps to educate the young and support the old through a progressive inheritance tax.

While Paine has been called the father of English socialism, he was in fact a staunch advocate of business enterprise: universal and free commerce would extirpate war. He never advocated economic equality and thought private property would always remain unequal. His capitalist way of thinking led him to defend representative government in terms of a limited company with citizen shareholders: ‘Every man is a proprietor in government, and considers it a necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest, because it affects his property.’39 In his last major work, Agrarian Justice (1797), he did not call, like his contemporary Thomas Spence, for the nationalization and common ownership of land but for a society of small landowners to be achieved through a land tax of ten per cent. Paine’s final vision was of a representative and republican democracy of independent property owners in which every citizen has an equal opportunity to develop his talents.

Paine developed liberal theory to the threshold of anarchism but he did not cross over. In fact, he was the greatest spokesman for bourgeois radicalism, exhorting the rising middle class to take over the State from the monarchy and aristocracy. But, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, he recognized the ability of people to govern themselves and thereby contributed to the pool of ideas and values out of which anarchism and socialism were to spring.

PART THREE Great Libertarians

Government is begotten of aggression, by aggression.

HERBERT SPENCER

I call it the State where everyone, good or bad, is a poison-drinker: the State where universal slow suicide is called – life.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

That government is best which governs not at all.

HENRY THOREAU

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

OSCAR WILDE

11 French Libertarians

IN FRANCE THE DIFFERENCE between libertarian and anarchist was not clearly defined and the terms were often used interchangeably. De Sade and Fourier were both libertarian in the sense that they wished to expand human freedom, but they were not always anarchist in wanting to abolish the State completely. De Sade for a time during the French Revolution entertained the idea of a society without law, although in the end called for a minimal State. Fourier was one of the most original Utopian thinkers of the nineteenth century and his vision of a free society inspired many later anarchists and anticipated social ecology.

Marquis de Sade

The spirit of free enquiry sparked off by the Enlightenment led to increasingly bold questioning of existing social and moral laws in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The boldest thinker of them all was the Marquis de Sade. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade of course is remembered for his perversity, and sadism is associated with an abnormal pleasure in cruelty. In fact, the picture of de Sade as a monster is largely the work of prudish and puritanical moralists who have never read his books. The imaginary portraits of de Sade as a dashing Casanova are as inaccurate as his reputation: he was a plump little man with fair hair, blue eyes and a tiny mouth.