Demanding the Impossible

14 American Libertarians

THERE IS A LONG TRADITION in North America of hostility to the State and defence of personal autonomy; the United States is after all the oldest liberal democracy in the world. The Protestant right of private judgement or conscience became a central part of American political culture, and formed the basis of the defence of freedom of thought and speech. It also accounts for the deeply ingrained sense of individualism in American society.

After the American War of Independence, the founding fathers of the new republic felt compelled to introduce government to protect private property and individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But they were keen to keep government interference to a minimum and adopted the principle of federation to spread political authority throughout the regions. Immediately after the Revolution, the Articles of Confederation established minimal government, libertarian and decentralized, although its powers were inexorably strengthened in the following decades.

The self-reliant settlers were well aware without reading Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776) that ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one’. They shared for the most part the maxim attributed to Thomas Jefferson: ‘That government is best which governs least.’ The principle has become a rallying-cry for libertarians ever since, although anarchists have added that the best government is that which governs not at all.

In the nineteenth century, American anarchism developed mainly in an individualist direction in the hands of Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. While they came close to anarchism, the writers Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau expressed most keenly the libertarian ideal. Their independent stance directly inspired later anarchists and their combination of ‘Transcendental Individualism’ with a search for a creative life close to nature finds echoes in the counter-culture and Green movements of the late-twentieth century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the elder guru of the Transcendentalists of New England. After Harvard University, he entered the ministry, only to abandon it and sail to Europe, where he became a friend of Carlyle. He returned to Massachusetts and was soon installed as ‘the Sage of Concord’, attracting a literary-philosophical coterie. At Concord, he developed his philosophy – relying on intuition as the only access to reality – in prose of uncommon lyricism. Believing in the ‘divine sufficiency of the individual’, he refused to accept the inevitability or objective existence of evil. Emerson based his libertarian vision on a belief that ‘reason is potentially perfect’ in everyone and that ‘a man contains all that is needful to his government within himself.1 Conscience moreover is sacrosanct and capable of leading us to moral truth. ‘Judge for yourself … reverence yourself, he taught. An inevitable inference of his doctrine was that each man should be a State in himself; we should develop our individual character as rational and moral beings rather than set up oppressive and superfluous State institutions. Indeed, in his essay on ‘Politics’ (1845), Emerson declared as a radical Jeffersonian:

the less government we have the better – the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual … To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State.2

He went on to advise Americans to ‘give up the government, without too solicitously inquiring whether roads can still be built, letters carried, and tide deeds secured when the government of force is at an end’.3 When in 1850 a fugitive slave bill was passed by Congress and supported by the President, he characteristically declared: ‘I will not obey it, by God!’ He once wrote the lines which the anarchist Benjamin Tucker was fond of quoting:

When the Church is social worth,

When the State-house the hearth,

Then the perfect state has come, —

The republican at home.

In place of government by force, Emerson proposed the popular assembly of a town meeting as the forum for decision-malting. It had served well in seventeenth-century new England, and could serve well again. But there were limits to Emerson’s libertarianism. Having freely accepted to be bound by the rules of a society, he believed that one had an obligation to obey them or else try and change them from within or withdraw. On these grounds, Emerson upheld the Harvard regulation for compulsory chapel.

Emerson’s social views were only a minor part of his Transcendental philosophy which stressed the unity of all things. Everything in this world is a microcosm of the universe and ‘the world globes itself in a drop of dew’. The universe is also ordered by a Supreme Mind or Over-Soul. Since man’s soul is identical with the Over-Soul, and human nature is divine, it follows that there is no need of external authority and tradition. Because there is a higher law in the universe, man does not need human law. The individual can therefore rely on his direct experience for guidance; hence Emerson’s motto ‘Trust thyself’.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was not a member of Emerson’s literary circle in Concord, but the Sage recognized him immediately as a kindred spirit. When the first edition of his rhapsodic book of poems Leaves of Grass (1855) appeared, he greeted Whitman ‘at the beginning of a great career’, and wished him ‘joy of ‘your free and brave thought’.4 After their meeting, Emerson went on to praise Whitman’s lawless nature.

Whitman had a completely different background from Emerson. He left school at eleven and held several odd jobs, but gradually began earning a living through printing and journalism. He became the editor of the Brooklyn Democrat paper Eagle, but was sacked for supporting the Freedom movement. He then founded his own paper the Freeman but it folded within a year. Little of his early writing anticipated the remarkable originality of his first volume of twelve untitled poems which became expanded in Leaves of Grass. Whitman intended his poetry, with its remarkable mixture of the earthy and the mystical, to be read by the working man and woman of America. Yet, apart from Emerson’s approval, it was not well received.

A strong democratic and egalitarian impetus and sensibility fire all Whitman’s work. He felt that the New World needed poems of ‘the democratic average and basic equality’.5 In ‘A Thought by the Roadside’, he wrote:

Of Equality – as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself – as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.6

At the same time, Whitman like Emerson was a great individualist. He sang a song of himself and offered an exposé of his own personality in his poems of freedom. But while he celebrated the sacredness of the self, he also praised the love of comrades. He therefore combined his love of comradeship with a strong sense of individuality; he wanted his poems to stress American individuality and assist it—‘not only because that is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, but as a counterpoise to the leveling; tendencies of Democracy’. It was the ambitious thought of his song to form ‘myriads of fully develop’d and enclosing individuals’.7

As a journalist, Whitman knew at first hand the corrupting nature of everyday politics. He also directly suffered at the hands of the State. He served as a nurse in the military hospitals of Washington during the Civil War and revealed his sympathy for the common soldier and his hatred of war in Drum-Taps (1865). Afterwards, he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior until the Secretary discovered he was there and dismissed him as the author of a Vulgar’ book.

Whitman therefore had good reason to consider politicians and judges as ‘scum floating atop of the waters’ of society—‘as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol.8 He also advised the working men and women of America thus:

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, no state, city of this earth, ever afterwards resumes its liberty.9

Whitman spoke on behalf of most anarchists when he asked ‘What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?’ But although a radically democratic conception of society emerges from his poetry, he did not offer any clear or definite vision of a free society.

Henry David Thoreau

This cannot be said of Henry David Thoreau, whom Whitman admired deeply. ‘One thing about Thoreau keeps him very close to me’, he remarked. ‘I refer to his lawlessness – his dissent – his going his absolute own road hell blaze all it chooses.’10

Although Thoreau came under Emerson’s direct influence, he combined mysticism with a Whitmanesque earthiness, and he took Transcendentalism in a more naturalistic direction. He also was not content merely to preach, but strove to act out his beliefs.

Thoreau was born at Concord, and while he spent most of his youth there, he eventually followed Emerson and became a student at Harvard University. After his studies he became a teacher, but he soon returned to Concord. The experience had not entirely been in harmony with his nature: he rapidly tired of modern civilization and sought a new way of life. For a while he lived under Emerson’s roof as a general handyman and pupil, but still he was not satisfied. He therefore decided in 1845 to undertake what was to be his famous experiment in simple living: he built himself a shack on Emerson’s land on the shores of Walden Pond. He lived and meditated there for two years, two months and two days. But the State would still not leave him alone and he was arrested and imprisoned for one night in 1845 for refusing to pay his poll tax. The experience led him to write a lecture on ‘The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government’. Printed in a revised form, it became first the essay ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ and then finally On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). It proved to be Thoreau’s greatest contribution to libertarian thought.

Thoreau’s refusal to pay a poll tax was a symbolic protest against America’s imperialistic war in Mexico. He could not bring himself to recognize a government as his own which was also a slave’s government. He accepted his imprisonment on the moral principle that ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.’11

Emerson rightly called Thoreau a ‘born Protestant’. He combined the Dissenters’ belief in the right of private judgement with Locke’s right to resist tyranny. He added to them and developed a highly personal and influential form of individualism which was to influence many anarchists and libertarians, including Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Thoreau’s key principle is the absolute right to exercise his own judgement or moral sense: ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right.’12

Like Godwin, he opposed this individual right against man-made laws. If a person considers that a law is wrong, he has no obligation to obey it; indeed, he has a duty to disobey it. Morality and man-made law therefore have little to do with each other: ‘Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.’13

It was his belief that a person need only follow a higher law discerned by his conscience which led Thoreau to renounce external authority and government. He therefore went beyond the Jeffersonian formula ‘That government is best which governs least’ to the anarchist conclusion ‘That government is best which governs not at all.’14 Thoreau felt that the same objection against governments may be brought against standing armies: both oblige men to serve the State with their bodies as if they were mindless machines.

Beyond the close argument about moral and political obligation, what emerges most prominently from Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience is his passion for freedom: ‘I was not born to be forced’, he declares. ‘I will breathe after my own fashion.’ After leaving prison his first impulse was to walk in a nearby huckleberry field on the highest hill where ‘the State was nowhere to be seen’.15

It was the same impulse which made him celebrate the wilderness as ‘absolute freedom’, an oasis in the desert of modern urban civilization.16 Thoreau believed that the preservation of the world is to be found in the wilderness; his social ecology was so radical that he went beyond politics: ‘Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less to alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine is dying out in the country, and I might attend.’17

Thoreau asked his compatriots:

Do you call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue to be slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free.18

In Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), he described the ‘quiet desperation’ or alienation of urban industrialized man, alienated from nature, himself and his fellows as a producer and a consumer. In the process of searching for profit and power, modern man had lost his way. Servitude not only took the form of Negro slavery, but many subtle masters enslaved society as a whole. Worst of all, people made slave-drivers of themselves. It was to overcome this state of affairs that Thoreau chose to live as self-sufficiently as possible by the pond at Walden. He went into the woods to confront only the essential facts of life, wanting to live in simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust

Thoreau had a singular yearning towards all wildness. He had a passion for the primitive. He delighted in the sensuous vitality of his body (while being unable to appreciate women) and was awed by the teeming life in nature. A chaste and literate loner, he was one of the first imaginary Indians. Yet he did not want to return to a primitive way of life and turn his back on all the gains of Western civilization. Although fascinated by the culture of American Indians, he was repelled on occasion by their ‘coarse and imperfect use of nature’. Following an unhappy moose-hunt in Maine, he recalled: ‘I, already, and for weeks afterwards, felt my nature coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.’19

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.

PART FOUR Classic Anarchist Thinkers

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.

ELISÉE RECLUS

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.

WILLIAM GODWIN

Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice … Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.

MICHAEL BAKUNIN

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.

LEO TOLSTOY

Mind your own business.

BENJAMIN TUCKER

15 William Godwin The Lover of Order

WILLIAM GODWIN 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,

as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, and justice was the theme, his name was not far off … No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice.1

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.