MEN AGAINST THE STATE: THE EXPOSITORS OF INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM IN AMERICA 1827-1908 by James J. Martin
Ralph Myles Publisher, Inc., P.O. Box 1533, Colorado Springs, Colorodo 80901 1970, 315 pp., S2.50
Reviewed by S.E. Parker, editor of MINUS ONE
Reprinted from FREEDOM — 10-10-70, 84 Whitechapel High Street, London E1, England

Just as no two blades of grass are exactly alike; just as no grain of sand is identical with another; so are human beings diverse. And their diversity is much more profound and complex than that of blades of grass or grains of sand. They differ in their physique, physiognomy, reactions, abilities and aspirations. It is for this reason that government is the enemy of the individual, for all governments try to force the individual into pre-established patterns of behaviour and to combine his interests with the interests of others, thus robbing him of his individuality and freedom. For life to be worth living the soverignty of the individual must take the place of the sovereignty of government:

Everyone must Peel that he is the supreme arbiter of his own, that no power on earth shall rise over him, that he is and always shall be sovereign of himself and ail relating to his individuality. Then only shall all men realise security of person and property.

It was in this way that Josiah Warren, “the first American anarchist”, set the theme for a talented, articulate, sometimes brilliant, group of libertarian writers and publicists who flourished in the USA between 1827 and 1908. It is to these that Dr. Martin devotes his MEN AGAINST THE STATE.

When I reviewed the first edition of this work in 1953, I wrote that it was “one of the most objective books on anarchists ever written.” Seventeen years later I still think the same. Dr. Martin’s book remains an outstanding model for the historical treatment of men and their ideas. Other recent writings on anarchism (Woodcock, Joll, Jacker, et al.) compare badly with h. And it is much superior to Rudolph Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom which covers almost the same ground. So definitive was the first edition that Dr.Martin has only had to make slight revisions (mainly additional biographical data concerning Warren and Tucker) for the second.

Dr. Martin begins his book with Josiah Warren, the first of the group in point of time. Warren was pre-eminently an inventor and experimenter who found writing difficult. Nonetheless, he managed to expound his ideas in a straightforward and often eloquent manner. Taking his stand on “the sovereignty of the individual” and the labour note principle he called “cost the limit of price”, he experimented with “time stores” to prove the practicability of his economic ideas, and founded three “equity villages” as examples of living in freedom.

For a time Warren had a valuable ally in the person of the erudite philosopher and polymath, Stephen Pearl Andrews, who wrote The Science of Society, in which Warren’s ideas received their most polished expression. Despite his later partial defection from Warrenite individualism, Andrews still continued to contribute to the contemporary anarchist press.

Independently of Warren and Andrews, the lawyer and legal theorist, Lysander Spooner, developed his fiery attacks on the banking monopoly and his mercilessly logical critiques of the American Constitution. The latter, he held, had no authority whatsoever over anyone who had not given his formal and open consent to its provisions (No Treason, his main work on this subject, was reprinted as late as 1966, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Martin, and received an unexpected accolade from Playboy magazine!) In defiance of conventional theories of maturation, Spooner became more radical as he grew older and eventually became a contributor to Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty after following a lone path for many years.

As well as the work of Warren, Andrews and Spooner, Dr, Martin details that of J.K. Ingalls, whose main concern was the elimination of land monopolies; W.B. Greene, whose theories of mutual banking had a great influence on Tucker; and Ezra Heywood, the most militant pamphleteer and flamboyant character of them all, who was the only one of the group to suffer serious persecution for hie activities, being imprisoned for several years for his outspoken advocacy of sexual freedom.

The last and best known of this group was Benjamin Tucker. Dr. Martin corrects the impression fostered by Eltzbacher that Tucker was an original thinker. Tucker’s thinking was, in fact, a synthesis of the ideas of Warren, Greene, Proudhon and (later) Stirner, together with material taken from such writers as Spooner and Ingalls. An accomplished translator, he was also a skilled joumalist, a cultural catalyst, and a stimulating commentator on current events. A logical and lucid polemicist, he delighted in debate. When his lnstead of a Book was published in 1893, he included his opponents’ criticisms in full — a rare, if not unique, thing for an author to do.

Tucker’s main achievement, however, was the publishing and editing of the journal Liberty from 1881 to 1908. In the first issue he declared:

It may be well to state at the outset that this journal will be edited to suit its editor, not its readers. He hopes that what suits him will suit them; but if not, it will make no difference. No subscriber, or body of subscribers, will be allowed to govern his course, dictate his policy, or prescribe his methods. Liberty is published for the vert’ definate purpose of spreading certain ideas, and no claim will be admitted on any pretext of freedom of speech, to waste its limited space in hindering the attainment of that object.

The result of this admirably selfish declaration was a publication of a polish and competence unusual among radical journals. Tucker and his collaborators ranged over economics, politics, history, philosophy, ethics and the arts, and one notable issue was written by George Bernard Shaw as a reply to Max Nordau’s Degeneration — a lengthy and vitriolic attack on the avant-garde of the period.

It was in the columns of Liberty that the shift began amongst individualists from the “natural rights” doctrines of Warren and the earlier writers to the conscious egoism of Max Stirner. Led by James L. Walker, who had reached similiar conclusions independently of Stirner, the egoists split the Tucker associates in two and carried Tucker with them. Walker, whose posthumous Philosophy of Egoism deserves reprinting, later contributed the introduction to the English translation of Stirners The Ego and His Own, published by Tucker in 1907.

In 1908 Tucker went to live in France after his uninsured bookshop and publishing business were destroyed by fire. There he lived in retirement until bis death in 1939, becoming increasingly pessimistic about the social realization of his ideas. Writing to Clarence Lee Swartz in 1930 he commented:

” . . . the insurmountable obstacle to the realization of Anarchy is no longer the power of the trusts, but the indisputable fact that our civilization is in its death throes. We may last a couple of decades yet; on the other hand, a decade may precipitate our finish. . . . The dark ages sure enough. The Monster, Mechanism, is devouring Mankind.”

He was still unrelenting in his opposition to communism: ‘The term Communist Anarchist has no sense’, he wrote to Eugene Baskette in 1933, echoing his debates of over forty years before with Kropotkin and Johann Most.

To chose whose perspectives were shaped by the hope that anarchism can be universalized, the story told by Dr. Martin may well proue depressing. Here was a movement, born at a time of social ferment and optimism, in a country where the State apparatus was comparatively weak and land plentiful. It was supported not only by capable theoreticians and publiciste, but also by practical exponents of ‘community living’ whose work, with varying degrees of success, extended over thirty years. Yet after eighty years of vigorous activity it petered out — despite the efforts of the few and scattered survivors of Tucker’s departure.

As I see it, one of the reasons for this was the attempt to reconcile anarchist individualism with “social engineering.”

Because of their desire to establish a future society on the basis of their ideas, Warren and Tucker were forced to squeeze their anarchism into a societal context. Their championship of the individual was thereby deformed. Dr. Martin rightly questions whether anarchism is translatable into a social reality. That it is capable of being made an individual reality, and even partially viable as a small milieu, Warren’s experiments showed. But between the conscious choice of a few, select individuals and universal application to a mass there is a wide and apparently unbridgeable gulf. Neither Warren nor Tucker seem to have had any awareness of that fundamental aspect of the organizational problem that Robert Michels called “the iron law of oligarchy”; the invariable development of oligarchs in all organizations of any scale or permanence. Nor were they aware that any extended, organised social application of anarchism might at most lead to an “anarchism of groups” — to use Estey’s terminology — but would necessarily deny the “anarchism of individuals.”

For these reasons the later anarchist individualist perspective of continual conflict between the individual and the collective makes far more sense. Warren’s “equity villages” functioned as they did not because of the essence of the societary principle, but because of one of its accidents: the conjunction of pioneering conditions in the USA with an unusually wide plurality of differing and conflicting interests among reformers and rebels. The threatening future blend of 1984 with Brave New World, or the equally ominous alternative of rule by the acephalous mob, makes the possibility of even the small scale and limited efflorescence of individual autonomy possible in Warren’s experiments an increasingly remote prospect.

However, Warren’s concept of the individualization of interests, instead of their combination, was one of the most fruitful approaches to anarchism ever made. Its eclipse by the attempt to link anarchism with collectivism led to disastrous consequences. Now that there is a revival of interest in Warrenite anarchism in the USA — which even shows signs of spreading to Britain –perhaps its value will be recognised once more and, shorn of social utopianism, it can be developed into an effective weapon in the unending struggle for the individual. The sovereignty of the individual may never replace the sovereignty of government, but it certainly can be opposed to it.

The second-to-last chapter is titled “Other Libertarians” and this short bit from Walker is the last section in that chapter. It features two chapters culled from Walker’s book The Philosophy of Egoism that was serialized in the journal Egoism and wasn’t published in book form until 1915, two years after Liberty and the Great Libertarians was published.

While presented without distinction, the first paragraph is pulled from chapter 22 of The Philosophy of Egoism, but not the entirety, and the second paragraph is from chapter 5, but not the entirety. Even though the text is available in full elsewhere, they are god excerpts and I felt it was worth posting them here giving context that they were printed in the aformetioned book in 1913.

EGOISM
Dr. James L. Walker

What is good? What is evil? These words express only appreciations. A good fighter is a “good man” or a “bad man”! both words expressing the same idea of ability, but from different points of view. To the beggar a generous giver is a good man. To the master a servant is good when he cheerfully slaves for the master. A good subject is one obedient to his prince. A good citizen is one who gives no trouble to the State, but contributes to its revenues and stability. Evil is only what we do not find to our good, but what we have to combat. A horse is not good because strong and swift if he be “vicious” ; that is, if we find him hard to tame. A breed of dogs is good if readily susceptible of training to hunt all day or watch all night for the benefit of the owner. A wife is “good” if she will not be good to any man but her husband.

The love of money within reason is conspicuously an Egoistic manifestation, but when the passion gets the man, when money becomes his ideal, his god, we must class him as an Altruist. There is the characteristic of “devotion to another,” no matter that that other is neither a person nor the social welfare, nothing but the fascinating golden calf or a row of figures. We Egoists draw the line of distinction between the Egoist and the devotee. It is the same logically when a person becomes bewitched with another of the opposite sex so as to lose judgment and self-control, though this species of fascination is usually curable by experience, while the miser’s insanity cannot be reached. The love-sick man or woman has the illusion dispelled by contact with the particular person that caused it; but in certain cases absence or death prevents the remedy from being applied, and in some of these instances the mental malady is lifelong.

British Nietzschean elitist Anthony M. Ludovici (1882 – 1971) is not a name many modern readers would associate with egoism and Max Stirner, though I believe that is largely due to the narrowing of Stirner’s audience to the anarchist milieu. It is clear he is familiar with him along with the earliest Americans being exposed to the German’s works.

Recently in doing research relating to the School of Living and Ralph Borsodi, I noticed — was shocked, in fact — to see Ludovici was listed as part of an “Advisory Council” in a 1967 issue of their Journal The Way Out. Bersodi himself was influenced by Benjamin Tucker, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry George, Lysander Spooner, and Arthur Schopenhauer, among others. He rejected the “anarchist” label.

In Ludovici’s 1909 book Who is to be Master of This World? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, published just two years after the first English language edition of The Ego and His Own, he makes mention of Stirner in context of discussing Nietzsche:

From that time forward, Nietzsche began to regard our modern values “good” and “evil” with ever-increasing suspicion, and literally did not rest until he had formulated the theory expounded in his latter works.
Of course we had had moralists, or preferably immoralists, who, without offering a substitute, had attacked the Christian values. French books had been plentiful, and Stirner in modern times had presented us with a strikingly original and very deep work on the subject. * But the only favourable comment we find concerning any modern school of ethics, in Nietzsche’s works, relates to Herbert Spencer. The position Spencer assumes,, although not sanctioned by Nietzsche, is nevertheless declared to be “psychologically tenable.”

In the 1963 essay from The South African Observer titled The essentials of good government, Stirner is mentioned along-side other notable figures, though not in a flattering way:

This probably explains the frequency with which the advocates of Anarchism and newfangled policies like Socialism, Communism and other forms of State ownership of the means of production, together with all the grave errors in Psychology which these systems involve, emanate from middle-class minds; that is to say, the minds of men who have never experienced want and have in their family lines long enjoyed the safety of a well-regulated existence.
From the ancient Greek, Zeno (B.C. 342–267), who set his community, destitute of any government, against Plato’s ordered State, down to our William Godwin, the Frenchman, Proudhon, the German, Max Stirner, and men like Thoreau and Tolstoy, all these professed Anarchists have come from middle-class families, traditionally contented with their lot and belonging to a type which might be fancifully described as “Surfeited with Smugness”.

Certainly a great deal of time passed between the writing of those two items, over 50 years, in fact. It is wise to note that more time passed between these to mentions of Max Stirner than Max Stirner was even alive.

The following selection is from his book The Choice of a Mate (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1935). While one can discuss Ludovici’s other work and it’s compatibility or incompatibility with egoism, the following passage certainly cannot be disputed in its naked Stirnerite egoism. Not just vaguely egoistic, but explicit “enlightened egoism”.

The Choice of a Mate (excerpt)

From the very beginning it would be well for all young people to recognize that on this question of unselfishness and selfishness and the praise and blame commonly accorded to each, Christian teaching is psychologically false. Owing to its early appeal to the pariah and the outcast, this religion constantly reveals a psychology framed more on demagogic appeal than actual fact. The very command, “Love one another!” like the Mosaic command, “Honour thy father and thy mother”, is based on a misunderstanding of normal mental processes.
Love and honour are not voluntary; they are a natural, inevitable and quite involuntary reaction to the lovableness and honourableness of the object, whether neighbour or parent.
No command can make one love anyone who is not lovable. “Seek neighbours that are loveable so that you may inevitably love them”, would have been more sensible. “Love one another!” is shallow and reveals a poor, almost benighted grasp of human psychology.
You might just as well say, “Admire one another”, or “Esteem one another”. These reactions depend on certain qualities in the other, and cannot be auto-generated in response to a command even from a god.
The same remarks apply to the Mosaic “Honour thy father and thy mother!” The proper command would have been: “Parents, make yourselves honourable in the sight of your children!”
I take it that all intellectually honest persons know that in everything they do, they act either under compulsion, from inclination, or from self-interest. There is no such thing as a consistent course of so-called “unselfish” conduct that is not pursued for some kind of self-gratification. Charity is the most transparent of these.
Everybody, therefore, is consistently “selfish”. The wise, however, are “enlightened egoists”, i.e. they are “selfish” only up to the point when self ceases to be best served by “selfishness”, as, for instance, in their relationship to immediate dependents who can minister to their happiness, in their relationship to menials, retainers, and friends, all of whom may make life happy or the reverse, for a central figure. And the unwise are “unenlightened egoists”, i.e. they carry “selfishness” to a point which turns their environment against them, so that, in the end, “self” gets badly served and is made unhappy as the result of “selfishness”.
The mistake is to suppose that the “enlightened egoist” is “unselfish”, and that the “unenlightened egoist” is “selfish”. Both are “selfish” — if the word has any meaning at all, but whereas the former is so with intelligence, the latter is so as a dolt and dullard.

SEPTEMBER 1st TOTAL: $80

Click the PayPal link in the  if you have enjoyed the content of this site. Read on to see where it’s going.

If you’d paid attention to the site you’ll have noticed a great deal of material has been pulled from the Libertarian Microfiche Project that was run by John Zube from 1978 to around 2012. Over the course of time Mr. Zube committed about 500,000 pages of libertarian, anarchist, free market and other related material to microfiche in a series he called Peace Plans.

Between my co-founder Trevor Blake, our good friend Dustin and myself we are ready to match donations dollar for dollar to go toward purchasing an entire set of microfiche and archival sleeves and archival storage boxes.

We need a total of  $2,000 to purchase the fiche and the archival supplies to properly store them. Beginning in August of 2016, all money donated to the UoE project will go just to the Libertarian Microfiche Publishing Peace Plans acquisition until it and the archival materials are all together in the Union of Egoists archive. The current total is displayed in ye cliche thermometer on the sidebar.

I have registered http://www.libertarianmicrofiche.com and resurrected the index to the Peace Plans from the grave of archive.org. To get an idea of the magnitude and importance of his work and the archive, spend a few minutes browsing the site.

As a bonus, we’ve integrated Wendy McElroy‘s “Comprehensive Index To Liberty: Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order 1881-1908” to the site in order to have results from that pop up in any searches.

 WE NOW HAS A TWEET: @DerGeistJournal

If you have any corrections, additions or would like to make a contribution, please use our contact form.
Underworld Amusements is distributing many titles relating to Egoism and Individualist Anarchism.