At its best, anarchism represents both a philosophy of mutual respect, contract, and cooperation and a set of strategies for building — right now, both within and outside of the existing order — the infrastructures of mutual aid and a better world.
Over one years ago, introducing his biography of the pioneering American inventor, musician, businessman, and anarchist Josiah Warren ,. William Bailie explained that anarchism "teaches not violence, nor does it inculcate insurrection. Neither is it an incipient revolution. Anarchism's whole justification for existence was to prosecute the argument that the existing order is founded up violence, oppression, and exploitation — that a freer and more just world, without ruling classes or ruled classes, is both desirable and possible.
Anarchist infighting has been a venerable tradition. For his part, Tucker insisted that anarchist communism was a contradiction in terms a term that "has no sense" , even remarking that the anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War were "a crazy bunch", adding, "'Anarchism' in Spain is a misnomer. The whole hope of humanity, Tucker said, is bound up in avoiding just the kind of "revolution by force" that so many anarchists were attempting to touch off.
Attempts to police the label or excommunicate certain elements are exercises in futility, usually self-serving and tendentious — notably because anarchist history does include episodes of violence. And anarchist violence, even at its very worst, has always paled next to the systematic, institutional violence of the state, the crimes of which are especially dangerous in that they're never called what they are. Paraphrasing Max Stirner, the state calls its violence law the violence of all other crimes.
But even if particular self-identified anarchists believe that violence and destruction are somehow excusable or justifiable given the situation or the historical context, they are strategically unsound as tactics for positive, liberatory social change.
Depending in large part on how anarchists proceed from here, anarchism could be poised to become a vital source of new ideas at a point of apparent crisis in our history. But to fulfill that function, it will have to be anarchism of Tucker's "philosophical" variety — certainly not without direct action, but embracing direct action only of the nonviolent kind.
In an essay from , Emerson suggests that all politicians are hucksters and salesmen, peddling their wares by manipulating our opinions.
Emerson connects this with a critique of religion the Church and politics the State. While this spirit of skepticism and critique puts him at odds with the more Biblically based nonresistant Christian anarchism considered above, Emerson and the Christian anarchists shared similar aims with regard to the abolition of slavery and a general critique of politics and society.
But he suggests that we are afraid to admit our skepticis m. All society is divided in opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance; and the only defence set up, is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. The state is not clearly justified.
But we continue to hold our allegiance to it on pragmatic grounds: we are afraid of anything else. Skepticism leaves us without comfort or rest — especially when it comes to politics, society, and the question of conformity. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen. While Emerson is clearly not calling for the immediate destruction of social and political institutions, he registers a deep uneasiness with regard to these centralizing and domineering structures.
Hence 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; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. This anarchist affirmation stems from his fundamental skepticism.
The truth lies beyond our simplistic categories of thought. If we adamantly maintain skepticism or militantly advocate anarchism, we end up with the thing we do not want — as when skepticism becomes a philosophical school or when anarchism becomes a political party. The problem is, in part, one of words and institutions: our words betray us when they become institutionalized.
We doubt and question and follow our moods and experiences as they bubble and move. And its result is a kind of anarchism of the spirit and of experience. This approach culminates in the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance and nonconformity.
But it does not lead toward active resistance to the state. Like Ballou, Thoreau seems to believe that human government is nearly nothing.
This attitude also helps to explain why Thoreau has remained a significant figure in mainstream discussions of American political philosophy. Despite his anarchist sympathies, his withdrawal from society at Walden pond, and his anti-state civil disobedience, Thoreau is not a radical revolutionary who calls for radical destruction of the status quo although his later support of the violent abolitionist John Brown indicates that he is not opposed to violence on principle — as later anarchists would.
Nor does he advocate complete retreat into a commune — as Christian anarchists such as Ballou did. He takes some modest action on his ideas. But he is not calling for a utopian anarchist revolution based in a religiously oriented ideas about allegiance to the Kingdom of God. But like Emerson — and like later pragmatists — Thoreau appears to have doubts about utopian communities and religiously based anarchism. Emerson and Thoreau articulated skepticism toward government that is grounded in the ideal of self-reliant individualism — not in utopian aspiration.
Henry James Sr. But like the others in this circle, James was critical of government. Moreover, James notes that no government lives up to the standard of absolute justice. Instead, he thought that there should be a reform in social and political institutions which would be directed by universal and cosmopolitan norms grounded in human rights and the Golden Rule.
William James also links this critique to the search for a moral alternative to war, nationalism, and militarism. Pragmatists like William James were skeptical of absolutizing systems — both in metaphysics and in political life. James is particularly critical of the massiveness of modern nation-states.
Mass society is not conducive to the sort of trust and familiarity that is essential for political legitimacy grounded in the consent of the governed. Mass society is a breeding ground for alienation and skepticism. The anarchist strain in American pragmatism is linked to skepticism about the justification of large social institutions, which is connected with pragmatic skepticism toward absolutizing philosophical systems.
Pragmatic meliorism is aimed at incrementally improving the world, not at radically revolutionizing it based upon some utopian ideal. Nonetheless, the direction of improvement for the American pragmatists is oriented around the critical insight into the failure of justification and the legitimation crisis that haunts the large political structures of mass society.
Moreover, this tradition is skeptical about the motives of politicians and doubts about the usefulness of values embodied in political formulas. This social and political skepticism holds that it is difficult to see the value in larger systems and institutions, which reify political life and give politicians increasing amounts of power.
From this perspective, the state begins to lose its legitimacy. We mentioned that Emerson was also skeptical of anarchy — for Emerson there is a flux of moods and no one should tyrannize over the others, including the tyrannical desire to destroy the state and create anarchy.
But as American Imperialism spread under Roosevelt, James criticized such big heroic adventures, nationalism, militarism, and the rest of the Roosevelt agenda. The connection between anarchism, anti-Imperialism and pragmatism is found in skepticism about the significance of absolutist and monistic philosophical and political systems.
Rather — like Emerson and Thoreau — James longed for a smaller world that made sense to individuals. James put it this way in another letter to Sarah Wyman Whitman; June 7, :. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed.
So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost… At some point, as the scale of things — technologies, economics, politics — increases, there is a qualitative shift and the personal and humane is lost amid the machinery of mass life.
James saw in anarchism a movement that was close in spirit to his own pluralistic approach to the world. In Lecture VII of Pragmatism , James used political and social metaphors to describe the world as it appears to pragmatists.
He explicitly connects his ideas with anarchism. This happy-go-lucky anarchism is closely related to a sort of skepticism, especially skepticism directed at big, absolutizing, and monistic systems. While not calling for direct action against the state, James is advocating for a kind of freedom that occurs through the employment of skeptical and anarchist criticism. James points out that it is the bigness of things that alienates us and disenchants us. The primary focus of lived experience is the micro-level of individual life.
That is where things make sense. Swift eventually would write a book in entitled Can Mankind Survive? Jane Addams, for example, was accused of being an anarchist. Addams travelled to Russia to meet Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian anarchist. As part of the backlash in response to the McKinley assassination, anarchists were rounded up and jailed in Chicago.
Addams went to the mayor of Chicago to complain on their behalf. But Addams remained committed to the political process and the legal traditions of the United States.
What sort of Anarchists are those who say that? Where is their Anarchism, their belief in freedom, and the right of every living man to his own life and liberty? Anarchism is not bomb throwing, violence, incendiarism, destruction.
Odd that anything so self evident should need saying. Odder still that one set of Anarchists should be obliged to turn round in the thick of battle against the common foe to say it to another set. Real Anarchists too, not hybrids, with one eye on freedom and the other on property. The two cannot anyhow be identical; the question of the hour is—Is one of them ever a rational outcome of the other?
Can a real Anarchist—a man whose creed is Anarchism—be at the same time a person who deliberately injures, or tries to injure, persons or property. I, for one, have no hesitation in saying that, if destitute because of monopoly, he can. I go even further. For what is Anarchism? Belief in Anarchy as the ultimate solution of all social and economic difficulties.
A belief, that is, that Anarchy or freedom from laws made and fixed by man for man, is the ideal state in which alone complete harmony and a self adjusting equilibrium between our individual interests and our social instincts can be secured and maintained.
Despite its supreme advantages, our faculty of language has immensely complicated and confused our development as social beings, since it has decoyed us by means of dangerous and misleading abstractions from the surely and safely educational paths of actual experience, causing a long and painful digression from the natural high road of our progress as a species. Nature shows us that among wild creatures, destitute of true language, and so safe against abstractions and prejudices, it is precisely the most social which have become the most intelligent.
We human beings cannot develop develope wholesome customs, at once tough and flexible,—self modifying and fitted to our individual comfort and our reciprocal protection by one another, so long as we are harassed by the crude provisions of artificially coercive law. And we are, one and all, the poorer for this. But now—what is there about Anarchism which should page: 6 suggest, justify, or render intelligible the use of violence in any of those who profess it?
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