American Anarchists
NOMAD, MAX
American Anarchists Men Against the State. By James J. Martin. Libertarian. 306 pp. $3.25. Revieived by Max Nomad Author, "Rebels and Renegades," "Apostles of Revolution ' Those of the older...
...There were also those among them who, having imbibed the amoralism of Stirner and Nietzsche and not being overly blessed with earthly riches, became ordinary crooks or bandits...
...They believed in private property minus monopoly as a guarantee of personal liberty, and, of course, in the main tenet of all anarchists, the rejection of the state...
...Well, there certainly have been other brands of anarchism, such as the colleetivist anarchism of Bakunin, the communist anarchism of Kro-potkin and the syndicalist anarchism of Fernand Pelloutier...
...These were the gentlemen-anarchists, as it were...
...Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), and Benjamin R. Tucker (1854-1939...
...Its most important articles he later published in a volume titled Instead of a Booh...
...Hunted b\ the police, ridiculed by the Socialists, they were at the same time plagued by the existence of mavericks who were known as individualist anarchists...
...It was only in the United States that the individualist anarchists ever succeeded in creating something close to a following (it could not be called a "movement") and even a tradition with venerable names, all of them borne by native American writers...
...Martin's book is concerned...
...All the more so as it deals also with the entire field of European anarchist and socialist theory insofar as the theorists in question exerted any influence upon American radical thought...
...they were altogether ignored by the general public, which could not imagine an anarchist who did not believe in violence (the Tolstoyans, though anarchists in theory, as a rule did not use that designation) ; and they were looked upon as cranks or bores bv the revolutionary anarchists, who, in turn, were looked upon as dangerous maniacs by the man in the street...
...One of these subjects is anarchism, a theory and a movement which two generations ago was the "red specter" dreaded and hated by the beati possidentes, but which—outside of Spain—has altogether disappeared from the political scene...
...Subconsciously, Tucker's aversion to modern industrialism might have been at the root of his individualism...
...For this reason, those interested in the history of political ideas cannot but hail with satisfaction the present offering of the Libertarian Book Club, whose members could be called the last of the English-speaking Mohicans of a now-extinct ideological volcano, if the reader will forgive an atrociously mixed metaphor...
...Most of them rejected violence and the class struggle, believing in education and persuasion...
...For it is reported—we read in Dr...
...Why the adjective "individualist" —has there ever been any other...
...Roughly speaking, the ideas common to all of them were those of "the sovereignty of the individual," the "exchange of equivalents instead of profit-making," "free and mutual or cooperative banking," and "mind everyone your own business...
...It is with the views of these men and also of some writers of lesser importance that Dr...
...It was these revolutionary anarchists who, in their time, constituted the bulk of the anarchist movement the world over...
...The book is to be warmly recommended to all those interested in the history of radical ideas current in the United States during the 19th century...
...Some of these got their inspiration from Max Stirner, others from Proudhon, others again from Herbert Spencer and the American Spencerian and Proudhonist Benjamin R. Tucker...
...others—and they constituted the enormous majority—contented themselves with occasionally publishing a pamphlet or starting a periodical which, as a rule, was a very short-lived affair...
...James J. Martin must have devoted very many years to an exhaustive study of the subject...
...Dr...
...The most important among them were Josiah Warren (17981874), Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812-1886...
...They all believed in the violent overthrow of capitalism, which was to be replaced by some form of collective, but not state, ownership...
...Revieived by Max Nomad Author, "Rebels and Renegades," "Apostles of Revolution ' Those of the older generation still remember the quip credited to the editor of a French periodical who, having been offered an article dealing with religion, rejected it on the ground that "God was not a timely subject...
...God is still a very timely subject for most American publications, but there are other subjects which no editor or commercial publisher would touch because of the public's complete lack of interest...
...His views, a combination of Spencerian philosophy and Proudhonist politics and economics, were presented from 1881 to 1908 in his periodical Liberty...
...Toward the end of his life...
...It has often been pointed out that the views of the individualist anarchists, as far as their social ideal was concerned, were a throwback to the pre-capitalist period of small producers and that they were altogether inapplicable to the modern period of trusts, monopolies and mass production...
...Martin's book—that he "hated the linotype machine" (without which modern daily newspapers would be unthinkable) and "it is believed that he never rode in an automobile in his life...
...Tucker lost his faith in his remedy against what he called "the Monster, Mechanism, devouring mankind...
...Of all these schools of individualist anarchism, that of Benjamin R. Tucker was closest to our time...
...They also rejected the belief in human solidarity and insisted upon a recognition of egoism as man's driving force...
...To the American reader who is as little familiar with the internal history of anarchism as he is with the doctrines of the various early and medieval Christian heresies, the subtitle of the book—"The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908"—will present a puzzle...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 40
