In his confused attempt to criticize libertarians (and Tea Party folks, whom I’ll ignore here), Terrell gets one thing right when he says, “The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication” (emphasis added).

Indeed it is. Unfortunately for Terrell’s case, it’s his treacherous fabrication.

Terrell targets the Enlightenment and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which is doubly funny. Libertarians don’t claim Rousseau as a forebear; he was an advocate of imposing the “general will” — ascertained through democratic procedures — on dissidents as a means of forcing them to be “free.” Does that sound libertarian to Terrell?

As for the Enlightenment, last I checked Adam Smith was a principal of the Scottish wing of that intellectual movement. And he never would have claimed that “it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements.” (I’m not aware of French Enlightenment economists who thought that either.) Has Terrell never heard of Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1859 — 17 years before The Wealth of Nations and revised throughout his life? Or is he in that group of scribblers who think The Wealth of Nations was all that Smith had to say about the human enterprise? (Of course, The Wealth of Nations also does not embrace the view that Terrell ascribes to libertarians.) For Terrell’s edification, I’ll point out that The Theory of Moral Sentiments is an extended discussion of “fellow-feeling,” that is, our natural sympathy for others.

Smith would laugh at any portrayal of the isolated, allegedly self-sufficient individual as the summit of human development. No less than the great Greek philosophers, Adam Smith understood how inherently social the individual person is. The self itself is a product of social life. People, he said, seek praise from their fellows and, importantly, aspire to be worthy of praise.

“What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?” Smith asks. The reason, he makes clear, is not merely that a good reputation produces material benefits. As he writes on page one,

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

By coincidence, just before reading Terrell’s post, I had listened to Russ Roberts’s EconTalk interview with Vernon Smith, the Nobel laureate who is steeped in the economics tradition of Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek. The topic of discussion was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is entirely appropriate considering that Roberts and Vernon Smith are two of the small group of professional economists who are intimately familiar with the book. (Another is Dan Klein, with whom Roberts held a multipart book-club discussion. Check out Roberts’s new book about The Theory of Moral Sentiments: How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.)

At one point in the interview, Vernon Smith notes enthusiastically,

[Adam Smith] says, imagine a person, a member of the species being brought up entirely isolated.… He says that person can no more understand what it means for his mind to be deformed than for his face to be deformed. And Smith says — I’m paraphrasing — bring him into society and you give him the mirror he needed before. In other words, the looking glass in which we are able to see ourselves as others see us.

Thus society is indispensable for the proper development of the person.

Vernon Smith has also written (in “The Two Faces of Adam Smith,” 1998) that Adam Smith’s two published works both describe

one behavioral axiom, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,” where the objects of trade I will interpret to include not only goods, but also gifts, assistance, and favors out of sympathy.… [W]hether it is goods or favors that are exchanged, they bestow gains from trade that humans seek relentlessly in all social transactions. Thus, Adam Smith’s single axiom, broadly interpreted … is sufficient to characterize a major portion of the human social and cultural enterprise. It explains why human nature appears to be simultaneously self-regarding and other-regarding.

Does it sound as though either of the Smiths would be inclined to deny, as Terrell puts it, that “evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others”?

Has Terrell not heard of Adam or Vernon Smith? Or F.A. Hayek or James Buchanan (two Nobel laureates, so their names have been in the papers)? Or Russ Roberts? Or Dan Klein? And while we’re at it, let’s drop the name Herbert Spencer. As Spencer wrote in Social Statics (1851):

The increasing assertion of personal rights is an increasing demand that the external conditions needful to a complete unfolding of the individuality shall be respected….

Yet must this higher individuation be joined with the greatest mutual dependence. Paradoxical though the assertion looks, the progress is at once toward complete separateness and complete union. But the separateness is of a kind consistent with the most complex combinations for fulfilling social wants; and the union is of a kind that does not hinder entire development of each personality. Civilization is evolving a state of things and a kind of character in which two apparently conflicting requirements are reconciled.

He anticipated “at once perfect individuation and perfect mutual dependence.”

If Terrell has never encountered these thinkers, how much research could he have done before he opined about libertarianism? Why should we take Terrell seriously?

I wish I could understand intellectuals who seem to form a priori notions about their opponents, do no empirical research to see if these notions hold up, and then go public with criticisms that should embarrass them badly. If I may say something in the spirit of The Theory of Moral Sentiments: I am embarrassed that a fellow member of the human race has written something so ridiculous.

What people like Terrell don’t realize — or perhaps realize too well — is that the fundamental point in dispute is not whether the individual is a social animal or a creature best suited for an atomistic existence. No libertarian I know of subscribes to the latter notion. The point in dispute is whether proper social life should be founded on peaceful consensual cooperation or on compulsion. (See my “What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.”)

Terrell asserts a dubious distinction between thinking of society as natural and thinking society as a matter merely of convention. I says it’s dubious, and of doubtful significance, because the conventionalist (David Hume, perhaps?) still believes that given their nature, only a social existence generated by certain conventions is appropriate for human beings.

But if for argument’s sake we accept Terrell’s distinction and his preference for naturalism, we still must ask: if society is natural, why must we be compelled to be social? Why is aggressive force — the initiation of violence, which robs persons of their dignity and self-determination — acceptable when free and spontaneous cooperation — voluntary exchange and mutual aid — ought to work reasonably well?  Do the Terrells of the world believe that society would fail without violence?  That, I submit, is bizarre.

It is precisely because human beings are social by nature that physical force should be banned except to repel aggressors and to effect restitution for torts.

I welcome the day that someone writes a serious criticism of liberalism/libertarianism that reflects a real understanding of what is being criticized. Terrell and like-minded folks would expect that of their critics. How about applying the Golden Rule, guys? Go home and do your homework. Then come back and give us your best shot. I promise I’ll be waiting.

Dan Sanchez discusses Tolkien, Plato, and the state.

Kevin Carson discusses the controversy over Burger King.

Darian Worden reviews a book about the Modern School movement.

Shamus Cooke discusses Progressive Democrats going to war.

Patrick Cockburn discusses fear of ISIS.

Laurence M. Vance discusses the legalization of heroin.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses the market.

Ivan Eland discusses the fight against ISIS and U.S. policy.

Arthur Silber discusses suicide and being a parent.

Arthur Silber discusses suicide and parenting.

Majorie Cohn discusses perpetual war under Obama.

Salon.com interviews Ted Rall.

Sheldon Richman discusses the clueless character of America’s foreign policy elite.

David R. Henderson discusses Richard Epstein’s case for intervention.

George Leef discusses a new book on libertarianism by Tom Palmer.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses ISIS and fixing the government.

Studies in Emergent Order discusses Anarchy and Legal Order.

Colin P. Elliot discusses how police militarization is a consequence of policing the world.

Gary Chariter discusses a new book on who rules America.

George H. Smith has released the eighth part of his series on social laws.

Sheldon Richman discusses the anti-militarist heritage of Herbert Spencer.

Robert C. Koehler discusses the God of war.

Peter Hart discusses the PBS left on airstrikes.

Joel Schlosberg discusses the conquest of the U.K. by Scotland.

Kevin Carson discusses online learning.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown discusses Ron Paul at LPAC.

Robby Soave discusses a case of zero tolerance school policies.

Viktor Korchnoi draws Edmar J. Mednis.

Mikhail Tal beats Mikhail Botvinnik in a world championship game.

Herbert Spencer, the great English libertarian philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century, eloquently expressed radical liberalism’s antipathy to war and militarism. His writings are full of warnings about the dangers of war and conquest. Young Spencer saw and cheered the rise of the industrial type of society, which was displacing what he called the militant type. The industrial type was founded on equal freedom, consent, and contract, the militant on hierarchy, command, and force. Yet he lived long enough to see a reversal, and his later writings lamented the ascendancy of the old militant traits. We have a good deal to learn from the much-maligned Spencer, who is inexplicably condemned as favoring the “law of the jungle.” This is so laughably opposite of the truth that one couldn’t be blamed for concluding that the calumny is the product of bad faith. As Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long writes,

The textbook summary is absurd, of course. Far from being a proponent of “might makes right,” Spencer wrote that the “desire to command is essentially a barbarous desire” because it “implies an appeal to force,” which is “inconsistent with the first law of morality” and “radically wrong.” While Spencer opposed tax-funded welfare programs, he strongly supported voluntary charity, and indeed devoted ten chapters of his Principles of Ethics to a discussion of the duty of “positive beneficence.”

Spencer jumped on the issues of war and peace right out of the gate. His first book, Social Statics (1851), contains a chapter, “Government Colonization,” that examines the effects of imperialism on both the home and subjugated populations. While formal colonization has gone out of style, many of its key characteristics have been preserved in a new form; thus Spencer’s observations are entirely pertinent.

He starts by pointing out that the “parent” country’s government must violate the rights of its own citizens when it engages in colonial conquest and rule. Spencer advocated just enough government to protect the freedom of the citizens who live under it (although the first edition of his book included the chapter “The Right to Ignore the State,” which he removed from later editions), and he claims that the money spent on colonies necessarily is money not needed to protect that freedom. He writes,

That a government cannot undertake to administer the affairs of a colony, and to support for it a judicial staff, a constabulary, a garrison, and so forth, without trespassing against the parent society, scarcely needs pointing out. Any expenditure for these purposes, be it like our own some three and a half millions sterling a year, or but a few thousands, involves a breach of state-duty. The taking from men property beyond what is needful for the better securing of their rights, we have seen to be an infringement of their rights. Colonial expenditure cannot be met without property being so taken. Colonial expenditure is therefore unjustifiable.

Spencer proceeds to demolish the argument that foreign acquisitions increase the wealth of the parent society, as though such acquisitions are analogous to voluntary trade relations. He writes,

Experience is fast teaching us that distant dependencies are burdens, and not acquisitions. And thus this earliest motive for state-colonization — the craving for wider possessions — will very soon be destroyed by the conviction that territorial aggression is as impolitic as it is unjust.

Any true economic benefits from dealing with foreign populations can be obtained through free trade, he says. He invokes the law of comparative advantage to argue that the parent society loses, not gains, when the government coercively creates artificial foreign markets for products the society can’t produce as efficiently as others can.

As for those on the receiving end of colonial policy, Spencer was blunt: “We … meet nothing but evil results. It is a prettily sounding expression that of mother-country protection, but a very delusive one. If we are to believe those who have known the thing rather than the name, there is but little of the maternal about it.” While the worst practices, he adds, were less common in his time, “kindred iniquities are continued.”

We have but to glance over the newspapers published in our foreign possessions, to see that the arbitrary rule of the Colonial Office is no blessing. Chronic irritation, varying in intensity from that of which petitions are symptomatic, to that exhibited in open rebellions, is habitually present in these forty-six scattered dependencies which statesmen have encumbered us with.

He condemns “the pitiless taxation, that wrings from the poor ryots nearly half the produce of the soil” and “the cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection — a despotism under which, not many years since, a regiment of sepoys was deliberately massacred, for refusing to march without proper clothing.”

Down to our own day the police authorities league with wealthy scamps, and allow the machinery of the law to be used for purposes of extortion. Down to our own day, so-called gentlemen will ride their elephants through the crops of impoverished peasants; and will supply themselves with provisions from the native villages without paying for them. And down to our own day, it is common with the people in the interior to run into the woods at sight of a European!

Spencer wonders,

Is it not, then, sufficiently clear that this state-colonization is as indefensible on the score of colonial welfare, as on that of home interests? May we not reasonably doubt the propriety of people on one side of the earth being governed by officials on the other? Would not these transplanted societies probably manage their affairs better than we can do it for them?

No one can fail to see that these cruelties, these treacheries, these deeds of blood and rapine, for which European nations in general have to blush, are mainly due to the carrying on of colonization under state-management, and with the help of state-funds and state-force.

Spencer was keenly aware that such criticism of the government was regarded as unpatriotic. In 1902, near the end of his life, he turned his attention to that charge.

In an essay titled “Patriotism,” included in his collection Facts and Comments, he begins, “Were anyone to call me dishonest or untruthful he would touch me to the quick. Were he to say that I am unpatriotic, he would leave me unmoved.”

England may have done things in the past to advance freedom, Spencer says, but “there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse.”

Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions — settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. — does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so-called “pacification” — these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators.… If because my love of country does not survive these and many other adverse experiences I am called unpatriotic — well, I am content to be so called.

“To me the cry — ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ seems detestable,” he continues.

Spencer gave no ground on this matter, which he made obvious with a story he relates toward the end of his essay.

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling — anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called — in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man — then a captain but now a general — drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying — “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” [Emphasis added.]

Spencer was second to none in his antimilitarism and anti-imperialism, that is, his love of universal individual liberty and all forms of voluntary social cooperation. With heads held high, libertarians can claim him as one of their own.

“For the last century, or more, we have been experimenting with the rule of democracy–the bludgeoning by governors whom majorities, drunk with power, impose on vanquished minorities. This last is probably the worst of all, for we stand to-day steeped to the lips in a universal corruption that is rotting every nation to the core. Is it not a fact that, whether it be a French Deputy or an English Member of Parliament, a Republican, a Democratic, or a Socialist candidate for office, each and every one of them sings exactly the same siren song: “Clothe me with power, and I will use it for your good “? It has been the song of every tyrant and despoiler since history began.” – W.C. Owen, “Anarchism versus Socialism”

W(illiam) C(harles) Owen (2/16/1854-7/9/1929), individualist-anarchist, author of The Economics of Herbert Spencer, “Anarchism versus Socialism” (and here), “Elisée Reclus”, “England Monopolised or England Free?”, “Full steam astern! Is this progress or the road to ruin?”, “The Mexican revolution, its progress, causes purpose and probable results” and numerous other essays was born in Dinapore, India, raised in England, and emigrated to the United States in 1882.

His socialist leanings led him to become a member of the International Workingmen’s Association in California. He discovered Kropotkin’s writings and translated of several of his works, beginning his travel fromsocialism to anarchism. He was a contributor to Burnette G. Haskell’s (1857-1907) San Francisco Truth (1882-97); editor of Nationalist of Los Angeles (1890) and San Francisco (1891-4); and contributed to Commonweal, organ of the Socialist League (which had been taken over by anarchists in 1890) of William Morris in England. In 1890, in New York, with Italian Saverio Merlino he joined the league and became a founder of the New York Socialist League in 1890. He was expelled from the League in 1892. Owen, now influenced by Benjamin Tucker, became an anarchist-individualist. He contributed to Freedom from 1893 on and returned to California to work as a journalist, where he would become involved in the land question, a subject which he would turn to again and again. Owen also contributed to the libertarian weekly “Free Society” in San Francisco (1897-1904) and Emma Goldman’s “Mother Earth“.

In 1911, he began his work withRicardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) and his brother, Enrique Flores Magón and becomes editor of the English section of Regeneración (1910-1916) and corresponds throughout the international libertarian press. Many anarchists, both individualist and collectivist, throughout the western United States would actively support the Magón brothers and their revolutionary activities in Baja California. Emma Goldman, in her biographical essay, “Voltairine de Cleyre,” said, Voltairine

“fervently took up the fight of the Mexican people who threw off their yoke; she wrote, she lectured, she collected funds for the Mexican cause”

before dying in 1912 (in Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell’s Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre–Anarchist, Feminist, Genius (Albany, SUNY Press, 2005. p. 38). Their offices and activities were centered in Los Angeles and Tijuana where most of their publications were produced. In the 1970’s, I tracked down their address in the center of Los Angeles and kept some pieces of the old brick building which had been torn down. Only the foundation was left.

He published his own periodical,”Land & Liberty” (1914-15) and then in 1916 returned to England (1916). At that time, anarchist immigrants, especially activists, in the United States were under severe pressure from the federal government to be deported and the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles was seeking

“a federal indictment against [any anarchists involved]…for conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States and to invade Mexico.” (William Preston, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933 (NY: Harper & Row, 1963, p. 53).

Congressmen were applauded in Congress for saying such things as

“Now I would execute these anarchists if I could, and then I would deport them, so that the soil of our country might not be polluted by their presence even after the breath had gone out of their bodies. I do not care what the time limit is. I want to get rid of them by some route… or by execution by the hangman. It makes no difference to me so that we get rid of them.” (ibid., p. 83).

On February 18, 1916, Enrique & Ricardo Flores Magón were arrested at their Community Farm near Los Angeles, California. Enrique was beaten by the police and hospitalized. The Magón brothers were charged with mailing articles inciting “murder, arson and treason,” and go on trial May 21. Both were convicted, given prison sentences and fines.
As Owen’s friends and fellow-travelers in the I.W.W. poetically said at the time that WWI was beginning,

I love my flag, I do, I do.
Which floats upon the breeze,
I also love my arms and legs,
And neck, and nose and knees.
One little shell might spoil them all
Or give them such a twist,
They would be of no use to me;
I guess I won’t enlist.<br
I love my country, yes, I do
I hope her folks do well.
Without our arms, and legs and things,
I think we’d look like hell.
Young men with faces half shot off
Are unfit to be kissed,
I’ve read in books it spoils their looks,
I guess I won’t enlist.
(ibid., p. 89)

When back in London, he took part in the newspaper “Freedom” (1886-?) and the Freedom Press, joined the Commonwealth League, and wrote for its organ Commonweal. In 1926, he became part of a small co-operative colony close to Storrington (Sussex). W.C. Owen died in Worthing, Great Britain in 1929.

Along with Auberon Herbert, Victor Yarros, Henry Bool, Charles T. Sprading and a few other writers, he would be regarded as among the best of the Spencerian Anarchists, integrating the insights of Herbert Spencer with individualist-anarchism. Marcus Graham (aka Shmuel Marcus, 1893-197?, Romanian-born editor of the anarchist journal Man! (1933-40) would say of Owen that

“He proved to be one of the most interesting men I ever had the good fortune to know. We met often and he was a fountain of knowledge in every respect…Owen’s spirit was that of a revolutionary…Owen carried on a long correspondence with me until his death, and his reading and correcting the proofs of the Anthology [of Revolutionary Poetry (New York: The Active Press, 1929)] was of immense value.” Marcus Graham, MAN! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974. p. 10)

Anarchy versus Socialism
Introduction

“Anarchy versus Socialism”, W.C. Owen’s best-known work, was written originally around 1902 at the request of Owen’s friend, Emma Goldman, who wanted a work detailing the difference between Anarchism and Socialism, most likely, as a response to Daniel DeLeon‘s “Socialism versus Anarchism” (Girard, Kansas: People’s Pocket Series No. 5; Appeal to Reason. Lecture Delivered at Boston, October 13, 1901. The individualist-anarchist, A.H. Simpson, was in the audience and provided questions for DeLeon which are valuable to read, just as E. Belfort Bax’s “‘Voluntaryism’ versus ‘Socialism'”, a response to Auberon Herbert, is useful). It was Owen’s belief that no honest alliance was possible between the two. As he said,

“either you believe in the right of the Individual to govern himself, which is the basis of Anarchism, or you believe that he must be governed by others, which is the cornerstone of all those creeds which should be grouped generically as Socialism. One or the other must be the road to human progress. Both cannot be.”

The following is a condensed version of his essay:

Man is manifestly destined to be master of himself and his surroundings, individually free. His capacity for achievement has shown itself practically boundless, whenever and wherever it has been permitted the opportunity of expansion; and no less an ideal than equal and unfettered opportunity–that is to say, individual freedom–should satisfy him…[A]ll forms of slavery [are] a refusal to recognize Man’s dignity or native worth.

Anarchism

[S]o long as the ordinary individual remains unconscious of his proper dignity as the great thinking animal, slavery, in my judgment, will continue. The first essential business, therefore, is to awaken thought; to get men to look at things as they are; to induce them to hunt for truth.

To us the problem is not merely economic…[T]he promotion of individuality, and the encouragement of the spirit of revolt against whatever institutions may be unworthy of humanity, are everything. We are rebels against slavery, and we understand that men will win their way to freedom only when they yearn to be free.

Back of all this infamy stands always the Government machine; dead to all human sympathy, as are all machines; bent only on increasing its efficiency as a machine, and enlarging its power; organized expressly to keep things, in all essentials, precisely as they are. It is the arch-type of immobility, and, therefore, the foe of growth. It is the quintessence of compulsion, and, therefore, the enemy of freedom. To it the individual is a subject, of whom it demands unquestioning obedience. Necessarily we Anarchists are opposed to it. We do not dream, as do the Socialists, of making it the one great Monopolist, and therefore the sole arbiter of life. On the contrary, we seek to whittle away its powers, that it may be reduced to nothingness and be succeeded by a society of free individuals, equipped with equal opportunities and arranging their own affairs by mutual agreement.

[Echoing Herbert Spencer, [t]he Anarchist type of social structure is the industrial type, and for it the true industrialist, the working man, should stand. On the other hand, he who cries for more Government is declaring himself an advocate of the military type, wherein society is graded into classes and all life’s business conducted by inferiors obeying orders issued by the superior command. That offers the worker only permanent inferiority and enslavement, and against that he should revolt.

[T]he State…deprives men of personal responsibility, robs them of their natural virility, takes out of their hands the conduct of their own lives, thereby reduces them to helplessness, and thus insures the final collapse of the whole social structure.

[Anarchism i]s based on the conception that the Individual is the natural fount of all activity, and that his claim to free and full development of all his powers is paramount. The Socialist interpretation, on the other hand, is presented as resting on the conception that the claim of the Collectivity is paramount, and that to its welfare, real or imagined, the Individual must and should subordinate himself.

On the correct interpretation of Life everything depends, and the question is as to which of these two conflicting interpretations is correct. Always and everywhere the entire social struggle hinges on that very point, and every one of us has his feet set, however unconsciously, in one or other of these camps. Some would sacrifice the Individual, and all minorities, to the supposed interests of the collective whole. Others are equally convinced that a wrong inflicted on one member poisons the whole body, and that only when it renders full justice to the Individual will society be once more on the road to health.

[T]he existing system is a miserable compromise between Anarchism and Socialism with which neither can be content. On the one hand, the Individual is instructed to play for his own hand, however fatally the cards are stacked against him. On the other hand, he is adjured incessantly to sacrifice himself to the common weal. Special Privilege, when undisturbed, preaches always individual struggle, although it is Special Privilege that robs the ordinary individual of all his chances of success. Let Special Privilege be attacked, however, and it appeals forthwith to the Socialistic principle declaring vehemently that the general interests of society must be protected at any cost.

When a man says he is an Anarchist he puts on himself the most definite of labels. He announces that he is a “no rule” man. “Anarchy”–compounded of the Greek words “ana,” without, and “arche,” rule–gives in a nutshell the whole of his philosophy. His one conviction is that men must be free; that they must own themselves.

Anarchists do not propose to invade the individual rights of others, but they propose to resist, and do resist, to the best of their ability all invasion by others. To order your own life, as a responsible individual, without invading the lives of others, is freedom; to invade and attempt to rule the lives of others is to constitute yourself an enslaver; to submit to invasion and rule imposed on you against your own will and judgment is to write yourself down a slave.

Anarchism stands for the free, unrestricted development of each individual; for the giving to each equal opportunity of controlling and developing his own particular life. It insists on equal opportunity of development for all, regardless of colour, race, or class; on equal rights to whatever shall be found necessary to the proper maintenance and development of individual life; on a “square deal” for every human being, in the most literal sense of the term.

Moreover, it matters not to the Anarchist whether the rule imposed on him is benevolent or malicious. In either case it is an equal trespass on his right to govern his own life. In either case the imposed rule tends to weaken him, and he recognizes that to be weak is to court oppression.

So, from the exact Greek language the precise and unmistakable word “Anarchy” was coined, as expressing beyond question the basic conviction that all rule of man by man is slavery.

The entire Anarchist movement is based on an unshakeable conviction that the time has come for men–not merely in the mass, but individually–to assert themselves and insist on the right to manage their own affairs without external interference; to insist on equal opportunities for self-development; to insist on a “square deal,” unhampered by the intervention of self-asserted superiors.

[U]nder the artificial conditions imposed on them by rulers, who portion out among themselves the means of life, millions of the powerful species known as “Man” are reduced to conditions of abject helplessness of which a starving timber-wolf would be ashamed. It is unspeakably disgusting to us, this helplessness of countless millions of our fellow creatures; we trace it directly to stupid, unnatural laws, by which the few plunder and rule over the many, and we propose to do our part in restoring to the race its natural strength, by abolishing the conditions that render it at present so pitiably weak.

For the last century, or more, we have been experimenting with the rule of democracy–the bludgeoning by governors whom majorities, drunk with power, impose on vanquished minorities. This last is probably the worst of all, for we stand to-day steeped to the lips in a universal corruption that is rotting every nation to the core. Is it not a fact that, whether it be a French Deputy or an English Member of Parliament, a Republican, a Democratic, or a Socialist candidate for office, each and every one of them sings exactly the same siren song: “Clothe me with power, and I will use it for your good “? It has been the song of every tyrant and despoiler since history began.

It is you yourselves, governed by the misrepresentations of superstition, and not daring to lift your heads and look life in the face, who substitute for that magnificent justice the hideously unjust inequalities with which society is sick well-nigh to death. Does not the experience of your daily life teach you that when, in any community, any one man is loaded with power it is always at the expense of many others, who are thereby rendered helpless?

Let us not flatter ourselves that we can shirk this imperative call to self-assertion by appointing deputies to perform the task that properly belongs to us alone. Already it is clear to all who look facts in the face that the entire representative system, to which the workers so fatuously looked for deliverance, has resulted in a concentration of political power such as is almost without parallel in history.

Our representative system is farce incarnate. We take a number of men who have been making their living by some one pursuit–in most cases that of the law–and know nothing outside that pursuit, and we require them to legislate on the ten thousand and one problems to which a highly diversified and intricate industrial development has given rise. The net result is work for lawyers and places for office-holders, together with special privileges for shrewd financiers, who know well how to get clauses inserted in measures that seem innocence itself but are always fatal to the people’s rights.

Anarchism concentrates its attention on the individual, considering that only when absolute justice is done to him or her will it be possible to have a healthy and happy society. For society is merely the ordinary citizen multiplied indefinitely, and as long as the individuals of which it is composed are treated unjustly, it is impossible for the body at large to be healthy and happy. Anarchism, therefore, cannot tolerate the sacrifice of the individual to the supposed interests of the majority, or to any of those high-sounding catchwords (patriotism, the public welfare, and so forth) for the sake of which the individual–and always the weakest individual, the poor, helpless working man and woman–is murdered and mutilated to-day, as he has been for untold ages past.

Only by a direct attack on monopoly and special privilege; only by a courageous and unswerving insistence on the rights of the individual, whoever he may be; on his individual right to equality of opportunity, to an absolutely square deal, to a full and equal seat at the table of life, can this great social problem, with which the whole world now groans in agony, be solved.

In a word, the freedom of the individual, won by the abolition of special privileges and the securing to all of equal opportunities, is the gateway through which we must pass to the higher civilisation that is already calling loudly to us.

It is urged that we Anarchists have no plans; that we do not set out in detail how the society of the future is to be run. This is true. We are not inclined to waste our breath in guesses about things we cannot know. We are not in the business of putting humanity in irons. We are trying to get humanity to shake off its irons. We have no co-operative commonwealth, cut and dried, to impose on the generations yet unborn. We are living men and women, concerned with the living present, and we recognize that the future will be as the men and women of the future make it, which in its turn will depend on themselves and the conditions in which they find themselves. If we bequeath to them freedom they will be able to conduct their lives freely.

To overthrow human slavery, which is always the enslavement of individuals, is Anarchism’s one and only task. It is not interested in making men better under slavery, because it considers that impossible–a statement before which the ordinary reader probably will stand aghast. It seems, therefore, necessary to remind him once again that Anarchists are realists who try to see Life as it is, here on this earth, the only place where we can study it, indeed the only place whereon, so far as hitherto discovered, human life exists. Our view is that of the biologist. We take Man as we find him, individually and as a member of a species. We see him subject to certain natural laws, obedience to which brings healthy growth while disobedience entails decay and untimely death. This to us is fundamental, and much of Anarchism’s finest literature is devoted to it.

Now, from the biological standpoint, Freedom is the all-essential thing. Without it individual health and growth are impossible… Biologically we are all parts of one organic whole–the human species–and, from the purely scientific standpoint, an injury to one is the concern of all. You cannot have slavery at one end of the chain and freedom at the other. In our view, therefore, Special Privilege in every shape and form, must go. It is a denial of the organic unity of mankind; of that oneness of the human family which is, to us, a scientific truth. …Internationalism is, to us, a biological fact a natural law which cannot be violated with impunity or explained away. The most criminal violators of that natural law are modern Governments, which devote all the force at their command to the maintenance of Special Privilege, and, in their lust for supremacy, keep nations perpetually at war. Back of all this brutal murdering is the thought: “Our governing machine will become more powerful. Eventually we shall emerge from the struggle as rulers of the earth.”

This earth is not to be ruled by the few. It is or the free and equal enjoyment of every member of the human race. It is not to be held in fee by old and decaying aristocracies, or bought up as a private preserve by the newly rich–that hard-faced and harder-conscienced mob which hangs like a vulture over every battlefield and gorges on the slain…For, just as the human species is one organic whole, so the earth, this solid globe beneath our feet, is one economic organism, one single store-house of natural wealth, one single workroom in which all men and women have an equal right to labour.

To every Anarchist the right to free and equal use of natural opportunities is an individual right, conferred by Nature and imposed by Life. It is a fundamental law of human existence.

It is a question of intelligence, and to Anarchists the methods generally proposed for restoring the land to the use of the living do not appear intelligent. Clearly Nationalization will not do; for Nationalization ignores the organic unity of the human species, and merely substitutes for monopoly by the individual monopoly by that artificial creation, the State, as representing that equally artificial creation, the Nation. Such a philosophy lands us at once in absurdities so obvious that their bare statement suffices to explode them.

Even Capitalism knows better than that. In theory, as in practice, Capitalism is international, for it recognizes that what is needed by the world at large must pass into the channels of international trade and be distributed.

To all Anarchists, therefore, the abolition of Land Monopoly is fundamental. Land Monopoly is the denial of Life’s basic law, whether regarded from the standpoint of the individual or of the species.

In some way or another the Individual must assert and maintain his free and equal right to life, which means his free and equal right to the use of that without which life is impossible, our common Mother, Earth. And it is to the incalculable advantage of society, the whole, to secure to each of its units that inalienable right; to release the vast accumulations of constructive energy now lying idle and enslaved; to say to every willing worker–“Wherever there is an unused opportunity which you can turn to account you are free to use it. We do not bound you. We do not limit you. This earth is yours individually as it is ours racially, and the essential meaning of our conquest of the seas, of air and space, is that you are free to come and go whither you will upon this planet, which is at once our individual and racial home.”

The Land Question, viewed biologically, reveals wide horizons and opens doors already half ajar. Placed on the basis of equal human rights, it is nobly destructive, for it spells death to wrongs now hurling civilisation to its ruin. Were free and equal use of natural opportunities accepted as a fundamental law–just as most of us accept, in theory, the Golden Rule–there would be no more territory-grabbing wars. …Free exchange, so essential to international prosperity, would follow automatically, and with it we should shake off those monstrous bureaucracies now crushing us.

These doors already are standing more than half ajar… Science, annihilating distance, has made, potentially at least, the human family one. What sense is there in fencing off countries by protective tariffs when the very purpose of the railway and the steamship, the cable and the wireless station, is to break through those fences?

All intelligent and courageous action along one line of the great struggle for human rights helps thought and action along other lines, and the contest that is certain to come over the land question cannot but clear the field in other directions. It will be seen, for example, that freedom of production will not suffice without freedom of distribution.

If mankind is ever to be master of itself, scientific thought–which deals with realities and bases its conclusions on ascertained facts–must take the place of guess and superstition. To bring the conduct of human life into accord with the ascertained facts of life is, at bottom, the great struggle that is going on in society.

War

[War] has thrown us back into barbarism. For the moment it has afflicted us with Militarism and scourged us with all the tyrannies that military philosophy and tactics approve of and enforce. Necessarily Militarism believes in itself and in that physical violence which is its speciality. Necessarily it sympathies with all those barbarisms of which it is the still-surviving representative, and distrusts those larger views that come with riper growth. How could it be otherwise? By the essence of its being Militarism does not argue; it commands. Its business is not to yield but to conquer, and to keep, at any cost, its conquests. Always, by the fundamental tenets of its creed it will invade; drive the weaker to the wall, enforce submission. He who talks to it of human rights, on the full recognition of which social peace depends, speaks a language it does not and cannot understand. To Militarism he is a dreamer, and, in the words of the great German soldier, Von Moltke, it does not even regard his dream as beautiful.

Every Government is a vast military machine, armed with all the resources of modern science. Every Government is invading ruthlessly the liberties of its own “subjects” and stripping them of elemental rights. Resolved on keeping, at any cost, its existing conquests, every Government treats as an outcast and criminal him who questions its autocracy. Obsessed perpetually by fear, which is the real root of military philosophy, every Government is guarding itself against popular attack; and with Governments, as with all living creatures, there is nothing so unscrupulous as fear. When Government punishes the man who dares to express honestly his honest thought, does it pause to consider that it is killing that spirit of enquiry which is the life of progress, and crushing out of existence the courageous few who are the backbone of the nation? Not at all. Like an arrant coward, it thinks only of its own safety. When, by an elaborate system of registration, passports, inspection of private correspondence, and incessant police espionage, it checks all the comings and goings of individual life, does it give a thought to personal liberty or suffer a single pang at the reflection that it is sinking its country…? Not a bit of it. The machine thinks only of itself; of how it may I increase and fortify its power.

Just as the Court sets the fashions that rule “Society,” so the influence of the governmental machine permeates all our economic life. The political helplessness of the individual citizen finds its exact counterpart in the economic helplessness of the masses, reduced to helplessness by the privileges Government confers upon the ruling class, and exploited by that ruling class in exact proportion to their helplessness. Throughout the economic domain “Woe to the Conquered” is the order of the day; and to this barbaric military maxim, which poisons our entire industrial system and brutalizes our whole philosophy of life, we owe it that Plutocracy is gathering into its clutches all the resources of this planet and imposing on the workers everywhere what I myself believe to be the heaviest yoke they have, as yet, been forced to bear.

Anarchists … regard Militarism as a straitjacket in which modern Industrialism, now struggling violently for expansion, cannot fetch its breath. And everything that smacks of Governmentalism smacks also of Militarism, they being Siamese twins, vultures out of the same egg. The type now advancing to the centre of the stage, and destined to occupy it exclusively, is, as they see it, the industrial type; a type that will give all men equal opportunities, as of human right, and not tolerate the invasion of that right, a type, therefore, that will enable men to regulate their own affairs by mutual agreement and free them from their present slavery to the militant employing class; a type that will release incalculably enormous reservoirs of energy now lying stagnant … That such is the natural trend of the evolution now in process they do not doubt; but its pace will be determined by the vigour with which we shake off the servile spirit now para lysing us, and by the intelligence with which we get down to the facts that really count. At bottom it is a question of freedom or slavery; of self-mastery or being mastered.

Our faith is in Science, in knowledge, in the infinite possibilities of the human brain, in that indomitable vital force we have hitherto abused so greatly because only now are we beginning to glimpse the splendour of the uses to which it may be brought.

[H]ow can Science discover except through free experiment? How can the mind of Man expand when it is laced in the straitjacket of authority and is forbidden independence? This question answers itself, and the verdict passed by history leaves no room for doubt. Only with the winning from Militarism and Ecclesiasticism of some measure of freedom did Science come to life; and if the world were to pass again into a similar thraldom, that life would fall once more into a stupor from which it could be shaken only by some social upheaval far greater and more bloody than the French Revolution ever began to be. It is not the champions of Freedom who are responsible for violent Revolutions, but those who, in their ignorant insanity, believe they can serve Humanity by putting it in irons and further happiness by fettering Mankind. We may be passing even now into such a thraldom, for Democracy, trained from time immemorial to servility, has not yet learned the worth of Freedom and Plutocracy would only too gladly render all thought and knowledge subservient to its own profit-making schemes.

[T]he seven great Anarchist writers…–Tolstoy, Bakunin, Kropotkin Proudhon, Stirner, Godwin, and Tucker–calls special attention to the fact that, although on innumerable points they differ widely, as against the crippling authoritarianism of all governing machines they stand a solid phalanx. The whole body of Herbert Spencer’s teaching, once so influential in this country, moves firmly toward that goal. His test of Civilisation was the extent to which voluntary co-operation has occupied the position previously monopolized by the compelling State, which he regarded as essentially a military institution. Habitually we circulate, as one of our most convincing documents, his treatise on “Man versus the State,” and in his “Data of Ethics” he has given us a picture of the future which is Anarchism of the purest type.

Every organism struggles with all the vitality at its command against extinction; and every Government, whatever it may call itself, is an organism composed of human beings. It exists, and can exist, only by compelling other human beings to remain a part of it; by exacting service from them, that is to say, by making them its serfs and slaves. The organism’s real basis is human slavery, and it cannot be anything else.

Socialism

[T]he position of Socialism…is to free mankind. The first difficulty, however, lies in the fact that while the word “Anarchy,” signifying “without rule,” is exceedingly precise, the word “Socialism” is not. Socialism merely means association, and a Socialist is one who believes in associated life and effort. Immediately a thousand questions of the greatest difficulty arise. Obviously there are different ways in which people can associate; some of them delightful, venue quite the reverse. It is delightful to associate yourself, freely and voluntarily, with those to whom you feel attracted by similarity of tastes and pursuits. It is torture to be herded compulsorily among those with whom you have nothing in common. Association with free and equal partners, working for a common end in which all are alike interested, is among the things that make life worth living. On the other hand, the association of men who are compelled by the whip of authority to live together in a prison is about as near hell as it is possible to get.

To be associated in governmentally conducted industries, whether it be as soldier or sailor, as railroad, telegraph, or postal employee, is to become a mere cog in a vast political machine… Under such conditions there would be less freedom than there is even now under the régime of private monopoly; the workers would abdicate all control of their own lives and become a flock of party sheep, rounded up at the will of their political bosses taking what those bosses chose to give them, and, in the end being thankful to be allowed to hold a job on any terms.

Let no one delude himself with the fallacy that governmental institutions under Socialist administration would be shorn of their present objectionable features. They would be precisely what they are to-day. If the workers were to come into possession of the means of production to-morrow, their administration under the most perfect form of universal suffrage–which the United States, for example, has been vainly trying to doctor into decent shape for generations past–would simply result in the creation of a special class of political managers, professing to act for the welfare of the majority. Were they as honest as the day–which it is folly to expect–they could only carry out the dictates of the majority, and those who did not agree slavishly with those dictates would find themselves outcasts. In reality, we should have put a special class of men in absolute control of the most powerful official machine that the world has ever seen, and should have installed a new form of wage-slavery, with the State as master. And the workingman who was ill-used by the State would find it a master a thousand times more difficult to overthrow than the most powerful of private employers.

Socialists declare loudly that the entire capitalistic system is slavery of the most unendurable type, and that landowning, production, and distribution for private profit must be abolished. They preach a class war as the only method by which this can be accomplished, and they proclaim, as fervently as ever did a Mohammedan calling for a holy crusade against the accursed infidel, that he who is not with them is against them. For this truly gigantic undertaking they have adopted a philosophy and pursue means that seem to us childishly inadequate.

To us it is inconceivable that institutions so deeply rooted in the savagery and superstitions of the past can be overthrown except by people who have become saturated to the very marrow of their bones with loathing for such superstition and such savagery. To us the first indispensable step is the creation of profoundly rebellious spirits who will make no truce, no compromise. We recognize that it is worse than useless to waste our breath on effects; that the causes are what we must go for, and that every form of monopoly, every phase of slavery and oppression, has its root in the ambition of the few to rule and fleece, and the sheepish willingness of the many to be ruled and fleeced.

What is the course that the Socialists are pursuing…? In private they will tell you that they are rebels against the existing unnatural disorder as truly as are we Anarchists, but in the actual conduct of their movement they are autocrats, bent on the suppression of all individuality, whipping, drilling, and disciplining their recruits into absolute conformity with the ironclad requirements of the party. They declare themselves occupied with a campaign of education. They are not. In such a contest as this, wherein the lines are drawn so sharply; where on the one side are ranged the natural laws of life, and on the other an insanely artificial system that ignores all the fundamental laws of life, there can be no such thing as compromise; and he who for the sake of getting votes attempts to make black appear white is not an educator but a confidence man. We are aware that there are many confidence men who grow into the belief that theirs is a highly honourable profession, but they are confidence men all the same.

The truth is that the Socialists have become the helpless victims of their own political tactics. We speak correctly of political “campaigns,” for politics is warfare. Its object is to get power, by gathering to its side the majority, and reduce the minority to submission. In politics, as in every other branch of war, the entire armoury of spies, treachery, stratagem and deceit of every kind is utilized to gain the one important end–victory in the fight. And it is precisely because our modern democracy is engaged, year in and year out, in this most unscrupulous warfare that the basic and all-essential virtues of truth, honesty, and the spirit of fair play have almost disappeared.

We raise further that if politics could, by any miracle, be purified, it would mean, if possible, a still more detestable consummation, for there would not remain a single individual right that was not helplessly at the mercy of the triumphant majority. It is imperative, and especially for the weaker–those who are now poor and uneducated–that the “inalienable” rights of man be recognized; and that, while he is now “supposed” to be guaranteed absolute right of free speech and assemblage, and the right to think on religious matters as he pleases, in the future he shall be really guaranteed full opportunities of supporting and developing his life–a right that cannot be taken away from him by a dominant party that may have chanced to secure, for the time being, the majority of votes.

This is the rock on which Socialism everlastingly goes to pieces. It mocks at the basic laws of life. It denies, both openly and tacitly, that there are such things as individual rights; and while it asserts that assuredly, as civilized beings the majorities of the future will grant the minority far greater freedom and opportunity than it has at present, it has to admit that all this will be a “grant,” a “concession” from those in power. There probably never has been a despot that waded through slaughter to a throne who has not made similar promises.

The way in which a man looks at a subject determines his treatment of it. If he thinks, with the Socialists, that the collectivity is everything and the individual an insignificant cipher, he will fall in willingly with all those movements that profess to be working for the good of the majority, and sacrifice the individual remorselessly for this supposed good. For example: Although he may admit, in theory, as the Socialists generally do, that men should be permitted to govern their own lives, his belief in legislating for the majority, and the scant value he puts on the individual life, will lead him to support such movements as Prohibition, which, in the name of the good of the majority, takes away from the individual, absolutely and in a most important matter–as in the question of what he shall and shall not drink–the command of his own life.

Apparently Socialists cannot conceive of a society run on other than the most strictly centralized principles. This seems to us a profound error.

Locomotion is the industry of all others that seemed, by its very nature, doomed to centralization, yet even in this department the tide of decentralization has set in with extraordinary rapidity. With the advent of the bicycle came the first break the individual machine becoming at once a formidable competitor of the street car companies. The tendency received a further and enormous impetus with the introduction of the motor, which throws every highway open to the individual owner of the machine and does away with the immense advantage previously enjoyed by those who had acquired the monopoly of the comparatively few routes along which it is possible to lay down rails and operate trains. It is obvious that the motor, both as a passenger and freight carrier, is as yet only in its infancy; and when the flying machine comes, as eventually it will come, into general use the individualization of locomotion will be complete.

In short, the philosophy that bases its conclusions on the conditions that happen to prevail at any given moment in the machine industry is necessarily building on quicksand, since the machine itself is undergoing a veritable revolution along the individualistic lines we have indicated.

This delusion respecting machinery has led the Socialists into ridiculous assumptions on the subject of centralization in general, committing them for a couple of generations past to the pipe-dream that under the régime of Capitalism the middle class is doomed, by the natural development of the economic system, to speedy extinction. On the other hand, in proportion as the capitalistic system develops the numbers and influence of the middle class increase, until in America–the country in which Capitalism has attained its greatest growth–it is well nigh omnipotent.

[T]hose who have studied the works of such profound writers as Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Sir Henry Maine, and others too numerous to mention are well aware that the history taught the Socialists through Marx and Engels is partisan history, and that the real movement of humanity has been to get away from the military régime of authority to the domain of individual freedom. It is this movement with which we have allied ourselves, convinced that there is nothing too fine for man, and that it is only under conditions of freedom that man has the opportunity of being fine. The tendency must be toward a finer, which means a freer, more self-governing life.

My own hatred of State Socialism, in all its forms, springs from my conviction that it fosters in the Individual this terrible psychology of invasion; that it denies the existence of Rights which should be secure from assault; that it teaches the Individual that in himself he is of no account and that only as a member of the State has he any valid title to existence. That, as it seems to me, reduces him to helplessness, and it is the helplessness of the exploited that makes exploitation possible. From that flow, with inexorable logic, all wars, all tyrannies, all those despotic regulations and restrictions which to-day are robbing Life of all its elasticity, its virility, its proper sweetness. State Socialism is a military creed, forged centuries ago by conquerors who put the world in chains. It is as old as the hills, and, like the hills, is destined to crumble into dust. Throughout the crisis of the past eight years its failure as even a palliative policy has been colossal.

Conclusion

[O]ur suffering and danger do not come from Free Industrialism but from an Industrialism that is not free because it is enslaved by Monopoly and caught fast in the clutches of that invasive military machine–the State. Monopoly is the enemy, the most dangerous enemy the world has known; and never was it so dangerous as now, when the State has made itself well-nigh omnipotent, Monopoly is State-created, State-upheld, and could not exist were it not for the organized violence with which everywhere the State supports it. At the behest of State-protected Monopoly the ordinary man can be deprived at any moment of the opportunity of earning a livelihood, and thrown into the gutter. At the command of the State, acting always in the interests of Monopoly, he can be converted at any moment into food for powder. Show me, if you can, a tyranny more terrible than that!

I call myself an Anarchist because, as it appears to me, Anarchism is the only philosophy that grips firmly and voices unambiguously this central, vital truth. It is either a fallacy or a truth and Anarchism is either right or wrong. If Anarchism is right, it cannot compromise in any shape or form with the existing State régime without convicting itself thereby of dishonesty and infidelity to Truth. Tyranny is not a thing to be shored up or made endurable, but a disease to be recognized frankly as unendurable and purged out of the social system. Personally I am a foe to all schemes for bolstering up the present reign of violence, and I cannot regard the compulsions of Trade Unionism, Syndicalism, and similar States-within- States, as bridges from the old order to the new, and wombs in which the society of the future is being moulded. Such analogies seem to me ridiculous and fatally misleading. Freedom is not an embryo. Freedom is not a helpless infant struggling into birth. Freedom is the greatest force at our command; the one incomparable constructor capable of beating swords into ploughshares and converting this war-stricken desert of a world into a decent dwelling-place.

Anarchism rests on the conviction that human beings, if granted full and equal opportunity to satisfy their wants, could and would do it far more satisfactorily than can or will a master class. It is inconceivable to us that they could make such a failure of it as the master class has done. We do not believe that the peoples, having once become self-owning, would exhaust all the resources of science in murdering one another.

We are for abolishing Capitalism by giving all men free and equal access to capital in its strictest and most proper sense, viz., the chief thing, the means of producing wealth–that is, the well-being of themselves and the community… The work of their brains–these few who “scorned delights and lived laborious days”–has put into our hands a capacity to produce which is practically illimitable, and a power to distribute which laughs at physical obstacles and could, by the exercise of ordinary humanity and common sense, knit the entire world into one harmonious commonwealth and free it forever from the mean and sordid struggle that keeps it in the sewer. These few, knowing no God but Truth and no religion but loyalty to Truth, have made Nature, which was for ages Man’s ruthless master, to-day his docile slave. In all history there is nothing to compare with the Industrial Revolution wrought by Science, but the harvest of that mighty sowing we have not as yet even begun to reap.

This is the dream; but it is not a dream. The abolition of human slavery is essentially the most practical of things. The adjustment of individual and social life to conditions that have been completely revolutionized by the advance of human knowledge is an adjustment that must be made.

FINIS

Just a thought.

On October 11th I received the following bizarre note from Mr. Black:

I have sent these to two others in your circle and I send it to you as well.

Dear Sir:

Being on a 40-city 24×7 book tour for War Against the Weak. I am writing this from an airplane, and I regret my brevity. Catching up on some email from a few weeks back I have now come across your remarks and those of your like-minded friends defending Spencer.

You wrote, as shown below: “Spencer, of course, was a radical liberal,steadfastly opposed to all coercive state control over the individual;associating Spencer with compulsory sterilization, or indeed compulsory anything, is ludicrous.”

You are correct in that statement, and the only thing ludicrous in this matter is that you and your quoted and unquoted colleagues think that I “defamed” Spencer by suggesting he was indeed linked to and advocating compulsory sterilization or eugenics. This is idiotic. Let me be explicit. Spencer was not adcoating [sic] or responsibility [sic] for coercive sterilization, Darwin was not, Malthus was not. Nor is the Holy Bible a justification for the KKK or the Inquisition. My book is about the distortion of 19th Century ideas and 20th Century science to create the sham science eugenics which misused every notion they could grapple.

There has been no defamation by me of Spencer – only a defamation of me by you those [sic] in your circle who have falsely and deliberately circulated this notion that I blame Spencer for the ideas implemented by American and Nazi eugenics. I do not. Repeat, I do not. Now kindly remove all such references from the Internet, cease your campaign of falsity, and spread the word amongst your colleagues that I know the true definition of defamation, libel and slander.

edwin black

I have no idea what the phrases “your circle,” “your like-minded friends,” and “your quoted and unquoted colleagues” refer to (I am the only author quoted in his letter), unless he just means people who read my columns. (I’m aware that my article has been cited favorably by other critics of Mr. Black’s work, and I’ve seen some evidence that attempts may have been made, by parties unknown, to suppress those criticisms – see my blog entry for September 18th – but I’m not personally acquainted with any of the people involved, nor am I involved in a “campaign” against anybody, unless writing a negative book review (!) can be so described.)

But since Mr. Black has apparently sent his allegations of defamation against me to other (unnamed) persons, I feel it is appropriate for me to post his letter and to respond publicly.

Mr. Black accuses me of “defaming” him by attributing to him the following theses:

1. Herbert Spencer was an advocate of compulsory sterilization.
2. Herbert Spencer bears responsibility for the later movement for compulsory sterilization.

Mr. Black’s accusation is erroneous. Nowhere in my original article do I attribute to him thesis (a). For the record: Edwin Black does not accuse Spencer of advocating compulsory sterilization, and I have never said anything to the contrary. Mr. Black’s assertion that I have done so is without basis in fact.

Nor do I attribute to him thesis (b), though I do attribute to him a closely related thesis. I claim in my article that Mr. Black’s book “treat[s] the campaign for compulsory sterilization as a natural outgrowth of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.” In short, I describe Mr. Black as holding that:

3. Herbert Spencer bears responsibility for contributing to an intellectual climate that helped to bring about compulsory sterilization.

In addition, my article also attributes to him the claim that:

4. Herbert Spencer “completely denounced charity,” favored the strong over the weak, and advocated allowing the unfit to die off.

Now thesis (c) bears some resemblance to thesis (b), but it is not the same thesis. (For a defense of the distinction between being responsible for X and being responsible for contributing to a climate leading to X, see David Kelley’s book The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, especially Chapter 3.) So I’m happy to take Mr. Black’s word for it that he does not hold thesis (b). But then I never attributed thesis (b) to Mr. Black in the first place, any more than I attributed (a). I did, and do, attribute (c) and (d). Rebutting his thesis (d) was in fact the central point of my article, though you’d never guess it from Mr. Black’s reply, which utterly ignores the subject of thesis (d), and reads as though my concern had been compulsory sterilization and nothing else. Compulsory sterilization was not even the main, let alone the sole, topic of my article.

In short, the criticisms Mr. Black complains about are criticisms I did not make, and the criticisms I actually made are ones that Mr. Black’s response says nothing to dispel.

My original article fully documents my claim that Mr. Black asserts thesis (d). It also fully documents my claim that thesis (d) is false. If falsely asserting thesis (d) does not count as a defamation of Spencer, I can’t imagine what would. (I also criticized Mr. Black for misdescribing the theological position of Social Statics. That’s not a defamation, exactly, but it is certainly a worrisome inaccuracy in a book that prides itself on rigorous fact-checking.) If Mr. Black thinks I am wrong to describe him as defaming Spencer, then he must show either that thesis (d) is true, or else that his book does not after all assert thesis (d). So far Mr. Black has done neither.

What about thesis (c)? In my original article I describe Mr. Black’s book as suggesting not only that Spencer held repugnant ideas, but also that the influence of his ideas naturally led in the end to the 20th century’s campaigns for compulsory sterilization. In offering this interpretation, have I misrepresented what Mr. Black wrote? Judge for yourself:

Mr. Black’s main discussion of Herbert Spencer occurs in the book’s opening section, which is titled “From Peapod to Persecution.” The obvious implication is that this section describes the small beginnings (peapod) from which the later eugenics movement (persecution) grew. The organic metaphor of “peapod” also implies that the movement was a natural outgrowth of these early beginnings rather than a perversion of them.

After a brief, hostile, and thoroughly inaccurate summary of Social Statics, Spencer’s thought is classified among the “new philosophies [that] suggested society would only improve when the unwashed classes faded away.” (p. 12) The reader is clearly invited to conclude that coercive measures to help these classes fade away are a logical extension of Spencer’s ideas. (Mr. Black’s treatment of Spencer is incidentally far more hostile, and insinuates far more affinity with the eugenics movement, than anything he says about Malthus or Darwin.)

This implication is strengthened by Mr. Black’s treatment of Buck v. Bell, the notorious case in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld compulsory sterilization. Notice how Mr. Black introduces the issue of Spencer’s influence:

Buck v. Bell would be decided in May of 1927. But the eighty-six-year-old Holmes was in many ways defined by the Civil War and ethically shaped by the nineteenth century. While recovering from the wounds of Chancellorsville, his reading included Spencer’s Social Statics, the turning-point tract that advocated social Darwinism and so significantly influenced Galtonian thought. Spencer argued the strong over the weak, and believed that human entitlements and charity itself were false and against nature. Indeed, Holmes’ 1881 lecture series in The Common Law also asserted that the idea of inherent rights was “intrinsically absurd.” (War Against the Weak, p. 119)In this passage Mr. Black not only grossly mischaracterizes Spencer’s views (which, as I’ve shown, were in fact diametrically opposed to the ones described), but he clearly implies that Spencer’s ideas were among the nineteenth-century influences that “ethically shaped” Holmes’ thinking and thereby helped determine the outcome of Buck v. Bell. Mr. Black appeals to Spencer’s influence to explain Holmes’ decision in Buck v. Bell; otherwise a reference to Spencer in this paragraph would be pointless. And there is no suggestion that Holmes misused or perverted Spencer’s teachings. On the contrary, the phrase “Holmes … also asserted” plainly suggests, in context, that Holmes and Spencer were in agreement on fundamentals, and that Holmes wassimply taking Spencer’s ideas to their logical conclusion. (The fact that Holmes’ most famous reference to Spencer was hostile is not mentioned.)

Given that Mr. Black asserts thesis (d), there is nothing surprising in his also being committed to thesis (c). Indeed, if thesis (d) were true, that would be an excellent reason for believing thesis (c). Unfortunately, it is the only reason for believing thesis (c). Hence if (d) falls, as it must, (c) falls as well.

In short, the theses Mr. Black repudiates – (a) and (b) – are theses I never attributed to him, and the theses I do attribute to him – (c) and (d) – he ignores. Thesis (d) is explicitly asserted in his book (see the passages quoted in my original article), while thesis (c) is unmistakably implied. Both (c) and (d) are demonstrably false (again, as I showed in my original article).

I am astonished by Mr. Black’s closing suggestion that criticisms of his book should be “remove[d] from the Internet” rather than answered. That is not my conception of how free civil discussion operates. I have not, for example, written secret notes to Mr. Black’s publisher demanding that his book be withdrawn from circulation. Instead I have answered Mr. Black’s assertions in a public forum, presented my evidence, and left the verdict to my readers. Doesn’tMr. Black owe his readers the same courtesy?

As I mentioned above and elsewhere, there are indications that some online criticisms of Mr.Black’s book have been silently suppressed. A Google search on my name and his reveals numerous webpages on which critical reviews of his book, citing my article, have been mysteriously deleted (they’re in the “cached” but not the current version of the pages), though comments favorable to the book remain untouched. I sincerely hope that Mr. Black himself has not been involved in this apparent campaign to suppress criticism of his work, since that would be a far more serious breach of professionalism than anything I originally complained of in the book itself.

In closing: Mr. Black’s charge that I have misrepresented his book is false. Instead he has misrepresented my article. More importantly, he has misrepresented the views of Herbert Spencer,a hero of liberty, by recycling (whether knowingly or unknowingly) ancient smears first invented in the 19th century by Spencer’s political enemies. Mr. Black has not yet addressed my criticisms;instead he has denounced other criticisms that I did not make, and he has by his own testimony sent accusations of defamation against me to persons he does not name.

I stand by my original article, and I request a retraction of Mr. Black’s misrepresentations both of Spencer and of myself.

The latest dishonor to Spencer’s memory turns up in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, a new book by Edwin Black (best known as the author of IBM and the Holocaust). Black’s subject is the American eugenics movement, which in the heyday of its influence was responsible for the forcible sterilization of thousands of Americans, and which also contributed, ideologically and sometimes financially, to the rise of Nazism in Germany. It’s an ugly and important story that needs to be told.

But what should rouse the ire of any intellectual historian is Black’soutrageous attempt to treat the campaign for compulsory sterilizationas a natural outgrowth of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. Spencer, of course, was a radical liberal, steadfastly opposed to all coercive state control over the individual; associating Spencer with compulsorysterilization, or indeed compulsory anything, is ludicrous. As Spencer wrote in his 1851 classicSocial Statics:

The desire to command is essentially a barbarous desire. … Command cannot be otherwise than savage, for it implies an appeal to force, should force be needful. … Command is the foe of peace, for it breeds war of words and feelings – sometimes of deeds. It is inconsistent with the first law of morality. It is radically wrong. … “You must do not as you will, but as I will,” is the basis of every mandate, whether used by a planter to his Negro, or by a husband to his wife. (pp. 144–5)

Voluntary cooperation, Spencer held, is in the nature of things both more just and more efficient than force and intimidation. Accordingly, Spencer condemned slavery, imperialism, sexual inequality, censorship, economic regulation, and every other violation of his Law of EqualFreedom: “Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.” (p. 95) (Spencer would go on to elaborate and develop the radical antistatism of Social Statics in such later works as The Principles of Sociology, The Principles of Ethics, and The Man Versus the State.)

So what common ground could there be between Spencer and the eugenicists? Both, to be sure, were “Social Darwinists,” if that means that both thought there were important sociopolitical lessons to be drawn from evolutionary biology. But Spencer and the eugenicists drew opposite lessons. For the eugenicists, the moral of evolutionary biology was that the course of human evolution must be coercively managed and controlled by a centralized, paternalistic technocracy.For Spencer, by contrast, the moral was that coercive, centralized, paternalistic approaches to social problems were counterproductive and so would tend to be eliminated by the spontaneous forces of social evolution, which would instead favor a system of fully consensual human relationships.

Admittedly, industrialist Andrew Carnegie was an admirer of Herbert Spencer, and the Carnegie Institution appears to have played an important role in the eugenics movement. But so what? I do not know how far Carnegie himself personally supported the tyrannical policies that Black discusses, but suppose he supported them up to the hilt; if Carnegie said nice things about Spencer, but also supported policies antithetical to everything Spencer stood for, this can hardly be laid at Spencer’s door. In short, there are no grounds for linking one of the great libertarian heroes of the 19th century with one of the great statist evils of the 20th.

With Charity Toward None?

On what basis, then, can Black associate Spencer with compulsory sterilization? Black’s answer lies in his peculiar synopsis of the argument of Social Statics:

In the 1850s, agnostic English philosopher Herbert Spencer published Social Statics, asserting that man and society, in truth, followed the laws of cold science, not the will of a caring, almighty God. Spencer popularized a powerful new term: “survival of the fittest.” He declared that man and society were evolving according to their inherited nature. Through evolution, the “fittest” wouldnaturally continue to perfect society. And the “unfit” would naturally become more impoverished, less educated, and ultimately die off, as well they should. Indeed, Spencer saw the misery and starvation of the pauper classes as an inevitable decree of a “far-seeing benevolence,” that is, the laws of nature. He unambiguously insisted, “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, and to make room for better. … If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.” Spencer left no room for doubt, declaring, “all imperfection must disappear.” As such, he completely denounced charity and instead extolled the purifying elimination of the “unfit.” The unfit, he argued, were predestined by their nature to an existence of downwardly spiraling degradation. (Black, p. 12)

From declaring that the unfit should be allowed to die off, Black suggests, it is only a short step to declaring that they should be forcibly sterilized, if not killed outright.

That something is awry in Black’s synopsis is already evident from its opening sentence, which describes Social Statics as the work of an “agnostic” who rejected the “will of a caring, almightyGod” in favor of the “laws of cold science.” Contrast this description with what we actually find in the pages of Social Statics:

[T]here are few if any among civilized people who do not agree that human well-being is in accordance with the Divine will. The doctrine is taught by all our religious teachers; it is assumedby every writer on morality; we may therefore safely consider it as an admitted truth. … Starting afresh, then, from the admitted truth, that human happiness is the Divine will, let us look at the means appointed for the obtainment of that happiness and observe what conditions they presuppose. … Now if God wills man’s happiness, and man’s happiness can be obtained only by the exercise of his faculties; then … it is man’s duty to exercise his faculties, for duty means fulfillment of the Divine will. That it is man’s duty to exercise his faculties is further proved by thefact that what we call punishment attaches to the neglect of that exercise. … But the fulfillment of this duty necessarily presupposes freedom of action. … He has Divine authority, therefore, for claiming this freedom of action. God intended him to have it; that is, he has a right to it. (Social Statics, pp. 61, 67–69)

How could any reader of this passage take Social Statics to be a book committed to theological agnosticism and the rejection of a benevolent deity? Obviously, no reader could; and Black’s description, I therefore infer, is not based on a reading of the book Social Statics.

What is it based on? Well, as a matter of fact Spencer eventually did adopt an agnostic position, which he defended in First Principles (1860–62); in his subsequent ethical writings he accordingly dispensed with the theological underpinnings of Social Statics, instead defending the same normative conclusions on purely secular grounds. (In effect, Spencer came to treat “human happiness is desirable” as a basic premise rather than, as in Social Statics, as a deduction from “God wills human happiness.”) My hypothesis, then, is that Black has relied on background information about the later Spencer and then mistakenly assumed that the earlySpencer’s position was the same. Black cites Social Statics in his footnotes; but he clearly has not read it.

What, then, about the main charge: that Spencer “completely denounced charity” and advocated allowing the unfit to die off? This accusation is impossible to square with the text of Social Statics (or with any of Spencer’s other writings, for that matter). In referring to the process by which nature weeds out the unfit, Spencer wrote that “in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated” (Social Statics, p. 340); in short, Spencer endorsed charity. Such sympathy is to be condemned, he maintained, only when it either “prompts to a breach of equity” and so “originates an interference forbidden by the law of equal freedom” (p. 340) – i.e., Spencer was condemning state-enforcedcharity, not voluntary (“spontaneous”) charity – or else when it gives rise to those specific forms of charity that encourage dependence and reward idleness and folly.

Now it is only against this injudicious charity that the foregoing argument tells. To that charity which may be described as helping men to help themselves it makes no objection – countenances it, rather. … Accidents will still supply victims on whom generosity may be legitimately expended. Men thrown upon their backs by unforeseen events, men who have failed for want of knowledge inaccessible to them, men ruined by the dishonesty of others, and men in whom hope long delayed has made the heart sick may, with advantage to all parties, be assisted. Even the prodigal, after severe hardship has branded his memory with the unbending conditions of social life to which he must submit, may properly have another trial afforded him. (Social Statics, p. 291)

Spencer also maintained the same pro-charity position throughout his later works – devoting, for example, ten chapters of the final volume of Principles of Ethics (published in 1893) to the subject of “Positive Beneficence.” If there is a deficiency of charity here, it is on Black’s part, not Spencer’s.

Spencer praises the “far-seeing benevolence” of evolutionary selection, not because he wants to see the unfit weeded out, but because past selection has led to the emergence of beings with a moral sense advanced enough to moderate the operation of evolutionary selection now. In Spencer’s eyes, charity (at least of the judicious and voluntary kind) represents not a transgression against evolution, but rather a transcendence of one form of evolution in favor of a higher form:“And although by these ameliorations the process of adaptation must be remotely interfered with, yet in the majority of cases it will not be so much retarded in one direction as it will be advanced in another.” (Social Statics, pp. 291-2)

But didn’t Spencer regard the mental and moral inferiority of the lower classes as the cause of their poverty? On the contrary, to those who maintained such views Spencer replied with asperity:

It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people – very easy for you to censure theirextravagant and vicious habits …. It is no honor to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in theposition of the laborer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you …? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meager food, and scarcely enough of that …. Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a despised class contemptuously termed “the great unwashed”; stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious… and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. … How offensive it is to hear some pert, self-approving personage, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, passing harsh sentence on his poor, hard-worked, heavily burdened fellow countrymen …. (Social Statics, pp. 203–5)

Are these passages buried somewhere in Spencer’s text so that Black could easily have missed them? On the contrary, most of them are located on the very pages that Black cites. (My page references are to the same edition of Social Statics that Black cites: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, New York, 1970.) Once again, Black is confidently citing and describing a book he apparently has not read.

This is rather embarrassing for an author who begins his book with the assertion:

Every fact and fragment and its context was supported with black and white documents, then double-checked and separately triple-checked in a rigorous multistage verification regimen by a team of argumentative, hairsplitting fact-checkers. (Black, p. xxii)

Obviously the hairsplitting fact-checkers were napping over Black’s synopsis of Social Statics.

Spencer and the Supreme Court

Later in War Against the Weak, Black asserts that “Spencer argued the strong over the weak.” (p. 119) This too is grotesquely false (or would be if it were grammatical). In fact Spencer maintainedthat “forcible supplantings of the weak by the strong” belonged to a relatively primitive phase in the development of human civilization, one that was beginning to wane, and deserved to wane, in favor of an “advanced social state” based on mutual respect and mutual benevolence. (Social Statics, pp. 374–5) Heaping scorn upon British attempts to “justify our colonial aggressions by saying that the Creator intends the Anglo-Saxon race to people the world” (p. 142), Spencer condemned the “piratical spirit” (p. 322) of European imperialism, with its “deeds of blood and rapine” inflicted on “subjugated races” by “so-called Christian nations” (pp. 328–29). When Spencer says that the ill-adapted must give way to the well-adapted, part of what he means is that social systems involving the oppression of the weak are ill-adapted and must give way to a more sophisticated social system enshrining equal justice for all.

In a particularly surreal section, Black blames Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ decision in Buck v. Bell on Holmes’ alleged admiration for Herbert Spencer. This is the famous case in which Holmes ordered the compulsory sterilization of a mentally impaired woman, on the grounds that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” If “the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives” (e.g., in time of war), all the more,Holmes reasoned, may it demand “lesser sacrifices” from “those whoalready sap the strength of the State.”

Attributing Holmes’ decision in Buck v. Bell to an admiration for Herbert Spencer is bizarre for two reasons. First, nothing could be more antithetical to Spencer’s outlook than the notion that theState has the authority to require sacrifices of any sort from its citizens. The fact that the woman in question was mentally impaired would be of little relevance from Spencer’s point of view, since he always argued strenuously that inferiority of intellect is no ground for restriction of liberty; from the fact that A’s faculties are inferior to B’s, Spencer pointed out, it would be a non sequitur to infer that A should be prevented from exercising such faculties as A does possess. (Social Statics, pp. 141, 156)

Second, Holmes’ attitude toward Spencer was famously one of antagonism, not admiration. In his oft-quoted dissent in Lochner v. New York, Holmes, defending governmental interference with private contracts, contemptuously dismissed Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom:

The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics. … I think that the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion.

Historians have sometimes puzzled over how to reconcile the “progressive” character of Holmes’ dissent in Lochner with the “reactionary” character of his decision in Buck. But Spencer would nothave been puzzled; he would have recognized that both of these Holmesian positions emanated from the same fundamental contempt for individual autonomy, and so from a sociopolitical perspective that was the antipode of Spencer’s own.

Black goes on to quote various fascistic-sounding opinions of Holmes with the suggestion that Spencer would agree: that the notion of inherent human rights is “intrinsically absurd,” that truth is “the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others,” that “force, mitigated so far as it may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio,” and that “the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, in a plan of a campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” (Black, pp. 119–120) (Ironically, the one opinion Black praises Holmes for (p. 119) – his famous “shouting fire in a theatre” dictum – comes from Schenck v. United States, a case in which Holmes ruled that war protestors have no right to free speech; one suspects (hopes?) that Black did not check the context of that quote either.)

Each of these opinions would be anathema to Spencer. Spencer despised forcible compulsion, and devoted an entire essay (“The Great Political Superstition,” in The Man Versus the State) to denouncing the identification of truth with majority vote. Far from admiring the blindly obedient soldier praised by Holmes, Spencer angrily wrote: “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” (“Patriotism,” in Facts and Comments, Ch. 20) As for the notion that Spencer rejectedinherent human rights, the barest glance at the table of contents of Social Statics or The Principles of Ethics will demonstrate its absurdity. Holmes’ credo was that might makes right; Spencer’s was that might must yield to right.

I doubt that Edwin Black himself harbors any particular animus against Herbert Spencer. (His smearing of today’s genetic scientists as mere crypto-eugenicists is perhaps less innocent, but that’s a separate issue.) Black simply retails what has become the standard textbook caricature of Spencer. But that caricature is false from beginning to end, and is easily seen to be false by anyone who will take the trouble to read Spencer rather than relying on canned summaries. As George Smith wrote in 1978:

Probably no intellectual has suffered more distortion and abuse than Spencer. He is continually condemned for things he never said – indeed, he is taken to task for things he explicitly denied. The target of academic criticism is usually the mythical Spencer rather than the real Spencer; and although some critics may derive immense satisfaction from their devastating refutations of a Spencer who never existed, these treatments hinder rather than advance the cause of knowledge.(Smith, p. 293)

In any case, Black is perpetuating, whether through malice or through laziness, an injustice against one of history’s most liberal and humane philosophers. And the inaccuracy of his discussion of Spencer, in what Black claims is a thoroughly researched and painstakingly triple-checked book, casts doubt on all the rest of Black’s research. If War Against the Weak is this wrong about Spencer, one has to wonder: what else is it wrong about?

~ George H. Smith (Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies, p. 293)

I don’t know what it is about Herbert Spencer that brings out the worst in cultural historians; but the tendency to recycle the same bizarre, age-old smears against him, without ever checking the facts, remains firmly entrenched. Spencer, it seems, is a ready-made scapegoat, attacked because others have made it fashionable to attack him; and few bother to read what the man actually wrote, because “everybody knows” that his ideas, whatever they were, were inhuman and worthless.

To those, like myself, who admire Spencer as a profound thinker and a hero of liberty, the shameful treatment he regularly receives at the hands of careless and credulous scholars is especially infuriating. Indeed, lately I’ve found myself turning into something of a one-man Herbert Spencer Anti-Defamation League. (See my recent skirmishes here, here, and here.) Well, so be it; as long as scholars continue to misrepresent Herbert Spencer, I’ll continue to cry foul.

The latest offender is Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan, 2004). Since Spencer’s defense of theological agnosticism in his book First Principles (1862) was a significant influence on the American freethought movement, Jacoby devotes several pages to a discussion of his ideas.

The most popular stereotype of Spencer has always been that he opposed aid to the poor and needy, on the grounds that such assistance interfered with the process whereby natural selection weeds out the unfit. Jacoby duly repeats the stereotype. Unfortunately for Jacoby — and her many, many predecessors in this calumny — Spencer never held any such view. That the stereotype is entirely false is clear to anyone who takes the trouble to read Spencer’s arguments rather than seizing on out-of-context fragments; but seizing on out-of-context fragments is exactly what Jacoby does.

Like all Spencer-bashers before her, Jacoby quotes with relish the infamous passage from Social Statics III. 28. 4, where Spencer says: “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.” And like all Spencer-bashers before her, Jacoby conveniently omits the first sentence of the immediately following paragraph: “Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.” This omission creates the impression that Spencer thinks it a good idea to let the unfit die; but on the contrary, he goes on to argue that any “drawbacks” arising from aid to the unfit are outweighed by “the benefits otherwise conferred.”

The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial. But who would guess this from Jacoby’s highly selective excerpting? By quoting a snippet out of context, she has managed to make Spencer’s view appear to be the opposite of what it in fact was.

I don’t mean to suggest that Jacoby is being deliberately dishonest in her misrepresentation of Spencer’s position. I very much doubt that she read the whole section and then chose to quote just the misleading snippet while suppressing Spencer’s actual conclusions. I think it far more likely that Jacoby never read the section at all. I would be willing to bet that she found the snippet ready-made, quoted by some other author who perhaps also had never bothered to read the passage in its original context. This is how smears get perpetuated.

It must likewise be presumed that neither Jacoby nor the sources she relied on ever took a careful look at Principles of Ethics V. 1, where Spencer explains that “the highest form of life, individual and social, is not achievable under a reign of justice only; but … there must be joined with it a reign of beneficence.” A society cannot regard itself as advanced, Spencer explains, “until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others.” Spencer then follows up this declaration with eighteen chapters on the duties of beneficence. But he might as well have filled those eighteen chapters up with blank pages or chicken-scratchings for all the effect they have had on the prejudices of his interpreters. Spencer, as Jacoby blandly notes, is “virtually unread today.” (p. 139.)

Spencer the Reactionary?

Jacoby continues the misrepresentation by asserting that Spencer’s American followers were “unlike Spencer” in favouring “social action to ameliorate the harshest aspects of industrial capitalism” — giving Andrew Carnegie’s establishing libraries as an example. (p. 141.) She says this of the Spencer who not only (like Carnegie) favoured private philanthropy but also (unlike Carnegie) supported labour unions as a check on the “harsh and cruel conduct” of employers, and expressed the hope that workers’ cooperatives would eventually displace the “slavery” of the wage system altogether. (See Principles of Sociology VIII. 20-21.) It is this system of ideas that she calls “a philosophy well suited to … the more rapacious business interests of the Gilded Age.” (p. 139.)

Jacoby admits it is “difficult to understand why [Spencer] was taken so seriously by a great many Americans not identified with extreme conservatism.” (p. 141.) But she never pauses to wonder whether it is her own identification of Spencer as an “extreme conservative” that is causing the difficulty.

Admittedly I don’t know exactly what Jacoby takes to be involved in “extreme conservatism,” but it strikes me as a rather awkward label to apply to a thinker who, in addition to his opposition to the wage system, maintained as early as 1851 that the “law of equal freedom manifestly applies to the whole race — female as well as male,” so that the “rights deducible from that law must appertain equally to both sexes” (Social Statics II. 16. 1); who insisted that “by devoting a portion of its revenues or a part of the nation’s property to the propagation of Christianity or any other creed, a government necessarily commits a wrong” (Social Statics III. 24. 1); who, at least in his early writings, denied the legitimacy of private ownership in land, proclaiming that the public at large should be “free to resume as much of the earth’s surface as they think fit” (Social Statics II. 9); who dismissed all arguments for censorship as equivalent to “papal assumption,” i.e., a claim of governmental infallibility (Principles of Ethics IV. 18); who condemned Western imperialism for its “very repulsive likeness to the doings of buccaneers” (Social Statics III. 27) and for its exploitation of “the poor, starved, overburdened people” to benefit “rich owners of colonial property” (The Proper Sphere of Government, 6); and who denied having any “patriotic feeling,” remarking of his country’s troops in Afghanistan that “[w]hen men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves” (Facts and Comments, ch. 20). If all this is “extreme conservatism,” it is at least of an odd sort.

Perhaps the charge of “extreme conservatism” refers to Spencer’s hostility to government regulation. Certainly his antistatism was so radical as to border on anarchism — which explains why so many American anarchists cheerfully adopted his “law of equal freedom” as their credo. Spencer regarded the state as merely “a particular phase of human development,” and suggested that it is “a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last for ever. … As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government; so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.” (Social Statics Intro. 1. 4.) If this makes him a conservative, I suppose it makes Karl Marx one also.

Jacoby expresses astonishment that Spencer carries his antipathy toward government services so far as to criticise “basic government services like the post office.” (pp. 140-41.) As the author of a chapter on the connections between “Anticlericalism, Abolitionism, and Feminism” in 19th-century America, however, Jacoby might be expected to have learned in the course of her research that a private mail service, started by anticlerical-abolitionist-feminist Lysander Spooner, was offering mail service at cheaper rates than the government until it was forcibly shut down. Alas, Jacoby seems to be one of those people who think that anyone who calls for the non-violent, non-governmental provision of a service must be opposed to the existence of that service.

She opines, for example, that America’s “expanding support for public education, which Spencer deplored, provided far more opportunities for the ‘fittest’ of the poor to succeed.” (p. 140.) This is certainly a case of viewing the history of government schooling in America through rose-tinted glasses. As Murray Rothbard reminds us, the explicitly avowed purpose of the U.S. public education system was to impose docility and social conformity on the working class, particularly on Jacksonian democrats and Catholic immigrants — exactly the sort of abuse that Spencer was worried about. Jacoby does mention “anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic nativists” (p. 230) — but only to link them, incredibly and offensively, to Spencer.

Jacoby even goes so far as to compare Spencer to Ebenezer Scrooge. (p. 140.) There is a certain irony in this: after all, it is Scrooge who heartlessly supports the inefficient and brutal Poor Law while disparaging private charity. Spencer’s position, of course, was exactly the reverse.

Spencer the Nitwit?

Spencer’s attempts to develop a unified theory of cosmological, biological, and social evolution have often been hailed as an anticipation of modern systems theory, and his views on the natural tendency of systems to develop from homogeneity to heterogeneity seem to find confirmation in the work of such contemporary physicists as David Layzer and Ilya Prigogine. Nevertheless, Jacoby makes fun of Spencer’s efforts, dismisses his work as a “muddling of science with unscientific ideology,” and quotes with apparent approval Richard Hofstadter’s insulting characterisation of Spencer as “the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.” (p. 138.)

Did Jacoby form this opinion of Spencer’s system by actually reading his defense of that system in the ten-volume Synthetic Philosophy? I may be forgiven for doubting such an etiology; I rather suspect she is instead taking on credit some “scholarly consensus” on the matter — among historians most of whom have likewise never bothered to read much Spencer.

The only support Jacoby offers for her harsh verdict on Spencer’s system is a quotation from Spencer’s account (as quoted by someone else, of course; it’s not like she came across it by reading Spencer) of how watching waves on the surface of a pool led him to develop some of his theories; she sneeringly calls this passage an “example of Spencer’s logic (if it can be called that).” (pp. 139-40.) Of course the passage is not meant to be an argument at all; it simply describes how watching the undulations on the water led him to think of “the undulations of the ether” and “the rises and falls in the prices of money, shares, and commodities.” Spencer was no more offering the sight of waves on a pool as evidence for his unified systems theory than Newton was offering the fall of the apple as evidence for the theorems in the Principia, or than Kekul was offering the tail-swallowing serpent in his dream as evidence of the molecular structure of benzene. If Jacoby wanted to analyse an actual “example of Spencer’s logic,” she might have looked at one of the passages where he is arguing for his views rather than merely recounting the circumstances under which he formed them. But there is no evidence that she has ever perused any of Spencer’s arguments at all.

In addition, Jacoby offers us a series of comparisons between Spencer and Darwin, all intended to cast discredit on the former. But her attempt is vitiated by her lack of information on the topic in question.

• She says that Spencer “applied Darwin’s principle of natural selection to the social as well as to the natural world — a mistake Darwin never made.” (p. 138.) This is a remarkable statement, in light of the fact that Darwin devotes many pages of The Descent of Man to the sociological implications of natural selection. (But perhaps all she means is that Darwin never advised us to let the unfit die off. Well, neither did Spencer.)
• She notes that Darwin, allegedly unlike Spencer, was “no believer in the inevitability of progress.” (p. 142.) But again, neither was Spencer; on the contrary, he believed that human civilisation was headed for a long period of decline — which is why he penned so many articles with gloomy titles like “Re-barbarization” and “The Coming Slavery.”
• She tells us that “Darwin was not reluctant to reevaluate his ideas” while “Spencer, by contrast, tied up everything … in a grand metaphysical scheme that did not allow for new and contrary pieces of evidence.” (p. 143.) Had she read Spencer’s actual works, she would know that Spencer was constantly reassessing, revising, and recanting earlier opinions on the basis of new evidence or new reasoning or both. (Has she simply assumed that the dreadful Herbert Spencer must have been impervious to changes of mind? Or has she taken some author’s word for it without checking?)
• Finally, she trumpets Darwin’s superiority over the horrible Spencer on the grounds that for Darwin “natural selection becomes subordinate to environmental factors — and man’s own moral evolution — as soon as humans enter into a state of civilization,” so that we develop an “instinct of sympathy” that forbids us to “neglect the weak and helpless.” (p. 142.) But this is precisely Spencer’s view also. (Indeed, Darwin probably got it from Spencer, as he got so much else.) In an essay on “Evolutionary Ethics” (in Essays Moral, Political, and Speculative), Spencer painstakingly explains that according to his theory “the survival of the fittest is often not the survival of the best,” that “the ethical process is part of the process of evolution,” and that “the struggle for life needs to be qualified when the gregarious state is entered.” “So far from being, as some have alleged, an advocacy of the claims of the strong against the weak,” Spencer insists, his system “is much more an insistence that the weak shall be guarded against the strong.” And at Principles of Ethics I. 14 he even hopes that “unceasing social discipline will so mold human nature” that in due course the “likeness between the feelings of the sympathizer and those of the sympathized with” will come “near to identity,” with the result that “ministration to others’ happiness will become a daily need” and “sympathetic pleasures will be spontaneously pursued to the fullest extent advantageous to each and all.”

This is the man Jacoby compares to Ebenezer Scrooge.

Susan Jacoby’s book Freethinkers is a celebration of various figures who thought and inquired for themselves rather than showing a servile reliance on some established consensus. When it comes to assessing Herbert Spencer’s intellectual legacy, however, it seems that she herself has not thought sufficiently freely — and the result is that a brilliant and humane mind has been unfairly maligned yet again.

One of Spencer’s admirers once expressed the opinion that Spencer’s memory would not be done full justice until the 25th century. Maybe he was right; but can’t we work to make it happen just a little sooner?

In his short review of The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Timothy Virkkala (May 1999) praises Tim S. Gray’s discussion of the great classical liberal’s methodology as a synthesis of “individualist” and “holist” approaches to social theory. But Virkkala remarks

This method–I’m tempted to call it “dialectical,” but Spencer’s prose and position seem so far from Hegel’s that the term is almost indecent–confuses many readers. But it is surely his strength. Gray is one of the few Spencer scholars to see this method as fundamental, and to present sophisticated analyses of Spencer’s syntheses.

It is unfortunate that Virkkala refuses to give into his temptation, because crucially significant aspects of Herbert Spencer’s work are, indeed, dialectical.

Some will say: “Ah, there goes Sciabarra. He thinks everyone is dialectical!” The truth is, of course, that though a genuine dialectical mindset is rare, not a few of the major classical liberal and libertarian thinkers have had a strong dialectical sensibility–and the neglect of this dialectical streak has been something I’ve tried to remedy for many years. The project encompasses a trilogy of works that began with Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (SUNY, 1995), where I argued that Hayek’s critique of “constructivism” is essentially dialectical because it views utopianism as a revolt against the broad conditions within which freedom is born and nourished. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State, 1995) is the second part. There I argue that Rand was a master at tracing the relationships among disparate factors within a dynamic context; her emphasis on the epistemic, psychological, ethical, and cultural requirements of freedom was simultaneously a vision of an integrated human existence that triumphed over conventional dichotomies–mind versus body, fact versus value, theory versus practice, etc. My forthcoming book, Total Freedom, completes the trilogy by tracing the history and meaning of the concept of dialectic from the pre-Socratics to Murray Rothbard, focusing on its relevance to our defense of liberty.

Dialectics is a methodological orientation toward contextual analysis of dynamic, structured systems. Dialectical techniques have been championed by Hegel, Marx, and those on the left, but they are as old as Western philosophy. They originated in the argumentative arts. A two-person dialogue constituted a dialectic of sorts, a means of contextualizing a problem by looking at it from different vantage points. While Plato gave expression to the Socratic form in his many dialogues, Aristotle was the first theoretician, the father, of the enterprise. His Topics and Sophistical Refutations were the first textbooks of dialectic. He articulated its principles and was probably its teacher in Plato’s Academy.

In the evolution of dialectics, it was inevitable, perhaps, that it would be applied to objects and phenomena far beyond the confines of discourse. As long as an object of study can be treated as a structured totality–as a specific kind of whole constituted by dynamic relations–dialectical analysis becomes possible. There are many distinct phenomena–a language, a philosophy, a culture, an economy, a political organization, a social system, and even the relations among these–that can be analyzed as structured totalities. Because none of us can achieve a godlike vantage point on the whole, because the desire for omniscience is what Hayek called a “synoptic delusion,” dialectics requires that we grasp any given object in its multiple dimensions by successive shifts in our perspective.

For years, Marxists derided liberals as thoroughly “undialectical” because their allegedly “atomistic” approach reduced social analysis to an abstract mental gymnastic on the life and times of Robinson Crusoe. But the history of liberalism is replete with rich, textured, context-sensitive thinking. In this regard, Herbert Spencer was one of the most important classical liberal thinkers to pioneer an alternative “dialectical libertarianism.” His contributions to this project have yet to be fully appreciated, although his contributions to general systems theory in sociology are well known.

Hayek tells us too that Spencer’s work had an impact on some of the early Austrian economic thinkers, including Friedrich von Wieser. But as Tibor Machan argues, Spencer was also among the first to provide “a full-blown scientific justification” for the liberal worldview, just as Marx had done for communism (in Spencer [1879-93] 1978, 9). His evolutionary approach shared much with that of Darwin and provided inspiration for Collingwood, Kuhn, and Toulmin. It displayed all the “architectonic instinct[s]” and “propensit[ies] for synthesis” that we have come to expect from bona fide dialectical modes of inquiry (Copleston [1966] 1985, 145).

Spencer ([1879-93] 1978) admits into his conception a genuine appreciation for reciprocal relations among factors within a wider totality. It was Aristotle who first explored the mutual implications of “correlatives,” such as “master” and “slave.” Hegel stressed the same notion in his analysis of the relationship between “lord” and “bondsman.” Like Aristotle and Hegel, Spencer explains “that correlatives imply one another,” as surely as a father requires a child, and a child requires a father.

Beyond the primary truth that no idea of a whole can be framed without a nascent idea of parts constituting it, and that no idea of a part can be framed without a nascent idea of some whole to which it belongs, there is the secondary truth that there can be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative whole. There are several ways in which inadequate knowledge of the one involves inadequate knowledge of the other. (37)

An examination of the part of a whole must not reify that part as “an independent entity,” or it will risk the misapprehension of “its relations to existence in general . . .” (37). And the relations must not be viewed “statically,” says Spencer, but “dynamically” and “organic[ally]” (38). Spencer absorbs the organic metaphor from Aristotle in much the same way as Hegel did. In Parts of Animals, Aristotle examines the connections of parts that derive their essence from their constitution of the living organism as a whole. A hand disconnected from the body to which it belongs is a hand in name only, for “it will be unable to perform its function” (1.1.640b34-641a10).   Spencer ([1879-93] 1978) argues likewise that “a detached arm” is one in name only and that it must be integrally understood as part of the organic whole to which it belongs. The moon’s orbit cannot be understood apart from the movements of the larger solar system; the loading of a gun is “meaningless” outside the context of the “subsequent actions” performed; the “fragment[s] of a sentence” are “unintelligible” when disconnected from “the remainder”; and moral conduct “is an organic whole . . . of interdependent actions,” in which each action is “inextricably bound up with the rest” (38-39).

This dialectic is extended to the whole network of social intercourse. Long predating Hayek, Spencer ([1984] 1981) views society as a spontaneous “growth and not a manufacture.”  His focus on the “mutual dependence of parts” within a society and on the analytical “integrity of the whole” does not lead him to embrace the organic collectivism of traditional holistic approaches. He maintains that society lacks a collective brain, a “corporate consciousness,” and since each person within the community retains an individual consciousness, the “corporate life must here be subservient to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient to the corporate life.”  As a society becomes more and more integrated, there is a greater need for heterogeneity and differentiation among the individuals who compose it (392-93).

This individualist insight does not prevent Spencer ([1850] 1970) from suggesting that the “body-politic” requires the freedom of each of its members in order to achieve freedom-in-general (405). In Spencer’s conception of the social world, “whatever produces a diseased state in one part of the community must inevitably inflict injury upon all other parts.” It is a “salutary truth” of the ideal community “that no one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy” (409).

Eric Mack has recognized that this kind of utopian vision is “implausible and doctrinally corrosive” to the individualism that Spencer espouses (xvii). In the first place, it is virtually impossible to measure interpersonally people’s level of morality and happiness. And if the human community requires such “perfect” freedom across the globe, freedom is likely to remain a chimera for a long time to come. But despite these problems in Spencer’s work, we can still appreciate how he integrates the theoretical lessons of conservatism and radicalism, moving back and forth between adaptation “to old conditions of existence” and “becoming adapted to new ones” (Spencer [1950] 1970, 420).

What makes his contribution so important is his penchant for tracing the connections among social relations as manifested across different organizational structures and institutions. He sees an organic unity between the increasingly bureaucratic domestic state and its militarism abroad, between the interventionist dynamic and social disintegration. These ties are endemic to the statist system as a whole, as it evolves and influences each of its parts. Each part becomes a microcosm of the wider injustices, Spencer declares, even as all the parts reproduce injustice on a macroscopic scale.

The lesson is one that contemporary libertarians should heed. Those who advocate a single change in one part of society, namely government, will not sustain their revolution. To focus solely on rolling back the state, while not paying attention to the complexities of social psychology, ethics, and culture, is a sure prescription for failure. As Spencer might say, to disconnect a single aspect from its broad context is to achieve partial, one-sided, “inadequate knowledge” of all that is necessary to achieve fundamental change. That Spencer was among the first “dialectical libertarians” to grasp this principle remains an enduring legacy of his work.

REFERENCES

Copleston, Frederick. [1966] 1985. A History of Philosophy, BookThree Volume VIII. Bentham to Russell. Garden City, N.Y: .Image Books.

Gray, Tim S. 1996. The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Avebury.

Spencer, Herbert. [1879-93] 1978. The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. Introduction by Tibor R. Machan. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.

___. [1940] 1981. The Man versus the State, with Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom. Foreword by Eric Mack. Introduction by Albert Jay Nock. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.

___. [1850] 1970. Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.

Virkkala, Timothy. 1999. Booknotes: The Synthetic Man. Liberty 13, no. 5 (May): 59-60.

 $2.00 for the first copy. $1.00 for every additional copy. 

This lost classic was originally published in 1850 as a chapter of Herbert Spencer’s book Social Statics. When Spencer re-issued Social Statics late in his life he revised it to remove much of the most radical material, including this chapter.  However, earlier American facsimile editions continued to circulate, and the essay was widely read and discussed among American and English Anarchists, who republished the essay independently.  As Tucker wrote of his pamphlet edition, “Though Spencer, when in his later life he revised ‘Social Statics,’ suppressed this chapter, he never answered it, and it remains the best bit of political philosophy that ever came from his pen. It might well be called ‘The Right of Civil Disobedience,’ as a companion-work to Thoreau’s ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience.’ The two certainly constitute a pair of Anarchist classics. . . .” (Liberty XVI.6, p.1)

As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection and to refuse to pay toward its support. . . .

Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong—or, as we say, despotic—when crime is great? Is there not more liberty—that is, less government—when crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function? Not only does magisterial power exist because of evil, but it exists by evil. Violence is employed to maintain it, and all violence involves criminality. Soldiers, policemen, and jailers; swords, batons, and fetters are instruments for inflicting pain; and all infliction of pain is in the abstract wrong. . . .