Anarchism, the longest-lived philosophy of political relations, has had a varied and chequered career in both Occidental and Oriental history. With its sources in both Biblical and Cynical thought in the West, and in Taoist thought in the East, it has been variously expressed in human history.
This essay shall be primarily concerned with its expression in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth and first four decades of the twentieth centuries, as reflected in the life and times of Benjamin Ricketson Tucker. But careful examination of the root ideas expressed by Tucker and his colleagues, as well as by his anarchist opponents, evidences sources that even Tucker may have been unaware of; at least, did not refer to.
One of these sources is the perennial strand of millenarian thought, which runs through European and American history as a consistent theme. This millenarian attitude, awaiting the oncoming of an era that would reflect a world of individuals harmoniously united under a single law, self-imposed and universally accepted, was to be secularized in the United States, as were many other such themes that had previously been expressed in theological terms.
Another source is the more immediate one of the New England atmosphere itself, an atmosphere that was the product of several movements to establish an ideal society, a City on the Hill that would possess all the attributes of the ideal Jerusalem, writ large. With Upper New York State as its neighbor, this Massachusetts society nourished the attitudes of reform and change, always to improve society. This chapter deals with these two roots.
Millenarianism is a quest for this-worldly, collective salvation. To the millenarist, history has its own predetermined plan which is being carried to its completion, and this predestined denouement is due in the near future, within time. Because of its concern with the temporal, millenarism is this-worldly. The perfect order of things, although divinely directed, or, in another sense, historically inevitable, with history possessing omnipotent qualities, is to appear on earth. Thus, the notion of perfect time is accompanied by that of perfect space; in this sense, it is related to utopianism as well. Because it is collective, it involves not just a single, small space on earth, but an entire area (country, continent, or the whole world). However, this does not imply that all mankind will enjoy its blessings; only those that accept the role history places on them will be admitted to the new world-order. A fundamental division separates the followers from the non-followers; the believers from the nonbelievers. To use the terms found in the millenarian Qumram Sect, whose manuscripts were recently discovered dating from the first century before the Christian Era, it is a war between "the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness."
Millenarian movements also seem to occur predominantly in a period of social tension, when an old order of society is being transformed by technological innovations. Thus, the Qumram Sect of millenarians flourished in the period of Roman rule that preceded the destruction of the Second Temple; Joachim of Floris witnessed the introduction of the horse-stirrup and other animal controlling devices, which disturbed feudal society; the English millenarians witnessed the enclosure system and its elimination of random agricultural procedures; the American millenarians saw the Erie Canal provide an "imbalance" to their was of life. This is not meant to imply any "technological determinism"; the sources of millenarianism are too multiple and historically-conditioned for that simplistic approach. But one cannot but observe the relationship, which, if not causal, is certainly relevant. For example, urbanization is a significant factor in millenarist thought after 1400; such urbanization broke up familial ties and group-structures seemingly hallowed by a predominantly agrarian way of life that had existed for centuries before. So we find millenarian thought either looking backward towards a restoration of that predominantly agrarian way of life. or, on the other hand, a more equitably socially-organized urban cosmopolis (world-city). Millenarianism is essentially such a a search for a system of values, a new (or revived) cultural identity, which brings about a sense of individual dignity and self-respect.
Another feature of millenarist thought is that it does not limit its appeal to the "under-privileged." It seems to secure its greatest support from those who had a status in a previous order of society, a status which is being threatened at the time. There is a breakdown of the old order, and those who had lived within that order now feel insecure. To the millenarist, this feeling of insecurity can be interpreted as the deliberate renunciation of the value-system held by the existing social power-structure, or by condemning the historical result of permitting deterioration of the older value system by seeking other goals not originally envisioned in that value-system (i.e., war, profits, etc.). Thus, the upper strata of the minority group or the indigenous aristocracy of the previous system may identify with the millenarist movement, on the grounds that the existent system has betrayed the original ideas. This may account for such a phenomenon, for example, as members of the clergy or intellectuals (clerics?) advocating millenarian beliefs.
A consistent phrase in millenarianism is "Kingdom of God," or, as it is sometimes used, "Kingdom of Heaven," or even, as the Latter Day Saints were to call it, "Zion." It would be burdening the reader too much to go into the historical mutations of this phrase, but suffice it to say that, as used in Jewish (and early Christian) literature, the term simply meant what it says: God, and God alone, would rule over the earth. This reign of God was contrasted to the reign of some other earthly power, like Rome, for example. The hope that God would become King over all the earth is found in such early works as Exodus xv, 18, or Isaiah xxiv, 23, or Psalm xxix, 10. The phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" became a synonymous one with the "Kingdom of God" through an understandable transposition of ideas; since heaven is the seat of God, it becomes an equivalent for God himself, as one would say "Washington" instead of "the President". In Daniel iv, we find the word מָקוׄם makom, meaning place, as a synonym for God; in rabbinic literature, the word הַשָּׁמַיִם Ha-shamayim (the heavens) is frequently used as such a synonomic phrase. Even in the Christian Gospels, we find Matthew iii, 2, using the terms as implying the Kingdom of God, with the meaning that God's rules would be observed on earth in its entirety.
After this brief excursus into eschatology, we can return to the meanings given by the millenarianists themselves. We have yet to find any millenarianist using either the term Kingdom of God or Zion in other than an earthly sense. If they had used the term in a nonterrestrial sense, they would not be millenarianists, for the essence of that attitude is the bringing of a new order of society on earth. It is this perspective that associates the millenarists with later political movements, such as anarchism, as will be demonstrated.
For the purposes of this chapter, we must begin with the millenarist who is most pervasively influential, albeit sometimes even second- or third-hand, Joachim of Floris. Just as some speak of "bourgeoisie" or "proletariat" without attributing the sociological significance of the terms to Marx (who himself did not coin the words), so has Joachim's ideology permeated millenarist thought. This powerful figure, whom Dante was to exalt in his Paradiso (Canto xii, 140–141), has evidently never had his major work (the Tractatus Super Quator Evangelia) translated into English.1 Joachim must be read and understood if the millenarist mood can be captured in its essence; the tripartite periods of the Law (Father), Gospel (Son), and of the Spirit has its consistent overtones in all later literature. The antinomian tendencies here apparent may become more evident in later millenarian literature, but it does not take a mechanical drill to reach the Joachimite layers.
Joachim (1132–1202) postulated three realms of sequential time periods: first, that of God the Father (the Jewish Biblical period); second, of Christ and the Christian New Testament; the third, to be forthcoming in 1260, the era of the Holy Ghost. There would be no written testament for this third period, for the intellegentia spiritualis would rule. In this third realm would occur the first resurrection; there would be neither marriages nor death, no work would be necessary and all human weakness would vanish. "To each will be given in such a manner that he will rejoice less on his own account than because his neighbor has received something."2 In this third realm, which would occur in this world, the change would not be in the physical or geographical conditions, but in the moral nature of man.
Thus we find that Joachimite theory has three elements; the very idea of a perfect third realm implies the inadequacy of the preceding two; the time has come when the second realm must be superseded; and there is a feeling of intense expectation for the coming of this third realm.
Since it is a basic theme of this essay that the secularization of millenarianism into anarchism was essentially related to the seventeenth century Revolution in England, we begin with the Diggers of the Puritan Revolution. With their name given them because they were actually "digging" a city on a hill, a City of God (and this symbolic act was to have its overtones in succeeding epochs), the Diggers represent a unique English phenomenon, to be translated into the American colonies of New England and its environs. There is a practicality about their approaches and visions of the ideal order of society, and, as with all millenarians, they were driven by a unitary vision of the necessary solution of all problems, be it temperance, sexual chastity, or the like.
The combination of an active mysticism with a chiliastic prophecy is most evident in Gerrard Winstanley.3 Winstanley (b. 1609) is sometimes treated as a precursor of Marx in his social thought, and his roots are also in Muntzer, a sort of transition figure. The Utopian elements in his thoughts ally him with more formal Utopists, but there is a lively argument among academicians as to whether he is not more of the millenarian.4
The connecting link between Winstanley and the latter English millenarians is James Naylor (1618–1660). Here is a true millenarianist messiah, deriving from the Quakers, and persecuted as were the Quakers themselves, who was to achieve a unique status by being called "The King of Israel." Entering Bristol on a horse, riding singly, he emulated Jesus entering Bethlehem.5 His reliance on the "inner light" as his source of the new truth was to provide the Parliament, which tried and condemned him to imprisonment, with a dilemma; if every man could read the Bible in his own way, a basic premise in Reformation thought, what was to prevent a reading that contravened the authority of the official reformers? Both Luther and Calvin, and Cromwell, too, were to face this problem.
The next great English millenarianist was woman, Joanna Southcott (1750–1814). Called "The Bride of the Lamb," she is known to most Englishmen today as the owner of "Joanna Southcott's Box" which was presumed to contain a horse-pistol, a love novel, a lottery ticket, and some tracts, none her own. The twenty-four bishops who convened to open the box must have been somewhat startled at the contents. But she did publish more than 65 books and pamphlets, which, in the collected edition, run to 4,500 pages. More than half of the material is in doggerel form. Claiming to be the one prophesied in Revelations xii, she prophesied that she would soon bear the new king, to be named Shiloh, through divine intervention, on October 19, 1814. When Shiloh failed to appear, she went into a trance. With a following of more than 100,000 she was no small figure to contend with, and her Prophecies Announcing the Birth of the Prince of Peace (1814) was sold in the thousands.6
Richard Brothers (1757–1824) is still another figure entirely. Called "The Revealed Prince of the Hebrews," "God Almighty's Nephew," and other appellations, he was to throw English affairs in a turmoil during his period of activity. He even went so far as to declare the war against France an abomination unto the Lord, and this became a stick with which the Tories flayed the Whigs. William Gilray lampooned him in several notable cartoons of the time, as an agent of Charles James Fox. Parliament called him in on charges of high treason, and he was incarcerated as a madman, which only increased the sale of his books. Released in 1806, he continued his remaining eighteen years publishing emendations of his faith. He was to pick up Southcott's disappointed followers. Throught the beneficence of an admirer, a Scottish lawyer named John Finlayson, he financed his activities on a larger scale until his death. In 1794, he published his magnum opus, written, with eighteenth century titular flourish, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, Wrote under the direction of the Lord God and published by His sacred Command, containing the restoration of the Hebrews to Jerusalem by the year 1978 under their Revealed Prince and Prophet. Developing the more traditional theory of the British being the Ten Lost Tribes, he literally wrote for all Englishmen. With a train of carriages constantly before his door, he spoke to his listeners of redeeming Constantinople from the infidels, of restoring the Kingdom of God (through his messiahship), of the fall of Russia soon afterwards. Accused of being a Jacobin, he was harassed by Tories; the Whigs were embarrassed by his prophecies; and his disciples continued to listen. he was called Shiloh, "collector of the Jews", as spoken of in Genesis 49; the "Root of Jesse" and "The Ensign of the Nations" as prophesied by Isaiah. And, when his work was to end in seeming failure, the answer given by his followers was irrefutable: the fulfillment of his visions were dependent upon the wholehearted adherence of the English to his beliefs; if that acceptance was not present, the visions would be unfulfilled. The English were to blame for the failure, not Brothers. The founder of the Anglo-Israelite theory, his works are still constantly republished.7
John Nicholas Tom (1799–1838) was more patently involved in social protest, called "The Peasant's Saviour." Self-styled King of Jerusalem, his impressive figure appropriately dressed as befits such as king, he was to die in an armed conflict with the authorities, in defense of both his title and his role as proponent of "equal rights and an annual parliament" with universal suffrage as a necessary technique. The nature of his charisma is evidenced in the fact that the government had to post guards for three months over his grave, since thousands came to worship there in the belief that he would rise again. Material on Tom (who called himself Sir William Courtnay) is available only through his periodical, The Lion, and again, social histories of the time.
There were other Englishmen of the same type, like Henry James Prince (1811–1899), but his activities flow over into another period and will not be discussed.
That these activities were not performed in a vacuum is sufficiently attested to in a recently published book, Captain Swing, by E. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, which depicts the social repercussions of the changing society of which the aforementioned messiahs were but precursors of the revolt. With the Captain Swing Letters, we are in a period of actual revolution, and that is social history proper.
There are two Englishmen who deserve study as successors to these millenarianists. One is John Francis Bray (1809–1897), whose roots are in this movement through two works, A Voyage from Utopia to Several Unknown Regions of the World (1839), which describes the reaction of an Utopian to the world of new industrialism,8 and Labor's Wrongs (1838), which elaborated on the labor theory of value (Marx quotes this book favorably in his own Poverty of Philosophy). Using an approach later to be adopted by the American, William Dean Howells in A Traveler from Altruria, Bray has his Utopian comment on the inequalities of the England of his time. However, in God and Man a Unity, Bray has a more definite association with the millenarians, certainly in his denunciation of poverty and want as illustrative of the repudiation of Jesus' true teachings. Actually titled God and Man a Unity and all mankind a Unity—a basis for a new dispensation, social and religious (London, 1879), this book carries through some interesting themes, notably a sort of Feuerbachian "theological gods are but exaggerated man," an example of nineteenth century Euhemerism.
The second of the significant authors of this latter period is avowedly the most difficult to encompass in a paper such as this. William Blake has already a volume of bibliography devoted to him and his works, and I have no intention of repeating it here. But one would be remiss to fail to include him in this survey, for in Blake we have the poetic expression of the millenarian visions, and even semblances of utopian thought. We know that Blake was acquainted with Richard Brothers and reacted favorably to some of the ideas the latter presented. It is also suggested that Blake's radicalism, although he was basically an anti-enlightenment figure, was sufficiently strong enough for him to warn Thomas Paine to flee England when Blake heard through a friend that the authorities were about to arrest Paine.9 The association between Blake and Godwin, as well as Mary Wollestonecraft, is quite significant, as a transition from the more theological millenarian attitude to Godwin's anarchist book, the classic in secular Western anarchism (although the term does not appear in Godwin's writings), The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published during the period being discussed, 1791.
In the 1796 edition of Political Justice, Godwin could write: "By perfectible . . . is not meant . . . capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being made continually better and receiving perpetual improvement." And he continues this: "The term 'perfectible', thus explained, not only does not imply the capacity of being brought to perfection, but stands in express opposition to it. If we could arrive at perfection, there would be an end to our improvement."10
The final outcome of this view that there is no such thing as perfection, understood as a condition to be achieved once and for all, in which man can finally rest; the very idea of absolute perfection, Godwin himself suggests, may turn out to be "pregnant with absurdity and contradiction." If that still has to be demonstrated, he is sure of this much at least; the very nature of man excludes it, since man is so constituted that so long as he survives, he will learn. There is no such thing as a perfect man if by this we mean a man who has no longer any potentiality for improvement. There is, however, such a thing as perfecting men, bringing about moral improvement, and such a thing as perfectibility, the capacity for being morally improved. The doctrine of the perfectibility of man can now be reformulated thus: all men are capable of being perfected, and to a degree that has no limit. Or, as Robert Owen spelled it out in more detail, to assert the possibility of "endless progressive improvement, physical, intellectual, moral, and of happiness, without the possibility of retrogression and/or assignable limit." The classical ideal of prefection identified it with something that could not possibly be gone beyond; a man who had once seen the form of the good or achieved union with the one who had no greater perfection left to hope for. The new "perfectibilist" looked forward, rather, to an infinitely extensible moral improvement.
Suppose we then go on to ask how this perfecting is to be brought about. The obvious means—obvious since the time of Plato—is education, and it is in such education that eighteenth-century perfectibilists placed their trust. But it first had to be shown that education, as distinct from the divine grace, was capable of leading men to virtue. The great turning-pint, in this respect, is Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education, first published in 1693.
"Of all men we meet with," Locke there writes, "nine parts of man are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind." Notice that Locke is talking about men's moral character; education, he is saying, makes men "good or evil, useful or not." For Locke, indeed, education is essentially moral education. "It is virtue then," he maintains, "direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in education."11 The Augustinian denied that men can be educated into virtue; man's corruption is too deepseated to be corrigible by any merely human means. This view Locke is rejecting, and the way is open to the "secularized Pelagianism" of the later centuries' set of beliefs; we can sum up these beliefs by saying that they take literally Rousseau's cymbal-clashing slogans, from the opening of Emile, "Everything is good as it comes from the hand of the Creator, everything degenerates at the hands of man"; and from the opening of the Social Contract, "man is born free and is now everywhere in chains." In the context of Rousseau's own political thoughts, these slogans do not mean quite what the uninstructed reader would take them to mean. Rousseau himself was not an anarchist; the society which had been man's downfall could also, on his views, be man's saviour. Sometimes, indeed, as in his Treatise on the Government of Poland, Rousseau writes as if he were a pure Helvetian; in his Social Contract an obscure figure, "the Legislature," plays a vital part; his less sympathetic critics (such as J. Talmon) have detected in his theory of the "general will," to which the individual wills must be subordinated, the roots of modern totalitarianism.
Perhaps the most influential of all anarchists, P. J. Proudhon (the first to use the term in a commendatory sense) attacked Rousseau with particular venom: "Never man," he wrote, "united to such an extent intellectual ingratitude of heart. . . . His philosophy is all phrases and only covers emptiness, his politics is full of domination; as for his ideas about society, they scarcely conceal their profound hypocrisy."12
William Godwin, profound admirer of Rousseau though he was, and convinced that his Emile was "one of the principal reservoirs of philosophical truth, as yet existing in the world," was equally emphatic that Rousseau's genius deserted him in his purely political writings.
Then, too, there was the suggestion in Rousseau's non-political Emile, and even more in La Nouvelle Heloise, that the human being has innate potentialities which must be allowed to flower, as distinct from being forced into a predetermined mold. "Each individual," according to Rousseau's mouthpiece, Julie, "brings with him at birth a distinctive temperment, which determines his spirit and his character. There is no question of changing or putting a restraint upon this temperment, only of training it and bringing it to perfection." "Furthermore, this temperment is never of a kind which would, if properly trained, lead men to evil." "There are no mistakes in nature," Julie tells us. "All the faults which we impute to innate dispositions are the effects of the bad training which it has received. There is no criminal whose tendencies, had they been better directed, would not have yielded great virtues."13 That doctrine was destined, through Froebel, Pestalozzi, Dewey, to have a long intellectual history. The artist-anarchist-educator Herbert Read looks back to Rousseau as his intellectual ancestor, as the first, he says, to develop the theory of "freedom as the guiding principle of education"—even if, Read also thinks, Rousseau failed to carry it "to its democratic limits" and worked out, on the contrary, "a doctrine of sovereignty which was elaborated in a totalitarian direction by later philosophers."14 In general, is was easy enought to extract from selected passages in Rousseau the thesis that moral development is not a matter of conforming to pre-established standards but of realizing one's inner potentialities, potentialities at present stifled by the established institutions of society, private property, the church and above all, the state.
Only by careless reading, however, could the anarchists extract from Rousseau the doctrine that man is bound to perfect himself. Man's perfectibility, he certainly says—and it was Rousseau who brought into vogue the word perfectibilité—is precisely what distinguishes him from the animals. But this faculty, he goes on to add, "is the source of all human misfortunes . . . which, successively producing in different ages his discoveries and his errors, his vices and his virtues, make him at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature." In other words, there is nothing in man's perfectibility, his capacity for improving his position relative to Nature and to his fellow men, to give promise that he will progress morally. His "perfectibility" can as readily lead him into vice as into virtue; the successful criminal makes use of his perfectibility to a greater degree than does the virtuous patriarchal farmer of Rousseau's imagination. That men will certainly, some day, perfect themselves is not, then, a doctrine that anarchists cold learn from Rousseau. But he helped to teach them, whether or not this is what he wanted to teach, that man is naturally good and naturally free, and that social institutions, as they are now, are the source of all his corruption. So, for all the violence with which Proudhon elsewhere attacks Rousseau, it is to Rousseau that he turns in order to justify his claim that "man—as Rousseau has told us—is virtuous by nature,"15 and that all man needs in order to act virtuously is to be free.
Of the peace-loving, individualist, unrevolutionary philosophical anarchists, William Godwin is the outstanding example. No one could be more remote from the popular stereotype of the anarchist as a man of violence. Although his view altered in other respects, he remained firmly committed throughout his life to the basic principle he laid down in his Political Justice: there is only one method of social reform, by gradually improving social institutions in a manner which moves step by step parallel to "the illumination of the public understanding."
In the main text of the first edition of Political Justice, Godwin was prepared to concede that new political institutions, along democratic lines, might produce the desired effect on men, by "cherishing in their bosoms a manly sense of dignity, equality, and independence." But this, he soon came to feel, was altogether too generous a concession, since "government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of individual intellect." In his later revisions of Political Justice, Godwin set out to expunge from his work all remnants of the Helvetian doctrine that man can be perfected by legislative means. "With that delight," he wrote, "must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to the auspicious period, the dissolution of political government, of that brute engine, which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind."16
It was not by legislation that men were to be perfected, but rather by the unfettered exercise of their reason, its liberation from the restrictions now imposed upon it by government, private property, and marriage. Godwin entirely rejects that conception of morality on which the ideal of perfection by legislation rests. The imposition of punishments, he says, cannot moralize a man; nothing arouses Godwin's indignation to more fervent heights than the penal systems Bentham sought only to make more efficient. A man is not morally improved, in Godwin's eyes, when, solely in order to avoid judicial penalties, he is coerced into preferring the interests of the community to his own interests. He acts morally only when he is intellectually convinced that, other things being equal, he must prefer the welfare of twenty men to the welfare of one man, it being wholly irrelevant that the "one man" is himself.
If we ask which is to come first, the liberalization of social institutions or the enlightenment of men's reason, Godwin's answer as we have already seen, is that the two must run parallel. A little more enlightenment and men will being to liberate themselves from their irrational institutions; that degree of liberation will in turn make them more rational and so on indefinitely to an earthly paradise. For by such a process of gradual, rational improvement, inspired by an enlightened few, men can finally become godlike, not only fearless and courageous, truthful, honest, and intellectually advanced, but more than that "They will perhaps be immortal." Only then, as immortals in a community of fully adult beings, no longer obliged to act as pupils to their predecessors, no longer subject, as children, to the authority of parents, can Godwin's society of rational men achieve its full fruition. "Man is a godlike being"—in Godwin the old ambition to be like God reestablishes itself.
The paradise to come will be, above all, a community of individualists. Godwin's hostility is particularly directed towards the force and fraud inherent in all government; his ideal is a man who, in any situation is competent to exercise, in perfect freedom, his own judgement. In Godwin's paradise, there will be no theatrical performances and no orchestras, since both plays and symphonies necessarily involve "an absurd and vicious cooperation." About the propriety of reading other men's books, even, he was doubtful. Rousseau had already suggested that society began to decline morally when men were no longer content with what they could create with their own hands. Godwin carries matters much further. "Everything that is usually understood by the term cooperation," he goes so far as to suggest, "is, in some degree, an evil." That is his great objection to marriage; it is "a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies," the source of "despotic and artificial" rights of possession, involving, inevitably, self-deception, the shutting of one's eyes to realities, the subordination of one's own rationality to the wishes of another. This does not mean that human beings should separate themselves off from one another, retreating to some deserted isle. But their relationships, in the ideal society of Godwin's imagining, will be at all points free, at all points rational, and never carried so far as to threaten that individuality which is "of the very essence of intellectual excellence"—and, therefore of moral excellence, too. Godwin, then, is completely at odds with those of his anarchist successors—Kropotkin, for example—who have sought to substitute a society based on cooperation for a society based on force.17
The most conspicuous exponents of cooperation in the early nineteenth century were not anarchists; one does not know, indeed, quite how to describe a social reformer like Charles Fourier—"Socialist" is as misleading as "anarchist." Like the anarchists, and in more formidable detail, he his merciless in his attacks on contemporary civilization. "Civilization," he wrote, "is . . . a society that is contrary to nature, a reign of violence and cunning." But Fourier was no less critical of classical perfectibilists, who, he says, "in their treatises as 'perfectibile perfectibility' absurdly and monstrously sought to persuade men to govern their lives by reason." For Fourier, the spirit of conquest, robbery, concupiscence, and many other unsavory passions," he wrote, "are not vicious in the seed; only in growth are they rendered vicious by the civilization that poisons the mainsprings of the passions, which were all considered useful by God, who created none of them without assigning it to a place and a purpose in the vast harmonious mechanism. As soon as we wish to repress a single passion we are engaged in an act of insurrection against God. By that very act we accuse Him of stupidity in having created it."18
Fourier advocated the setting up of a form of social organization, the "phalanx", so organized that within it the passions of every different kind of man could be satisfied. Whereas classical perfectibilists had hoped to reform men, Fourier sought to reform society. And this reformation of society, to be accomplished through the phalanxes, would result in proving the superiority of such "associations" over the then existing order of governments.
Proudhon is wary of Fourier's "association" as he is of any form of government, any legislative act. "I have always regarded Association in general—fraternity—as a doubtful arrangement," he writes, "which, the same as pleasure, love, and many other things, concealed more evil than good under a most seductive aspect." Indeed (and the hit at Foureir is obvious) "I distrust fraternity as much as I do passion."
Contracts, not fraternal relationships, were Proudhon's ideal, contracts entered into on rational grounds, as distinct either from laws, imposed by force, or fraternal relationships, based on passion rather than reason. He converted laissez-faire economics, indeed, into a universal social policy. Not only economic relationships, but every form of social relationship, should, in his view, be left to the free operation of freely contracting groups and individuals. That is why he could write that in his ideal society "commerce, the concrete form of contract . . . takes the place of law."19
Proudhon's object, he tells us in The Philosophy of Progress, is to strengthen men's belief in progress while destroying their belief in the Absolute. Indeed, the idea of progress, as Proudhon there presents it, is still more than the simple negation, in consequence, of every immutable form and formula, every doctrine of eternity, irrevocability, impeccability, etc., when applied to any being whatsoever; of all permanent order, even that of the universe; of any subject or object, empirical or transcendental, which does not change. His critics were not slow to point out, however, that perpetual movement is by no means the same thing as progress; the movement might be cyclical, temporary advances being followed by retrogressions.
In the Ninth Study of his immense work On Justice, Proudhon returns, therefore, to this theme, but in a rather different spirit. He now defines Progress as progress in justice, brought about by free acts of free men. Up to his own time, he admits, society has not exhibited a progressive advance; it has been subject to decline, to retrogression. The explanatin of society's defects—and no less the explanation of the defects of individual man, their sins—is, he says, that actual justice has failed to coincide with men's ideal of justice. In consequence, men have been led to defy justice, entangled as it is, to take over Pope's phrase, in the "net of the law". Or alternatively, recognizing the defects of legalistic "justice," they have set up as their ideal something other than justice, some Absolute Object, such as God. And every society which takes permanence as its ideal is bound to be unjust; it can sustain itself only by the exercises of force, force directed against the natural tendency to change. In the long run, its efforts are bound to be unavailing; its inevitable fate, then, is to decline.
The situation is very different when justice and the ideal coincide. "In a society based on pure right, where justice and liberty are constantly advancing, it implies a contradiction," according to Proudhon, "for time to bring with it a falling-off at any point." By the very nature of the case, such a society must progress forever; every year of virtue adds to its social capital and its productive forces; "the collective being . . . enjoys through justice a perpetual regrowth of health, beauty, genius and honour." Whereas the age of religion, which is now ending, has been an age of endless struggle, the age to come, the age of justice, will, Proudhon has no doubt, be an age of "universal fraternity, human unity, a general harmony between the powers of man and the forces of the planet."20
It was Proudhon who was to influence American anarchism to as great an extent as Fourier was to influence early American socialism. In a certain sense, both of these writers were to provide incentives towards ideas and experiments that sometimes included the same men in America, oddly enough. This was probably due to the dynamic of their objections to the then-current urban-industrializing trends; those who read both seemed to find in them a reflection of their own concern over those trends. As Emerson was to observe, "Things are in the saddle," not men, and if Thoreau was to go off to Walden, others were to try to reform their society from within, for men.
Since it is a major thesis of this essay that anarchism is a secularized form of the aforesaid millenarian movements, a secularization initiated by the Renaissance in Europe, we shall now have to turn our attention to the political atmosphere in the United States, which was to promote its own forms of secularization in which a native anarchism was to flourish, nourished by the work of Locke, Godwin, Proudhon and others.
Along the Erie Canal, there stretched in the second quarter of the nineteenth sentury a "psychic highway," to use Carl Carmer's phrase in his description of this area. Upon this broad belt of land congregated a people extraordinarily given to unusual religious beliefs, particularly devoted as crusades aimed at the perfection of mankind and the attainment of millennial happiness. Some of the ideas are imported; some of them originated there. So, this district became known as the "burned-over district," using the analogy of the fires of the forest and those of the spirit. The population of this area came primarily from hill-country New England; few Bostonians traveled that far. Genesee, Oneida, Rochester, Chautauqua, Auburn, Ithaca, and Homer were settled by emigrants who were primarily under thirty in the early 1800's, seeking new ways of life, religious and economic.
The Great Awakening of the 1740's had touched their parents and split the Congregational Church. Half-way Covenanters had come in, who were accepted into membership without the demonstrable conversion experience; The "New Light" school, descended from Jonathan Edwards, the greatest intellect oof colonial America, had accepted the positive role of emotionalism in religious beliefs, in accordance with eighteenth sentury psychology.
We must bear in mind that already at this time, ministers were beginning to use the phrase "the church and society," indicating that although there was a nominal church membership, there were relatively few that attended religious services. Revivals usually affected those already believing, rather than making large numbers of new members.
The year 1825 marked the completion of the Erie Canal, and within twenty-five years the population of Albany had increased 96 per cent, Rochester 512 per cent, Buffalo 314 per cent, Utica 193 per cent, and Syracuse 282 per cent. Such increase was not, however, widely scattered over the area; many outlying areas were relatively untouched. The optimism of the Jacksonian period had become the belief in the millennium in America itself, which would come before the Second Coming.
The Latter Day Saints (Mormons) illustrate the new develpoments very well. The founder came from a barely literate family, who could read easily, but write and figure with difficulty. Yet he was able to convince men of greater intelligence than he, like Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, Sidney Rigdon, Orson Pratt, and Lorenzo Snow, to name only a few. Smith may have known of the Shakers at Keuka Lake, and through Rigdon (of Kirtland, Ohio) of the Owenites. Alexander Gamble, himself a religious innovator, was to observe that Mormonism contained "every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years."21
Revivalism, sponsored by orthodox groups, indirectly led to heterodoxy, for in claiming that conversions came through some supernatural agency, they opened the door to such an agency at any time.
1 It is in German, Italian, French, even Russian, and, certainly, in the original Latin. So I recommend its reading; I have used the Latin text, as edited by E. Bounaiuti (Rome, 1930), with its excellent Italian commentary. If such textual reading may be disorienting, then one can read Renan's very competent study in Nouvelles etudes d'histoire religieuse (Paris, 1884). If less is desired, any good encyclopedia like Hastings, or Schaff-Herzog, can fill the gap.
2 Expositio in Apocalypsim, Venice, 1527, p. 78.
3 Now available in George Sabine's edition, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca, New York, 1941). For a study of the general revolutionary impact of religious movements of this period, see M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Harvard, 1965).
4 See Sabine's introductory comments, pp. 36–51; Winthrop Hudson's article in Journal of Modern History, XVIII (1946), pp. 1–21, on Winstanley; and Wilson Coates' article in Millennial Dreams in Action, pp. 220–21. Remember, the difference between pure utopianism as one of place; millenarianism as one of time (and only by implication, place). A good study of the Diggers as a whole, but polemical, is Lewis H. Beren's The Digger Movement (London, 1961). For an anarchist treatment of the Diggers, see Marie Berneri, Journey Through Utopia (London, 1950). Chapter 3. A more recent study is Christopher Hill's World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972).
5 Unfortunately, there is no recent study of this man, and I have used photostats of a collected edition to be found in the British Museum, dated 1716. There also is a life of Naylor (Nayler) by Joseph G. Bevan, written in 1800.
6 For reference to her, there are D. Robert's book, published in 1807, and that of Robert Reece, published in 1815. She figures in many social histories of England during this period, and of her, it can be said that she was truly a feminist of the first order.
7 Cecil Roth's brochure on this aspect of Brothers (London, 1951) is excellent.
8 Labor's Wrongs (1838) which elaborated on the labor theory of value (Marx quotes this book favorably in his own Poverty of Philosophy). His Voyage from Utopia to Several Unknown Regions of the World (1839) was recently republished (London, 1957), describing the reaction of an Utopian to the world of new industrialism.
9 In this essay, I can only recommend that Blake be read as such a messianist, and the new edition published in 1965 (Doubleday, N.Y., edited by D. Erdman and H. Bloom) has an excellent commentary in this regard. Attention is particularly called to the poems Jerusalem (note the preface to Book Two of this poem), The Four Zoas, and Blake's most politically oriented poem, The French Revolution. A good discussion of the mystical-messianist side of Blake can be found in Volume III of Fairchild's Religious Trends in English Poetry, Chapter 111 (Columbia, 1949), as well as in Kathleen Raine's Blake and Traditon (Ballingen Series XXXV, Princeton, N.J., 2 vols.). See, in latter book, Chapter 13. The political Blake is discussed in H. Brailsford, Shelly, Godwin and Their Circle (London, Home University Series). Another millenarian was Jefferson's friend, the chemist, Joseph Priestly of this same period. See his "Letters of Thatcher," Writings, Vol. 1 (London, 1817–31).
10 Enquiry Converning Political Justice, Vol. 1, p. 93, of F.E.L. Priestly edition (Toronto, 1946).
11 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Pt. 1.
12 General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 120–21, J. Robinson trans. (London, 1923).
13 Julie, or the New Heloise, Letter III.
14 Education Through Art, pp. 6–9, Third Rev. Ed. (London, 1958).
15 De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l'eglise (in Œuvres completes, Vol. III, p. 483 (Paris, 1923).
16 Op. cit. (Enquiry, etc.) Vol. III, p. 144; Vol. I, p. viii; Vol. II, p. 212; Vol. I, pp. 172–73.
17 Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 500–508.
18 Quotations are from Frank E. Manuel's The Prophets of Paris (Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 215, 235.
19 General Idea of the Revolution, op. cit., pp. 79, 244.
20 DE la Justice, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 541–42.
21 Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon, etc. Boston, 1832, p. 13.