[In the following essay, Marshall considers the anarchist theories of William Godwin, Max Stirner, and Peter Kropotkin, and offers his own critique of the concept of human nature.]

Critics of anarchism, indeed of any attempt to expand freedom, have repeatedly fallen back on the tired argument that it is against ‘human nature’. The conventional wisdom amongst historians of political thought is that anarchists have an optimistic view of human beings as being naturally good and that it is only the state that produces evil in people. Abolish the state, they believe anarchists assert, and society will achieve a condition of perfect harmony. Convinced of the need for political authority, they argue that in reality the opposite would occur; without the state, society would collapse into the Hobbesian nightmare of violent disorder and permanent war. To criticize anarchism, it becomes enough to assert that is just a ‘puerile Utopia’.¹ ‘Human nature’ is thus depicted as a nasty fellow blocking our path to a free society and any further improvement.

The concept of human nature is undoubtedly a powerful weapon. It is appealed to as if it has its own invincible weight. On the one hand, it is given the force of logic so that like 2+2=4 it only has to be asserted to be self-evidently true. On the other, it is presented as an empirical reality. Traditional Christian moralists who asserted that we are irredeemably fallen in original sin with depraved and corrupt natures were given a pseudo-scientific gloss by the Social Darwinists of the last century who maintained that in the struggle for survival only the most powerful and cunning survive. In our own century, psychoanalysts have given their own version of original sin by arguing that we are in the grip of irrational and unconscious forces or driven by the will to power. In their attempt to trace the biological roots of capitalist society, the sociobiologists have argued more recently that human beings are naturally aggressive, genetically selfish, and overwhelmed by a territorial imperative.

The corollary of these arguments is that a society of violent, property-owning egoists seeking power and wealth is natural and that political authority in the shape of the state and law is necessary to curb human excesses. Any alternative model of society which might suggest that human beings are capable of governing themselves and of leading peaceful and productive lives without external coercion is dismissed as hopelessly naïve, implausible, and utopian. The anarchist vision of a free society is therefore said to be not only an impossibility but a self-deluding fantasy.

I would like to argue, however, that while classic anarchist thinkers, such as William Godwin, Max Stirner, and Peter Kropotkin, share common assumptions about the possibility of a free society, they do not have a common view of human nature. I also hope to show that their views of human nature are not so naïve or optimistic as is usually alleged. Finally, I would like to present my criticism of the very notion of human nature and offer a plausible view of the limits and possibilities of human beings which embraces the anarchist ideal of a free society. Libertarians clearly have to explain why the violence, oppression, and exploitation which have characterized so much of the past need not continue in the future. They also have to show how the increasing power of states in modern industrial societies throughout the world can be not only checked but actually dissolved. An account of human behaviour is needed which can explain the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and which can envisage the reign of peace, justice, and freedom.

HUMAN NATURE AND CLASSICAL ANARCHIST THEORY

If we look at the views of human nature put forward by the three nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers, William Godwin, Max Stirner, and Peter Kropotkin, we find some profound and often incompatible differences. Godwin was the most consistent and logical. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin firmly based his ethics and politics on a clear view of human nature. He believed in universal determinism; that is to say, both human nature as well as external nature are governed by necessary and universal laws. Within this broad philosophical framework, Godwin then asserted that the ‘characters of men originate in external circumstances’.² The effects of heredity are therefore minimal (there are no innate ideas or instincts): we are almost entirely the products of our environment. We are not born either virtuous or vicious, benevolent or selfish, but become so according to our upbringing and education.

But while Godwin argues that human nature is malleable, he also believes that it possesses certain characteristics. In the first place, we are both unique individuals and social beings. Godwin certainly valued personal autonomy and made the corner-stone of his anarchism the Dissenters' ‘right to private judgement’.³ He insisted that to be truly happy we must not forfeit our individuality by becoming dependent on others or losing ourselves in the mass. But it is wrong to categorize him as an individualist who did not take into account the social dimension of human life. He repeatedly stressed that we are social beings, that we are made for society, and that society brings out our best sympathies and abilities. Indeed, he saw no tension between autonomy and community, since ‘the love of liberty obviously leads to a sentiment of union, and a disposition to sympathize in the concerns of others’. In a free and equal society, Godwin believed that we would become both more social and more individual.

Godwin also thought that we are rational beings who can recognize truth and act accordingly. As potentially rational, we are voluntary beings, capable of consciously directing our actions. It is through reason that Godwin reconciled his belief in determinism and in human choice: while every action is determined by a motive, reason enables us to choose what motive to act upon. The will is therefore ‘the last act of the understanding’.⁴ Since we are both rational and voluntary beings, Godwin inferred that we are also progressive. Godwin's view of the ‘perfectibility of man’, as he called it, was based on the proposition that our voluntary actions originate in our opinions and that it is the nature of truth to triumph over error. He made his case in the form of a syllogism:

Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error: Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated: Truth is omnipotent: The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement.⁵

If vice is nothing more than ignorance and our opinions determine our actions, then education and enlightenment will enable us to become virtuous and free. Thus while we may be products of our circumstances, we can think critically about them and are able to change them. We are therefore to a large extent the creators of our own destiny.

Godwin has often been dismissed as a naïve visionary because he believed that human beings are rational and progressive in this way. In fact, his position is far from naïve. As a historian, he was only too well aware that from one point of view history is ‘little else than a record of crimes’.⁶ He knew from first hand the power of evil and the weight of coercive institutions. Yet Godwin discerned in the past clear signs of social and intellectual progress and saw no reason why the process should not continue in the future, although he warned that improvement would be inevitably gradual and often interrupted.

Again, it is difficult to sustain the charge that Godwin was too rational. He may have felt with John Stuart Mill that truth should be left alone to fight its own battles—he based his eloquent defence of the freedom of thought and expression on the belief—but he was fully informed of the force of prejudice. The fate of his own work and the political reaction in Britain after the French Revolution proved a daily remainder of the fragility of truth. It is true that Godwin argued that people usually do what they think is right. But while there is clearly on some occasions a gap between thought and action, it is quite plausible to say that we cannot be really convinced of the desirability of an object without desiring it.

Finally, Godwin cannot be accused of dismissing the power of the emotions. He maintained that ‘passion is inseparable from reason’ and that virtue cannot be ‘strenuously espoused’ without it being ‘ardently loved’.⁷ Indeed, reason is not an independent principle, and from a practical point of view is ‘merely a comparison and balancing of different feelings’.⁸ It is a subtle position which cannot easily be dismissed. In the final analysis, however, Godwin held firm to his view that human beings are potentially rational and that it is to the development of our reason that we are to look for the improvement in our social condition.

Godwin's view of human nature and social change placed him in a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, he stressed how opinions are shaped by economic and political circumstances, especially in the form of government. On the other, he was committed to education and enlightenment as the principal means of reform. It followed for Godwin that, since government is founded in opinion, all that is necessary to dissolve the foundation of government is to change public opinion. This meant, however, that he was left with the contradiction that human beings cannot become wholly rational as long as governments exist and yet governments will exist as long as human beings remain irrational.

Although Stirner like Godwin came to similar anarchist conclusions about the dissolution of the state and political authority, their views of human nature could not have been more disparate. Stirner was an out-and-out egoist. Where Godwin thought that human beings are capable of reason, benevolence, and solidarity, Stirner did not believe that such ideals were possible. Where Godwin claimed that the rational person would be benevolent, Stirner maintained the very opposite and asserted that human beings could only act in a self-interested way. There is no place for Godwin's calm reason and universal benevolence in Stirner's scheme of things: man (the word is appropriate, not sexist in this context) is driven by selfish instincts, and the self is his most valuable possession.

As the title of his principal work The Ego and Its Own (1845) implies, Stirner maintains that each individual is unique and the ego the sole arbitrator. His position may best be understood in the context of the left-Hegelian critique of religion that developed in Germany in the 1840s. Opposing Hegel's philosophical idealism which saw history as the unfurling of Spirit, the left-Hegelians argued that religion was a form of alienation in which the believer projected certain of his own desirable qualities on to a transcendent deity. Man is not created in God's image, but God is created in man's ideal image. To overcome this alienation, they argued that it was necessary to ‘reappropriate’ the human essence and to realize that the ideal qualities attributed to God are human qualities, partially realized at present but capable of being fully realized in a transformed society. The critique of religion thus became a radical call for reform.

Stirner went even further in his critique. Where the left-Hegelian Feuerbach argued that, instead of worshipping God, we should try to realize the human essence, Stirner declared that this kind of humanism was merely religion in disguise. Since the concept of human essence is merely an abstract thought, it cannot be an independent standard by which we measure our actions. It remains, like the concept of the people, nothing more than a ‘spook’.⁹

In metaphysical terms, Stirner is not strictly a solipsist in believing that the ego is the only reality, but he does hold that the ego is the highest level of reality.

In his psychology, he believes in psychological egoism. The self is a unity acting from a self-seeking will: ‘I am everything to myself and I do everything on my account.’¹⁰ The apparent altruist is an unconscious, involuntary egoist. Even love is a type of egoism: I love ‘because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me’.¹¹ Stirner thus anticipates Freud in his stress on the force of the desires to influence reason, and Adler in his description of the will as the highest faculty of the ego.

In his ethics, Stirner believes that self-interest is the sole good. There are no eternal moral truths and no values to be discovered in nature. There are no natural rights, no social rights, no historical rights. Right is merely might: ‘What you have the power to be you have the right to.’¹² The dominant morality will therefore be the values of the most powerful. The individual has no obligation to law or morality; his only interest is the free satisfaction of his needs. The conscious egoist is thus beyond all good and evil:

Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the ‘good cause’ must be my concern? What’s good, what’s bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me.

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is—unique, as I am unique.

Nothing is more to me than myself!¹³

Indeed, Stirner goes so far as to place one's ‘ownness’ above the value of freedom, since it is easier to be oneself than be free:

one becomes free from much, not from everything. ….‘Freedom lives only in the realm of dreams!’ Ownness, on the contrary, is my whole being and existence, it is I myself. I am free from what I am rid of, owner of what I have in my power or what I control. My own I am at all times and under all circumstances, if I know how to have myself and do not throw myself away on others.¹⁴

With this stress on the primacy of the ego, Stirner goes on to develop a view of freedom which calls not merely for an absence of constraint, but for the ability to act out of a truly free choice of the uncircumscribed individual: ‘I am my own only when I am master of myself.’¹⁵ On these grounds, he proceeds to demolish all those doctrines which demand the subordination of the interests in the individual to such mental fictions and abstractions as God, Humanity, Law, State, and Church.

Given his account of human nature, Stirner, no less than Hobbes, sees society as a war of all against all. As each individual tries to satisfy his desires he inevitably comes into conflict with others. But while Stirner's view of human nature as selfish, passionate, and power-seeking is close to that of Hobbes, they come to opposite conclusions. Where Hobbes called for an all-powerful state resting on the sword to enforce its laws to curb the unruly passions of humanity, Stirner believed that it is possible and desirable to form a spontaneous union of egoists. Moreover, he did not think that a long period of preparation and enlightenment would be necessary as Godwin suggests. People simply have to recognize what they are: ‘Your nature is, once for all, a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so.’¹⁶

The reason why the state and even formal institutions of society can be done away with is because we are more or less equal in power and ability. It is enough for people to become fully egoist to end the unequal distribution of power which produced a hierarchical society with servants and masters. In the ‘war of each against all’, force might be necessary to redistribute wealth, but Stirner goes beyond any revolution which seeks to make new institutions in his final celebration of individual self-assertion and rebellion:

Now, as my object is not the overthrow of an established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a political and social but (as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an egoistic purpose and deed.

The revolution commands one to make arrangements, the insurrection demands that he rise or exalt himself.¹⁷

In fact, Stirner celebrates the will to power not over others but rather over oneself. If all withdrew into their own uniqueness social conflict would be diminished and not exacerbated: ‘As unique you have nothing in common with the other any longer, and therefore nothing divisive or hostile either.’¹⁸ He therefore believed it was possible to form loose associations or spontaneous unions with other egoists. Human beings might therefore be fundamentally selfish, but it is possible to appeal to their selfishness for them to make contractual agreements among themselves to avoid violence and conflict and to pursue their selfish interests. In the final analysis, it seems little different from Adam Smith's enlightened self-interest.

With Godwin and Stirner we thus have two diametrically opposed views of human nature, but a common faith in the desirability and possibility of a free society without government. They both look to some form of enlightenment to change human conduct. But where Godwin felt human beings are capable of reason and benevolence and looked to education to improve their lot, Stirner felt human beings are irredeemably selfish and merely called on them to follow their interests in a clear-sighted way.

The problem with Stirner's position is that, given his view of human beings as self-seeking egoists, it is difficult to imagine that in a free society they would not grasp for power and resort to violence to settle disputes. Without the sanction of moral obligation or threat of force, there is no reason to expect that agreements would be binding. If such agreements were only kept out of prudence, then it would seem pointless making them in the first place. Again, to say that, because they have a substantial equality, a truce would emerge in the struggle for power seems unlikely. It was precisely because people have roughly equal talents that Hobbes felt there would be a war of all against all outside the restriction of the laws.

Like Hobbes's, Stirner's model of human nature would seem to reflect the alienated subjectivity of capitalist society. He applied the assumptions of capitalist economics to every aspect of human existence and reproduced in everyday life what is most vicious in capitalist institutions. As such his view differs little from that of Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations he translated into German) or the contemporary apologist of laissez-faire capitalism, Murray Rothbard.

In the final analysis, however, Stirner is not entirely consistent in his doctrine of amoral egoism. The consistent egoist would presumably keep quiet and pursue his own interest with complete disregard for others. Yet by recommending that everyone should become an egoist, he implies a moral ground. Stirner may reject all objective values, but he celebrates some values, even if they are only egoistic ones. His aggressive nihilism would therefore seem to imply a moral position after all.¹⁹

Kropotkin at the end of the nineteenth century proposed a very different model of human nature. On the one hand, he rejected what he called Stirner's ‘superficial negation of morality’.²⁰ On the other, he echoed Godwin in his scientific view of nature as governed by necessary laws, his stress on man as a social being, and his recognition that change will often be gradual. What was new was his confidence in the creativity and virtue of people living in simple societies, his desire to give a scientific grounding to his anarchist conclusions, and his overall evolutionary perspective.

Kropotkin's approach to nature and ‘man’ (as he called the human species in the linguistic habit of his day) was rigorously scientific. As a professional geographer and explorer, the subjective and windy imaginations of Stirner were anathema to him. He came to realize, he tells us, that anarchism is

part of a philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite different way from the metaphysical or dialectical methods which have been employed in sciences dealing with men. I saw it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences … on the solid basis of induction applied to human institutions.²¹

In Modern Science and Anarchism (1901), he went further to argue that the movement of both natural and social science was in the direction of the anarchist ideal.

Kropotkin developed his views in the context of Darwin's theory of evolution. The theory had come to be used by Social Darwinists to give pseudo-scientific support to capitalism, racism, and imperialism. Since there is allegedly a struggle for survival in society as well in nature, they argued that it is right and inevitable that the fittest should survive and rule, whether it be a class, a race, or a nation. T. H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, presented moreover the animal world as a perpetual ‘gladiator's show’ and the life of primitive man as a ‘continuous free fight’. Kropotkin threw himself into the controversy to offer an alternative interpretation of the evolutionary process.

It was his contention that there is more evidence in nature of co-operation within species than of competition. In his book Mutual Aid (1902), he suggested with a rich array of data taken from the life of animals and the development of human society that biological and social progress is best fostered by the practice of mutual aid:

we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay; while those animals which know best how to combine have the greatest chance of survival and of further evolution.²²

Kropotkin made clear that the struggle for survival which takes place is a struggle against adverse circumstances rather than between individuals of the same species. Where the Social Darwinists argued that the struggle between individuals leads to the survival of the fittest, Kropotkin asserted that the unit of competition is the species as a whole and that the species which has the greatest degree of co-operation and support between its members will be the most likely to flourish. Mutual aid within the species thus represents ‘the principal factor, the principal active agency in that which we may call evolution’.²³

Kropotkin does not hesitate to apply these observations of the animal world to human society. He maintains that society is a natural phenomenon existing anterior to the appearance of humanity, and humanity is naturally adapted to live in society without artificial regulations. Humanity is and always has been a social species. Kropotkin draws on the findings of anthropology to argue that in traditional societies human beings have always lived in clans and tribes in which customs and taboos ensured co-operation and mutual aid. He concludes from his historical studies that mutual aid reached its apogee in the communal life of the medieval cities. Even the appearance of coercive institutions and the state has not eradicated voluntary co-operation. According to Kropotkin, evolutionary theory, if properly understood, will demonstrate the possibility of anarchism rather than justify the capitalist system. Anarchism as a social philosophy is therefore not against but in keeping with evolving human nature.

Kropotkin not only argues that this is an accurate and true description of nature and the human species, but sees it as providing the ground for morality. ‘Nature’, he writes in his posthumous Ethics (1924),

has thus to be recognized as the first ethical teacher of man. The social instinct, innate in men as well as in all the social animals,—this is the origin of all ethical conceptions and all the subsequent development of morality.²⁴

Human beings are therefore naturally moral. Moreover, by living in society they develop their inherent sense of justice so that it comes to operate like a habit. As a result, we are morally progressive, and our primitive instinct of solidarity will become more refined and comprehensive as civilization develops.

Kropotkin thus presents man as a social being, and suggests that the most important factor in his development has been voluntary co-operation and mutual aid. But for all his respect for the sociability of traditional societies, Kropotkin does not reject the gains of civilization and culture. Humans like other animals need their basic needs satisfied, but they are also creative and imaginative beings. Indeed, our intellect and moral sense are primarily called forth by society. In The Conquest of Bread (1906), Kropotkin's principal criticism of the unequal distribution of property was that it does not give the necessary leisure for all to develop full human personalities:

Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are satisfied, other needs, which generally speaking may be described as of an artistic nature, will thrust themselves forward. These needs are of the greatest variety; they vary with each and every individual, and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied.²⁵

In the development of civilization in a free society, human beings would not only be able to evolve the full range of their artistic and intellectual abilities but become more truly social and individual. For this reason work would be made attractive and meaningful, fulfilling and not degrading the workers as at present. The incentive to work would be moral rather than material—the conscious satisfaction of contributing to the general well-being. And once bread was secured, leisure to develop the full human potential would be the supreme aim.

Kropotkin's anarchism is thus, like Godwin's, firmly based on a clear view of human nature. Mutual aid is a principal factor in natural and human evolution. There is a moral principle in nature which ensures that human beings have a sense of justice. We are naturally social, co-operative, and moral. But while society is a natural phenomenon, the state with its coercive institutions is an artificial and malignant growth.

If co-operation is natural, Kropotkin of course is left with the problem of explaining existing inequalities and egoism. To overcome this, he implies that human beings developed a secondary drive of self-assertion which led them to seek power and to dominate and exploit their fellows. Again, while he recognized the influence of economic arrangements on political institutions, his account of the origin of the state by which a minority combined military and judicial privileges suggests that political power was initially more important than economic power.

Nevertheless, Kropotkin remained confident that the dispossessed majority would destroy the new coercive institutions, and develop their natural propensity to help each other. If political authority were removed with all other artificial restrictions, Kropotkin was convinced that human beings would act socially, that is to say, in accordance with their social nature. However distant, he believed that a free society would eventually be realized as the natural outcome of human evolution.

HUMAN NATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND HISTORY

While I share some of the assumptions of these three classic anarchist thinkers, my own philosophical starting-point is somewhat different. I have little sympathy for Stirner's egoism and consider his account of human motivation to be simply false. Godwin's view of human beings as potentially rational, voluntary, and progressive is attractive, but it is ultimately based on the belief in the omnipotence of universal truth which is difficult to maintain. Kropotkin's evolutionary perspective is important, but his ethical naturalism is untenable. There are no values to be discovered in nature; all values are human creations.

It is my view that we should abandon the use of the term ‘human nature’ since it implies that there is a fixed essence within us which requires certain conditions to express itself, or some inherent force which directs us outside the influence of history or culture.

Sweeping assertions about human nature are notoriously suspect. They are often disguised definitions—as in the statement ‘all men are wild beasts’—and as such cannot be verified, proved, or disproved by appealing to any evidence. In addition, they usually contain a confused mixture of fact and value, a description of how people are and how they should be. The statement that ‘human beings are naturally aggressive’ is posed as a factual statement—‘all beings are actually aggressive’—but it also implies the value that we should all be aggressive. This becomes even more evident in statements like ‘pacifism is unnatural’.

Clearly facts are relevant to values, for to understand what we are helps us to decide what we can and should do. But what counts as a fact invariably depends on a prior theory and value. Ethnologists and psychologists are notorious for projecting human values into nature and then claiming that they have observed them as hard and certain ‘facts’. They extend, for instance, ideas of domination and hierarchy into the natural world of non-human biological relationships, but such ideas are the product of the socially conditioned human mind. Thus ‘man’ is depicted as a ‘naked ape’ driven by a ‘territorial imperative’ and prey to geese-like ‘aggression’. Science can help us to understand society and culture, but it is well to remember that so-called ‘objective’ science is also shaped and influenced by them.

In the circumstances, it would perhaps seem a good idea to go beyond the whole ‘fact/value’, ‘is/ought’ debate and to recognize that there is no unbridgeable gap between normative and prescriptive statements. Viewed dialectically, ‘what could be’ and ‘what should be’ are inseparable parts of ‘what is’, since the former contain the moral and practical potential of the latter.

The trouble with most views about ‘human nature’, particularly the ones put forward by psychoanalysts and sociobiologists, are that they have an uncanny similarity with the world view of the class to which the thinkers belong. In the West, the view of the dominant class is that human beings are fundamentally selfish, competitive, and aggressive. Yet this view is historically limited to the rise of capitalism and the nation state, and takes no account of either the organic and co-operative behaviour of traditional societies or even the mutual aid practised in the Middle Ages. The possessive individualism of the West is a comparatively recent development. The ruling class and their ideological apologists try to persuade us that certain human traits like self-interest and possessiveness which are historical and temporary are in fact existential and permanent.

Another difficulty with the concept of human nature is that for an assertion about human nature to be true it has to be true of all those beings classified as human. If counter-examples of human behaviour can be discerned in the findings of anthropology and history, then such statements are not universally valid. They should therefore be qualified by certain conditions; for instance, it can only be said that in certain capitalist societies human beings are possessive. Alternatively, such statements should be interpreted as only carrying the weak sense of meaning that people, or even most people, normally behave in particular ways. If this is the case, then it is easy for libertarians to argue that even if most people have been aggressive in the past, or even if most people are selfish today, it does not follow that they always will be, or that changed conditions will not bring about different behaviour. It then becomes possible to point to different societies in time and place (drawing on anthropology and history as Kropotkin and more recently Murray Bookchin have done) to show that self-interest and hierarchy are not universal and that it is possible to create a society different from the models held up by those in power. Rather than offering a single model of humanity, a knowledge of history and anthropology would suggest that human behaviour is systematically unpredictable.

I would take the argument further, however, and suggest that it is quite misleading to talk of the collective abstraction ‘Man’; there are only men and women, human beings. Human beings are social animals but they also have an irreducible uniqueness of their own. The human species is too diffuse to talk about an underlying fixed essence which society and culture are designed to express. Since ‘human nature’ is such an ambiguous and misleading term it would seem a good idea to abandon its use altogether.

This is not to suggest that there are no characteristics which are peculiarly human. We are a species which has developed during millions of years of biological evolution. With other species, we share the fundamental instincts of hunger and sex. Without the satisfaction of the former, we would not survive as individuals, and without the latter, our species would die out. I would also agree with Marx that we are fundamentally social beings: we are all born into a set of social relationships. But unlike other species we have emerged from the natural world to become thinking beings—Homo sapiens. The human mind is uniquely capable of conceptual thought, symbolic communication, and self-consciousness. We are therefore the product of an evolutionary process which has gone in the direction of increasing complexity, consciousness, and individuality.

Beyond biological evolution, we have entered in the last million years a phase of cultural evolution, in which our accumulated experience is handed down from generation to generation. The result is that while we share biological needs with other animals the manner in which they are expressed and satisfied is determined culturally and socially. In addition, human society itself has created new needs, such as the need for productive work, loving relations, and a meaningful relationship with the world.

Although we do not have a ‘human nature’ as a fixed essence, we are born with a certain evolving range of perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic powers. These innate capacities, which form a central part of human consciousness, enable us to think, to communicate, and to create. In the case of language, for instance, we are born with an ability to understand and use language. It not only enables us to interpret the world we find ourselves in but provides the basis of personal identity and social freedom. The advantage of this position is that it avoids the reductionism both of the rationalist, who maintains that we are born with innate ideas, and of the empiricist, who argues that we are blank sheets at birth.

The innate powers or capacities are not fixed however, but open. They may be innately determined but are also shaped by experience. The tired debate of the relative importance of heredity and environment, nature versus nurture, overlooks that the fact that neither are constant variables. From the moment a human being is conceived, heredity and environment interact on each other, and later experience is always interpreted according to earlier experience. Even varieties in height, for instance, used to depend on environmental factors like diet and health, and only recently have become largely genetically determined.

It follows that the way in which our innate capacities are expressed will depend on the circumstances we are born into. Our circumstances act as a series of limits and pressures upon us. But our circumstances, like everything else in the universe, are in a state of flux. In addition, since we are conscious beings, we are capable not only of adapting to our circumstances but of creating new ones. By changing our circumstances, we change ourselves. We are both the products and agents of history. Human society is thus not built on an unchanging bedrock of ‘human nature’, or on some fixed biological foundation, but develops dialectically and can be consciously shaped to express and satisfy our needs.

There are of course existential limits to our human condition: we long for immortality, yet we are born to die; we search for absolute knowledge, yet remain in doubt. Again, we do not choose our parents: we are born into a particular body in a particular time and place. But how we respond to our existential predicament is not predetermined or fixed.

It is our consciousness which sets us free. Because consciousness is intentional, we can become aware of and understand the influences at work on us. We can then choose which influences we want to check or develop, which motives we wish to act upon. Between ourselves and the world, there is a gap in which we can say ‘no’. We are not foregone conclusions: we can refuse to be the type that our mentors and leaders would like us to be.

Therein lies our freedom, the area of conscious choice. We are free to come to terms with our existential and social condition and to take up our past and to launch ourselves into a future of our own making. We have all been conditioned into dependence and obedience. We can choose, as Sartre suggests, not to choose and so become like a stone. We can be fearful of freedom and avoid the responsibility it entails. Nevertheless, in the end we are all responsible to a large degree for our individual lives, for our social arrangements and for nature itself.

This position may be called a kind of soft determinism. It recognizes that there are causes which influence us, but it sees all causes as incomplete and open-ended. Such causes dispose but do not determine.²⁶ It sees knowledge as inseparable from freedom and defines freedom both as the release from external restraint and as the ability to realize one's innate capacities. Like plants, human beings realize their potential according to their environment; but unlike plants, they can change the environment they find themselves in.

It also offers the possibility of elaborating a case for anarchism, as Noam Chomsky has hinted, based on the self-regulation of the innate intellectual and creative abilities of the human mind.²⁷ It is a kind of self-regulation which does not require coercive institutions or political authority; indeed, it is positively harmed by them. It sees freedom as the unique condition under which human consciousness and happiness can develop and grow. It is a liberty, as Bakunin observed, which implies

the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral capacities latent in everyone; the liberty which knows no other restrictions but those set by the laws of our own nature, consequently there are, properly speaking, no restrictions, since these laws are not imposed upon us by any legislator from outside, alongside, or above ourselves. These laws are subjective, inherent in ourselves; they constitute the very basis of our being.²⁸

Moreover, it is not only the mind but also our emotional and sexual drives which regulate themselves when not interfered with by artificial restrictions imposed by coercive institutions. As Wilhelm Reich argued; ‘The vital energies, under natural conditions, regulate themselves spontaneously, without compulsive duty or compulsive morality.’²⁹ The traditional conflict between reason and desire is not inevitable but a result of our social arrangements. Since the body and mind are two aspects of the whole person, and the whole person is self-regulating, only in a free society of self-governing individuals would people be able realize their full potential as social and creative beings.

To be self-regulating and autonomous individuals does not mean that we are floating atoms unconnected to each other. We are shaped by the whole and can only realize our individuality through others. To become truly individual, we must become fully social. This apparent paradox becomes less problematic when compared to Arthur Koestler's description of biological and social individuals as ‘holons’—‘self-regulating systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts’.³⁰ They have a dual tendency to assert their individuality as autonomous wholes and to function as an integrated part of a larger evolving whole.

As for the controversy about whether we are ‘naturally’ good or bad, selfish or benevolent, gentle or aggressive, I consider the search for one irreducible quality to be as absurd and reductionist as looking for a human essence. We have innate tendencies for both types of behaviour; it is our circumstances which encourage or check them. While our present authoritarian and hierarchical society encourages egoism, competition, and aggression, there is good reason to think that a free society without authority and coercion would encourage our benevolent and sympathetic tendencies. Instead of universalizing what we find in our own society, we should recognize that it is an exception rather than the norm. The present ideology, which identifies progress with growth and competition, defines happiness with consumption, and confuses having with being, is historically unique.

Anthropology shows that there have been many gentle societies where human beings have no wish to kill or dominate each other. The very disparate societies of the Arapesh of New Guinea, the Lepchas of Sikkim in the Himalayas, and the pygmies of the Ituri rain forest in the Congo offer striking examples. There is a wealth of data to demonstrate that for the greater part of history human beings have lived co-operatively and peacefully without rulers. These societies vary from small groups of hunter-gatherers like the Eskimos and Bushmen, to the Tiv gardeners, who number over a million in Nigeria. Even amongst agricultural societies, which can create a surplus for a ruling class and often have governments, there have been a number of highly decentralized federations. The Berbers, throughout the Middle East, and the Kabyles in Algeria, manage themselves through autonomous village councils. Again, the Santals, over three million of whom dwell in eastern India, decided their affairs in free and open meetings with the village headman merely being the voice of the consensus.

The anarchy of these traditional societies without rulers does not necessarily mean that they are free in the modern sense of offering a wide range of choices to the individual. They are often characterized by sexism and ageism, with power conferred on men and elders. In place of laws, there are also strong sanctions to reform the wrongdoer and to make the dissenting individual conform. These can be religious sanctions, such as the threat of supernatural punishment, and social ones, particularly in the form of ostracism, ridicule, and gossip. The force of habit and custom is also very strong, and can perpetuate ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice. Nevertheless, these societies show that human beings have lived and can live without coercive institutions and authoritarian leaders and rulers.³¹

In recent history, there have moreover been several self-conscious attempts to realize on a large scale a commonwealth which contains age-old patterns of co-operation with a modern desire for personal freedom. The self-managing districts in the Paris Commune remain an inspiration. The peasants in the Ukraine during the early days of the Russian Revolution formed anarchist communes. The greatest experiment so far was during the Spanish Revolution, when peasants in Aragon and Valencia and workers in Barcelona organized themselves in communes and councils and fought the civil war against Franco on anarchist lines. The fact that the revolution failed, largely due to external factors, does not alter the case that the anarchist ideal was partially realized and shown to be practicable.

The present direction of history would seem to be towards more centralized, militarized, and authoritarian states, but the dying breed of indigenous anarchies can tell us much about how to organize society without rulers. They show that the nation-state is only a recent cancer on the body politic. Above all they remind us of the important truth that liberty is the mother and not the daughter of order. While no self-conscious anarchist society as yet exists, the great social experiments in the last hundred years show that it is an ever-present possibility and an ineradicable part of human potential. A free society is in the realm of objective possibilities. There is no pre-ordained pattern to history, no iron law of capitalist development, no straight railroad which we have to follow. Although it is always made on prior circumstances, history is what we make it; and the future, as the past, can be either authoritarian or libertarian depending on our choices and actions.

TOWARDS A FREE AND ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Having exposed the myth of human nature as some fixed essence and sketched an alternative view of human limits and possibilities, I would like consider some moral implications. While nature does not preclude the possibility of freedom and autonomy, it is difficult to ground an objective ethics in a philosophy of nature as Kropotkin and now Murray Bookchin have attempted.³² In the first place, such an attempt overlooks the logical fallacy of maintaining that, because something is, it follows that it ought to be. A study of aggression in geese may or may not illuminate aggression in men; it does not tell us whether aggression is good or bad. There are no moral values to be discovered or revealed in nature. Stirner is right in stressing that it is human beings that create values. We tend to read into nature what we want to find. Kropotkin's and Bookchin's strategy, like that of the Social Darwinists and their contemporary counterparts, the sociobiologists, makes this fundamental error.

Nevertheless, I would argue that it is important to keep an evolutionary perspective which recognizes that human beings have changed in the past and are likely to continue to do so in the future. It reminds us that we are one species amongst others, and that there is a difference only in degree and not in kind between us and other animals. We are a part not only of human society, but of a wider community of all living beings. We have no God-given prerogative to become managers of the cosmic process or the lords of creation.

More important still, we should develop an ecological perspective which sees humanity as an inseparable part of the living web of nature, recognizes that our survival depends on the survival of our habitat, and sees different species as intrinsically valuable members in a non-hierarchical world. The integrity of the whole and the integrity of the part are mutually dependent. This is not to say that we should appeal to mere expediency to stop humans despoiling the earth. Nor does it imply that all organisms are equal citizens in a biospheric democracy.³³

Contrary to biocentric ethics, I would argue that all organisms are not of equal worth. They do not possess equal ‘rights’ which entitle them to identical treatment. Not only are rights purely human conventions, but such reasoning would put human beings and rhinos on the same level as the AIDS virus or smallpox. But while the utilitarian calculus can lead to abhorrent conclusions, and the language of rights is ambiguous and confused, I believe on the ground of the ability to feel—to suffer pain or enjoy happiness—that there should be equal consideration of different species.³⁴ The degree of consciousness may have a side constraint in our deliberations. While both are capable of suffering, it would be reasonable to conclude that the interests of a child are more important than the interests of a slug, since one is more conscious than the other. But even if we make this decision, we should also bear in mind the wider principles of the sanctity of life and the vitality of evolution and recognize that there is a place in the world for slugs as well as children.

While it is misleading to transpose observations about the natural world to human society, it is nevertheless salutary to be reminded of the ecological principle that the more variety there is in nature the greater the overall vitality. It offers a model of unity in diversity, difference with equality, change and equilibrium in a non-hierarchical framework. Applied to society, the principle suggests that the health of a free society might be measured by the amount of individuality it could tolerate and parasites it could support. Again, ecology presents the earth as a self-regulating and evolving system which reflects the self-regulating and evolving capacity of human beings.

We have evolved to be uniquely conscious and creative beings, and as such we have a responsibility for the world. We are rational and moral agents. We are in a position to participate in natural evolution and help realize the evolutionary trend towards greater complexity, consciousness, and individuality. We should go beyond Kropotkin, who was still committed to the nineteenth-century notion of ‘industrial progress’ as a ‘conquest over nature’, and develop Godwin's notion of stewardship of the good things of the world.³⁵ We should act not as conquerors but as stewards of the planet. It may be too arrogant and ambitious to try to ‘free’ nature itself by developing its potential, as Bookchin has suggested, but, by our intervention into the natural processes of evolution, we can certainly foster diversity, diminish suffering, and encourage latent life forms.³⁶ It is worth stressing that this is a moral and social problem, not to be confused with the fashionable misanthropy or vague calls for universal love which permeate sections of the Green movement.

How do we create a free society which is ecologically sound? I believe that such a desirable state of affairs is likely to be brought about gradually and peacefully. I do not agree with Godwin that a period of education and enlightenment must precede the dissolution of government, but share Kropotkin's confidence in the ability of ordinary people to shape their own lives and govern themselves. The resort to violence to transform society, however, which has been a minor but significant trend in the anarchist tradition, is inevitably self-defeating. As the major revolutions this century—the Russian, the Chinese, the Cuban—have only too vividly demonstrated, it is impossible to use authoritarian means to realize libertarian ends. The means have to be the same as the ends, or the ends themselves become distorted. The process and goal must be one. Although there is a possibility, there is no certainty that a free society will ever be achieved. If it is to be realized, then it will only be through our conscious choice and through persuasion and example.

I hope by now that I have persuaded that nasty fellow ‘human nature’ to step aside and to question his very existence! I have also tried to make clear that anarchism is not a puerile dream based on an unduly optimistic or simple view of what it is to be human. It not only expresses a central part of human experience but reflects the organic processes of nature itself. It offers a plausible ideal for the post-industrial age to come. I therefore see no bar within our make-up to prevent the creation of a society which will free us from psychological dependence and economic want and enable us all to develop in harmony with nature the full potential of our being.

Notes

1. For a recent version of this view, see Leszek Kolakowski's review of David Miller, Anarchism (London: Dent, 1984), in the Times Literary Supplement, January 4 1985, p. 3. Miller himself is not guilty of such an oversimplification (op. cit., p. 76).

2. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1976; reprint of 3rd edn, 1798), book I, chapter iv.

3. The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin, ed. Peter Marshall (London: Freedom Press, 1986), pp. 172–3. See also my William Godwin (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 112–13, 400.

4. Godwin, Political Justice, op. cit., p. 349.

5. The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin, op. cit., p. 61.

6. Godwin, Political Justice, op. cit., p. 83.

7. The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin, op. cit., p. 29.

8. Ibid., p. 51.

9. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (London: Rebel Press, 1982; reprint of 1963 edn), pp. 39-43.

10. Ibid., p. 162.

11. Ibid., p. 291.

12. Ibid., p. 189.

13. Ibid., p. 5.

14. Ibid., p. 157.

15. Ibid., p. 169.

16. Ibid., p. 332.

17. Ibid., p. 316.

18. Ibid., p. 209.

19. Cf. John P. Clark, Max Stirner's Egoism (London: Freedom Press, 1976), p. 53.

20. Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, ed. N. Lebedev (Dorchester: Prism Press, n.d.; reprint of 1924 edn), p. 338.

21. Quoted by George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 184.

22. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1919; reprint of 1902 edn), pp. 49-50.

23. Kropotkin, Ethics, op. cit., p. 45.

24. Ibid., p. 45.

25. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (London: Elephant Editions, 1985; reprint of 1913 edn), p. 108.

26. Cf. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 64.

27. In an interview with Paul Barker published in New Society, 2 April 1981, Chomsky argued that the ‘libertarian left should have a vested interest in innateness’. I would not, however, go so far as Chomsky, who believes in a well-defined biological concept of human nature which is independent of social and historical conditions. He does not hesitate to consider the faculty of language as part of human nature and maintains that in such domains ‘we can begin to formulate a significant concept of “human nature”, in its intellectual and cognitive aspects’ (Language and Responsibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 77). Cf. Carlos P. Otero, ‘Introduction to Chomsky's social theory’, in Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, ed. C. P. Otero (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1981), pp. 26-8. Where Chomsky claims that there is no inconsistency in believing that the ‘essential attributes of human nature give man the opportunity to create social conditions and social forms to maximize the possibilities for freedom, diversity, and individual self-realization’ (For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon Books 1973), pp. 395-6). His stress on human nature as an underlying innate structure undermines a creative and open-ended view of human intelligence and action.

28. Bakunin, ‘The Paris Commune and the idea of the state’, in Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. Sam Dolgoff (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), pp. 261-2, and cited by Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books, 21 May 1970. Chomsky compares in his note 11 Bakunin's remark on the laws of individual nature with the approach to creative thought in his own works Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) and Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1968). In an interview with Graham Baugh, a version of which appeared in Open Road (Summer, 1984), Chomsky acknowledges, however, that ‘one cannot simply deduce social or political consequences from any insights into language’. He adds that while one may hope to be able ‘to show that structures of authority and control limit and distort intrinsic human capacities and needs, and to lay a theoretical basis for a social theory that eventuates in practical ideas as to how to overcome them’, there are ‘huge gaps’ in any such argument.

29. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Noonday Press, 1942), p. xix, quoted by Charles Rycroft, Reich (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 40.

30. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), p. 341. Cf. Clark, Egoism, op. cit., p. 98.

31. See Harold Barclay, People without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchism (London: Kahn & Averill with Cienfuegos Press, 1982), especially chapter 8.

32. See Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, op. cit.; and Ethics, op. cit.; Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, Calif.: Cheshire Books, 1982); and ‘Thinking ecologically: a dialectical approach’, Our Generation, 18, 2 (Spring/Summer 1987). While Bookchin's contribution to social ecology has been profound and stimulating, his attempt to ground an ‘objective ethics’ in nature not only assumes a rational pattern and order in nature but tends to undermine the moral spontaneity and creativity of human beings. Again, his view that human society is a ‘second nature’ derived from ‘first nature’ made self-conscious, and his dialectic in which ‘what could be’ is contained in ‘what is’ seems unduly deterministic and Hegelian. Finally, he argues that ‘human nature’ does exist, even though he suggests that it consists of ‘proclivities and potentialities that become increasingly defined by the instillation of social needs’ (Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 114). Such a loose definition hardly adds up to the notion of a ‘human nature’ as usually defined.

33. For this view, see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), p. 67.

34. Cf. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: Towards an End to Man's Inhumanity to Animals (London: Paladin, 1977), p. 22.

35. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, op. cit., p. 221; The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin, op. cit., pp. 130, 133.

36. Bookchin, ‘Thinking ecologically’, op. cit., p. 36. See also his article ‘Social ecology versus “deep ecology” ’, Green Perspectives, 4-5 (Summer 1987), p. 21.