SOURCE: “Three Sources of Anarchism,” in Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 6-38.

[In the following essay, Crowder illuminates three major sources of anarchist thought: the concept of the moral and rational perfectibility of man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of civilization, and the optimism of Enlightenment science.]

The history of Western political thought contains many anti-authoritarian currents. The vision of a golden age without government is a favourite theme from Ovid to Rousseau, and those writers who have advocated release from the authority of Church and State are too numerous to mention.¹ Only in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, however, does anarchism (along with the other great modern ideologies: liberalism, socialism, conservatism) emerge as a systematic political theory. As David Miller puts it, for inchoate defiance to crystallize into a reasoned challenge to the existing order and a determinate proposal for its replacement, ‘such wholesale reconstruction needed to be thinkable’.² The practical example of the Revolution and the background beliefs of the intellectual climate from which it sprang made anarchism thinkable. In the new century the anarchist idea evolved into a distinctive, although multifaceted, theoretical and ideological tradition. In this [essay] I shall discuss three of the most important intellectual sources of that tradition. Sections 2 and 3 will deal with the influence on the anarchists of Rousseau and scientism respectively, sources that identify anarchism as preeminently a product of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. To begin with, however, I shall examine the most fundamental of all constituents of the anarchists' argument: their conception of freedom. To understand this idea, together with the notion of moral law from which it is inseparable, we should be prepared to follow a trail leading back to antiquity. Far from being rebels against all precedent, the classical anarchists are, in this respect at least, legitimate heirs to the mainstream of Western political thought.

1. FREEDOM AS MORAL SELF-DIRECTION

The freedom of the individual is widely assumed to be a leading ideal for the classical anarchists, but it has seldom been asked just what sort of freedom this is and why they value it so highly. A preliminary approach to the anarchist idea may be made by way of the familiar distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty. Although doubt has now been cast on the validity of the distinction as a tool of analysis, it remains useful at least as a historical framework, a guide to the way freedom has been conceived by theorists in the past. In this way the contrast was memorably drawn by Isaiah Berlin in terms of two traditions: the negative, conceiving of freedom as the absence of (humanly removable) obstacles to the fulfilment of actual or potential desires (Hobbes, Locke, Constant, J. S. Mill, etc.); and the positive, insisting that real or truly valuable freedom is self-government in accordance with the ‘real’ will, the will of the true self, which may not be identical with actual wants (Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, etc.).³ The same distinction can be expressed in somewhat more precise terms as follows. In social and political discourse all freedom is the absence of constraints on action. Negative liberty is the absence of constraints on action willed by ‘empirical’ persons, meaning individuals as we find them, identified by all the desires they might (actually or potentially) have. Roughly speaking, I am negatively free if I am not prevented by human agency from doing whatever I might want to do. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the absence of constraints on action willed by the ‘true’ or ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ self, or that part of the personality with which the individual is most closely identified.⁴ What exactly is to be taken as authentic to one's personality is a question which has received many different answers, and corresponding to these are many different versions of positive liberty. I shall shortly come to one such answer, and to one such version of the positive idea.

So far as the issue has been raised at all, most commentators, including Berlin, have assumed that the anarchists conceive of freedom in the negative sense.⁵ This assumption goes back to the heyday of the anarchist movement at the turn of the century. The Times in 1911 described the anarchists as claiming ‘a right of rebellion on the part of the individual’ that covers ‘whatever the individual pleases to do’, an opinion echoed by those more recent writers who picture classical anarchism as ‘extreme individualism’ or an extreme extension of liberalism.⁶ The idea of negative liberty is in keeping with this sort of picture since it is commonly associated with the idea of a personal area of non-interference asserted against the State or one's neighbours—one of the ideals of classical liberalism. If anarchists are concerned above all with securing the right to do as one pleases, then it might seem reasonable to think of anarchism as an extreme development of classical liberalism, as a doctrine urging the expansion without restraint of spheres of personal independence.

If such a view were correct, it would be hard to reconcile the anarchists' commitment to freedom with their claim that they are providing an account of social order. If their ideal is the maximal expansion of individual freedom conceived simply as the absence of impediments to whatever the individual might please to do, there would seem good reason to endorse the vulgar association of anarchism with the advocacy of disorder.

Many of those who have taken the ‘extreme individualist’ line have been happy to make just such a connection. H. M. Hyndman, for example, described anarchism as ‘individualism gone mad’, and according to D. G. Ritchie anarchists ‘carry out the principles of individualism to their logical conclusion—the destruction of all orderly society whatever’.⁷ In fact, as we shall see, interpretations such as these egregiously misrepresent the general tendency of the classical anarchist tradition. Far from being ruthlessly individualistic or amoral, the anarchists are, without exception, highly moralistic in temper.

A more sophisticated reading of anarchist freedom has recently been given by Alan Ritter.⁸ According to Ritter, the classical anarchist thinkers conceive of the free man as one who governs his own actions in accordance with a stringent critical rationality. This ‘procedural’ freedom ‘specifies only the manner in which members of an anarchy must choose their acts and says nothing about the attributes their acts must have’. It follows that a free action, for the anarchists, may be one that is morally ‘abominable’. Ritter concludes that the anarchists are therefore committed to placing restrictions on freedom, for which purpose they recommend ‘public censure’, the control of the individual by pressure of public opinion. At this point one may begin to wonder whether anarchism might not prove more suffocating than the State. It is this kind of picture that George Orwell has in mind when he accuses anarchism of harbouring a ‘totalitarian tendency’. ‘Public opinion,’ he argues, ‘because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.⁹ Again, this reading of the anarchists departs radically from their real meaning. The anarchists are no less alive than Mill and Tocqueville to the possibility of the tyranny of opinion, and no less opposed to it.¹⁰

Both the crude ‘negative liberty’ interpretation and Ritter's more sophisticated reading fail to give a satisfying account of the relation between freedom and order in anarchist thought, and they do so because they fail to give a satisfactory analysis of anarchist freedom. The defect common to both is that the ideal of freedom they attribute to the anarchists is too open-ended. Classical anarchism is committed to untrammelled freedom, but the anarchists do not characterize the good society simply as one in which people act as they please, even if this is sanctioned by a strong rationality. Negative liberty and critical rationality do matter to the anarchists, but their thought cannot be explained in these terms alone. If it could be, there might be more justice in the allegation of disorder—unless, as on Ritter's view, one were prepared to see them as limiting freedom by public censure. Such speculations are irrelevant, however, once one has grasped certain crucial features of the anarchist conception of freedom that have generally been overlooked.

To begin with, the anarchist idea is not negative but positive.¹¹ The anarchists are most concerned to promote a freedom to act in accordance not with the empirical self but with the authentic self, with that part of my personality which identifies me most fundamentally. What meaning do they attach to the ‘authentic’ here? It has two elements. First, rationality. Authentic individuals are governed by a stringent, critical reason, such that they judge or act only for reasons that are ‘their own’ in a strong sense. (Thus far Ritter is a helpful guide, although he does not present the anarchist ideal of rationality as part of an ideal of authenticity.) Secondly (crucially omitted by Ritter), virtue. The authentic self is not only the rational but also the moral self: that part of the personality that wills morally right action. I am free, for the anarchists, to the extent that I conscientiously govern my actions in accordance with moral rules. The good society is a realm neither of chaos nor of competition nor of purely procedural reason, but a moral order in which freedom implies virtue as part of its meaning. Freedom in this sense need not be restricted on moral grounds, since it already entails obedience to moral rules by definition. I shall refer to this conception of freedom as ‘moral self-direction’.

The moral rules which, according to the anarchists, must be followed by the free man are not merely his own subjective inventions or projections, or even those of mankind at large. If they were, that might leave room for divergence in the judgement and conduct of free men, and consequently the renewal of doubts about anarchist order. Although the classical anarchists might regard particular conventional moralities as subjective and divergent, they all hold that beyond convention there is an overarching moral law, ‘immanent’ (to use Proudhon's word) in the nature of things, that is objectively valid or ‘true’. The anarchists subscribe (in Godwin's case only implicitly) to the ancient tradition of ‘natural law’. Truly free men, by definition obedient to that law, will necessarily converge on the same universal norms.

As to exactly what sort of conduct is enjoined by the moral law, the anarchists give somewhat differing, although overlapping, accounts, and these tend to be fairly vague. (For reasons that will become clearer, they might reasonably argue that they are not yet in a position to be more precise.) Godwin is an avowed utilitarian who commends the pleasures of benevolence, while Proudhon rejects uncompensated assistance in favour of strict reciprocity. Both give a central place in the pictures they draw of the good society to images of reason controlling the passions, and to aspects of self-sufficiency. Bakunin and Kropotkin, on the other hand, are more open to the cultivation of the emotional side of human nature, especially the sentiments of sympathy and brotherhood. These they see as the basis for an interdependent and solidaristic community, although they differ over the criteria according to which such a community will distribute property. All four are agreed on one point, however, which is that moral self-direction is itself enjoined by the moral law, indeed is the highest value of all.

It might be objected that moral self-direction as thus conceived contains a conceptual difficulty: its rational and moral elements may pull apart. My reason, that is, may not invariably lead me to act rightly, may even suggest the opposite. The short analytical answer to this apparent difficulty is that it depends on a failure to give proper weight to the role played here by the notion of authenticity. So far as I am ‘free’, reasons ‘I’ find convincing, as the anarchists understand these terms, can never lead me away from substantive moral imperatives. This is because the ‘I’ here is not just an empirical (albeit rational) self, but the authentic self, which is conceived as partly constituted by a commitment to right action. Classical anarchist freedom is not simply Ritter's procedural freedom plus obedience to moral rules, the two juxtaposed, but the freedom of an authentic self in which reason and moral will are fused or in harmony. Reason, so far as it is authentic, will necessarily lead to right action.

To understand this more clearly requires some appreciation of the historical dimension of the idea of moral self-direction. Far from being peculiar to the anarchists, the notion can be traced back at least as far as the concept of ‘self-mastery’, the rule of the ‘naturally better’, that is to say, rational and right-willing, element of the personality over the ‘worse’, found in Plato.¹² There the sense of self-mastery as ‘freedom’ is only latent, but it becomes explicit in the work of a long line of successors: in the Stoics and other thinkers in the natural law tradition, in Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel. I shall call this way of thinking about freedom the ‘perfectionist’ tradition.

According to this tradition, men are capable of achieving an authentic or perfected condition in which their nature or essence as human beings is fully realized. That authenticity or perfection consists in the full development of man's two distinctive faculties, his reason and his moral nature. The two are not merely contingently related but fused or harmonized. To be fully human is to be fully rational, which is necessarily to be virtuous. Perfected reason can only lead to the perfection of man's moral nature. Why should that be so? Underlying the perfectionist view is an assumption of ultimate harmony in the universe. Where reason is perfected it surely cannot, it is supposed, give equal sanction to two conflicting ends, since that would deny the evident nature of the universe as a rationally comprehensible whole. This, as Berlin has pointed out, is the assumption of ‘the central Western tradition in ethics and politics’, and its consequence is the belief ‘that the ends of all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern’.¹³ The human personality, which is an integral part of the universal order, must, when perfected, reflect the harmony of the universe at large. Since this perfection of the human personality involves the release of the authentic nature from that which is unauthentic or alien—the lower passions, ignorance, vice—it naturally suggests a conception of freedom. As Berlin puts it: ‘when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free’.¹⁴

This is the source of the basic anarchist conception of freedom. When the anarchists talk about the freedom they uphold as a social and political ideal, they are talking about the liberation not of an empirical, open-ended self, but of a perfected self which is in part constituted by ethical commitments sanctioned by reason. Such a view contrasts with the modern outlook introduced by thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, according to which the individual's reason may well bring him into conflict with moral norms, since the whole notion of a human essence that mirrors the harmony of a universal order has been abandoned. Rationality, on this latter view, is entirely instrumental and open-ended, a picture that is now, for the most part, our own. But it was not the view of the anarchists. For them, in accordance with the earlier tradition, to be truly free is to realize one's nature as a human being, to be fully rational and, therefore, moral. The anarchists, moreover, are heirs to the perfectionist tradition in the form of argument they advance for the high value they place on freedom as moral self-direction. Man is free, his true potential realized, when that part of him that expresses his full humanity—that is closest to the divine or, in the secular version, furthest removed from the non-human—is released from bondage to his merely animal component. Freedom in this sense is valuable because equivalent to the perfecting of human nature; to deny such freedom is to deny man his status as a fully human being.

The idea of freedom as moral self-direction finds little favour with current philosophers and social theorists, but it was widespread among their counterparts of the nineteenth century. It was associated with philosophical positions as diverse as idealism and materialism, and with political ideologies of the right (Fichte and Hegel), of the centre (the British neo-Hegelians T. H. Green and Bosanquet), and of the left (Marx, for whom work rather than reason or morality is definitive of human authenticity). Uniting these disparate writers in their commitment to moral self-direction and cognate notions of positive freedom is their use of these concepts to criticize the ascendant doctrines and sensibility of laissez-faire liberalism.¹⁵ The basic insight is trenchantly expressed by Hegel. The purely negative notion of liberty as the ability to do as we please is ‘mere arbitrariness’, the determination of the will by ‘natural impulses’, an idea that reveals ‘an utter immaturity of thought’ since it lacks any inkling of, among other things, ‘right’ and ‘the ethical life’. True freedom is obedience to duty, ‘the attainment of our essence, the winning of positive freedom’.¹⁶ The freedom promised and, at least for some, delivered by the laissez-faire system is for Hegel and like-minded theorists not true freedom but mere ‘licence’, the enslavement of man by his lower, animal nature. The freedom worthy of humanity could only be created by a different social order—or at least, in the case of the British neo-Hegelians, by the energetic amelioration of the existing order.

This is the view of the anarchists. What the dominant classes call freedom is really servitude; the prospects for true freedom depend on the complete abolition of the bourgeois order. Neither their basic conception of freedom itself nor their use of it as the focus of a radical critique of laissez-faire liberalism makes the anarchists unique among nineteenth-century thinkers. What is distinctive in their thought is that while so many nineteenth-century positive libertarians seek the advancement of freedom through the expansion of the State—or at least, in the case of Marx, through the temporary harnessing of its power—the anarchists move in the opposite direction, toward the State's complete abolition.

This raises an interesting conceptual issue. It has often been argued, most famously by Berlin, that the general tendency in positive libertarians to promote the power of the State follows somehow from the nature of the positive idea itself.¹⁷ The rationale of this tendency is said to look back to Rousseau's dictum in The Social Contract that the individual who is forced to act in conformity with the General Will, which is identical with his own real will, is in effect ‘forced to be free’. Berlin warns of the authoritarian implications of this. The way is opened for a blinkered or unscrupulous regime to represent its own ideals as the real will of the people, and so to justify oppression in the name of freedom. If this analysis were correct it would leave the anarchists in a position that is not merely unique among social critics of the nineteenth century but highly anomalous, since they would be upholding a libertarian ideology on the basis of a concept of freedom that is logically or naturally authoritarian.

In fact it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the positive idea is by no means logically or naturally authoritarian. One after another of Berlin's ‘negative’ liberals have been shown to possess (perhaps in addition to the negative idea) a positive conception of freedom.¹⁸ My argument that the anarchists succeeded in founding a coherent non-authoritarian theory on a positive conception of freedom is therefore not as surprising as it might have been some years ago, although Berlin's influence in this area is still remarkably resilient. My further claim that the success of the anarchist argument in this connection implies the need to revise Berlin's thesis can also be seen as extending an argument the broad pattern of which is already familiar. What will be less familiar is the anarchists' largely successful use of positive freedom as the basis for a theory that is not merely liberal but thoroughly libertarian, involving not merely the limitation of government power but its wholesale rejection. The anarchist case also has its limits, however, and I shall try to indicate some of these by focusing on what remains of value in Berlin.

To summarize: the widespread assumption that classical anarchist thought is founded on a negative or open-ended conception of freedom is false and leads to a distortion of the anarchists' views, especially on the crucial question of social order. Rather, the anarchist idea is positive, more precisely ‘perfectionist’: the idea of moral self-direction. That such an idea could be the basis of a libertarian political theory suggests that the influential view of positive liberty as naturally authoritarian in tendency is mistaken.

2. THE ANARCHISTS AND ROUSSEAU

Writing in 1851, Proudhon refers to the ‘authority’ of Rousseau as having ‘ruled us for almost a century’.¹⁹ The ambiguity in the word ‘authority’ here points to a significant ambivalence. For Proudhon, and for the classical anarchist tradition as a whole, Rousseau is both authoritative and authoritarian, both starting point and adversary. Proudhon is inclined to emphasize the negative view, at times exhibiting a near-hysterical hatred of Rousseau: ‘Never did a man unite to such a degree intellectual pride, aridity of soul, baseness of tastes, depravity of habits, ingratitude of heart: never did the eloquence of passion, the pretension of sensitiveness, the effrontery of paradox arouse such a fever of infatuation.’²⁰ Yet, elsewhere he calls Rousseau a ‘great innovator’ and ‘the apostle of liberty and equality’.²¹ Rousseau is an ambiguous figure for the other anarchists, too. Godwin, for example, although starting from a more sympathetic perspective, feels obliged to admit reservations. ‘Rousseau,’ he writes, ‘notwithstanding his great genius, was full of weakness and prejudice.’²²

The question of the precise relation between the anarchists and Rousseau is therefore a complicated one.²³ He is a figure of unique significance for the origins of anarchist thought, but it is difficult to capture concisely just what that significance is. Godwin and Proudhon in particular are vividly aware of him, engaging explicitly with his work in many places. This engagement amounts sometimes to positive influence, sometimes to negative reaction; the former tends to predominate in Godwin, the latter in Proudhon. There are several points in the thought of the anarchists where some degree of influence, either positive or negative, might plausibly be suspected, although it cannot be demonstrated conclusively. And aside altogether from questions of causal influence, a comparison of the anarchists with Rousseau reveals many illuminating affinities and contrasts. Explanatory illumination rather than pure historical enquiry will, indeed, be my main concern; it is this that makes the difficult task of unravelling and assessing these connections and parallels worthwhile. The full extent of the Rousseauian connection can emerge only through detailed textual comparison, and much of the evidence for this will be reserved for subsequent chapters dealing with individual anarchists, in particular Godwin and Proudhon. However, the broad pattern of the argument can be sketched in advance.

At its most general, Rousseau's significance for classical anarchism is tied to his embodiment, at the level of popular reputation, of certain aspects of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Beyond the many expressions of resistance to authority contained in Western thought, it was the Enlightenment and the Revolution that laid the foundations of the systematic social and political theory that became known as anarchism. In many ways Rousseau was not a representative Enlightenment thinker. His doubts about the value of reason and civilization, his sense of religion and community and his rejection of progress set him apart from the confidently rationalistic and cosmopolitan philosophes. On these issues the anarchists are very much closer to Rousseau's rivals than to him. He was, nevertheless, in some respects the most radical thinker of his age, and despite the peculiarities of his position he inevitably became associated in the public, and to some extent the anarchist, mind with that critical, iconoclastic side of the Enlightenment that challenged received tradition and established institutions.

In particular he was identified with the spectacular culmination of this broad movement of ideas, the French Revolution. That watershed, like the man held to have inspired it, is regarded by the anarchists with mixed feelings. On the one hand ‘the myth of the revolution’, as James Joll calls it, provides them with a precedent for wholesale social change: for the defeat of the entrenched interests of the governing classes in the name of freedom and equality.²⁴ On the other hand the history of the revolution, its degeneration from popular uprising to Jacobin Terror and eventually Napoleonic dictatorship, strikes them as a tragic demonstration of how the quest for liberty and social justice can miscarry. The example of the revolution is always before them, as both inspiration and warning. The same is true of the revolutionary role of Rousseau. For Kropotkin, he is a more or less sympathetic figure in this regard, an exceptionally eloquent spokesman for equality and human rights. Equality in particular is a principle which, according to Kropotkin, Rousseau ‘upheld … so passionately, so alluringly, so convincingly that his writings exerted a tremendous influence not only in France where the Revolution wrote on its banner “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” but throughout Europe as well’.²⁵ Bakunin also sees Rousseau as having had a powerful effect on the Revolution, but judges this to be essentially malign. He links Rousseau with Robespierre and the perversion of the Revolution's ideals, calling him

the falsest mind … of the last century … the real creator of modern reaction. To all appearances the most democratic writer of the eighteenth century, he bred within himself the pitiless despotism of the statesman. He was the prophet of the doctrinaire state, as Robespierre, his worthy and faithful disciple, tried to become its high priest.²⁶

Again, however, it is worth noting that Bakunin had once seen Rousseau in a very different light. In 1843, while staying on the island of Saint Pierre where the Reveries of the Solitary Walker had been written, he refers to the place as ‘Rousseau's island’, and declares that in his faith in the eventual triumph of mankind over priests and tyrants he is at one with the ‘immortal Rousseau’.²⁷

At the level of general historical reputation, then, Rousseau gets a mixed reception from the anarchists, corresponding to the ambivalence they feel toward the revolution with which he was associated. But what about their response to his actual writings? Here, too, the story is far from straightforward. Most of Rousseau's main works were well known to Godwin and Proudhon, while Bakunin and Kropotkin, although giving little evidence of first-hand familiarity with the Rousseauian texts, at least knew of them through the writings of others, including Proudhon.²⁸ Various parts of Rousseau's many-sided output might be expected to have excited the sympathy of some or all of the anarchists. La Nouvelle Héloïse was among Godwin's favourite books, and both he and Proudhon would have found much to admire in the austere morality preached by the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (First Discourse) and the Letter to d’Alembert. The young Bakunin, as just seen, seems to have been attracted by the Reveries. Emile contains, in the Savoyard Priest section, an account of natural law and conscientious self-direction that is somewhat congenial to anarchist views, while the scheme of natural education advocated in the rest of the book inspired Godwin's attempt to found a school in 1781 and in some degree anticipated the proposals put forward by Bakunin and Kropotkin for ‘integral education’.²⁹ Yet the more significant effect Rousseau had on the anarchists is owed neither to his theory of education nor his romanticism. Ironically, the two works in which his influence is at its most direct and crucial are those which the anarchists purport to dislike most intensely: The Social Contract and the Discourse on Inequality (Second Discourse).

Of all Rousseau's works The Social Contract is the least loved by the anarchists. Godwin, after dealing sympathetically with the Second Discourse and Emile, remarks that ‘in his writings expressly political, Du Contrat Social and Considérations sur la Pologne, the superiority of his genius seems to have deserted him’.³⁰ Proudhon and Bakunin are less restrained in describing The Social Contract as a ‘monument of incurable misanthropy’, ‘a clever fraud’, ‘an absurd and, what is more, an evil fiction’.³¹ The anarchists see the work as the representative text of the most influential secular line of justification of the State, the social contract tradition. To make matters worse, Rousseau's version of the contract is expressed in the very language of freedom that is so dear to the anarchists. Rousseau may pose as a defender of liberty, they say, but his real intentions are transparent. The Social Contract amounts to no more than an especially devious form of the basic argument against freedom found in all the contractarians: that freedom is pre-social and must be limited by government if men are to coexist in society.³² As an interpretation of the treatment of freedom in The Social Contract this hardly does justice to the subtlety of Rousseau's position. Indeed it might be argued that Rousseau's blueprint is not far removed from the anarchists' own: that if every citizen is indivisibly a member of the sovereign, each governs himself and the contract creates not a State, separate from those it governs, but a self-governing community. That possibility the anarchists either do not appreciate or merely dismiss as sleight of hand.

Whether they are entirely fair in this is a matter I need not pursue. What is important for my purposes is that although they reject Rousseau's theory of the legitimate sovereign they do not dispute his starting point, the inviolability of moral self-direction. Indeed, they adopt it as their own.³³ Moreover, there is evidence, which will appear in its place, that one of their sources for this principle is The Social Contract. There Rousseau describes moral self-direction as ‘the quality of man’, invoking the perfectionist argument that the rule of the right-willing self over the rest of the personality is part of human perfection.³⁴ Rousseau's elevation of freedom in this sense to the status of supreme good was unprecedented. Spinoza and Locke had placed a high value on freedom, but no one before Rousseau went so far as to make it pre-eminent above all other values, or to insist that for a State to count as legitimate every member must literally prescribe the law to himself. The detested Social Contract is thus a possible source of that most fundamental of the anarchists' premisses, the paramount value of moral self-direction.

The Social Contract contains much else that the anarchists would agree with. The inadequacy of representatives as guardians of freedom, the difficulty for even the best-constituted legislature to discover the moral law and to translate it into positive law, the implication that existing States must be regarded as illegitimate, the tendency of even the best executive to degenerate because of the weaknesses of human nature—all these Rousseauian principles and observations are tenets of anarchism too. It is by no means obvious that the anarchists themselves saw Rousseau as their source for all of these ideas, but at least in the highly significant case of the argument against representation the authority of Rousseau is expressly cited by both Godwin and Proudhon.³⁵ In another respect, however, the anarchists are quite right to sense in The Social Contract an outlook inimical to their own. For there Rousseau looks to political institutions for the answer to all difficulties. Government is a source not only of happiness but of virtue itself, the one modern institution capable of shaping the best people. For the anarchists the truth is the exact opposite: government is capable only of evil; life in the State is in the most literal sense demoralizing. But if The Social Contract is in this respect so clearly antipathetic to anarchist thought, there is a quite different aspect of Rousseau from which they might seek support. That the realm of freedom is a ‘natural’ order outside the artificiality of the State is a proposition that might well be derived from the Second Discourse.

The Discourse is essentially a lament for lost authenticity. It describes a hypothetical evolution of man from his origins in a solitary, animal state of nature, through primitive association in which he is humanized by realizing his potential as a moral being, to the breakdown of primitive happiness and the emergence of troubled modernity. The condition of modern man, corrupt, discontented, driven to endless acquisition in order to satisfy his desire for admiration (amour propre), is contrasted with the virtuous and integrated life of primitive society, where amour propre had nothing to feed on. While the savage could satisfy his simple desires for himself, the accumulation of wealth made possible by improved agriculture has created sophisticated wants that can only be satisfied with the assistance of others. Where this is not forthcoming post-primitive man resorts to manipulation, deception, and eventually force.

The contrast is also to be understood in terms of freedom. While the primitive associate is free in the sense that he is governed by the authentic, moral part of his nature, the modern civilisé is ‘dependent’. ‘Dependence’ in Rousseau's usage has two elements. In a purely descriptive sense it refers to reliance on others for assistance or direction, especially in production. But it also carries a normative connotation of lack of integrity and freedom. Reliance on others places a man at the mercy of others' arbitrary wills, preventing him from being governed solely by the moral law. Virtue is expelled from human relations and thus moral self-direction destroyed. The kind of social relation most characteristic of the post-primitive epoch is dependence in the economic sphere. Accumulation leads to inequality of wealth and to the creation of rival classes, each of which must enlist the assistance or compliance of the other in order to satisfy its increasingly sophisticated desires. Neither rich nor poor are free, because relations between them are governed by desire and need rather than by morality. The attempts of the poor to beg or extort a subsistence from the rich, and of the rich to keep the poor in subjection lead eventually to violence. Government is then instituted by the rich ostensibly as a solution to violence in the interests of all but in reality to serve their own purposes by maintaining the proprietory status quo. Global unhappiness, inauthenticity, and unfreedom are thus set permanently in place.

Rousseau's description of the primitive society is a potential source of inspiration for the anarchists, for here is a vision of a society which is at once fully human—virtuous and free—and without government. The Nouvelle Héloïse contains similar pictures in its descriptions of the model estate of Clarens and of peasant life in the Swiss Haut Valais. (The isolated rural simplicity depicted in Émile is also similar, but less truly social in character.) In all these cases the simplicity of quiet village and household life is seen as a protection against amour propre, hence a bulwark of moral self-direction. The model of the good life is what Judith Shklar has called Rousseau's notion of the ‘Golden Age’, one of two distinct and irreconcilable utopias he holds up for the edification of his corrupt and enslaved contemporaries.³⁶ The alternative ideal, that of ‘Sparta’, the virtuous republic evoked in the First Discourse, The Social Contract and elsewhere, is the better known. But although relatively neglected, the vision of the Golden Age is an important part of Rousseau's thought, and one that might have attracted the anarchists.

Rousseau's vision of stateless freedom is, however, spoiled for the anarchists by what they see as deep flaws. First, a tension runs through the Second Discourse, as it does through Rousseau's thought as a whole, between the idea that social life is necessary to the perfection of man's distinctively human nature and the suspicion that society itself lies at the root of man's present corruption and enslavement. On the one hand it is only when man associates that his life assumes the moral character distinctive of his humanity; on the other, association brings with it the emergence of amour propre—although this does not become damaging until developing material conditions give it the opportunity to flourish. Thus Proudhon sees Rousseau as having ‘rigorously decided against society, while recognizing that there was no humanity outside of it’.³⁷ The anarchists for their part insist that society is both essential to human perfection and in itself natural and blameless. Only certain kinds of society are undesirable. To suppose that society itself is corrupting is a monstrous error, since it implies that people cannot coexist without being restrained from harming one another. To suppose this is as damaging to the cause of freedom as to accept that other slander against human nature, the doctrine of original sin. Proudhon writes: ‘the ancients accused individual man; Rousseau accuses collective man: it is fundamentally the same proposition, and equally absurd.’³⁸

A second aspect of Rousseau's treatment of society without government which the anarchists would have cause to dislike is the assertion that such a society is now irretrievably lost along with the simplicity of desire that characterized it. The implication is that a social order without government might be conceivable, but only under primitive conditions in which desires can be satisfied by austerely self-sufficient producers. The emergence of more sophisticated wants inevitably leads to social conflict, which can be contained only by the institution of government. The anarchists, however, are committed to arguing that statelessness is both desirable and possible under modern conditions. Yet in making that assertion they perhaps betray the extent to which Rousseau's vision remains at the back of their minds. This is most explicit in Godwin, who, in a long footnote devoted to Rousseau's ‘general merits, as a moral and political writer’, remarks that

he has been subjected to continual ridicule for the extravagance of the proposition with which he began his literary career: that the savage state was the genuine and proper condition of man. It was however by a very slight mistake that he missed the opposite opinion which it is the business of the present enquiry to establish. He only substituted, as the topic of his eulogium, the period that preceded government and laws, instead of the period that may possibly follow upon their abolition.³⁹

Rousseau's narrative locates a happy, virtuous, and free anarchy in the primitive past and presents it as irrevocably displaced by the misery and servitude of the modern regime of property secured by government. Godwin would accept relevantly similar categories but set them in a reversed chronology. There is also a trace of this in Proudhon, who in his unpublished notes on the Second Discourse reproaches Rousseau for ‘relegating equality to an ideal condition’.⁴⁰ Bakunin and Kropotkin may similarly be read as reversing Rousseau's scheme of history. They take pains to reject his notion of a state of nature, Bakunin in particular attacking the implication that this was a realm of perfect freedom now lost with the advent of society.⁴¹ In similar spirit, although without express reference to Rousseau, Bakunin writes that ‘The light of humanity, which alone can light us and warm us, deliver us and exalt us, make us free, happy and brothers, stands never at the beginning of history but always at the end.’⁴² Such a view might be held by any of the anarchists. Inequality and government, they suppose, are legacies of an irrational past which will be superseded by a desirable anarchy in the future.

A theme from the Second Discourse of especial significance for understanding the anarchists is Rousseau's description and analysis of the modern social and political predicament. The unprecedented radicalism of that message is best brought out by comparing it with the standard views of the classical republican tradition. Classical republicanism, with its roots in the politics of the Greek and Roman city-states and in the writings of Aristotle, Polybius, and the Roman historians, exerted a powerful influence on Rousseau, who admired its values of conscientious citizenship: the capacity to rule and be ruled in turn, to play one's part in the defence of the city, in general to place public before private interest.⁴³ Revived by Renaissance humanism, republicanism survived into the eighteenth century to become, in the hands of Rousseau among others, one of the main theoretical counterweights to the values of the burgeoning commercial culture.⁴⁴ A persistent concern of republicanism had always been that the good life of citizenship could be undermined by excessive concern for private material gain. While a certain level of wealth was desirable, indeed essential in order to ensure the leisure in which the virtues of the citizen could be cultivated, this must not lead to an overmastering preoccupation with ‘luxury’. But hostility to luxury did not necessarily imply a hostility to inequality of wealth or social position as such. For many republican writers the only wholly desirable equality was isonomia, ‘equal subjection to the res publica’, or public authority.⁴⁵ Economic and social inequality were accepted with equanimity.

Although some classical republicans exhibit a concern that marked inequalities of wealth might lead to instability in relations between citizens, Rousseau takes the analysis of the effects of economic inequality, and opposition to that inequality, very much further. Imbalance of wealth is for him not merely a threat to social stability but the cause of a much more profound blight on modern life, the psychological malaise he describes in terms of corruption, unfreedom, and man's alienation from his true nature.⁴⁶ The level simplicity of primitive society was a period of wholeness, happiness, and freedom. It is only when the possibility of accumulation emerges that man begins his downward slide. Every relation of man-made inequality is an instance of dependence, of corruption and enslavement, but Rousseau's principal focus in the Second Discourse is on economic inequality; it is from this starting point that all else follows. Once trapped in the power relations of wealth and poverty, the whole life of post-primitive man becomes infected with self-interest and consequently vice, enslavement, and the feeling that he is living ‘outside himself’, separated from his authentic identity.

A similar pattern appears in all the anarchists: the analysis of modern society as a complex of power relations, the inherently evil character of all power, the linking of both the subservient and the dominant in a web of mutual dependence that alienates each from his true moral nature, the role of government in fixing the whole structure permanently in place. Rousseau's picture of a moral crisis so deep that it pervades the whole of society points the way to the anarchists' conviction that mere reform is inadequate if freedom and virtue are to be attained; nothing less than a total transformation of society is necessary. The anarchist insistence that freedom and virtue must be based not merely on political but on economic and social equality looks back to Rousseau's distinctive development of republicanism.

In the Second Discourse at least, Rousseau sees no hope of escape from the plight he describes. The primitive society in which virtue was possible is now irretrievable. Nevertheless, embedded in the essay is a theme which, once separated from Rousseau's degenerative historical pattern, could give grounds for optimism. The modern sickness, though pervasive and profound, is not to be understood as the result of God's will or of features inherent in human nature. Man is not inherently evil but vulnerable to social influences that have led him to develop in unfortunate ways. The anarchists would agree. Where they differ from Rousseau is in their view of the fundamental nature of the present sickness, and consequently in their conception of its treatment and prognosis. For Rousseau, modern corruption is basically a sickness of the heart, the eclipse of the virtuous sentiments by the lower passions. The only way out is to renew contact with the pure conscience within—an all but hopeless task in the prevailing environment of decadence. The anarchists, on the other hand, see the problem, in terms more characteristic of the Enlightenment, as basically one of ignorance, the ascendancy of the passions over a still feeble but improvable reason. The State, with its attendant evils, is merely the product of an imperfectly evolved human rationality. Its eventual dissolution is assured if only we can expect the requisite improvements in human knowledge.

We can now see that although there are parallels and connections between the anarchists and Rousseau at many points, two areas of affinity are especially striking: the paramount commitment to freedom understood as moral self-direction, and the radical critique of modern ‘civilized’ society, which is pictured as destructive of moral self-direction. Indeed there is evidence, as will appear, that these two Rousseauian positions are not only paralleled by Godwin and Proudhon but received by them directly. Together they form a platform from which the anarchists develop their attack on the State. In addition, Rousseau's work offers the anarchists some cause for hope. On this point there is only limited evidence of positive influence, although Rousseau's picture of the primitive anarchy and his diagnosis of the present social sickness as man-made are suggestive of the anarchist vision of future statelessness. That vision, however, owes more to another source, to which I shall now turn.

3. SCIENTISM

The anarchists' sanguine view of the possibilities for moral and political progress through the growth of knowledge originated, like the critical phase of their case, in the Enlightenment. The spectacular advances of the natural sciences in the age of Newton had suggested that no problem was impenetrable to human reason, and the eighteenth century saw the beginning of the attempt to extend the triumphant empirical method to the study of man and society. Just as the physical sciences had unveiled the true principles of nature, so the social sciences, constructed on the same methodological model, would reveal the true principles of morals and politics. Rousseau was untypical of his age in his belief that man should seek moral truth through introspection. The anarchists are heirs to the mainstream of advanced eighteenth-century opinion when they look for moral guidance to modern empirical science.

‘Scientism’, the belief that the methods of empirical science provide a model appropriate to all fields of inquiry, is the chief support of the anarchists' optimism about the possibility of a non-coercive social order. This aspect of their thought has generally been overlooked in favour of their romanticism.⁴⁷ The cause of this neglect may be in part political, since it has served the purpose of those who have claimed the status of the sole ‘scientific’ form of socialism for Marxism. Similarly it may be wondered whether the attention received by the romantic strand in anarchism is not due in some degree to its providing a highly convenient peg on which to hang the change of lack of realism that has been foisted on anarchism from all sides. Certainly there is a romantic side to the anarchists; it is part of their mixed Rousseauian heritage. But there is also a strong scientific ambition, and it is this that I shall emphasize in order to restore it to its rightful prominence in classical anarchist thought. Compared with the influence of Rousseau, the influence of scientism on the anarchists is of a more general, imprecise nature, the transmission not so much of specific arguments traceable to particular works as of a general intellectual climate. That influence is nevertheless of great importance in forming the basic assumptions of the anarchists.

It should first be asked just what the classical anarchists believe science can reveal to us, what they take to be the object of scientific knowledge relevant to morals and politics. Here there is room for confusion, since the commitment of the anarchists to natural law might be thought antipathetic to scientism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the line between natural law and the laws of nature was not always clearly drawn, and was sometimes crossed by social and political theorists seeking the normative implications of empirical observation or scientific sanction for normative claims.⁴⁸ For the anarchists, the concept of natural law served as a strong antidote to those theories—notably the social contract theories of Hobbes and, on some readings, Rousseau—which implied that there was no morality outside the State. The anarchists reply that the laws of governments are one thing, the moral law quite another. (As suggested above, Rousseau might be cited as authority for this latter view if one emphasizes the Second Discourse and the Savoyard Priest.) Drawing on the venerable tradition that reaches back to the Stoics, they conceive of morality as a species of truth inherent in the nature of the universe. Unlike the laws of governments, which merely serve the interests of the dominant, the moral law of nature is universal, eternal, and seamlessly harmonious (its injunctions never conflict with one another). As Herbert Read puts it, ‘modern anarchism … is based on analogies derived from the simplicity and harmony of universal physical laws’.⁴⁹ To reject the laws of men and follow the law of nature is to abandon the realm of interest and conflict for that of truth and concord as reflected in the structure of the universe itself.

That structure can be variously conceived, and precisely how it is conceived will determine the means by which the content of the natural law can be known. In the medieval conception the universe is a hierarchy of essences created by God and governed by his laws. Natural law is that part of God's law accessible to human reason, which attains knowledge of the law through a priori reflection on the essences of things. The anarchists, however, conceive of natural law in the secularized and mechanical (but still partly normative) form in which it emerged from the Enlightenment. The universe is now the mechanism described by Newton, governed by the laws of physics. Man is part of that universe, and the laws that govern him, including the laws of morality, are to be known not by revelation or semi-mystical intuition or even reasoning a priori, but by investigating the sensible universe, which is the province of natural science. Thus Kropotkin, in his survey of the history of ethical thought, praises what he sees as the (admittedly imperfect) naturalism of the Stoics, leaving the medieval version of natural law largely out of the picture. The Stoics are linked directly to ‘the modern natural-scientific school of ethics’ that includes ‘Bacon, Spinoza, Auguste Comte and Darwin’.⁵⁰

The moral law must be derived from science rather than ‘metaphysics’. But it must also be seen to express the eternal truths of nature, not mere contingency. With the exception of Godwin, the anarchists are hostile to utilitarianism, which they see as too narrowly focused on the contingent interests of individuals, the ethical expression, they believe, of unrestrained Anglo-Saxon individualism and commercialism.⁵¹ Godwin saw it otherwise, as the expression of disinterested justice, moreover a theory of justice which relied solely on the materials of experience. Although the European anarchists give them no credit for it, the utilitarians were the initiators of the project of deriving ethical principles from the application of empirical scientific methodology. Hume's ‘attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’ was the basically explanatory or descriptive beginning from which evolved Bentham's declaration that mankind's ‘two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure … point out what we ought to do as well as what we shall do’.⁵² To the alleged psychological truth that man's primitive motivation is his desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, was added the characteristic utilitarian axiom that only pleasure is desirable for its own sake: that pleasure is the only good. To judge the morally right course an agent must gauge the consequences, in terms of the pleasure and pain experienced by those affected, of the choices facing him. Moral judgement is not, as for Rousseau, a matter of simply knowing or feeling by immediate apprehension or sensation what one ought to do; it requires a process of reasoning, of weighing up the likely repercussions of the relevant actions. That process must be based on knowledge of the world, which is best obtained by scientific observation. The rise of utilitarianism is an important element in the intellectual background of Godwin. Although far from the consistent utilitarian he has often been painted, he was clearly much influenced by the scientific climate of the eighteenth century. This source of his thought ought not to be overlooked now merely because his utilitarianism has been over-emphasized in the past.⁵³

The impact of the accelerating scientific revolution was felt still more powerfully by the Continental members of the anarchist tradition, who were influenced by streams of scientistic thought other than the utilitarian. This part of the intellectual ancestry of Proudhon and Bakunin began, perhaps, with the celebration of progress by Turgot and Condorcet. The former set out a historical scheme of advancing human rationality which anticipated Comte's, while the latter, writing contemporaneously with Godwin, predicted a rational amelioration of social and political institutions which would in turn lead to enhanced rationality. Condorcet's hopes are summed up in a passage that could have been written by Godwin or any of his anarchist successors: ‘The time will come when the sun will shine only upon a world of free men who recognize no master except their reason, when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will no longer exist except in history or on the stage.’⁵⁴ It was after the turn of the eighteenth century, however, that this mood of rationalist optimism was combined with more explicit proposals for the role of science. As Kropotkin observes, the first half of the new century was a period of exhilarating advances in virtually every field of knowledge: ‘in philosophy—positivism; in science—the theory of evolution … in sociology the socialism of its three great founders: Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen, together with their followers’. But the most important development was ‘in ethics—a free morality, not forced upon us from without, but resulting from the innate endowments of human nature’.⁵⁵ This was the scientific morality: a normative system that would not need to be enforced (the anarchists would add that it could not be enforced) because it perfectly reflected the fundamental, authentic moral will of man discovered through scientific investigation of his nature. The key figures in this broad movement of ideas were Saint-Simon, Comte, and Darwin.⁵⁶

The anarchists refer less often to Saint-Simon than to his followers the Saint-Simonians, whom they dismiss, with some justification, as proponents of the dirigiste strain in socialist thought and as religious cranks.⁵⁷ Saint-Simon himself was a more substantial thinker, and a complex one. His views were hardly likely to appeal unproblematically to anarchist sympathies, since he was in no way committed to economic equality and he believed that the desirable society would be governed by an élite. But his conception of that élite and of its mode of government make him an anarchist precursor of real importance. Unlike the ruling classes of the past, whose authority was founded on military power, Saint-Simon's governors will be scientists and industrialists whose right to rule, reflecting the demands of a new technological age, will rest not on coercion but on a common recognition of their specialist knowledge: the application to man and society of the scientific or ‘positive’ method. Ordinary people will accept the directions of this technocracy as one would accept the opinion of experts in other fields; hence, force will no longer be necessary to govern mankind and ‘government’ will become mere ‘administration’. Proudhon takes up this point, quoting Saint-Simon's declaration that ‘the human race … is destined to pass from the governmental or military rule to administrative or industrial rule, after it has made sufficient progress in the physical sciences and in industry’. He goes on to present himself as Saint-Simon's successor, his own economic analysis supplementing the latter's deduction of the ‘negation of government’ from the study of history and progress.⁵⁸

Saint-Simon's positive approach was expanded and refined by his one-time assistant and follower Comte, who constructed a massively comprehensive ‘positive philosophy’ aiming at the unification of all the sciences, natural and social. Although they share similar reservations about the religious tendency of his later work, Bakunin and Kropotkin think very highly of Comte, like so many of their contemporaries regarding the positivist principle as the key to the future.⁵⁹ Kropotkin refers to Comte's ‘flashes of genius’, and Bakunin goes so far as to rate him ‘after Hegel, the greatest philosopher of our century’.⁶⁰ Proudhon, on the other hand, seldom mentions him, and then usually for the purpose of brusque dismissal: ‘the most pedantic of savants, the most shallow of all philosophers, the most insipid of socialists, the most unbearable of all writers’.⁶¹ But this may be because he regards Comte as an unwelcome rival, for some of his own ideas, especially in the works of the 1840s, are very similar.⁶² Proudhon's tripartite account of intellectual and social evolution, outlined in La Création de l’ordre dans l’humanité (1843), is almost certainly a renarration of Comte's ‘law of the three stages’, according to which human knowledge ascends from the ‘theological’ to the ‘metaphysical’ before reaching to ‘positive’ form of modern science.⁶³

Comte made explicit a claim which had long been implied by European scientism but which had never been brought fully into the open: that the province of science included not only the question of why men act as they do but also that of how they ought to act. The culmination of Comte's positivism was the proposal of a truly scientific morality, a system of ethics that would be demonstrably true according to scientific method. In this he went further than his admirer J. S. Mill, who looked to the natural and social sciences to provide information that would help to guide moral improvement, but who maintained a careful distinction between assertions of fact, which were the business of science, and practical rules of ‘art’, the stuff of ethics.⁶⁴ But even Mill contributed, through his support for Comte's early work and his own hopes for the social sciences, to a climate of opinion in which the distinction between fact and value was submerged by a pervasive enthusiasm for the moral potential of science. Comte expressed one of the most powerful intellectual currents of the age when he argued that science would become not merely the servant of ethics but its master.

A scientific view of history indicates, according to Comte, that in proportion as society develops and man progresses, the self-regarding affections are restricted and the benevolent affections become stronger. On the principle that a scientific morality must accord with and even assist the inevitable course of social progress, the chief aim of positive morality must therefore be ‘to make our sympathetic instincts preponderate as far as possible over the selfish instincts’.⁶⁵ This prescription appeals strongly to Kropotkin, and, together with the principle that ethics should be given a scientific grounding, it earns Comte his warm endorsement.⁶⁶ But Kropotkin also sees Comte as having been insufficiently rigorous when it came to applying his positivist principles to morals and politics, accusing him of abandoning naturalism at this point for metaphysical speculation and invention. What Comte lacked, he argues, was the biological knowledge that would have provided him with a fully naturalistic account of the moral sentiments. Fortunately such knowledge and such an account are now available in the work of Darwin. The Descent of Man becomes the basis of Kropotkin's own science of ethics. In successive works he sets out to show that modern evolutionary science implies a scheme of morals and politics. In this he is hardly alone among his contemporaries, but he turns against the prevailing current of Social Darwinism by characterizing the scientific morality and politics as altruistic and anarchistic.

Kropotkin's appeal to a permanent law underlying all evolution is perhaps better adapted to anarchist purposes than the historicist moral relativism of Comte or Marx. There may be more than a trace of the latter in the view sometimes found in the anarchists that institutions like the State and the Church were in some sense fitting for pre-modern forms of society. But time and again the anarchists return to the idea of eternal natural law. Beliefs in conflict with that law are explained as expressions of social forms that are not merely archaic but imperfectly human, antedating the emergence of man as a being capable of recognizing his capacity for self-directed virtue. Truly human morality has always required the recognition of man's capacity for moral self-direction, with all the implications which flow from that. If such recognition has been withheld at previous stages of social development, then man could not at that time have been fully humanized. The mission of modern science is therefore not merely to describe past conjunctions of intellectual and moral improvement, nor even to predict the nature of the moral system that will emerge out of contemporary social advance, although these are part of its task. In addition it must reveal the permanent moral order that has been concealed, by ignorance and conspiracy, hitherto. It is not the sociological aspect of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Darwin that is echoed most clearly by the anarchists, but their role as moralists. The climate of confidence in science assures the anarchists that the moral world is part of the natural, investigation of which will uncover the moral law itself. Once that law is revealed, man will be able to accept its guidance in just the same way that he recognizes the validity of the laws of nature demonstrated by natural scientists. In so doing he will be free: rationally and morally perfected and self-directing. Government will then be unnecessary and will be dispensed with.

Where Rousseau almost despaired of the prospects for quietening the din of passions and opinions sufficiently to let the voice of conscience be heard, the anarchists share the widespread confidence of the high Enlightenment and the nineteenth century that intellectual and material improvement will lead to moral improvement. Moral conviction is principally a function of knowledge, and knowledge of the moral law lies along the same continuum as knowledge of the laws of physics; evidence for the one is of essentially the same kind and is similarly compelling as evidence for the other. By arguing for the eventual redundancy of government, the anarchists, as Berlin has noted, are doing no more than following out the logic of contemporary scientism—granting the further assumption that scientific knowledge of morality will be accessible to everyone, so that there will be no need for the Saint-Simonian expert.⁶⁷ Here, then, are the three principal of the anarchist argument: the perfectionist idea of rational and moral self-mastery, Rousseau's passionate critique of modern civilization, the scientistic optimism of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Together these form much of the basis on which the anarchists build their distinctive theories.

Notes

1. The prehistory of anarchism is surveyed by G. Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth, 1963), ch. 1.

2. D. Miller, Anarchism (London, 1984), 3.

3. I. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969).

4. This form of the distinction is developed more fully in G. Crowder, ‘Negative and Positive Liberty’, Political Science 40 (1988), 57-73.

5. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, xliv-xlv. But note that the ‘negative liberty’ Berlin attributes to the anarchists here is quite different from what he usually means by this term, and indeed is difficult to distinguish from what he calls positive liberty elsewhere. He gives the impression of stretching the negative category to fit his negative/liberal—positive/authoritarian pattern. Cf. ibid. 149, where the anarchists seem to be placed in the positive category, and his treatment of Bakunin, discussed in Ch. 4, s. 2 below. Other ‘negative’ readings of anarchist freedom include R. B. Fowler, ‘The Anarchist Tradition of Political Thought’, Western Political Quarterly 25 (1972), 738-52 at 745-7 (but cf. 750); and P. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London, 1980), 7-11.

6. The Times, 7 Jan. 1911. Among those who see the classical anarchists as extreme individualists see J. Bowle on ‘rampant individualism’ in Godwin: Politics and Opinion in the 19th Century (London, 1954), 140; and E. H. Carr's description of Bakunin as ‘the most complete individualist who ever lived’: Michael Bakunin (London, 1937), 434-5. For the claim that classical anarchism is essentially an extreme form of liberalism see Fowler, ‘The Anarchist Tradition of Political Thought’, 745-7; and Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists, 7-11.

7. H. M. Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (London, 1883); D. G. Ritchie, Natural Rights (London, 1894), 19.

8. A. Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge, 1980), ch. 1.

9. See G. Orwell, ‘Politics vs Literature’, in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, 1962), 132-3.

10. I agree with Ritter, however, that a demanding level of rationality is part of the anarchist conception of freedom (although see below for the question of how ‘rationality’ should be interpreted in this context). It might also be argued that the notion of ‘communal individuality’ that Ritter attributes to the anarchists as their primary goal is in some respects not far from what I shall identify as their idea of the desirable freedom.

11. On the question of whether classical anarchism is more properly described as an extension of liberalism or as a species of socialism, it is more difficult to reach a straightforward conclusion. My own view is that from a historical point of view classical anarchism belongs more properly within the socialist tradition (see M. Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (London, 1979); G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, ii (London, 1954)), but that conceptually it shares a good deal of ground with liberalism, although this should not entail its misinterpretation as a doctrine of negative liberty.

12. Republic, 431.

13. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 154.

14. Ibid.

15. This is by no means true of every proponent of positive liberty, as shown by the example of J. S. Mill. For the positive idea in Mill see J. N. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London, 1983); G. W. Smith, ‘Mill on Freedom’, in Z. Pelczynski and J. N. Gray (eds.), Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London, 1984), 182-216.

16. Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London, 1952), paras. 15, 149, 149A. Hegel did not reject negative liberty entirely, since he also saw the market economy as having a liberating aspect. But he clearly believed that the positive freedom he commended was a more complete and valuable form of liberty.

17. Berlin sometimes seems to suggest that his thesis is purely historical—that it does no more than draw attention to the fact, which might have been otherwise, that the positive idea has been abused rather more than the negative: see, especially, the Introduction to Four Essays on Liberty. But he is surely saying more than this when the whole tendency of ‘Two Concepts’ is to link the allegation of historical abuse with an examination of conceptual features of positive liberty not shared by its negative counterpart.

18. For positive liberty in Mill see above, n. 15. The case of Locke is conceded by Berlin himself: ‘Two Concepts’, 147; see also J. Tully, ‘Locke on Liberty’, in Pelczynski and Gray, Conceptions of Liberty, 57-82. Constant is also a positive libertarian: see S. Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, 1984).

19. General Idea of the Revolution, 120-1 (trans. A. Noland, in ‘Proudhon and Rousseau’, Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), 33-54, at 36-7).

20. Ibid.

21. Carnets, ed. P. Haubtmann (Paris, 1960), no. 8, 26 Oct. 1850, cited by Noland, ‘Proudhon and Rousseau’, 35; What is Property? (Second Memoir), trans. B. Tucker (New York, 1970), 391.

22. Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its influence on Morals and Happiness, 3rd edn., ed. I. Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1976), v. xv. 497 note.

23. The literature occasionally refers to affinities between aspects of Rousseau and of anarchism, and to the influence of the former on the latter, but these connections have never to my knowledge been pursued very fully. In some cases these matters receive no more than a passing mention: see, e.g., A. Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (London, 1971), 1; D. Guérin, Anarchism, trans. M. Klopper (New York, 1970), p. xi; J. Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1958), 90. In others there are brief references to the presence in the anarchists of various Rousseauian themes, including: man's natural goodness and perfectibility, ‘dependence’, the opposition between ‘nature’ and repressive civilized convention (especially in education), the rejection of the liberal social contract, opposition to the ‘overgrown’ State. See, e.g., C. J. Friedrich, Tradition and Authority (London, 1972), 100; B. Goodwin, Using Political Ideas, 2nd edn. (Chichester, 1987), 123-5; J. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London, 1970), 177-9; J. Joll, The Anarchists, 2nd edn. (London, 1979), 15-16; C. Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Chichester, 1979); J. Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London, 1973), 45-7. As we shall see, similar parallels and connections have also been noted between Rousseau and particular anarchists.

24. Joll, The Anarchists, 33-4.

25. Ethics: Origin and Development, trans. L. S. Friedland and J. R. Piroshnikoff (New York, 1924), 195. This apparently supersedes Kropotkin's earlier view that Rousseau had only a limited role as an inspirer of the Revolution and that Mably was a more important influence: The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793, trans. N. F. Dryhurst (London, 1909), 12.

26. God and the State (New York, 1970), 79. See also Œuvres, I. 263 for a reference to Rousseau and Robespierre as ‘absolutist Jacobins’; similarly Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution, 121-2.

27. Letter to Ruge, quoted by Carr, Michael Bakunin, 117, and by A. Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin (Oxford, 1982), 108.

28. Godwin's Rousseauian readings are listed below, Ch. 2, s. 1. For Proudhon's see Noland, ‘Proudhon and Rousseau’, 37, and P. Haubtmann, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: sa vie et sa pensée 1809-1849 (Paris, 1982), 250-1. The evidence concerning Bakunin and Kropotkin is sparse, but references to Rousseau are scattered throughout their writings: see below, Ch. 4, s. 1.

29. Godwin, An Account of the Seminary, etc. … in Four Early Pamphlets, ed. B. R. Pollin (Gainesville, Fla., 1966). Bakunin, ‘L’Instruction intégrale’, Œuvres Complètes (Paris, 1895-1913). v. 134-68; Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, ed. C. Ward (London, 1974), ch. 4. Another anarchist educator influenced by Rousseau is Herbert Read: Education Through Art, 3rd edn. (London, 1961).

30. Political Justice, v. xv. 497 note.

31. Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. J. B. Robinson (London, 1923), 118, 119; Bakunin, Œuvres, i. 139-40.

32. See Bakunin, Œuvres, i. 139-40 (The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, ed. G. P. Maximoff (New York and London, 1953) 165-7).

33. Note that, as will appear in more detail later (see Ch. 2, s. 2 below), the anarchist conception of moral self-direction is by no means identical to Rousseau's. While Rousseau tends to stress the role of sentiment in human authenticity, the anarchists follow the usual line of the perfectionist tradition in assigning a dominant role to reason. (There is, nevertheless, a rationalist element in Rousseau, too: R. Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris, 1950).) But this is chiefly a difference of emphasis. Both the anarchist and Rousseauian conceptions of freedom are recognizably conceptions of moral self-direction, involving the claim that freedom implies conscientious obedience to an objective moral law, however that law is known. My argument is, in any case, not that the anarchists derive their basic concept of freedom directly from Rousseau (they derive it, more generally, from the perfectionist tradition at large), but that they share with Rousseau a conception of freedom which is recognizable as moral self-direction, and that Rousseau is at least one of the sources of their claim that freedom in that sense is inviolable.

34. The Social Contract, I. iv.

35. See below, Ch. 2, s. 3; Ch. 3, s. 4.

36. J. Shklar, Men and Citizens, a Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969).

37. Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophie de la misère, 2 vols. (Paris, 1923), i. 350. See similarly General Idea of the Revolution, 117.

38. Contradictions économiques, i. 350.

39. Political Justice, v. xv. 497 note.

40. Quoted by P. Haubtmann, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 250 (see also 315, n. 19).

41. Bakunin, Œuvres, i. 139-43 (Maximoff, Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 165-7), and see below, Ch. 4, s. 2. See also Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Harmondsworth, 1939), 23-4, 75, 99, Ethics: Origin and Development, trans. L. B. Friedland and J. R. Piroshnikoff (New York, 1924), 78, The State: its Historic Role, trans. V. Richards (London, 1969), 12.

42. God and the State (New York, 1970), 21.

43. For the influence of classical republicanism on Rousseau see Shklar, Men and Citizens; and M. Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the ‘Well-Ordered Society’, trans. D. Hanson (Cambridge, 1988).

44. Commerce and republicanism are, however, to some degree reconciled by the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. See I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983).

45. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ, 1975), 469.

46. For the embryonic theory of alienation in Rousseau see J. P. Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man (Oxford, 1975); I. Mészáros, Marx's Theory of Alienation, 4th edn. (London, 1975).

47. A notable exception to this tendency is Marie Fleming, although she confines the scientific strand of anarchism to ‘Bakunin's spiritual descendants’, i.e., Reclus, Kropotkin, and their followers: The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 22.

48. Perhaps the clearest example of this tendency is provided by the Victorian social evolutionists: see J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966), 263.

49. H. Read, ‘The Philosophy of Anarchism’, in Anarchy and Order (London, 1954), 43.

50. Ethics, 110.

51. The Continental anarchists all reject utilitarianism more or less explicitly. See Ritter, Anarchism, 115-16; and below, Ch. 3, n. 48, and Ch. 4, n. 18.

52. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1978), subtitle; Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London, 1970), 11.

53. See below, Ch. 2, s. 1.

54. Quoted in G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), 572.

55. Ethics, 250.

56. It is tempting to add the name of Marx, who was probably a greater influence on the European anarchists than any of them cares to admit. But the intellectual links between Marx and the anarchists are so obscured by political differences that the matter cannot be done justice here and is best left to one side. For a thorough treatment of this question from a Marxian point of view see Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists. An account more sympathetic to the anarchist side of the dispute is given by R. Hoffman, ‘Marx and Proudhon: A Reappraisal of Their Relationship’, The Historian, 29 (1967), 409-30, and Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Urbana, Illinois, 1972), ch. 4.

57. See, e.g., Bakunin, Maximoff, Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 278.

58. General Idea of the Revolution, 122-5.

59. For the general influence of Comte see W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1963).

60. Ibid. 48 note; Œuvres, iii. 331.

61. Quoted by Simon, European Positivism 142.

62. The evidence for and against seeing Comte as an important influence on Proudhon is reviewed by de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon, trans. Canon R. E. Scantlebury (London, 1948), 236-9; Haubtmann, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 384-97.

63. Proudhon's ‘Three great stages in the development of human knowledge’ are, similarly, ‘the Religious, the Philosophical and the Scientific’: De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité (Paris, 1927), 36-7, 39 (Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, trans. E. Fraser, ed. S. Edwards (London, 1969), 239).

64. A Systēm of Logic (London, 1843), vi. See the final section, ‘The Logic of Practice, or Art: Including Morality and Policy’.

65. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, ed. G. Lenzer (New York, 1975), 337.

66. Modern Science and Anarchism (London, 1912), 18-19; Ethics, 48 and note.

67. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 148-9.