[In the following excerpt, Kline discusses the American brand of individualist anarchism advocated by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews.]

INTRODUCTION

Almost fifty years ago the last distinct vestiges of an entire radical American tradition disappeared with the death of Benjamin Tucker. Since that time the radical tradition which Tucker represented has been virtually lost in American history books. The reasons for this obscurity are manifold but two seem to predominate. The first reason is that American radicals have frequently been either neglected, or treated quite glibly and tendentiously. The second major reason is reflected in the neat, quiet manner in which this tradition was absorbed into the mainstream of traditional American thought. In turn, the reason for such absorption is to be found in the many fundamental assumptions shared by the mainstream and this radical tradition.

Tucker was the last major representative of a collection of thinkers and social activists known today as the Individualist Anarchists. Though in many ways they were a diverse collection, a bond existed between them at the core of their philosophies. They all desired a society without a government, based instead upon voluntary association. Indeed, many of these anarchists hoped, like their European cousins, to extirpate authority in all of its forms.

They were libertarians, then, absolutely distrustful of all authority and institutions and of hierarchy in general. Instead, they proposed to substitute such mechanisms as self-discipline, federalism, mutualism, and mutual aid. In the case of these Individualist Anarchists, the market would play a special part in bringing about justice and social harmony. But it will be argued here that the market is itself capable of a tyranny of sorts. Moreover, some anarchists proposed that social customs and mores be allowed to act upon individuals to an extent which might well have seriously threatened any meaningful autonomy.

These American anarchists were distinct from the European Socialist-anarchists not merely for their emphasis upon a market system. Although most of the Individualist Anarchists adamantly opposed such essential aspects of capitalism as rent, interest, and profits as distortions arising from state established privilege and monopolies, they were generally committed to the sanctity of private property. The Europeans, on the other hand, tended more toward communitarian forms of socialism.

Where the Communist-anarchists, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, conceived of property primarily in terms of social relations (and thus manipulable), most of the American anarchists followed Locke in viewing it as an extension of the individual, and a guarantee of his liberty. After all, the liberal stalwart Adam Smith had not referred to capitalism in his Wealth of Nations, but rather to “the system of natural liberty.”

The American anarchists also differed from the Europeans in their emphasis on individualism. Along with their devotion to private property, individualism provided the glue which would bind the Americans into a distinct group of anarchists. Worker struggles, relatively advanced in Europe, had given the anarchists of the continent an appreciation of solidarity, communitarian values, and direct action. Individualism in Europe was thought by many to be a threat not only to the solidarity requisite to the oppressed in their struggles for social justice, but also to the basic social bonds necessary for preserving order and culture: the result of individualism would be social dissolution and individual isolation.

By contrast, there was nothing pejorative in the term “individualism” as defined by the Americans. For them it expressed, above all else, the dignity and sovereignty of the individual. The term denoted the right of the individual to autonomy and self-direction, especially in a sphere of activity separate from the public realm where each person could cultivate his unique skills and characteristics. Since the individual was supreme, it followed that society should be secondary, arranged to accommodate the individual. Society had to rest on the consent of free individuals; it should have no other function than to enable the individual to pursue his own, chosen course and to protect him in this pursuit. If government had confined itself to protection of property and of individual liberty, as posited by Lockean liberalism, the American anarchists would not have objected to it. However, it seemed to them inevitably to overstep these bounds, and to create privilege, protect monopoly, and trample the rights it was supposed to secure.

The individualism of the Americans was predicated upon a belief that each individual would display rational economic conduct in a rational market system in order to maximize individual good; this conception, of course, was a familiar tenet of Adam Smith, among other classical political economists. The philosophy of the Individualist Anarchists, then, emphasized individual initiative and individual activity and interests, this latter measured principally in terms of material well-being (that is, private property).

The Individualist Anarchists have generally been presented as a stripe of radicals who fundamentally broke with the liberalism of their society. This has been the tenor of studies from Eunice Schuster's, Native American Anarchism to James Martin's, Men Against the State and William Reichert's, Partisans of Freedom. In the course of this essay it will be argued, however, that the Individualist Anarchists offered not a genuine critique of American society but, rather, an anomalous expression of the liberal tradition in the United States. If so, this provides more substance to the claim that “anarchism … had much deeper roots in the culture of this country than most people realize.”¹

It will be argued that they are distinguished in that they took liberal democratic theory much more seriously than most other Americans. No other group of American radicals gave such a central place in their philosophy to the concept of individualism. One need only philosophically un-pack the concept to understand what the Individualist Anarchists shared with traditional American thought: entailed are assumptions about human nature and human relations, property and liberty firmly grounded in classical liberal thought. The anarchists shared a belief in the essential rationality and goodness of the individual; in a set of natural individual rights, fully developed in the state of nature, the protection of which is the reason for society itself, as Locke argued. They believed in the basically contractual nature of society and in minimal government, which for the anarchist was no government; in a transcendental order of truth; and foremost, of course, in the absolute value and autonomy of the individual.

Individualism, as a basic theoretical stance, was incorporated into the philosphy of Hobbes. It was important in America as early as the Puritan period in the form of an assertion of the moral worth of each individual. Rogues Island, later known as Rhode Island, was initially the freest of the American colonies. Settlements without governments were founded there by those fleeing the religious and political authoritarianism of Puritan Massachusetts. Leading a politico-religious movement, Roger Williams, who bore some resemblance to the levellers of England,² founded in 1636 the settlement of Providence. Discussing the manner of operation of settlement, Williams said that “the masters of families have ordinarily met once a fortnight and consulted about our common peace, watch and plenty; and mutual consent have finished all matters of speed and pace.”³

This respect for the rights and wishes of men was carried over into the relationship between the settlers and those they were to displace. Unlike the Massachusetts settlers who forcefully expropriated land from the Indians, the settlers of Rhode Island acquired land by purchase from the natives. Gaining titles to their lands eventually resulted in a kind of “feudal” system; land could not be acquired by homesteading, but rather had to be purchased or rented from the original claiments. This eventuated in oligopolistic rule.⁴

Roger Williams was assuredly a libertarian, but his contemporary, Anne Hutchinson, was, according to Murray Rothbard, the first explicit American anarchist. Like Williams, a religious leader, Hutchinson and her followers also fled Massachusetts and in 1638 founded the settlement of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Their constitution of 1639 declared all male inhabitants equal before the law, the separation of Church and State, and the right of trial by jury for all accused. The anarchistic belief of Anne Hutchinson had origin in her theology. She thought salvation to be contained in the breast of every Christian; she therefore posited absolute religious freedom so that this guidance from within should not be obstructed. And if there must be absolute religious freedom, and if guidance comes from within each individual, what right, asked Hutchinson, does the government have to rule any individual at all?⁵

Meanwhile, in Plymouth, Roger Williams began to lose his libertarian temper as he aged. A group of Baptist Anarchists opposed themselves to him; led by Reverend Thomas Olney, this group included Roger's brother, Robert, John Field, William Harris, and John Throckmorton. These men circulated a petition claiming that the punishment of transgressors and the bearing of arms were anti-Christian acts. When Roger Williams denounced the petition, the anarchists rebelled but were put down by force. Yet the adherents of Baptist Anarchism increased until 1657, when Williams brought the four leaders into court. He achieved his purpose. Of the leaders, only William Harris persisted; he circulated petitions condemning all taxation, civil government, officials, legislative assemblies, punishments and prisons.⁶ At about the time this movement in Rhode Island was collapsing, the would-be governor of another American colony began to grapple with a larger number of colonists with similar anarchistic bent.

In 1681, William Penn began his “Holy Experiment.” Initially the Quaker colony waived all taxes to encourage settlement. However, Penn had planned eventually, as feudal landlord of the colony, designated by the Crown, to collect quitrents from the settlers. But “freedom and taxless society had contaminated the colonists,”⁷ and Penn found it impossible to exercise the perquisites of his authority. In 1684, William Penn went to England and government of the colony was lodged in the Council of Pennsylvania which had no focus of power and met infrequently; in effect, Pennsylvania was without government during this period of time.

In the period between 1684 and 1688, no funds were provided for a permanent bureaucracy. The people of the colony were pleased with the situation. Penn, alone it seems, was not satisfied with the conditions in his colony and he enlisted the assistance of an old Puritan soldier, John Blackwell, who he named governor of Pennsylvania. Within months, however, the tough old soldier was frustrated to the point of surrender, convinced by that time that the Quakers were the Devil's agents, defiant of every authority.⁸

The Quaker creed, argued George Keith, militates against any participation in government. Keith lead a group of Quakers who subscribed to this belief and though they were persecuted by the majority and their pamphlets banned, they were not much more extreme than most other Quakers. By 1692, King William was thoroughly disgusted with the pacifism and anarchy of Penn's colony and removed Penn, naming as governor Benjamin Fletcher. The King wanted to attack the French in Canada and had been unable to obtain suitable conditions in Pennsylvania.⁹

Taxation was still a serious problem from the viewpoint of the would-be governors of the colony: there was none. In 1693, the King got a bill passed to allow taxation, but collection was frustrated. So in 1694 William returned the colony to Penn. In 1695, the Council refused to consider a tax bill but the appointed governor, Markham, usurped this power and finally successfully instituted taxation among the Quakers.

To be sure, these were not highly conscious political movements based upon political speculation as in the case of the later Individualist Anarchists, but were religious movements grounded upon theology, the unique physical conditions of the New World, and the temper of settlers acquainted with intolerance, many of whom fled some kind of authoritarianism. They do, however, illustrate the fact that anarchistic tendencies were present in America in its earliest phase.

Benjamin Tucker once referred to Thomas Paine as the first American anarchist.¹⁰ Certainly, the philosophy of Paine approximated Anarchism, but Tucker's assessment overlooks Paine's staunch advocacy of republicanism. Like the anarchists who were to arise in the United States in the 1840's and 1850's, Thomas Paine rejected all authority not based upon consent. Wrote Paine in The Rights of Man: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it.”¹¹ He adhered to a theory of natural rights and denied that these rights could be alienated, nor, emphatically, could the rights of posterity.

“Every man is a proprietor in society, and draws on capital as a matter of right.”¹² The structure of society, according to Paine, must harmonize with the natural rights of men: “The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” said Paine “and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security and Resistance of Oppression.”¹³ Order, he taught, “has its origins in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man”¹⁴ It follows from this that government is for the most part superfluous and, indeed, Paine adds that “society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to Government. … The instant formal Government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.”¹⁵ Paine's conception of order and social harmony was intimately bound to his conception of progress. Like Proudhon after him, Paine felt that government diminishes as civilization progresses. Disorder is introduced as government deprives society of “its natural cohesion.”¹⁶ In any case, government should have no other object than general happiness, since for Paine, unlike the Individualist Anarchists, the culmination of his theory is society and not the individual.

Paine believed men to be naturally good and possessed of reason which might govern men successfully if not hampered. “Man, were he not corrupted by Governments, is naturally the friend of man, and … human nature is not of itself vicious.”¹⁷ He viewed Reason in almost evolutional terms; since “no man is prejudiced in favor of a thing knowing it to be wrong” one must conclude that “Reason, like time, will make its way, and prejudice will fall in a combat with interest.”¹⁸ Elsewhere Paine reiterates optimistically: “Reason and discussion will soon bring things right, however wrong they may begin.”¹⁹

It is important to note the conception of Liberty posited by Paine. “Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every man, has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights.”²⁰ This formulation bears striking resemblance to the “law of equal liberty” advocated by later American Anarchists and Herbert Spencer.

Paine even anticipated the faith in Laissez faire which was later to seize, among others, the Individualist Anarchists. “If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a Revolution in the uncivilized state of Governments.”²¹ he wrote.

The elements of anarchist philosophy were indeed present before 1800 but Josiah Warren would become known as the father of American Anarchism, the first to propose Anarchism as a system based upon a philosophy of society. During the Jacksonian period a multitude of reform and intellectual movements, including attempts at fundamental economic reform and communities designed to replace the existing system, flourished and were tolerated. There arose religious communes, communities of property settlements such as those of Wilhelm Weitling and Etienne Cabet, Fourierite joint-stock phalanxes, and communities planned and under the guidance of enlightened philanthropists such as Robert Owen. It was out of this milieu and, more specifically, out of an experiment of this last type that Josiah Warren appeared.

Warren was born in 1798; the place of his birth, however, is unknown. Some early historians thought him the descendant of the General Warren of Revolutionary war fame, though this is today generally thought to be a spurious claim. In 1819 Warren moved West with his wife and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio where he earned a living as a musician and a teacher of music. His mind was disposed to experimentation and innovation and he invented, among other things, a lard-burning lamp which would probably have insured his fortune had Warren not, at his point, been influenced by Robert Owen; Warren determined to abandon the lamp business and follow Owen.

Robert Owen was an environmental determinist: he did not believe in free will, personal responsibility, praise and blame. It was his conviction that social systems are responsible for the character of their peoples. For a sum of 150,000 dollars Owen purchased 30,000 acres from a German Lutheran sect in Harmony, Indiana. The community was renamed New Harmony and Josiah Warren involved himself in its establishment. He helped to draft and approve the first constitution of New Harmony in February of 1826. Warren occupied himself as the leader of the community band. From this point Warren committed himself to a life of social experimentation.

JOSIAH WARREN, SOCIAL SCIENTIST

The inhabitants of New Harmony had confidently created a central organization, but a year and a half after its inception the community was seen to be a failure. Warren viewed New Harmony as an effort to harmonize the multitude of interests of the individuals involved, to establish a situation in which the various interests cooperate rather than conflict. The problem had been, as Warren identified it, that the individual was submerged under the community. He also felt that the elimination of individual property rights had diminished the sense of personal responsibility.²² He concluded that “difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increase just in proportion to the demand for conformity.”²³ Varying opinions were, thus, less and less tolerated.

Warren, however, retained some of the ideas he had absorbed from Owen. He adopted Owen's view that happiness is the proper goal of life and utility the measure of virtue. Like Owen, Josiah Warren believed in the possibility of Man's emancipation and that his happiness is conditioned by his social environment.²⁴ At the same time Warren believed that men produce their environment.²⁵ He embraced Owen's concern with determinism but attempted to combine with it a belief in free will and individual responsibility.

Warren subscribed to the labor theory of value of Adam Smith and he was especially attracted to Owen's labor exchange ideas, building relentlessly upon these for nearly fifty years following the New Harmony experiment. Warren immediately began developing an economic doctrine of cooperation employing a system of equal exchange of labor in the production of goods and services; exchange was to be upon an hour for hour basis facilitated by the use of labor notes.

His first social research using these economic ideas began on May 18, 1827. James Martin refers to Warren's Cincinnati Time Store as the first experiment in cooperative economy in modern times.²⁶ Upon opening the Time Store, Warren posted the prices he had paid for all of his goods and he added a seven percent charge for “contingent expenses,” including shipping and overhead. For his services as a merchant, however, Warren asked only that the customer agree to give him a labor note promising to repay the storekeeper with an amount of labor in time equal to that expended by Warren in the transfer, or exchange, of merchandise.

Warren placed in his store two clocks, one whose hands would remain fixed wherever set and the other functioning in the ordinary fashion. Thus, when Warren began each transaction he would set the hands of the first clock at the time the exchange began; at the end of the exchange the time elapsed could be easily calculated by comparing the fixed hands with those of the ordinary clock.

Within three months Warren's store was a success and had made a significant impression on people of the area. At least three other stores arose based upon the same principles, two of which were located in Philadelphia.²⁷ Two doctors who had traded with Warren at his store began to offer their services on the same basis—labor in exchange for labor. Within one year the capacity of the Time Store was doubled to accommodate the increased volume of business. Warren continued to teach music but now upon the basis of the labor exchange used in his store.

According to Warren, demand is but a desire for a particular thing, regardless of ability to pay. In his Time Store he posted a paper with a list of demands of various people of the community and with offers of labor to exchange. Thus Warren facilitated a kind of market system for labor exchange. In addition, he listed commodities which he would exchange for labor.

In the course of his examination of the labor theory of value, Warren seized upon and inveighed against the conditions of wage labor with respect to women and children. Their wages he realized were kept artificially low. Warren followed this up with an investigation of the apprentice system and again concluded that the system was a means of intentionally and unnaturally restricting employment and production and services, an “obsolete barbarity”²⁸ designed to drive down wages and to thwart a cost-basis economy to the benefit of a few.

The popularity of Warren's store with the community encouraged him to expand it and insured him an adequate living. His labor for labor principle, as well, seemed to be catching on. By these standards a success, then, in May, 1830, Josiah Warren closed his Cincinnati Time Store satisfied that he had proven the practicability and virtues of his economic principles. Owen himself seems to have been impressed with Warren's experimentation. In 1832 he established his “Equitable Banks of Labor Exchange.” Value was determined by the average quantity of labor spent in the production of a given commodity. Owen used only time as a measure of labor. Warren, on the other hand, who was the first to employ the labor theory of value in a Bank of Exchange, used time and repugnance, which he intended as a criterion for measuring the offensiveness or odiousness of a task or job. This latter concept he left rather inchoate, however, suggesting that he was but dimly aware of the degree to which advancing industrialization and division of labor were complicating any pure labor theory of value. Doubtless, Warren was confident that an unrestricted market could equitably assign values to labor and account for repugnance in its workings.

Between 1830 and 1831 Warren returned to the problem of apprenticeships and established schools in Ohio for teaching young men trades quickly to reduce the periods of apprenticeship; these appear to have been precursors of the contemporary trade schools.

In 1833 Warren established The Peaceful Revolutionist, the first anarchist paper anywhere. Warren is also distinguished by the fact that he established the first anarchist communities: Tuscarawas County, Ohio (1835-1837); “Utopia” in Clermont, Ohio (1847-1851); and “Modern Times” in Brentwood, Long Island (1850-1862). This last settlement lasted for twelve years and was the most successful of his colonies. Goods were exchanged using the medium of labor notes. The basic moral principle of “Modern Times” is said to have been the maxim: “Mind your business.”²⁹ In fact, Warren's vision was a nation of small, autonomous communities. The principles of individuality and of mutual exchange based upon the labor theory of value were to provide the groundwork for these communities.

His observation of the variety of human differences manifested during the New Harmony experiment led Warren to abandon any hope of achieving economic equality; he assumed that different individuals would inevitably invest varying amounts of energy and time toward accomplishing the same goals.³⁰ Yet he believed that “enlightened self-interest” would supply the requisite motivational drive to make the system work and he proposed as a substitute for economic equality, equality of opportunity. He advocated equal access to land, raw materials, and credit. Individual differences would interact in free competition so as to produce an equitable society. The quest for equity Warren thought to be the highest human goal, and equity was always conceptualized in terms of the individual. In his Practical Details Warren wrote the following:

Society must be so converted as to preserve the sovereignty of every individual inviolate. That it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgement may dictate, without involving the persons or interests of others.³¹

For Warren, Liberty involved a recognition by every individual of the equal rights of every other to this own life, conscience, and property, but this latter only insofar as the individual produced or acquired it in fair exchange. In addition, he thought each should have a right to the tools and materials necessary to production. He denied that Liberty could be defined without negating it, asserting instead the right of the individual to make such a determination according to his own conscience.³² Each individual should be free and each should accept the consequences of his own acts. In Practical Details he made this point by saying that each individual should be “a system within himself.”³³ Warren felt that the “law of natural consequences,” of cause and effect would produce a balance between the multiplicity of individual self-interests.

Many entrepreneurs and businessmen at this time were calling for less government interference. What they actually wanted is a question that will go unexamined here. In a sense, though, Warren wanted to extend to every individual the freedom exercised by the capitalists. Warren, like Proudhon, wanted to eliminate the “middle man” and the large, unearned profits, to mitigate the disparity in the distribution of wealth, and to halt the tendency of industrializing society to overwhelm the individual. To this end he rejected the democratic system and the combinations and integrations increasingly a part of modern society.³⁴

In his labor-cost theory of value, indirectly received from Smith, in his labor exchange ideas and the proposal for a kind of mutual banking system—the borrower securing capital directly from the possessor, without interest—Warren anticipated Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In addition to an entire school of anarchist thinkers, Warren influenced the advocate of women's rights, Frances Wright; a group of English anarchists who founded the London Confederation of Political Reformers in August of 1853; Robert Dale Owen; Henry George; and even John Stuart Mill, who credited Warren with influencing some of his own thought, especially with regard to his conception of individualism.³⁵ Warren's primary method of disseminating his doctrines was by means of his “Parlor Conversations.” However, his ideas were set down in various writings, and the task remains to detail his thought based upon these writings.

EQUITABLE COMMERCE

Perhaps no phrase summarizes the thrust of Josiah Warren's philosophical effort as concisely as “equitable commerce.” In 1852, one of the most significant of the written works of Warren was published, Equitable Commerce: A New Development of Principles as Substitutes for Laws and Governments, for the Harmonious Adjustment and Regulation of the Pecuniary, Intellectual, and Moral Intercourse of Mankind Proposed as Elements of a New Society. In his introduction he described the book as the culmination of twenty-five years of investigation and experimentation with a proposal for peaceful, yet fundamental, social change.

Warren's initial proposal is to identify the social problem. Society, he said, wants the following:

I. The proper, legitimate, and just reward of labor.

II. Security of person and property.

III. The greatest practicable amount of freedom to each individual.

IV. Economy in the production and uses of wealth.

V. To open the way for each individual to the possession of land, and all other natural wealth.

VI. To make the interests of all to cooperate with and assist each other, instead of clashing with and counteracting each other.

VII. To withdraw the elements of discord, of war, of distrust, and repulsion, and to establish a prevailing spirit of peace, order, and social sympathy.³⁶

In the course of the book, then, Warren addressed himself to these issues and attempted to resolve each. He began by praising technology and its benefits for the workman; also, he applauded the doctrine of environmentalism for helping men better to understand themselves and society. However, these preliminaries were quickly discarded as Warren undertook examination of the concept of “Individuality” which is the underpinning of his entire philosophy.

It should here be recalled that one of the primary lessons Warren had drawn from his critique of the New Harmony experiment was the fact of the great variety and diversity constitutive of human life. This lesson was reflected in his conception of individuality. In a section of Equitable Commerce entitled “The Study of Individuality, or the Practice of Mentally Discriminating, Dividing, Separating, Disconnecting Persons, Things, and Events According to their Individual Peculiarities,” Warren made the claim that individuality “pervades everything” and is “the life principle of society.”³⁷ Nature, said Warren, produces diversity. “The surrounding atmosphere, the contact of various persons and circumstances, all contribute to make us more the mirrors of passing things than the possessors of any fixed character,” he said.³⁸ For example, mood affects feelings and perceptions. Thus people may interpret differently any given written rule; though words comprise the primary means of our “intellectual commerce,” “written laws, or rules, or institutions, or verbal precepts” are rendered ambiguous at least and usually arbitrary, liable to multifarious interpretations.³⁹

Carrying an interesting idea with an element of validity ad absurdum, Warren argued that since language admits only of individual interpretations and cannot be made definite, positive human institutions cannot be based upon language because “to possess the interpreting power of verbal institutions is to possess unlimited power!”⁴⁰ This flaw is an intrinsic element of all governments and such institutions. Thus “to require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments, or in the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action where there is no natural coincidence, is a fundamental error in human legislation.”⁴¹ Only disorder and enmity could arise where conformity is demanded of diversity.

Since individuality is a product of Nature, according to Warren, we must conclude that “out of the indestructibility or inalienability of this Individuality grows the absolute right of its exercise or the absolute sovereignty of every individual.”⁴² Individuality, therefore, has primacy and is properly above “institutions based on language. Institutions thus become subordinate to our judgement and subject to our convenience.” That is, individuality is a given and “we must conform our institutions to it!”⁴³

For Warren, the principle of individuality is synonymous with his conception of progress, order, and harmony. “It is within everyone's experience,” he wrote, “that when many things of any kind are heterogeneously mixed together, separation, disconnection, division, Individuality restores them to order, but no other process will do it.”⁴⁴ He argued that this observation applies to all situations. “Every person is an individual, and therefore possesses the essential qualification for a leader”,⁴⁵ but there must be a lead, or “directing power” whether a person or a thing. He was adamant also that responsibility for one's actions must rest with the individual; otherwise it is a hollow notion.⁴⁶ Individual responsibility is subverted, however, whenever it is deputed to the “phantom” known as the State. This violates the dictum against placing institutions above individuals.⁴⁷

“Definiteness,” he taught, can arise only out of individuality and the sovereignty of the individual is not possible under conditions of “close connections and combinations.” Therefore, it is necessary to find

modes by which all these connections and amalgamated interests can be Individualized, so that each can exercise his right of individuality at his own cost, without involving or counteracting others; then, that his cooperation must not be required in anything wherein his own inclinations do not concur or harmonize with the object in view.⁴⁸

The true basis for a society is the opposite of connections, amalgamations, combinations, communism and their like. Rather it is “freedom to differ in all things, or the sovereignty of every individual.”⁴⁹ Social harmony, then, is conditional upon the commitment of every individual to respect the right, or liberty, of other individuals to differ.

Warren could hope for the realization of this social condition because he believed in the perfectibility of reason. Thus he was confident that “among a multitude of untried routes, only one of which is right, the more Liberty there is to differ and take different routes, the sooner will all come to a harmonious conclusion as the right one.”⁵⁰ He concluded that “this is the only possible mode by which the harmonious result aimed at can be attained. Compulsion will never be harmonious.”⁵¹

The process of individualization, then, had to be applied to the questions of concern to society as posited by Warren. Currently, price, noted the author of Equitable Commerce, is dependent upon want. As want increases, just so does price increase. Value, he thought, should not go into the determination of price, for value includes some measure of want. Cost, on the other hand, consists in a particular amount of labor used in the production of a given commodity, plus such contingent expenses as taxes, insurance, shipping and the like. In True Civilization Warren further clarified the concept of cost. He said there that it signifies

the endurance of whatever is disagreeable Fatigue of mind or body is Cost. Responsibility which causes anxiety is Cost. To have our time or attention taken up against our preferences—to make a sacrifice of any kind—a feeling of mortification—painful suspense—fear—suffering or enduring anything against our inclinations, is here considered Cost.⁵²

“Cost, then, is the only rational ground of price.”⁵³ Essentially, what Warren advocated was that value and cost be individualized, or disconnected, in order to avoid the confusion and discord he perceived in the realm of commerce. This principle he extended to all forms of commerce. Intellectual commerce, conversation, or the “intercourse of mind with mind,” he said, may be of great value but if the cost is nothing, no price should be laid upon it.⁵⁴ Additionally, “talents which cost nothing, are natural wealth, and should be accessible to all without price.”⁵⁵ The same principle applied to the loan of money would dictate that the legitimate—“equitable”—compensation for the loan be “the cost of labor in lending it and receiving it back again.”⁵⁶ Equitable rent would include only the cost of wear and insurance, and the cost of making the contracts and receiving the rent. Herein lies the resolution of the first social problem identified by Warren: Cost being made the limit of price will insure that labor receives its just and equitable reward.

The principle of “cost-the-limit of price” would have this effect by placing the responsibility upon each to earn just so much as he consumes. It would lighten the burden of work in producing the needed goods for society by distributing that burden more equitably; it would reduce prices for goods; it would create security and obviate cupidity arising from insecurity, the “scramble for unlimited accumulations of property, and all degradation and crime and the horrors of punishments arising from these causes!”⁵⁷

With regard to the second social need, security of person and property, Warren denied that government could provide for this. Indeed, government is, for Warren, its antithesis: “security of person and property cannot consist in anything less than having the supreme government of himself and all his own interests; therefore, security cannot exist under any government whatever.”⁵⁸ Where government exists, however, greater relative security is to be obtained in positions of political power, thus explaining the reason that a premium is placed upon their acquisition.

But “supreme government” must rest with each individual, or as Warren poses the issue in his work True Civilization, “self-sovereignty is an instinct of every living organism” and as an instinct it cannot be alienated. Generally, a person may exercise “supreme power or absolute authority” in the sphere of his or her own person, property, time and responsibilities⁵⁹—a formula reminiscent of that of John Stuart Mill, and equally vague. Self-sovereignty and the principle of equivalents will provide guidelines for determining when an action is invasive, he argued.⁶⁰ From its status as an instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, derives the absolute right of its exercise.⁶¹ Government, however, cannot provide the security requisite to self-sovereignty.

In Equitable Commerce Warren expressed the belief that government exists primarily for the benefit of combination, a condition of which he disapproved. Eleven years later he ascribed to government the function of “intervention for the sake of non-intervention,” or the use of force against force or invasiveness.⁶² This he felt to be the only proper use of government and the only justification for the violation of individual sovereignty.

Coercive government should be responsible for the protection of persons and property from invasion, and it should have just so much force as to perform this function.⁶³ As an anarchist, Warren objected to any element of government which violated the liberties and self-sovereignty of the non-invasive individual. However, he had no objection to cooperating—in the form of “government” if that term were used—to protect against invasions of liberty. The only possible objection to a “government” with this limited function, he said, would be an objection to a misapplication of its power. By 1863 he had used this belief to justify a military “for the advantage of drill and systematic cooperation.”⁶⁴ The term militia would probably be more descriptive of the military he invisioned since all action was to be placed upon a voluntary basis. “It will be asked, what could be accomplished by a military organization, if every individual were allowed to judge of the propriety of an order before he obeyed it? I answer,” replied Warren, “that nothing could be accomplished that did not commend itself to men educated to understand, and trained to respect the rights of persons and property set forth in the ‘Declaration of Independence.’”⁶⁵ This would provide a check on barbarities, theorized Warren. Further, Warren proposed a “Deliberative Council” as a kind of judiciary for rendering advice in cases of dispute, but not possessing coercive powers. If the advice were not followed and the dispute continued unresolved, he suggested that the matter then be put to the military “to act at its discretion; selecting that course which promises the least violence or disturbance.”⁶⁶

But who will decide when violence in resistance is necessary? Warren believed that in cases of blatant invasion, most would resist; in cases of less obvious invasion, resistance would occur in varying degrees. The important thing, according to Warren, is to insure that each individual has the freedom to judge of himself and to differ.

Warren was convinced that “this Modern Military, as a Government, will be necessary only in the transitionary stage of society from confusion and wanton violence to true order and mature civilization.”⁶⁷ He optimistically envisioned a period of examination of the causes of avarice, crimes, wars and violence, poverty, etc. followed by peace and order: the discovery would be made that making value the basis of price results in disorders in the market, business uncertainties, inequitable rewards, poverty, greed and the other ills of society. Cost, the limit of price, alone, he thought, could provide for society the security of person and property it desires.

In his analysis of equitable commerce, Warren addressed himself to the issue of the “greatest practicable liberty.” Warren equated Liberty with the Sovereignty of the Individual and claimed that “Liberty defined and limited by others is slavery!”⁶⁸ The Sovereignty of the Individual demands that each live and act “at his own cost,” and this, according to Warren, is impossible “just in proportion as we or our interests are united or combined with others.”⁶⁹ On the contrary, he claimed that “the only ground upon which man can know liberty, is that of disconnection, disunion, individuality.”⁷⁰ Warren claimed at this point, that government arose out of a necessity for some third party to arbitrate in a society filled with the discord of united interests, a self defeating measure which further jeopardizes Liberty.

Warren notes that the desire for human “Sympathy,” “Harmony” or “Unity” is indeed one of the strongest of all human needs and he hoped to accommodate these by providing the space for each person to move in without disturbing others. However, his proscription upon combination stood. He decried communism for the often overlooked flaw intrinsic to it—the attempt to achieve harmony by combination. Harmony can only be realized in the “freedom to differ in all things where difference is possible.”⁷¹ Warren was confident that “enlightened and regulated self-interest” would give rise to the desired harmony and “universal sympathy.”⁷² Education in the principles of anarchy would provide the enlightenment necessary to achieve such harmony.

The cost principle was the cornerstone of Warren's system and the focus for any education into that new system. Such “continuous convulsions” as reflected by the Civil War were viewed by Warren as the products of a system unjust to labor; “the whole of what is called civilization rests upon labor, and … it is everywhere prostrate—starving—groaning, and imploringly lifting up its hands in silent agony for help. …” ⁷³ He compared the functioning of the value principle to cannibalism⁷⁴ and he designated the government and money as the two oppressors. But his conception of government was limited to its overt coersive functions and he failed to discuss such elements of power as symbolism, socialization, the State as idea, and other related forms.

Warren relied on the cost principle to obviate the search for harmony in union. The cost principle was said by Warren to render competition harmless and a regulating and adjusting power. Competition, he reasoned, would not drive work below equivalents because the comparative cost in labor for any given product would be established by public opinion; and anyone could leave an occupation that did not suit them—by talent or wage criteria—until all occupations were equalized. Also, it was through competition that Warren expected the cost system, by virtue of its natural superiority, to replace the system as it existed in the Nineteenth Century. The cost principle would make natural wealth accessible to all; and all would have an interest in helping another begin a business with the awareness that products would then be had at cost.⁷⁵ Since losses and waste would become part of the price, each would have an interest in minimizing cost.⁷⁶ Thus there would arise cooperation without combination; with this Warren claimed to have “solved the great problem of the individual good harmonized with the public good!”⁷⁷

The problems with which Warren concerned himself were those of the expanding middle class of the Jacksonian period. Many Jacksonian Democrats were making the same sorts of demands, that privilege and monopoly no longer be sanctioned, that equal access to the system be granted to all. Walt Whitman argued that the only necessary function of government is the prevention of anyone from infringing on the rights of any other. William Leggett demanded that government confine itself to “equal protection.”⁷⁸ John Vethake and Theodore Sedgwick, Jr. inveighed against the monopolies and Stephen Simpson blamed the laws for creating privileges and robbing labor of its reward. “The mischief,” complained Andrew Jackson, “springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control. … ”⁷⁹ Langdon Byllesby demanded that labor receive its full product and have control over it, that exchange be based upon reciprocity (equal quantities of labor), that interest be abolished, and that no one consume without exact compensation. Warren went beyond calls to disconnect the political and economic spheres; he proclaimed the complete superfluity of the political sphere.

Many proponents of laissez faire assumed the continuance of the state, however, and expected it to have a subtly pro-business orientation which would sanction, if not encourage, combinations and trusts, collusion, growth of corporations, and the like. Stephen Pearl Andrews foresaw this culminating in the laissez faire doctrine of a plutocracy which was only another species of authoritarianism. Warren and his supporters, on the other hand, believed that if government were abolished and the struts upholding privilege and monopoly thus eliminated, trusts, combinations, and collusion would soon wither in a free market competition. With access to the market free and open to all, voluntary and cooperative associations would proliferate to supply goods and services on a cost-basis. Without government regulations, subsidies, patents, and so forth, profit-oriented entities could not extract unearned value from consumers, nor could they successfully compete with producers and suppliers operating on a cost-basis.

Warren's demands, then, were within the spirit of the times. His proposed solutions, however, his extreme emphasis on individualism, and his rejection of government placed him outside the mainstream of Jacksonian Democrats. Central proposals of his thought—cost the limit of price and labor for labor exchange—were soon outdated. The Civil War period saw a series of major legislation (the National Bank Act of 1863, subsidies for railroads, contract labor laws) heralding a system of government partisanship rather than laissez-faire. The idea that politics and economics could be separated became positively anachronistic. (Charles Beard has called this the period of the “Second American Revolution.”) The war hastened industrialization and technology, scientific farming and the growth of cities. The role of labor was altered as relations between employer and employee were de-personalized, economic insecurities increased and labor unions began to develop. The Republican Party and big business, with its Captains of Industry (Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Gould) were wedded. Yet Warren remained convinced that he had discovered the essential elements of a program to bring harmony to American society; and in the mid-fifties this claim was accepted by a former Fourierite named Stephen Pearl Andrews, who was later to popularize Warren's social research and transmit his ideas to future Individualist Anarchists.

STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS AND THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY

The man whom Henry Appleton, American anarchist, called “the intellectual giant of America” and English anarchist Henry Seymour proclaimed “the most intellectual man on this planet” early displayed a proficiency in languages and went on to learn thirty-two of them while studying philology. Not surprisingly, he also earned a reputation as a brilliant orator. Born in Massachusetts in 1812, Stephen Pearl Andrews could claim to be of solid New England stock. When only 19 years of age, Andrews moved with an older brother to Louisiana and took up the study of law. Over the next several years he taught at Louisiana State University, introduced the first system of shorthand from England to America, translated the laws and constitution of Texas into Spanish at the request of that state's legislature, developed a language which he intended to be used for global communication, and practiced law in New Orleans. In 1839 he began practicing law in Galveston, but four years later when his efforts to conspire against slavery became known he was forced to flee for his life just minutes ahead of a violent mob. Thus, in his first thirty years, Andrews had experienced and achieved more than most manage in a lifetime. But at this point, his contributions were just beginning.

During the 1840's Andrews came under the influence of Fourierism and of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg. However, in a speech before the New York Mechanics Institute in 1850, Andrews professed his belief that the formula of Fourier, that “destinies are proportioned to attractions” meant that a social system should be organized so as to give each individual the power to “choose and vary his own destiny or condition and pursuits in life, untrammelled by social restrictions … so that every man may be a law unto himself, paramount to all other human laws, the sole judge for himself of the divine law and of the requisitions of his own individual nature and organization.”⁸⁰ Shortly prior to that year Andrews had met Warren and found the philosophy of the social experimenter to be a completion of the tendencies of his own philosophy.

Like Warren, Andrews perceived the essential law of nature to be the manifold diversity of life. He thought all that threatens this diversity stifles life and results in social unrest, crime, war, and the like. The goal, he taught, is not to attempt to limit diversity and human individuality, but to establish social relations so as to put them on a just basis.

Andrews became acquainted with the philosophy of Comte through his American exponent, Henry Edger, and by 1857 had absorbed many of the tenets of positivism into his own philosophy. Andrews was also among the first Americans to discover Marx and the first to publish his Communist Manifesto in the U.S. In 1869 Andrews helped to found the First International, but his flirtation with Marxism was short-lived and mostly based on a spiritual kinship rather than on principles. In his Basic Outline of Universology published in 1872, Andrews attempted to mesh what he considered to be the scientific approach of Warren with the metaphysical approach of Comte. He still considered Fourier an important early pioneer in this attempted synthesis.⁸¹

In the post-Civil War period Andrews was active in the feminist movement. He was at that time closely associated with Victoria Woodhull, often writing speeches for her stressing the intimate relationship between the sexual bondage of women and the political and economic bondage obtaining in society.

By 1877, Andrews' increasingly syncretistic philosophy could scarcely be identified as a form of anarchism. During the railroad strike in that year he called for “the forced transfer of all railroads, magnetic telegraphs, and great public works to the government, with the laborers paid fixed and equitable prices, as government employees.”⁸² In addition, he envisioned “the organization of great government work-shops, or organized government colonization, or other similar enterprises, and the honest effort that government shall become the social providence of all the people.”⁸³

Andrews thought that by the Twenty-first Century a single governmental unit would exist for all the world and that all people would speak the same language and share the same religion. This would be the result of a conflict between plutocracy and the “politarchy” of state socialism. Andrews had come to believe that government, if manipulated by social scientists, might be an effective agent for the social reforms he wanted to see. From this condition of world order anarchism would eventuate as government control was discarded “to relegate the management of all human affairs to the pure, unorganized, unregulated spontaneity of the people themselves.”⁸⁴ Though not abandoning the anarchist principle, Andrews had come to the unorthodox conclusion that it would be realized through a strange dialectical conflict between two competing notions of the state idea, one capitalist and the other socialist. In the hands of system-builders like himself, the state might even help bring about this utopian stage of society.

Andrews' principal contribution to Individualist Anarchism, however, was his lucid elaboration of the thought of Warren. Andrews must be credited with passing this philosophy to the Individualist Anarchists that were to proliferate in the 1880's. The Science of Society commences with a declaration, in the manner of Warren, of the supremacy of the individual. Protestantism, Democracy, and Socialism, proclaimed Andrews, are the growing expressions of that supremacy. For him, Protestantism represents the demand for “emancipation of the individual from ecclesiastical bondage.”⁸⁵ DeMaistre, after all, had dubbed individualism political Protestantism in 1820. As Protestantism reflected a rejection of religious absolutism, Democracy expressed a demand for emancipation from political absolutism and Socialism a demand for emancipation from economic bondage, or absolutism. (This last is in stark contrast to the interpretation of socialism given by George Fitzhugh in his Sociology of the South appearing in the same year as Andrews' work, 1854. Fitzhugh thought the growth of socialism signified a desire—perhaps unconscious—for slavery.)

Individuality, wrote Andrews, is the generic principle from which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual is derived. No two things or events in the universe are exactly the same. Taught Andrews: “Infinite diversity is the universal law.”⁸⁶ This fact “mocks at all human attempts to make laws, or constitutions, or governmental institutions of any sort, which shall work justly and harmoniously amidst the unforeseen contingencies of the future.”⁸⁷

Men must choose between despotism and revolution argued Andrews. Despotism is successful in proportion as it “denaturalizes mankind.” Revolution, however, explodes the unnatural bonds of institutions. Institutions are made by man, Individuality by God, according to Andrews, and, thus, it could not be alienated. Each person was for Andrews a microcosm, “an image or reflection of God.”⁸⁸ It followed that to the extent that conformity is demanded of Individuality disorder would increase.

In Love, Marriage and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual: A Discussion Between Henry James, Horace Greely and Stephen Pearl Andrews (1889), Andrews labelled Greeley a conservative. There are two theories of government, declared Andrews: one that views Man as essentially irresponsible and incapable of self-government, the theory adhered to by Greeley; and the second theory asserting that Man is potentially capable of governing himself, lack of practice being the only obstacle to realization of this potential.”⁸⁹

One facet of Andrews' anarchism resembled the colonial religious anarchism of Anne Hutchinson: he argued that Protestantism posits the individual as the ultimate and highest authority to interpret God's laws. He concluded that “in religious affairs the end must be that every man shall be his own sect.”⁹⁰

Majoritarian rule, Andrews claimed, is antithetical to democracy, the assertion “that every individual is of right free and equal, that is, that every individual is of right free from the governing control of every other and all others.”⁹¹ Democracy, then, “is identical with the no-government doctrine.”⁹² He asserted that democracy is inconsonant with the existing order and would remain so until the demand of socialism, that labor receive its just reward, be realized.

Andrews thought governments originate from a need to “restrain encroachments” and “to manage the combined interests of mankind.”⁹³ Coercive government for the first purpose is clearly unnecessary, however, if, as Andrews claimed, “a clear scientific perception of the point at which encroachment begins” can be formulated.⁹⁴ For Andrews, the rule that governs this is derived from the principle of equity: “every individual is the rightful Sovereign over his own conduct in all things, whenever, and just so far as, the consequences of his conduct can be assumed by himself.”⁹⁵ Yet this rule could be made practicable only after changes in the “commercial, ethical, and social spheres.”⁹⁶ Andrews dismissed the second purpose occasioning the rise of government since it obviously contradicts the principle of individuality; union, connection, etc. inevitably introduce into society the disorder which government is meant to eliminate or mitigate. According to Andrews, the goal is to disconnect, individualize, separate, all this after the fashion of Josiah Warren.

Andrews considered the cost principle to be the primary mechanism by which this could be accomplished and the second part of The Science of Society is devoted to expatiation of this principle. His discussion opens with a condemnation of prior political economy: It has failed, Andrews asserted, because “it treats wealth as if it were an abstract thing having interests of its own, apart from the well-being of the laborers who produce it.”⁹⁷ He thought that the scientific method alone could place social relations on an equitable basis; and toward a scientific resolution of this goal Andrews adopted the five major principles of Warren's program: Individuality, the sovereignty of the Individual, cost the limit of price, a circulating medium founded on the cost of labor, and adaptation of the supply to demand.

Andrews recognized cooperation and economies of scale as beneficial and worth preserving. To this end he distinguished between combination and cooperation:

By Combinations are meant partnership interests and community of property or administration, such as confuse, in any degree, or obliterate the lines of Individuality in the ownership or use of property.

By Co-operation, or co-operative relations, is meant such an arrangement of the property and industrial interests of the different Individuals of the community, that each, in pursuing his own pleasure or benefit, contributes incidentally to the pleasure or benefit of the others.⁹⁸

His description of cooperation, then, paralleled the principle represented by Adam Smith's “invisible hand.” The interests were to be individual and the pursuit by self-interested, acquisitive individuals would, in theory, lead to their mutual benefit.

However, cooperation can be achieved only by a scientific restructuring of society, taught Andrews, and the new structure of society must be predicated upon the exchange of equivalents in all forms of commerce. Wrote Andrews: “Simple equity is this, that so much of your labor as I take and apply to my benefit, so much of my labor ought I to give you to be applied to your benefit.”⁹⁹ Exchanges might have been reduced to simple exchanges of equal hours of labor were it not for the additional complexity introduced by the necessity for measuring the repugnance of various labors. “Equity,” Andrews claimed, “is the equality of burdens.”¹⁰⁰ Each individual must determine the extent to which his labor is a burden. He would then reflect his determination of repugnance through the medium of the labor note. Under the Cost Principle the “more ordinary and menial kinds of labor will be usually paid best” due to the repugnance entailed in such labor.

The labor note would make “every man his own banker.”¹⁰¹ It would be a circulating medium and a means of credit as well; and it would represent a definite amount of labor or property. If the subjective measure of repugnance determined by an individual for a given type of labor were greater than that determined by most other individuals in that type of labor, the expression of this fact in labor notes would have the result of making them less competitive with the labor notes of those enjoying their work more. It would also indicate that the individual should consider another, less onerous type of labor. In any case, cost would not and should not reflect the value of the labor or good to the purchaser, but only the amount of labor time and a determination of repugnance. Competition would force cost to its minimum.

Andrews' analysis of the results of the existing condition of commerce may be summarized as follows: (a) It nurtures falsehood and hypocrisy in trade. (b) It increases the disparity of wealth. (c) The quest for profits results in trade for the sake of trading and the concomitant of this is an increasing number of non-producers who must be supported by labor. (d) Labor is demeaned. (e) Supply cannot be “scientifically” adjusted to the demand. (f) Competition becomes “desperate and destructive” when a determination of value is included in the cost; unemployment results. (g) In addition to this, the Value Principle transforms machinery into a weapon against labor rather than a blessing.¹⁰²

Andrews argued that a system of commerce founded upon the Cost Principle would provide for “Attractive Industry,” a concept elaborated by Fourier: each individual would have the opportunity to seek his occupation “according to his natural bias or genius” resulting in the most efficient and advantageous “employment of all human powers.”

The Cost Principle, claimed Andrews, would render competition harmless. Under this principle competition would “operate at the point of superiority of performance in the respective functions of each member of society, and will, therefore, be purely beneficent in its results.” On the other hand, wrote Andrews, “in the existing social order it is chiefly destructive, because it operates upon the point of insuring security of condition or the means of existence.”¹⁰³ That is, competition manifests itself primarily in struggles for jobs or job security.

Andrews noted that in our society overproduction merely signifies a condition in which the worker cannot afford to purchase the available goods. But the cost principle was perceived by Andrews as the mechanism by which price would be adjusted scientifically to accord with actual demand.

One might assume that Andrews' philosophy implies the ideal of a society of individual, self-employed workers. This, however, is not the case. Wrote Andrews: “the relation of employer and employed is stigmatized daily as vicious in itself, and the ideal is entertained of each individual being employed as to be his own ‘boss’ and to work solely for himself. No such arrangement is either desirable or feasible.”¹⁰⁴ Indeed, Andrews approved of both economies of scale and the wage system. He claimed to have “no sympathies with aimless and fruitless struggles, the recrimination of different classes in society, not with merely anarchical and destructive onslaughts upon existing institutions”¹⁰⁵ Change was to be a gradual and peaceful substitution of the new for the old.

Andrews thought that all people are subject to refinement and that

if the laborer enjoyed the full results of his own labor in immediate products or equivalents of cost, two hours of labor a day would be ample to supply the ordinary wants of the individual—that is, to bring his condition up to the average standard of comfort—even without the benefits of labor-saving machinery, or the economies of the large scale.¹⁰⁶

This would leave time for each individual to develop his mind, pursue hobbies and amusements, store up wealth for illness and old age, and the like.

To the charge that the Cost Principle makes no provision for the poor and unfortunate, Andrews replied that “mutual benevolence can only exist after all the requirements of equity have been complied with, and that can only be by first knowing what the requirements of equity really are.”¹⁰⁷ That is, where justice ends, only there does benevolence begin:

First do justice and extinguish the pauperism, crime, and disease which grow out of relations of injustice, and cease to fear that the spontaneous benevolence of humanity will not be amply adequate to provide for the sparsely scattered instances of misfortune which may ever remain as an incentive to the healthy action of that affection.¹⁰⁸

Andrews saw the world becoming more integrated, national boundaries dissolving, pacifism growing. He thought a day would come when military forces would be unnecessary. Patriotism would be transformed into philanthropy and each individual would become “his own nation” at peace with every other.¹⁰⁹ The functions of government and its bureaucracy would become obsolete and disappear. Andrews believed the increasing unpopularity of politics adumbrated this. In the place of government, the “excellence of achievement” would rule. “Those who have the most power to impress themselves upon the community in which they live, will govern in larger, and those who have less will govern in smaller spheres,” giving rise to a natural hierarchy where each individual is “a sovereign having sovereigns for subjects” … who might transfer loyalties at will.¹¹⁰

One author has referred to Andrews as a “utopistic system-building type of social scientist” in the French tradition. It does appear that he had greater affinity to the followers of Fourier and Comte than to most political economists. Andrews was certainly a visionary; yet his ideal had a force of persuasion and Andrews, himself, the impact of a prophet among a small but growing number of equally inspired disciples.

Notes

1. William O. Reichert, Partisans of Freedom (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976), pp. 196-197.

2. Murray N. Rothbard, “Individualist Anarchism in the United States,” Libertarian Analysis vol. 1, no. 1 (New York: Winter 1970): p. 15.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 19.

7. Ibid., p. 20.

8. Ibid., p. 22-24.

9. Ibid., p. 26

10. Benjamin Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty vol. 5, no. 16 (10 March 1888): p. 1.

11. Thomas Paine, The Essential Thomas Paine (New York: The New American Library, 1969), p. 128.

12. Ibid., p. 151.

13. Ibid., p. 186.

14. Ibid., p. 228.

15. Ibid., p. 228-29.

16. Ibid., p. 230.

17. Ibid., p. 264.

18. Ibid., p. 227.

19. Ibid., p. 281.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 267.

22. James J. Martin, Men Against the State (DeKalb, Illinois: Adrian Allen Associates, 1953), p. 9.

23. Ibid., p. 10.

24. Eunice M. Schuster, Native American Anarchism (Northampton, Mass.: Dept. of History of Smith College, 1932), p. 95.

25. Ibid., p. 100.

26. Martin, p. 13.

27. John R. Commons and Associates, History of Labor in the United States (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1936), vol. 1: p. 99.

28. Martin, p. 21.

29. Rudolf Rocker, Pioneers of American Freedom (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1949), p. 64.

30. Martin, p. 13.

31. Martin, p. 14.

32. Schuster, p. 101.

33. Ibid., p. 102.

34. Martin, p. 99.

35. Martin, p. 67.

36. Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (New York: Burt Franklin, 1852), p. 13. (Hereafter referred to as Commerce.)

37. Ibid., p. 15.

38. Ibid., p. 37.

39. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

40. Ibid., p. 52.

41. Ibid., p. 19.

42. Ibid., p. 18.

43. Ibid., pp. 19.

44. Ibid., p. 20.

45. Ibid., p. 35.

46. Ibid., p. 23.

47. Ibid., p. 27.

48. Ibid., p. 24.

49. Ibid., p. 26..

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Josiah Warren, True Civilization (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), p. 74. (Hereafter referred to as Civilization.)

53. Warren, Commerce, p. 43.

54. Ibid., p. 44.

55. Ibid., p. 45.

56. Ibid., p. 46.

57. Warren, Civilization, p. 83.

58. Warren, Commerce, p. 50.

59. Warren, Civilization, p. 14.

60. Ibid., pp. 178-79.

61. Ibid., p. 10.

62. Ibid., p. 12.

63. Ibid., p. 15.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., p. 18.

66. Ibid., pp. 29-31.

67. Ibid., p. 33.

68. Warren, Commerce, p. 56.

69. Ibid., p. 57.

70. Ibid.

71. Warren, Civilization, p. 146.

72. Ibid., p. 148.

73. Ibid., p. 69.

74. Ibid., p. 70, 73, 95.

75. Warren, Commerce, p. 93.

76. Ibid., p. 77.

77. Ibid.

78. Joseph L. Blau, Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1954), pp. 74-75.

79. Ibid., p. 17.

80. Commons., p. 517.

81. Martin, p. 158.

82. Commons., p. 159.

83. Ibid., p. 160.

84. Ibid., p. 165.

85. Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Science of Society—No. 1 (New York: T. L. Nichols, 1854), p. 15.

86. Ibid., p. 19.

87. Ibid., p. 19-20.

88. Ibid., p. 21.

89. Martin, p. 155.

90. Ibid., p. 40.

91. Ibid., p. 38.

92. Ibid., p. 39.

93. Ibid., p. 43.

94. Ibid., p. 44.

95. Ibid., p. 63.

96. Ibid., p. 44.

97. Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Science of Society—No. 2 (New York: T. L. Nichols, 1854), p. 13.

98. Ibid., p. 48.

99. Ibid., p. 53.

100. Ibid., p. 55.

101. Ibid., p. 63.

102. Ibid., p. 120-31.

103. Ibid., p. 164.

104. Ibid., p. 209.

105. Ibid., p. 68.

106. Ibid., p. 137.

107. Ibid., p. 146.

108. Ibid., p. 148.

109. Ibid., p. 48.

110. Ibid., p. 54.