Anarchy

Part 1

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ANARCHY

by Robert LeFevre

Copyright 1959, by Robert LeFevre

Permission to reprint in whole or in part granted without special request.

PRINTED IN COLORADO SPRINGS, U.S.A.

Published June, 1959

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-13480

THE FREEDOM SCHOOL P.O. Box 165 Colorado Springs, Colorado

EDITOR’S NOTE

Robert LeFevre, president and founder of the Freedom School, has also served as the editorial writer for the Gazette Telegraph in Colorado Springs, since 1954. In addition to several thousand editorials, he has written numerous articles for the Freeman Magazine, including: “The Straight Line,” “Jim Leadbetter’s Discovery,” “Shades of Hammurabi,” “Grasshoppers and Widows,” and “Coercion at the Local Level.”

His article “Even the Girl Scouts” (Human Events, 1953) led to a recall of the Handbook of this organization and extensive revisions. His book, “The Nature of Man and His Government,” has recently been published by Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho.

ANARCHY

A rational being, intent upon learning the nature of liberty or freedom, is confronted almost at once with innumerable instances of governmental predation against liberty.

As the subject of liberty is pursued, the more frequently and the more persistently the fact emerges that governments have been one of the principal opponents if not the only principal opponent to liberty.

Invariably, this discovery leads the perspiring seeker after truth to a fork in the road. Is it possible, the aspirant to libertarian certainty asks himself, to pursue the end of the rainbow of liberty into a miasma of quicksand and uncertainty?

Might I not end at a place where I would advocate the cessation of all government? And if I reached such a conclusion, would I not find myself aligned with the very forces I sought to oppose in the beginning, namely, the forces of lawlessness, chaos and anarchy?

At this fork in the road, libertarians hesitate, some briefly and some for lengthy periods of time. The choice to be made is a difficult one. To abandon liberty at this juncture and to endorse minimal governments as devices which might prevent license, could cause the devotee of liberty to endorse the active enemy of liberty, albeit in small doses. On the other hand, to pursue liberty to its logical conclusions might end in an endorsement of license, The very antonym of liberty.

It is at this juncture that the word “anarchy” rears its dreadful visage. It becomes incumbent upon sincere seekers after liberty to grapple with this word and to seek to understand its implications.

Anarchy has very ancient roots. It is not wholly essential to probe to the last hidden tendril altho such a probe can be highly instructive. What does appear to be a necessary minimal effort, however, is to explore at least the principal authors of anarchistic thought with the view to discovering what it was that motivated these men.

We can begin with William Godwin of England. Godwin is noteworthy as the “father of anarchistic communism” (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

In 1793 he published the first of several works on this subject entitled, “Inquiry Concerning Political Justice.” He is probably most famous as the author of an anarchistic novel which he named, “Caleb Williams.”

It was Godwin’s thesis that governments are instruments of eternal bickering and war; that wars are fought over property; that the ownership of property privately is the greatest curse ever to beset the human race. As a specific example of tyranny in its worst form, Godwin suggests marriage.

Before we lay the soubriquet “crackpot” behind his name, let us look at the England of Godwin’s time to try to find an explanation for his radical conclusions.

In Godwin’s day (1756-1836) with only a few minor exceptions, all property was owned by the nobility, which is to say by the persons favored by government. The common people owned little save the shirts on their backs. As for marriage, women were chattels, given by a male parent to another male, during a governmentally approved ceremony. The idea of one person actually owning and controlling another, which we would call slavery, and which Godwin saw as the marriage state, was repellent to him. He insisted that females were human beings and as such had as much right to individuality as males.

To cure the malady, which Godwin saw as ownership of property, the early Briton recommended an abolition of governments. It was the government which sanctified and protected property rights, even in marriage. To return to a state of nature (see Rousseau) governments would have to be abolished.

Be it noted to Godwin’s credit that he despised violence. And in this position he is far removed from both the true communist and the anarchists of action who followed him.

The next anarchist to be examined is Pierre Joseph Proudhon of Bexancon, France (1809-1865). Proudhon drank deeply from Godwin’s well and came forward with certain modifications and extensions of the Godwin doctrine.

Part 2

Proudhon acknowledged a debt of gratitude to both Plato and Thomas More, a pair of dedicated socialists (see Plato’s “Republic” and More’s “Utopia”) and busied himself with some practical means for implementing the socialist dream.

Like his precursors, he was fundamentally opposed to property ownership. His most famous work, “Qu’est-ce que La Propriete?” (“What Is Property?”), got him into immediate difficulties with the government. Proudhon, in this opus, declared that “property is robbery” and set about outlining a social order in which no property could be privately owned.

The Encyclopedia Americana says that Proudhon was the “first to formulate the doctrines of philosophic anarchism.”

It is probably true that there are no better writings extant extolling individualism as opposed to collectivism than Proudhon’s early essays. Yet, it should be recalled that Proudhon’s aim, in addition to a society free of governmental coercion, was a state in which property as a private device was abolished.

It is also interesting to recall that Karl Marx was deeply moved by Proudhon’s arguments. The first of Proudhon’s writings appeared in print in 1840 and formed the basis of Marx’s first expostulations which appeared in 1842. Shortly thereafter, Marx veered away from Proudhon’s individualism and contrived his concept of collectivism as the natural and the inevitable course of history.

Marx, however, was never an anarchist, despite the well-known phrase frequently attributed to him that in time the government of the proletariat would simply “wither away.” This phrase should properly be attributed to Lenin.

However, it is known that Marx did make an attempt to lure the anarchists of France into the first “Internationale” and was hooted down for his pains. The anarchists of that time were shrewd enough to sense that the enlargement of government into a general holding company for all property, would never result in the abolition of private ownership of property. Rather, it would result in the perpetuation of a privileged class of persons who would have possession of the property to the exclusion of all others, the very contingency the anarchists sought to avoid. And since the aim of the anarchists was to eliminate exclusive ownership, they could not agree to the Marxist arguments respecting the usefulness of a government as the repository of all property.

We pass from Proudhon to another noteworthy anarchist, the Russian Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921). In his hands, the doctrine of anarchism took on an international aspect. In point of fact he added little to either Godwin or Proudhon, except the more grandiose concept of a world order. He suggested that ALL governments must be overthrown either peacefully or in any other manner after which “the present system of class privilege and unjust distribution of the wealth produced by labor that creates and fosters crime” would be abolished.

It was Kropotkin who endeavored to preserve the ideals of a property-less society after the most exciting and destructive of all the anarchists had done his work. This was Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). Bakunin took his ideology both from Proudhon and from Marx and endeavored to unite the objectives of the former with the methods of the latter.

Bakunin despaired of bringing about a state of universal property-less-ness by means of education and propaganda. So did Marx. Marx declared that those who owned property would never give it up without a struggle. This idea entranced Bakunin. He devised what was to be called “propaganda of action.”

It was Bakunin’s contribution to anarchistic methods that persons who held governmental offices should be assassinated while they held office. Such assassination, he argued, would have a persuasive effect upon future politicians. If the offices could be made sufficiently dangerous and risky, there would be few who would care to hazard their necks in such unrewarding positions. The answer to the force of government, according to Bakunin, was the force of non-government. As an educational device, a thrown bomb was considered to be the final argument.

It is unnecessary to embroider the result. The peaceful arguments of Proudhon and Godwin went by the boards as anarchists rallied to Bakunin’s banner. Beginning in 1878 there was a series of assassinations and attempted assassinations against the heads of governments.

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