For a century, anarchists have used the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist’, both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1895. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers – David Friedman, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Paul Wolff – so it is necessary to examine the modern individualist ‘libertarian’ response from the standpoint of the anarchist tradition.

In approaching this theme, one obstacle to circumnavigate is the German advocate of ‘conscious egoism’, Max Stirner. He was born Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806–56) and his book, published in 1845, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, was translated into English in 1907 as The Ego and His Own. I have made several efforts to read this book, but have continually found it incomprehensible. I used to excuse myself with the comment that the cult of the ‘Ego’ seemed to me as distasteful as Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’, but anarchist admirers of Stirner assure me that his approach is quite different from Nietzsche’s. They argue that Stirner’s ‘conscious egoism’ does not in any way deny the human tendency towards altruistic behavior, precisely because our own self-image is gratified by the way we perceive ourselves as social beings. They also draw my attention to Stirner’s anticipation of the later perception by Robert Michels of an ‘iron law of oligarchy’, diagnosing an inbuilt tendency of all human institutions to ossify into oppressive bodies, which have to be opposed in the name of individual liberty.

Far more typical than Stirner of the anarchist individualist current was a long series of American activists and innovators, predating the vigorous history of anarchist propaganda among numerous immigrant groups of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: German, Russian, Jewish, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. Such guidebooks as James J. Martin’s Men Against the State (which first appeared in 1953) and David DeLeon’s The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (which first appeared in 1978) provide a rich and varied history in the United States of inventive individual and social anarchist argument and experiment.

The immigrant tradition was of social and collective ventures rapidly growing into deeply rooted organizations for welfare and conviviality. It included workers’ unions, schools, and cooperatives. The indigenous tradition was far more individualistic but its protagonists have had a remarkable range of impacts on American life. Their chroniclers distinguish between the ideologies of these libertarians of the Left, and that of the libertarians of the Right. As David DeLeon separates them: ‘While the libertarians of the Right despise the state because it hinders the freedom of property, Left libertarians condemn the state because it is a bastion of property.’

The first of these luminaries was Josiah Warren (1798–1874) who, disappointed by the failure of Robert Owen’s cooperative colony of New Harmony, set up a Time Store in Cincinnati, whose customers bought goods in return for ‘labor notes’ promising the trader an equivalent product or service. This was followed by a cooperative Village of Equity in Ohio, the long-lived ‘mutualist’ village of Utopia, and the community of Modern Times on Long Island that similarly retained its cooperative character for at least 20 years. Warren’s belief in the importance of the individual led him to advocate communal kitchens, to ‘relieve the females of the family from the full, mill-horse drudgery to which they otherwise are irretrievably doomed’.

Lysander Spooner (1808–87) wanted an America of self-employed individuals sharing equal access to credit. He argued, too, that

if a man has never consented or agreed to support a government, he breaks no faith in refusing to support it. And if he makes war on it, he does so as an open enemy, and not as a traitor.

Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–86) similarly accepted that the sovereignty of the individual applied to every individual. Consequently, as Peter Marshall explains,

He consistently opposed slavery and tried to free the state of Texas by raising money to buy off all of its slaves but the war with Mexico intervened. He also argued that sexual behavior and family life should be matters of personal responsibility beyond the control of Church and State.

Like that of Warren, the individualism of S. P. Andrews led him to recommend communal nurseries, infant schools, and cooperative cafeterias, in order to liberate women.

Benjamin R. Tucker (1854–1939) was, in his day, the best-known of the American individualist anarchists, since his journal Liberty lasted a quarter of a century, until his Boston printing shop was burned down in 1907. He was also the pioneer translator of Proudhon and Bakunin.

But among the American libertarians of the 19th century, the most individual and the best remembered is Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). His famous book Walden is an account of the two years he spent seeking self-sufficiency in the hut he built for himself near Concord, Massachusetts. This did not imply a withdrawal from American life, for the man who declared that the soldier’s natural enemy is the government that drills him was his country’s most forthright subversive. One of his essays, usually called ‘On the duty of civil disobedience’, though originally published in 1849 as ‘Resistance to civil government’, attracted no attention at the time, but subsequently influenced both Tolstoy and Gandhi (who read it in prison in South Africa). Martin Luther King read it as a student in Atlanta, and recalled that,

Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.

Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, originating in his sense of outrage at the United States’ government’s Mexican War and at the continuance of black slavery, began its history as a lecture to his fellow citizens at the Concord Lyceum in 1848. When the abolitionist John Brown took up arms against the United States in 1859 and was condemned to death, Thoreau, against some opposition, delivered an address in the Town Hall called ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’. Many decades later Havelock Ellis remarked that Thoreau was ‘the one man in America to recognize the greatness of the occasion and to stand up publicly on his side’.

Another remarkable American individualist, Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), invented a famous phrase during the First World War, as he observed the process by which his country was manouevred into participating in that war. ‘War is the health of the state’, he claimed, and he explained that

The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetime it has vainly struggled to become . . . The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, towards that peacefulness of being at war . . .

His perception of the way that 20th-century governments have been able to manufacture and manipulate opinion is amply demonstrated by events in the 90 years since he was writing. American anarchist individualist protesters have lobbied in the streets against the policies of the United States government ever since. One was Ammon Hennacy, always described as ‘the one-man revolution’, who maintained a continual individual protest against United States imperialism, from the East Coast to the Southwest, and another was Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, who testified for many decades of the 20th century to her faith in self-organizing cooperative communities, which in political terms has to be described as anarchism.

Some time later, in the 1970s, a series of books, from academics rather than activists, proclaimed a different style of American libertarianism. They were Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism; Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia; David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom; and Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. This phalanx of authors have provided the ‘ideological superstructure’ of the swing to the Right in federal and local politics in the United States, and in British politics for the aim of ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’, which was actually a cloak for increased subservience to central decision-making. Robert Paul Wolff claimed that ‘philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable belief for an enlightened man’. Robert Nozick is said by the historian Peter Marshall to have ‘helped to make libertarian and anarchist theory acceptable in academic circles’ – no small achievement; while David Friedman has popularized for an American readership the argument of Friedrich von Hayek that welfare legislation is the first step on The Road to Serfdom.

Peter Marshall sees the economist Murray Rothbard as the most aware of the actual anarchist tradition among the anarcho- capitalist apologists:

He was originally regarded as an extreme right-wing Republican, but went on to edit La Boétie’s libertarian classic Of Voluntary Servitude and now calls himself an anarchist. ‘If you wish to know how the libertarians regard the State and any of its acts,’ he wrote in For a New Liberty, ‘simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.’ He reduces the libertarian creed to one central axiom, ‘that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.’ Neither the State nor any private party therefore can initiate or threaten the use of force against any person for any purpose. Free individuals should regulate their affairs and dispose of their property only by voluntary agreement based on contractual obligation.

Rothbard is aware of a tradition, but he is singularly unaware of the old proverb that freedom for the pike means death for the minnow. For the bleak facts about the United States economy are that 10% of its citizens possess 85% of the nation’s net wealth, and that this minority are also the people who benefit from every reduction in the nation’s social welfare budget.

The libertarians of the Right have, nevertheless, a function in the spectrum of anarchist discussion. Every anarchist propagandist finds that the audience or readership is perplexed by the very idea that it might be possible to organize human life without government. That is why Kropotkin, as a libertarian of the Left, as we saw in Chapter 3, insisted that anarchist propagandists should identify new forms of organization for those functions that the state now fulfills through bureaucracy.

Murray Rothbard was one of the founders of a Libertarian Party in the United States, seeking, as Peter Marshall explains, to abolish ‘the entire Federal regulatory apparatus as well as social security, welfare, public education and taxation’, and urging the United States ‘to withdraw from the United Nations and its foreign commitments, and to reduce its military forces to those required for minimal defense.’

Beyond an aspiration to repeal all ‘victimless crime’ laws, we did not learn about any commitment to a change in the United States penal system, which now imprisons a larger proportion of the population than any other nation that keeps reliable records. But in any case, the other philosophers of the new libertarian Right seem to have a less sweeping agenda. Robert Paul Wolff, for example, in the 1998 reprint of his book In Defense of Anarchism, suggests that ‘a system of in-the-home voting machines be set up’, each of them ‘attached to the television set’, to decide social and political issues. He asserts that ‘social justice would flourish as it has never flourished before’.

Most anarchists would see this as a rather pathetic evasion of the issues raised by the anarchist criticism of American society, and would prefer to commemorate a far richer heritage of dissent in the United States, exemplified by a long series of well-remembered propagandists, from Thoreau in one generation and Emma Goldman in another, down to Paul Goodman, who bequeathed an intriguing legacy to his anarchist successors. In his last article in the American press, he suggested that

For me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy, the ability to initiate a task and do it one’s own way. The weakness of ‘my’ anarchism is that the lust for freedom is a powerful motive for political change, whereas autonomy is not. Autonomous people protect themselves stubbornly but by less strenuous means, including plenty of passive resistance. They do it their own way anyway. The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they don’t know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they don’t know what it’s like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to abdicate . . .

The 19th-century American individualists were busy creating communes, cooperatives, alternative schools, local currencies, and schemes for mutual banking. They were busy social inventors exploring the potential of autonomy, including women’s liberation and black equality. Their experience, in the social climate of America, illustrates Martin Buber’s insistence, cited in Chapter 3, on the inverse relationship between the social principle and the political principle. The practice of autonomy generates the experience that enlarges the possibility of success. Or as the American anarchist David Wieck expresssed it: ‘The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being free, prepared to live responsibly in a free society.’

The American ‘libertarians’ of the 20th century are academics rather than social activists, and their inventiveness seems to be limited to providing an ideology for untrammeled market capitalism.