Anarchism
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and self-reliance led him to flee from civilized life and live for several years in virtual solitude, close to nature, an experience described in Walden ([1854] 1983). In his most political work, ‘Civil Disobedience’ ([1849] 1983), Thoreau approved of Jefferson’s liberal motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’, but adapted it to conform with his own anarchist sentiment: ‘That government is best which governs not at all’. For Thoreau, individualism leads in the direction of civil disobedience: the individual has to be faithful to his or her conscience and do only what each believes to be right, regardless of the demands of society or the laws made by government. Thoreau’s anarchism places individual conscience above the demands of political obligation. In Thoreau’s case, this led him to disobey a US government he thought was acting immorally, both in upholding slavery and in waging war against other countries. KEY FIGURE HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–62)
A US author, poet and philosopher, Thoreau’s writings had a significant impact on individualist anarchism and, later, on the environmental movement. A follower of transcendentalism, Thoreau’s major work, Walden (1854), described his two- year ‘experiment’ in simple living, which emphasized the virtues of self-reliance, contemplation and a closeness to nature. In ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), he defended the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, emphasizing that government should never conflict with individual conscience, but he stopped short of explicitly advocating anarchy.
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Benjamin Tucker took libertarianism (see p. 61) further by considering how autonomous individuals could live and work with one another without the danger of conflict or disorder. Two possible solutions to this problem are available to the individualist. The first emphasizes human rationality, and suggests that when conflicts or disagreements develop they can be resolved by reasoned discussion. This, for example, was the position adopted by Godwin, who believed that truth will always tend to displace falsehood. The second solution is to find some sort of mechanism through which the independent actions of free individuals could be brought into harmony with one another. Extreme individualists such as Warren and Tucker believed that this could be achieved through a system of market exchange. Warren thought that individuals have a sovereign right to the property they themselves produce, but are also forced by economic logic to work with others in order to gain the advantages of the division of labour. He suggested that this could be achieved by a system of ‘labour-for-labour’ exchange, and set up ‘time stores’ through which one person’s labour could be exchanged for a promise to return labour in kind. Tucker argued that ‘Genuine anarchism is consistent Manchesterism’, referring to the nineteenth-century free-trade, free-market principles of Richard Cobden and John Bright (Nozick, 1974). Anarcho-capitalism The revival of interest in free-market economics in the late twentieth century led to increasingly radical political conclusions. New Right conservatives, attracted to classical economics, wished to ‘get government off the back of business’ and allow the economy to be disciplined by market forces, rather than managed by an interventionist state. Right- wing libertarians such as Robert Nozick (see p. 65) revived the idea of a minimal state,
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