Engagements with Anarchist-Pessimism

The anarchist Americans of the 19th and early 20th century remain, especially on a global scale, minor figures in the history of political thought. With the barrel-chested combination of “natural rights” liberalism, frontier-style “rugged individualism”, a concern for the plight of the common man, and a suspicion of socialism in all its contemporary senses, both pre- and post-Soviet implementation. The likes of Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, and, later, Benjamin R. Tucker were “men against the state” by way of promoting a “can do” attitude, which was interestingly inclusive of the capabilities and potentiality of the common man—regardless of how abstracted that notional man was—whilst also resisting the urge to appeal for a kind of paternalistic, pleading slavishness that they saw complicit with appeals for socialist struggle. In many ways, they were predecessors to a particular vein of “left-facing” anarchist, anarchist-capitalism, and libertarianisms of various flavours, all at once. Their ideas, for all their failings and possible irrelevance today, were elegant, brimming with practical implication, and loaded with that “right amount” of sentimental Romanticism and glassy-eyed utopianism that leads something to become more than a collection of propositions. Many of these thinkers were also noted for the challenge they presented to the status quo, most notably in Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company1 and Warren’s Cincinnati Time Store and utopian communities2, in a way which wasn’t merely a directionless appeal for “resistance” or self-deification in an attempt to capture the mythologised crown of power through stateful action.

There is much to admire in these men, even if only from an aesthetic perspective. But, we can’t find ourselves becoming too weighed down with the weight of hagiography—after all, these men ultimately failed to reinvent America into something compatible with their utopian idealising. Indeed, their unembarrassed belief in the goodness of humanity and the possibility for progress from under the oppressive iron fist of the state would seem almost childishly naive to those who had followed in their footsteps and had to both witness the horrors of secular society in the early 20th century and also then assert that there was this as yet untapped potential for human flourishing merely by way of removing all stateful functions—for some, it was too much.

Laurance Labadie—iconoclast against hope

Anarchists, as a breed of creature, have tended to be filled with this glassy-eyed optimism that believes in the universal goodness of the