Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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K. Steven Vincent
human beings possessed sufficient rational capacities or powerful enough
moral sentiments to hold society together; institutions like the state were
considered artificial, unnatural and oppressive.
While the theoretical roots of these visions of stateless society can be
traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium and followed
through utopian and millenarian religious movements like the Brethren
of the Free Spirit of the thirteenth century and the Anabaptists of the
sixteenth century, modern anarchism is rooted in the reorientation of socio-
political thought that took place in Europe following the outbreak of the
French Revolution.
1
This challenge of the Old Regime opened the gates
to numerous and profound examinations of states and other institutions
on the grounds of basic principles – religious, republican, natural rights,
social utility. Stimulated by revolutionary hopes for fundamental moral and
socio-political regeneration, thinkers imaginatively reformulated these basic
principles into competing visions of stateless societies.
One thesis of this essay is that nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers were
moralists and economists first and only secondarily concerned with politics –
indeed they found political practice distasteful and morally compromis-
ing, and they viewed traditional political institutions as inept and corrupt.
In their eyes, regeneration required the elimination of traditional political
institutions like the state and of traditional political practices like elections.
This does not mean that anarchists rejected all organisations that co-
ordinated collective actions or that they denied the significance of all inter-
actions that we would consider ‘political’. They were anti-political in their
rejection of traditional political institutions, but they remained political in
their concern to foster just human communities. Characteristically, they
looked for ways to bring individuals together in voluntary associations in
order to co-ordinate production and to provide social solidarity for other
specific purposes. In the words of Jean Grave (1854–1939), the most promi-
nent French anarchist journalist of the late nineteenth century, anarchists
wished to demonstrate ‘that individuality cannot develop except in the
community; that the latter cannot exist unless the former evolves freely;
and that they mutually complement each other’ (Grave 1893,p.3). States,
however, were unacceptable associations in their eyes because they were
coercive, punitive, exploitative, and destructive. And because state action
1 Most histories give cursory coverage of pre-revolutionary movements, but the emphasis is on the
nineteenth century. See, for example, Gu
´
erin 1970;Joll1964;Pr
´
eposiet 1993; Woodcock 1970.Most
analysts note, however, that anarchism did not become a widespread movement until the late 1870s.
On this point, see Cahm 1989; Fleming 1979;Maitron1975.
434
Visions of stateless society
was identified with politics, hopes for progress were predicated on the
absorption of this political realm into the moral and economic realms.
Before turning to the variety of ways this replacement or absorption of
politics was envisioned, it is necessary to stress the moral stance upon which
anarchist opposition to the state was based. Anarchists believed living the
‘good life’ required the complete development of the rational and moral
potentialities of individuals. This entailed a rejection of the position that
viewed any constraint on individual actions as an impediment to liberty.
They believed that the moral life implied a respect for other individuals
and for the larger social context; they insisted that fulfilment was intimately
connected with the utilisation of one’s rational capacities.
This moral dimension needs emphasis because many traditional accounts
have assumed that anarchists were dedicated to an absolute ideal of liberty
that implied the absence of impediments to whatever the individual wished
to do, and that this ‘negative’ liberty (to use Isaiah Berlin’s terminology)
was the value to which all other values needed to be subordinated. This,
however, proves to be an exaggeration. Anarchists accorded high respect
to liberty, but they were dedicated to a type of ‘positive’ liberty which
evaluated actions in accordance with conceptions of the true or essential
self – that is, in terms of obedience to normative conceptions of reason
and morality (Crowder 1991). Another way of stating this is to point out
that ‘negative’ liberty needed to be subordinated to the moral and rational
imperatives of living the ‘good life’.
The intellectual traditions that informed the moral thought of anarchist
thinkers were numerous; there were intertwinings of secular ised religious
ideals, normative ‘natural laws’ believed to be inherent in the universe,
and republican beliefs in the importance of altruistic virtue. Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809–65), for example, embraced a view of immanent justice
which may be interpreted either as a secularised version of Christian moral-
ity or as a development of the republican ideal of socio-political virtue – or,
perhaps more accurately, a combination of the two (Vincent 1984). When,
in 1840, he adopted the label ‘anarchist’, Proudhon insisted that society must
be infused with a social morality that would lead people to recognise the
dignity of their neighbours and that would promote the general interests of
society over the egoistic interests of isolated individuals (Proudhon 1926b,
p. 335).
The failure to recognise the centrality of the moral dimension of anarchist
thought has led many to assume that proponents of stateless societies were
hopelessly dedicated to disorder. In fact, anarchists disliked chaos, and argued
435
K. Steven Vincent
that anarchy, in the words of Elis
´
ee Reclus (1830–1905), was ‘the highest
expression of order’ (Reclus 1925). Anarchists believed that stateless societies
did not imply disorder because, in their eyes, humans could most successfully
achieve rational and moral fulfilment in arenas of human interaction not
identified with the state.
Where anarchists differed from other political thinkers was in their belief
that the rational and moral capacities of individuals were vigorous enough –
or could be improved sufficiently through education – to permit the elim-
ination of the threat and use of force associated with states. There is an
obvious assumption here that morality and rationality are not related to
state politics; indeed they are diametrically opposed. Anarchists viewed
states as poisons that contaminated social relations with impersonality, dis-
trust and resentment. And they argued that it was the inherent nature of
states that produced the evil, not a particular form of state control as might
be suggested by liberal or socialist theorists. ‘Under whatever form that the
state exists and functions’, wrote Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917)in1893, ‘it is
degrading and deadly to human activity: because it prevents the individual
from developing his normal sense’ (quoted in Carr 1977,p.38). Michael
Bakunin (1814–76) stated this conviction succinctly when he wrote that
‘despotism lies less in the form of the state or of power than in their very
principle’ (Bakunin 1961–81, ii,p.327).
Social authority, therefore, to the extent needed, was to be exercised
by local bodies or replaced by non-institutional action like public censure.
William Godwin (1756–1836) favoured the context of conversation – of
close interpersonal discussion – as the best means of fostering both the
growth of reason that makes individuals independent and the expansion of
sincerity that ties individuals together. Proudhon favoured the association
of the workshop and, in his later federalist phase, regional communities
as the appropriate loci for stimulating respect and the altruistic concern
for others. Bakunin and the anarchists connected with the Jura Feder-
ation during the 1870s, like Reclus and Paul Brousse (1844–1912), also
searched for social solidarity in the context of trade and industrial group-
ings (corps de m
´
etier or la corporation), organised federally and by contract.
Brousse, however, distinguished himself by emphasising that the commune
was the privileged agent for the achievement of a stateless society.
2
During
2 As David Stafford points out, this is the basis for Brousse’s later transition from anarchism (which he
embraced between 1873 and 1878/80) to ‘reformism’, a stance that also focused on the Commune
(Stafford 1971).
436
Visions of stateless society
the 1880s, P
¨
etr Kropotkin (1842–1921), Reclus and Grave translated anar-
chism into a language of solidarity and mutual aid, emphasising extended
neighbourhoods that fostered benevolence and reciprocal support. After
the mid-1890s, anarchist-syndicalists like Paul Delesalle, looked to syndi-
cates as the context for education and libertarian organisation (Jennings
1990; Julliard 1988;Maitron1985,pp.62–102).
Central to all anarchist visions was the conviction that the growth of
solidarity, neighbourhoods, free associations, syndicates, etc., would lead to
the development of moral and rational individuality and would stimulate
co-operation and community. And, all of this would make coercive social
authority, especially that connected with the state, less and less necessary. It
was this categorical opposition to the state which separated anarchists from
their closest ideological neighbours: from public service socialists like C
´
esar
De Paepe, who argued that some administrative concerns extended beyond
the competence of local bodies like communes and required a federative
body that one could legitimately call a state; from reformist socialists like Jean
Jaur
`
es, who argued that in some contexts militants should operate within
the existing political system to achieve concrete reforms; and from Marxists,
who shared the goal of ‘an association, in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all’,
3
but who believed that
the elimination of capitalism required the intervening stage of proletarian
dictatorship.
2 Scientific assumptions
During the nineteenth century, the anarchist stance in opposition to the state
and in favour of non-authoritarian associations was closely connected to two
assumptions. The first was that social and moral laws could be discerned
through a reasoned examination of human nature, human societies and the
larger universe. This stance was connected to what appears to us today as
an inflated belief in the efficacy of science. Nineteenth-century anarchists
believed that, just as Champolion had discovered the key that unlocked the
mystery of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, so they would discover the secrets of
human behaviour and social interaction that would permit a scientific view
of politics and economics. It speaks volumes that Charles Fourier (1772–
1837) referred to himself as the ‘Messiah of Reason’ and that Proudhon
3 This quote comes from the end of section II of Marx and Engels’ ‘Manifesto of t he Communist
Party’, originally published in 1848.
437
K. Steven Vincent
argued that ‘all that which is the material of legislation and of politics is
an object of science, not opinion . . . Justice and legality are two things as
independent of our assent as mathematical truth’ (Beecher 1986,p.497;
Proudhon 1926a, p. 45). Brousse summarised his analytic method in typical
nineteenth-century terms: ‘to impartially reunify the facts, to deduce from
them a general law which permits the future to be foreseen’. He referred to
anarchism as ‘a scientifically constituted society’ (quoted in Stafford 1971,
pp. 61, 78).
Such beliefs in ‘science’ were common throughout the century, though
the scientific model from which social science was extrapolated changed
in the late nineteenth century, as Darwinian and evolutionary theories
replaced the more static imagery associated with Newtonian mechanics,
physiology and mathematics. Reclus, for example, who was a professional
geographer, believed that the progressive evolution of humanity was based
on ‘laws’ which could be discovered through observation – laws like solidar-
ity and brotherhood, which were destined to burst through current insti-
tutional restraints (including state-imposed ‘laws’ which, Reclus insisted,
violated the laws immanent in human nature). Kropotkin and Grave, also
reflecting the influence of evolutionary theory, argued that anarchism con-
formed to the physiological and psychological nature of man and therefore
enjoyed the stature of scientific truth. ‘Anarchy,’ Grave wrote in 1899, ‘is
a theory suppor ting itself on rational bases.’ Anarchists are distinctive, he
claimed, because they support themselves ‘on their observations, [and] they
deduce logical, natural laws for the organisation of a better society’ (Grave
1899,pp.2–3).
4
The second assumption, closely connected with the first, was that moral
and rational advancement would occur. There was a general faith in histor-
ical progress – a confidence that things were improving and would continue
to get better. This optimism was a legacy of Enlightenment thought, but it
also reflected a widespread nineteenth-century belief in secular and scientific
advancement. Some of our thinkers went through pessimistic periods when
it seemed to them that humanity was destined temporarily to regression,
4 Anarchists are often characterised as woolly-minded romantics who rejected science and the modern
world. Albert Lindemann, for example, writes that anarchists ‘were distrustful . . . of modern progress
and of “scientific” or deterministic answers to what they considered the ultimately unpredictable
situations of life’ (Lindemann 1983,p.158). This descriptive statement fits only a minority of anarchist
writers, most notably a group of late nineteenth-century cultural anarchists. This is not to deny that
anarchist thinkers differed concerning the importance of science. Marie Fleming correctly points
out, for example, that spiritual descendants of Bakunin like Reclus and Kropotkin added a ‘scientific’
dimension that was largely absent from the writings of Bakunin himself (Fleming 1988,p.22).
438
Visions of stateless society
and most of them fully recognised that history was not an uninterrupted
story of improvement, but in general they sustained a belief that moral truth
would prevail, that rational advancement would continue, and that states
would wither away. ‘It is incontestable’, wrote Reclus for example, ‘that
humanity advances in the direction of progress’ (quoted in Fleming 1979,
p. 39). This was a view of progress that included an abounding faith, shared
by most of their contemporaries, in limitless natural resources. Anarchists
were critical of the inequitable distribution of natural and social wealth,
but they did not express any anxiety concerning the plentiful extent of the
earth’s riches.
Like most other nineteenth-century political thinkers, in short, most
anarchists believed that it was possible to recognise and discover moral and
social ‘laws’ – ‘laws’ that were at the same time descriptive and normative.
And they assumed that once these laws were conceptualised and articu-
lated, progress would result. However foreign such beliefs sound to our
more sceptical and cynical modern ears, they were common elements of
nineteenth-century socio-political thought.
3 Strategy
The existence of moral and social laws that presaged a better future did not
mean that human effort was not needed. Anarchists believed that progress
would result only when individuals came to understand the need for moral
actions and social co-operation, and when significant numbers began to
act on this understanding. The central importance of education is a natural
outgrowth of this assumption. Anarchists often saw their role as that of a
teacher: Proudhon, for example, insisted on the importance of articulating
the ‘worker idea’ (Proudhon 1923c, i,pp.74–5, 1924,pp.89ff.); Reclus
conceived in the 1870s a plan for a ‘scientific socialist education’ (Fleming
1979,pp.163–8); Grave wrote of the need to disseminate ‘propaganda’ to
emancipate people from prejudice, ignorance and the intellectual supports
of the bourgeois system (Grave 1893,pp.34–8).
Beyond calls for education, there were significant divergences concern-
ing strategy within anarchist thought. One common generalisation, how-
ever – that they were akin to ‘primitive’ messianic religious rebels of earlier
centuries
5
– must be rejected. However strongly their theories bore the
5 This is the argument of Joll 1964,pp.17–27 and of Hobsbawm 1959,p.83.
439
K. Steven Vincent
imprint of a religious legacy (and there is no doubt that some, like God-
win and Proudhon, reinterpreted and assimilated religious elements within
secular frames of reference), nineteenth-century anarchists did not have the
millenarian expectations nor the depth of religious belief that such general-
isations suggest. They were secular thinkers (Tolstoyan anarchists excepted)
who believed in the likelihood of progress towards higher moral conscious-
ness and less authoritarian societies.
But they imagined a large variety of means – all, of course, dismis-
sive of traditional forms of political activity and of state-regulated eco-
nomic strategies. Early anarchists like Godwin and Proudhon disapproved
of revolutionary upheavals, believing that rational discussion, education and
(for Proudhon) credit reform and productive co-operation based on con-
tracts were the appropriate means for ushering in the stateless society of
their dreams. Later anarchists like Bakunin, Brousse, Kropotkin, Reclus and
Grave believed that education, monetary reform and workers’ associations
were insufficient and that popular revolt was necessary.
One of the most controversial concepts to emerge among anarchists was
‘propaganda by the deed’, a notion that can be traced to anarchists in Italy
and Switzerland during the 1870s and which became current after the
Berne demonstration commemorating the Paris Commune on 18 March
1877, and the Benevento uprising of peasants in southern Italy in April
1877.In1881, at an international meeting in London called by anarchists
and social revolutionaries, ‘propaganda by the deed’ was formally adopted
as a tactic.
6
Whether ‘propaganda by the deed’ was confined to insurrection or sanc-
tioned acts of terrorism was a hotly debated issue. Many late nineteenth-
century anarchists believed in the necessity of violent insurrection – here
they differed from their ‘rationalist’ (Godwinian) and their ‘mutualist’
(Proudhonian) predecessors. But most did not support individual acts of
political terrorism. The outbreak of terrorist actions during l’
`
ere des attentats
(1892–4) – when self-professed anarchists like Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant,
Emile Henry and Santiago Salvador French set off bombs in public places
and in the homes of public figures – is telling in this regard, for most anar-
chist writers were embarrassed with the association and condemned the
acts, even if they were reluctant to condemn the actors who were depicted
as driven to action by circumstances (Carr 1977,pp.56–82;Maitron1964).
In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that ‘it is not by heroic acts that revolutions are
6 For an extensive analysis of the development of the idea of ‘propaganda by the deed’, see Cahm 1989.
440
Visions of stateless society
made...Revolution, above all, is a popular movement.’
7
And Jean Grave
defensively stated that ‘we are not among those who preach acts of violence’
(Grave 1893,p.210). But, it is also clear that Kropotkin and Grave were
disturbed only by violence directed at individuals; violence that attacked
institutions and that was part of a revolution was entirely justified. ‘Once
the struggle has begun’, wrote Grave, ‘sentimentality will have no place, the
multitude will distrust all phrase makers and unmercifully crush all who try
to stand in the way’ (Grave 1893,p.275).
Reclus and the majority of Italian anarchists refused to make these dis-
tinctions between insurrection and terrorism. They advocated ‘propaganda
by the deed’ in the late 1870s; they defended anarchist ‘thefts’ in the 1880s;
they wrote admiringly of the terrorists of the 1890s. Similarly, the Amer-
ican anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) argued in 1911 that virtually
every act of anarchist violence could be understood and justified in a moral
context; desperate individuals were ‘impelled’ to act ‘by the tremendous
pressure of conditions making life unbearable’ (Goldman 1983,p.266).
The popular image of the anarchist as a bomb-throwing extremist, not
surprisingly, grew accordingly.
For most anarchists, however, individual acts of violence were not viewed
as likely to lead to any positive transformation. Anarchists were forced,
therefore, to consider other means of achieving the stateless society – means
that covered the spectrum from relying on reason and education (Godwin,
especially, but also the others), through financial refor ms like the ‘People’s
Bank’ (Proudhon) and the elimination of inheritance (Bakunin), to mass
violence and revolutionary action.
Related to the issue of strategy was the question of appropriate economic
change. Here, too, there were significant divergences. Thomas Hodgskin
(1787–1869), proto-libertarian political economists like Jean-Baptiste Say
(1767–1832) and individualist anarchists like Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–
86) believed that justice and prosperity would emerge from a market econ-
omy, protected from any intervention by the state. Others, like Bakunin
and Kropotkin, desired a system of common ownership in which goods
would be produced by workers’ associations and independent communes
and would be distributed either on the basis of labour (Bakunin’s ideal
of ‘anarchist collectivism’) or on the basis of need (Kropotkin’s ideal of
‘anarchist communism’). Still other s, like Proudhon, can fairly be placed
between these two positions: he recommended a ‘mutualist’ position in
7 Le R
´
evolt
´
e,no.32 (18 March 1891).
441
K. Steven Vincent
which private stewardship was appropriate for some types of production
like agriculture, but where associative control was needed in industry. What
all anarchists shared was a belief that decentralised production was preferable
to production that was controlled by the state.
4 William Godwin and rationalist anarchism
William Godwin was the first writer to make a reputation condemning
government. Godwin believed that through education and through the
use of reason, men and women could make wise, benevolent and virtuous
decisions, and that these decisions would make government unnecessary.
In his most famous work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, first published
in 1793, Godwin argued that moral truth was eternal and immutable, not
relative to human passions, and that this truth was able to be discerned by
men and women who used reason and judgement. This faith in reason was
coupled with an optimistic view of human nature. Godwin believed that
once truth was perceived, it would be freely applied. Indeed, he argued that
our capacities for reasoning and our grasp of truths had grown progressively
as time had passed; history, in sum, was a record of improvement. Gov-
ernments, unfor tunately, obstructed the full exercise of private judgement
that was synonymous with moral improvement and the full growth of inde-
pendence. Based on force and stasis, governments had to be condemned in
favour of the right and duty of each individual to act according to the full
and free exercise of his private judgement.
Godwin’s stance was largely a secularised version of Rational Dissent,
which both shaped his moral-rational philosophy and nurtured his distrust
of government (Claeys 1983;Philp1986; Stafford 1980, 1987,pp.121–
45). It was the collision of Godwin’s deeply rooted Dissenting moral and
intellectual dispositions with Enlightenment thought and with the French
Revolution that resulted in the distinctive anarchist stance of Godwin’s
books of the 1790s.
Godwin was the son of an East Anglian Congregationalist minister and
was educated at Hindolveston by a Dr Samuel Newton, who adhered to a
sect close to Congregationalism called Sandemanian.
8
Sandemanians wished
to retur n to a pure Calvinism, but unlike many of the other Dissenting sects
(the Methodists, for example) they rejected emotionalism and mass enthu-
siasm in favour of rationalism and strict morality. Godwin insisted that he
8 For biographical details, see Marshall 1984;Philp1986; Woodcock 1989.
442
Visions of stateless society
was still a strict Calvinist and Sandemanian when he emerged from his for-
mal education in 1778, and he briefly became a minister. However, reading
texts of the French philosophes and of the Socinian Joseph Priestley stimulated
new religious doubts, and by 1787 he had given up the ministry and lost his
faith. What he had not lost was his attachment to many of the beliefs that
characterised his Calvinist roots: his ascetic dislike of worldly pleasures; his
assertion of the value of independence and distrust of institutions; his praise
of candour; his faith in reason; his focus on conduct and duty. Throughout
his life, Godwin retained a belief that we are obliged and motivated to act
in accordance with truths perceived through public discussion and private
judgement. These moral truths are objective, immutable, timeless. Through
the full exercise of reason, which is dependent on feeling but not a slave
to feeling, one can discern these truths, which it is then a duty to enact.
Godwin retained a stern rational moralism that is difficult not to interpret
as a secular version of Sandemanian Calvinism.
9
Godwin’s exposure to French Enlightenment thought reinforced many of
these stances. Reading Montesquieu and Rousseau, for example, introduced
Godwin to conceptions of independence and political morality that had
been central to republican thought since Aristotle (Monro 1953,pp.57–
132; Pocock 1975). Like Montesquieu and Rousseau, Godwin believed that
individuals must overcome selfishness and had a duty to place the interests of
others over their own interests. Godwin’s development of this idea consisted
in giving republican notions of virtue a utilitarian twist: he suggested that
disinterested action – which he termed benevolence – was the occasion
for experiencing the most exquisite form of happiness. Benevolent sacrifice
did not entail a renunciation of pleasure; rather, Godwin suggested that ‘no
man reaps so copious a harvest of pleasure as he who thinks only of the
pleasures of other men’ (Godwin 1976, Book iv, xi, p. 395).
Eighteenth-century republicans generally assumed that the exercise of
virtue or benevolence required independence, rigorous honesty and the
avoidance of the over-refined affectations of luxurious urban living. God-
win, deeply influenced by Rousseau, was no exception.
10
Like Rousseau,
for example, Godwin was critical of the unauthenticity of social mores
which prevented individuals honestly speaking their minds; Godwin’s
defence of ‘candour’ is strikingly similar to Rousseau’s preference for the
9 Max Beer has pointed out that Godwin’s ‘criticism is one long Nonconformist sermon, vivacious,
diffuse, and sometimes powerful, but always based on abstract reasoning’ (Beer 1948,p.115).
10 For an interesting analysis of the influence of Rousseau on Godwin – one that differs in some
particulars from that presented here – see Crowder 1991,pp.40–73.
443