Men Against the State

Talk about a suppressed intellectual tradition!

Chances are you will have to read historian James J. Martin's Men against the State to learn this woefully forgotten fact: around the turn of the last century America was home to the first full-blown movement of individualist anarchists. Martin adds the adjective "individualist" to distinguish these anarchists from socialists.

They were champions of liberty, and, yes, they were as quirky as any movement of this sort might be. Meanwhile they made mighty contributions to the history of ideas, and this book explains those contributions and the minds behind them.

The names are tragically lost to history: Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, J.K. Ingalls, among many others. They were thinkers and activists, not mere protesters or political dissidents. They had a positive agenda centered on the confidence that whatever kind of world would emerge without a state, it would be a better world than the one the state had made.

On the huge difference between these thinkers and the socialist anarchists, Martin explains, "The individualist anarchists held that the collective society in any form was an impossibility without the eventuality of authoritarianism, and ultimately, totalitarianism, and adhered resolutely to the concept of private property insofar as the term could be defined as the total product of a given individual's labor, but not more broadly than this."

James J. Martin wrote a book for the ages in 1952, a survey that is indispensable for anyone interested in the roots of modern libertarian thought. You will find these roots not in the postwar "conservatism" of William F. Buckley's movement but much further back. Here — in the radical company of Tucker and Spooner — is our heritage!