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AN INTERPRETATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA

Anselme Bellegarrigue

I am told that it is for my own good that I am governed. Now, since I give my money to be governed, it follows that it is for my own good that I give that money. This is possible, but it nevertheless deserves verification.

Moreover, it is a fact that no one may be more familiar than me with the means of making myself happy. I still find it strange, incomprehensible, anti-natural, and extra-human, to devote oneself to the happiness of people that one does not know, and I declare that I have not the honor of being known by the men who govern me.

It is therefore fair to say that, from my point of view, they are really too kind, and, in the end, a little indiscreet to preoccupy themselves so much with my felicity, but, more importantly, there is no evidence that I am unable to pursue this felicity myself.

I would add that devotion involves disinterestedness, and that one does not have a right to impose caring attentions unless they cost the recipient nothing. I know better than to discuss a question of money here, and God preserve me from questioning the devotion, or, on the contrary, the disinterestedness of our men of state. But I ask permission to wait to express my gratitude until the delicate attentions with which they deign to surround me become cheaper.

Anselme Bellegarrigue, Toulouse, 1848.

I

Had I a friend, but one friend—and, to have one, I lack only a good cook or a pleasant woman—I would not have written what follows; it would have been the subject of an intimate confession. Then, relieved of the weight of my concerns, I would have been consoled for my representative labors in the fraternal arms of the one who shared my burden.

However, I have neither a cook, nor a pleasant woman; therefore, no friend, and, by extension, no confidante; so that, for lack of anyone to talk to, I address myself to everyone. This manner of keeping to myself will, I trust, be appreciated by the Republic.

While we’re on the subject of the Republic, I humbly request forgiveness from the high and mighty scribblers of the Rue Lepelletier, but I must declare that this word—I said: this WORD—is beginning to weary France not a little, from the Ocean to the Alps and from the Pyrenees to the English Channel.

The word “Republic” poses rather prettily on its three rhythmic syllables; but a word is, after all, nothing but a word, as a sound is only a sound; while a thing is a fact; and the people—at least, this is what I believe—live much more on facts than on words.

Thus, if we leave the idea and pass on to the fact, I imagine that the evolution would be sufficiently to the taste of everyone; though when I say everyone, I very seriously intend to exclude from my formula that polished class of citizens that reads Le Moniteur, that plodding congregation that condescends to spend its time dragging the budget by the tail and without which one would never really know what to make of public liberties, nor of the ecus of the Treasury.

I would like to know—so it please God, I would not be found guilty of too much indiscretion!—I would like to know what is really meant by the word “Republic.”

II

Some months ago, when it was a question of electing agents in order to proceed to the liquidation of the late government, those who had seen nations not under tutelage, major nations; those who, too proud to be ambitious, had made their democratic egoism consist of not belonging to anyone; those whose faces had never been seen in the antechambers of any regime; the true democrats, the gentlemen of humanity have been able to speak of the Republic, and its name is not soiled in passing their lips.

These said, or might have said, in speaking of the members of the provisional government:

Let us not count on the verbose theorists to establish democracy in France, to introduce liberty into the practice of the social facts.

There are great intelligences in the improvised council, but these great intelligences have preserved intact both the governmental apparatus of the monarchies and the administrative organism of the condemned constitutions; these great intelligences have not repealed any of the organic legislation, which had the condemned constitutions for its basis; these great intelligences have assumed all the powers whose usurpation had been the crime of the condemned royalties.

Further, they said, or might have said:

M. de Lamartine has written a Robespierréide wherein is found consecrated the autocratic principle of the personification of democracy, and that doctrine can cease to be a dream of the poet only by becoming an attentat in the Russian or Chinese manner:—Case closed!

M. Ledru-Rollin was as much an exponent of exclusivism as M. Guizot:—Case closed!

M. Louis Blanc aristocratizes the workshop:—Case closed!

All the men who say that France has reconquered its liberties effectively hold in their hand, and do not wish to release, the liberties of France.

All the men who say that the people must govern themselves actually govern the people.

There are dreamers among them, and ambitious men, but no democrats.

And those who argued thus expressed a very respectable opinion, for it was the opinion of France, of that France which wanted only two very simple and legitimate things: to be free and to pay little.

In the time of which I have been speaking—an epoch I will call republican since the authority was public, since all the citizens, instead of connecting to a government which existed only in name, connected to the country, as the only immutable fact, and felt the need to shake hands fraternally—at that time, I say, which preceded the Meeting of the National Assembly, one could speak of the Republic: there were no other parties then, there was only the party of good sense, the party of public morality, established, in fact, on the democratic law of confidence in everyone, and sanctioned by the security of all.

So when one spoke of the Republic, everyone knew what was meant.

Today, as soon as I utter this word, around me one wonders what the color of the republic is to which I refer, and the mayor of my commune, who is no one except when he is being something, asks the Prefect for permission to have me arrested.

III

We speak of a red republic, of a tricolor republic, of a moderate republic; we speak of a violent republic; we also speak of an Orleanist, an imperialist and a legitimist republic.

Is it possible to explain well what all that means? In my opinion, it is very simple:

It means that the citizens one calls red are opposed to France being exploited by the tricolors; that the tricolors are opposed to her being exploited by the reds; that the Orleanists, imperialists and legitimists are opposed to her being exploited by the reds and tricolors. But it signifies as well, to be fair, that both sides would willingly accept the patriotic task of exploiting her, whether to their own ends and nominally or, in extremis, under an assumed name.

But short of giving wolves the name of sheepfolds, I do not see at all that one must call all these gentlemen republicans.

The Republic does not accept the coarse ridicule of the official denominations that I have just listed. It is just a republic of which I am, of which we are citizens—we, honest folk, who do not intrigue but pay for the irreverent national domesticity. The Republic, it is us. That is the real France, that which is exploitable and exploited; the quarry of all these frantic republics, of all these parties who have the wealth of others for dream and the laziness for idol.

The Republic is to parties what a tree is to parasites; parties are the vermin of nations, and it is important not to forget that it is because of the various claims of these political religionaries that we have to jolt along to revolutions resulting from insurrections, and of insurrections resulting from states of siege, to arrive periodically at the inhumation of the dead and at the payment of the bills of revolution, which are the premiums resulting from the imbecility of all in response to the audacity of a few.

Our forefathers saw the France of the great vassals and that of the absolute kings. Our fathers saw that of Marat, of Danton, of Robespierre, of Barras, of Bonaparte and of Napoleon. We, we have seen the France of Louis XVIII, the France of Charles X, the France of Louis-Philippe, the France of the provisional government, the France of the National Assembly; but France in person, that is to say, the France of everyone, the France of France, no one has yet seen her. No one, therefore, has seen the Republic, because the Republic is nothing other than the liberation of France from the tutelage of governments.

IV

Do not ask if a democrat is a socialist and of which faction, if he is conservative and of which faction; if he is Orleanist, imperialist, legitimist and of which faction. At the bottom of all these doctrines and social policies one could look for all one’s worth for the free man and respect for private money. One will only find there paid masters and paying servants. The Democrat is not of those who rule because he is the one who does not obey at all. If there are people who, shy or timid, take shelter in Fourier, if they lodge with M. Cabet or M. Proudhon, if there are any who take refuge in Louis-Philippe, in Bonaparte, in Henri de Bourbon, I declare for my part that I do not know how to live other than within myself and I do not propose to accept the renunciation of my identity.

Hear how others call with all their voice for the accession of a sovereign authority before which one bends! I proclaim my own accession to the sovereignty of action.

I am not at all opposed to the fact that, for recognition, for devotion or for charity, some men sacrifice some of their time, their work, their intelligence, their lives to provide comfort for some needy princes or for philosophers in poor accommodation; each can do as he feels fit, provide alms from what he has to whom he likes; and when, renouncing being themselves and acting according to themselves, there are those people who determine to live, think and produce for the benefit of dreamers, soldiers and princes, so be it! The princes are poor and the dreamers even poorer than the princes; the dreamers are idle and the princes more idle than the dreamers; the soldiers are vainglorious and the dreamers and the princes more vainglorious than the soldiers. But that those who give themselves to the dreamers, to the soldiers or to the princes claim the right to give up, along with their own, my time, my work, my intelligence, my life, my liberty; that there is an obligation for me to accept and pay the master who becomes my neighbor; that, just in order for a dreamer, a soldier or a prince to be installed in the Hôtel de Ville, I, myself, am required to become the devoted servant of this dreamer, soldier or prince, that is beyond the limits of my comprehension!

If it is called a profession to govern, then I demand to see the products of that profession, and if those products are not to my liking, then I proclaim that to force me to consume them is the oddest abuse of authority that one man can exercise on another. The truth is that that abuse exercises itself by force and that it is I who maintain, with my own funds, this force of which I complain. Considering this, I withdraw within myself and recognize that at the same time as I am a victim, I am also stupid.

But my stupidity depends on my isolation, and that is why I say to my fellow citizens: Hold your heads up! We have confidence in no one but ourselves. We say: liberty now and henceforth!

V

In this France of lords, princes, philosophers and generals; in this France, whipped and castigated, like a rebelling child by who-knows-whom for who-knows-what; in this France at the heart of which the governments have inoculated an administrative cancer with so many millions of francs, every last one of them a link in the chain that binds us; in this France, finally, where everything is denied us, from the freedom to educate ourselves to the right to freely season our food, everyone, in what concerns him, must shake off his torpor and proclaim himself minister of himself, governor of his own France.

The France of each and every one is the undeniable, egoistic achievement of one’s individuality with all that belongs to it: thought, production, commerce, property.

For me, as a writer, my France is my thought, over which I wish to have supreme control, the production of my thought that I wish to administer; the marketing of that product over which I have charge; the property of the acquired result that I wish to keep and to use when I like, within the limits of the respect I owe to the thought, to the products, to the market, to the property of that France comprised by others, whatever their profession or mode of life.

In the infinite number of diverse thoughts that find their social expression in various products, each producer carries, infallibly, an instinct for the public taste, for the producer seeking the consumer cannot ignore the fact that the latter will only surrender his money for a product that he likes and needs. Production could not be controlled by someone who cannot find an immediate interest in it, i.e., the producer, without it becoming bothersome and being discontinued, but if everyone governs their own thought, as a producer, production will necessarily tend towards a single goal: the satisfaction of the consumer who is everyone. In the same way if everyone governs their thoughts, as a consumer, a sure market is prepared as a result of their labor, and production will tend, in its turn, towards a single end, the satisfaction of the producer, which is also everyone.

In this way, each individual is the beneficiary administrator of all, and all are the beneficiary administrators of each individual; that is to say, the producer does well for himself in doing well by the consumer, and the consumer comforts his existence while creating the wealth of the producer. And this without effort, without anyone having to occupy himself with anything other than his own individual interest, which is necessarily in the interest of all. This is social harmony in its democratic simplicity, in what the Americans call, as they practice it, self-government, the government of oneself.

Either I govern myself, and my instinct cannot fail me in searching for my well-being; or else someone governs me, and I am sacrificed, because the instincts of my governor which, subjected to the same law as me, also seek his well-being, not only are not and cannot be mine, but rather are and must be opposed to mine.

Either my thought is free, that I can produce, that my product can find a market, that the market will provide me with resources the exchange of which I can bring home and allow me the consummation of the products of others. Or else, on the contrary, my thought is held in check by an authority; that I am not allowed to express myself according to the infallible law of my own instinct, and I do not produce anything or produce badly; not having a product of any value, I cannot effect any exchange, from which it follows that I consume nothing; I am dependent on others and on myself; I am paralyzed at the center of a circle.

Let us make a general application of that isolated fact and we will find that swirling flurry of a social residue unknown in the United States, but with which governmental barriers have rendered France familiar; that collection of stationary existences, which pass and pass again before the administration like bodies that pursue a restricted course, returning to the obstacle, and we have nothing more than a society where we all bump and run into each other, or else a society immobile, interdicted, annihilated, cadaverized.

VI

The organization of society is the enslavement of the individual, and its dismantling leads to the liberty which deploys in the social body those providential rules of harmony, whose observance, being in the interest of everyone, finds itself being the inclination of all.

But one says that unlimited liberty is a menace.

Whom does it menace?

Who must fear the proud horse, if not he who would tame it?

Who is afraid of an avalanche, if it is not the one who wants to stop it?

Who, therefore, trembles before freedom, if it is not tyranny?

Menacing liberty! One should say the opposite. What is frightening about it is the noise of the chains. Once it has broken them, it is no longer tumultuous, it is calm and wise.

Let us not forget the order that followed the revolt of 24 February and let us recall above all the disorder that arose from the revolt in June.

The gentlemen of the Hôtel de Ville ruled; that was their fault. They were nothing but simple keepers of the seals affixed by the revolution on the governmental succession of the royals. We were the inheritors of that succession; they thought it was they:—Madness! What was their dream? That they bore well-liked names? That they were more honest than those conquered? As if, in free nations, the government was a matter of proper names! As if, in a democracy, usurpation could argue for the probity of the usurper!

That they were more capable? As if it were possible to have the intelligence of everyone, when everyone withholds his intelligence.

They should have understood something completely simple, completely elementary, which is, that since the divine right has been consigned to the depths of the priesthood, no one has received a mandate to act in the name of all and in the place of all.

But what the provisional government has not done at all, the Assembly could do; one might hope that it would democratize France; whatever might be the attitude of the vast majority of representatives, a single, truly democratic man, that is to say a man who has lived in association with the practice of democracy and liberty, would suffice to clarify the situation and free the country. Well, this man, if he exists, has not shown himself; no one has addressed parliament in the noble, disinterested, grandiose language of democracy. There are, no doubt, some generous intentions at the Palais National; but unintelligent intentions are the miscarriages of human grandeur, the stillbirths of God, and the Assembly, like the provisional government that sanctioned its taking of control, failed to recognize its mandate.

We have only seen emerge from within it men of political party, theoreticians, political casuists who have only practiced monarchy, administrative exclusivism, ruling governments; men who have only seen liberty through the jealous veil of royalism.

We can therefore say of the majority of the Assembly that which we said of the members of the provisional government: do not count on these theorists to establish democracy in France, to introduce freedom in the practice of social facts.

[to be continued...]

[Translation by Collective Reason (Robert Tucker, Jesse Cohn, and Shawn P. Wilbur.) Robert did most of the hard work, and I'm responsible for the final choices.]

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

A notion that I'll be making use of in the next installment of "Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule" is Herbert Spencer's division of societies into "militant" and "industrial" types, introduced into the literature of mutualism (as far as I can see so far, at least) in Dyer D. Lum's The Economics of Anarchy. Lum's work is a very interesting attempt at an overview of anarchist economics, well worth the time it takes to read the whole thing. Roderick Long has a nicely annotated version of the text online, and I'm proofing a pamphlet edition for Corvus. I suspect that the Mutualism-to-Come — the "perfection" of the militancies of the present— may actually be a long, harmonian evolutionary step beyond industrial society and the regime of contracts, but the Spencer/Lum distinction certainly seems to point out one of the next mile-posts. Here's the introduction, with Lum's treatment of the militant/industrial distinction:

The Economics of Anarchy

by Dyer D. Lum

I. INTRODUCTION

All sociologists claim that progress has consisted in departure from compulsory to voluntary co-operation; from the reign of militant measures to what is termed the industrial type, wherein self-reliance and free co-operation directs; from the inequalities of privileged and restricted classes to the equality of equal freedom to natural opportunities; in short, to use the concise statement of Herbert Spencer, “from a regime of status to a regime of contract.” In the social order militancy and industrialism, therefore, represent past and future types; the first wherein war is the normal direction of human activity; the other where peace must prevail for healthful development. Following this guiding principle let us endeavor to group the salient points of progress from militant rule to industrial requirements in order to see more clearly not only in what direction we are tending, but also what methods are not conducive to that end. Starting with the fact that social evolution is chiefly characterized by a transition from warlike to peaceful pursuits, that from generation to generation activity has been turning from conquest over fellowmen to conquest over nature for men, we see at once that methods characterizing an outgrown phase of life are inappropriate to the end toward which progress has been made.

Before, however, applying to all schemes for reform the crucial test: Do they belong to the militant or industrial type? let us obtain a clearer view of their differences. The one being fixity, the other its abrogation, between the two there can be no golden mean without sacrifice of progress, for compromise in principles is ever incipient suicide. With a clear conception of the historical evolution of society we may be spared the folly everywhere attempted by would-be reformers of mixing incongruous principles; such may be compared with those who would seek a happy medium between daylight and darkness in twilight. Having attained this, to the great delight of sentimental lovers and fledgling poets, they flatter themselves in having solved the eternal contradiction in a state of possessing none of the positive nor negative qualities of either, and which, consequently, can be but temporary in duration.

To state in briefest form the essential distinction between militancy and industrialism, it may be said that the one is a scheme of compulsory co-operation, the other the natural outgrowth of voluntary co-operation. If we look at those States where the militant spirit dominates most largely we find the organization essential to an army extended to the concerns of private life. The whole nation virtually becomes a camp under military discipline; industrial life is subordinated to regulation; the individual exists for the State and a regimental uniformity pervades all social relations. The individual is a subject and with his condition, his residence, his family, enregistered. Of ancient Peru we read that officers “minutely inspected the houses, to see that the man, as well as his wife, kept the household in perfect order, and preserved a due state of discipline among their children.” Ancient Egypt furnishes ample evidence of a like regimentation of its inhabitants, who had to report at fixed intervals to account for the most trivial action. How fully the every-day life of the Hebrews was regulated in the most petty manner the pentateuch illustrates. The iron laws of Sparta are not exceptional illustrations. In every State where activities are chiefly military, even now, we see a greater or lesser degree of enforced discipline; patriotism becomes the highest virtue and disloyalty the deepest crime; no domestic tie is valid against the Frankenstein of the State; the assertion of common rights is hardly known. The State dominates the unit, pervades the household, is present at birth, presides at marriages, buries the dead, and the mass of the population endure life for work, instead of working to enjoy life. In every sphere of social co-operation the motive power is compulsion, not naturally evolved, but artificially instituted. Herbert Spencer says, and it cannot be disputed: “It is the law of all organization that as it becomes complete it becomes rigid,” a remark of profound significance which is earnestly commended to the thoughtful attention of Socialist and semi-Socialist reformers who would institute liberty and still preserve plasticity!

Let us beware the militant assumption that man exists for the State, and trust to theoretical brakes to check the momentum of a body moving with increasing velocity. The social aggregate is not something over and above the units which constitute it. When these units are moral, are intelligent, are secure, only then is social life moral, intelligent and secure. The condition of the units is mirrored in the social reflector. To subordinate the parts to the whole is to destroy that individuality by which the social unity has been attained; to place in the whole that which resides in none of its parts; to make an effect a generative cause and bestow upon a shadow the qualities of a substance. An illustration will make this clearer. College classes frequently have composite photographs taken in which the features of each is superimposed upon the others. The result is a face representing the striking characteristics of all, but in which angularities of character are merged into one. Though the class face represents no living original, yet each has contributed to form it. So in social life individual; peculiarities are merged into the composite social life, and the survival of the fittest determines what remains or sinks. In the class face the stronger the individuality the greater the effect upon the composite whole. As social life is but a composite representation of individual characteristics, how idle to hold that the unit is subordinate to the requirements of the composite reflection in which self has been an integral factor. Yet this is the logic of state-socialism and communism, for both rely upon direction from composite reflection, and directly violate the law of progress in seeking to establish a social structure upon uniformity rather than individuality, upon tendency to similarity rather than increasing variance of parts.

The whole course of modern history has been a perpetual struggle against direction in social relations. Motley calls the Fourteenth century an “Age of Revolt.” Europe everywhere displayed social life under paternal guidance. The very clothes that a man must wear, hours of work and of repose, the time for which a mechanic should be retained, the number of sheep a tenant might keep, limitations upon travel, restrictions upon diet, the hierarchy of ranks, rules regulating social intercourse, the very thoughts one must think,—were all matters for legislative direction in Merrie England. In philosophy, religion, politics and industry law established the standard for belief and action. The crusades by changing vast bodies of men from the narrow boundaries which had heretofore confined their vision, by opening to them new scenes and civilizations, by emancipating multitudes of serfs, by introducing Eastern arts and luxuries; all of which may be summed up in Sismondi’s phrase: “the geography of the pilgrims;” and above all by sowing broadcast the seeds of unbelief;—led to an awakening of intellect that shook the old foundations of social life to their center. Jack Cade and Wickliffe in England, the Artaveldes in Holland, Marcel and the jacquerie in France, the risings of the Swiss cantons, Rienzi at Rome, the Hanseatic League in Germany, and countless sporadic insurrections against authority in philosophy, in religion, in political and economic relations, all testify to the opening of a new era wherein individual sovereignty was posited against collective control. Industry felt the new breath and became arrayed against oppression. The communal struggles in France and the alliance of the Hanse Towns in Germany illustrated the new spirit wherein arms were only resorted to for defence against aggression, a contest wherein feudalism was wounded unto death and its history henceforth but the record of its dying struggles. The renaissance in thought and art, the Protestant revolution in religion, the English, American, and French revolutions in State policies, logically led to the extension of the assertion of the sovereignty of the individual to economic relations, a struggle which essentially characterizes the Nineteenth century. Every step forward has been at the expense of authority by increasing the area of voluntary actions; voluntary co-operation has invariably risen to supply needs as compulsory co-operation was removed. Authority has been shorn of its strength in philosophy and religion and Anarchy therein admitted to be in the line of progress; in the State its sphere has been continually narrowed by the growth of freedom to contract to achieve given ends. Nor have we yet reached the term of progress whatever may be the wishes of militant reactionists or the schemes of twilight reformers. The lines of progress have been so marled that we cannot doubt the ultimate result will be the extinction of all compulsory direction and the triumph of voluntary co-operation in every phase of social intercourse.

The theological age is of the past and we are yet in what may be termed the metaphysical age, in which names are taken for things. The industrial age has yet to come; we linger in the transition period in which old methods are laboriously hashed with the new and presented to twilight adorers as the Mecca of their hopes. Although we may already discern the dawn and hasten its progress by understanding the requirements of equal freedom, and hence equal rights, than which there are no other, it is still neither day nor night; happily however, a state of hazy twilight is unorganizable. The industrial type of social life, based on the law of equal freedom, demands the emancipation of the individual and establishes the desired synthetic harmony of individual and social forces by the removal of legislative interference. Out of this is naturally evolved free co-operation, for social interests being a permanent factor, it will be this seen to be best furthered; in other words, under individual freedom to contract self-interest will be seen to be identical with mutual interest. Only under equal freedom has individuality full scope, unchecked by restrictive interference and in joint concurrence of action where needed social and individual interests will be woven together in harmony, without the conflicts now incident upon their enforced separation. “Society” only then will become a social providence—not to dole out benefits to needs, and thus encourage mediocrity by weakening initiative, but to store the fruits of application, of co-operative effort; and in securing under equal opportunities to each the full reward of all deeds, find wherein to satisfy all needs. Then, and only then, will self-interest find its highest realization in the widely diffused benefits of morality, intelligence, and security.

The history of nations shows us that enforced “law and order” has prevailed largest where there existed similarity of interests. The irruption of the barbarians into Europe destroyed the unity that Rome had so laboriously established by causing diversity of aims between conquering and conquered peoples. Such countries as England and France attained partial equilibrium long before Spain with its mixture of Basque, Celtic, Gothic, Moorish and Jewish subjects, and in whom both religion and natural traits kept alive diversity, which while the result of militancy became the cause of its continuance to preserve the conquerors amid warring factions. Where interests were so diametrically opposite and each seeking vantage ground, where the strong hand could alone preserve the semblance of order by the subordination of all individual interests to those of the State, peace—the condition of industrial progress—could not obtain. Fusion by conquest could not obliterate distinctive characteristics founded in race. Might could silence, but not eradicate them. Discontent might not find expression, but the embers were kept smouldering beneath the ashes.

In the present form of society we find diversity, but of classes rather than of races. While we have no State-created class of priests nor nobles, while all men are theoretically declared “equal before the law,” we see unmistakeable evidence of radical diversity of interests leading to internecine strife, a diversity that manifests itself in countless ways provoking discord and struggle. This strife is no longer either religious or political in its nature; those issues are of the past, our records report no Praise-God-Barebones’ parliaments nor constitution-maker Sieyes’ conventions; those issues were long since threshed. The contest of the present is industrial, and it behooves every thoughtful person to seek out the causes and ponder over the character of the remedies so freely advertised for its cure. Progress requires diversity, but order can never result save as adapted to, not checking, progress. “Progress and Order,” rather than “Law and Order,” is the demand of the industrial type of civilization.

Reliance upon militant measures, trying to curb industrial discontent by legislative coercion, is reactionary in character. However disguised in twilight mixtures it is the spirit of the old regime seeking to dominate the new; as vain as seeking to check an exhaustless flow of water by damming the stream. The remedy cannot lie in enactments, in the organization of systems, in return to simplicity of structure, for industrial civilization demands plasticity of forms which “the law of equal freedom” alone gives, while organization, on the other hand, ever tends to rigidity. As in the physiological realm hybridity ever characterizes unlike organisms, so in sociology no successful progeny has ever resulted from compulsory intermingling of diverse classes; but where, as in sociology, the diverse classes are such because of chartered privileges, involving correlative restrictions, abolition can alone prove remedial. The sacerdotal and noble classes were destroyed as ruling classes, but to-day they stand behind the burgher class animating it with their inherited antagonism to plebeian interests. When Cæsar conquered Greece, he subjugated Olympus, and the gods now measure tape behind counters with Christian decorum. It is useless to seek to domesticate conquered classes for reproductive purposes; it is only in their extinction, the equalization of opportunities by which divers classes cease to exist, that relief can come. Privilege, though not symbolized by tiara and crown, still survives and is the soul of the prevailing economic system, a new incarnation of the ancient fetich. Hence the present contest.

Industrialism means the direction of human activities to conquest over nature, and only by the complete eradication of the militant theorem can the ideal ever become real. From compulsion, artificially induced, to voluntary co-operation, naturally evolved, the star of progress leads and no method of reform embodying any of the elements of the first will answer the end, for in so far as it does it contains the seeds which lead to fixity and choke plasticity. It is not by looking backward to regimentation, but forward to free contract, that the goal will be seen. Whether it be a Bismarck granting State pensions to aged workmen, France and England extending collective control over industrial activities, twilight schemes for instituting liberty by shifting tax burdens, or an appeal to a count of noses by which political alchemy will transform diffused ignorance into concrete wisdom, it is ever putting new wine into old bottles, an attempt to retard day by organizing morning twilight as a permanent condition for ever-varying needs. Voluntary co-operation needs no “direction”; self-interest alone will determine its rise and adaptation, for where the social demand is the supply then must follow. No matter how “advanced” a project may be vaunted to be, in so far as it incorporates militant direction, denies individual secession, forbids ignoring the State be it of what form it may, just so far is such project looking backward when tested by the law of progress, and consequently in disagreement with the requirements of the future. Free contract (once declared utopian in all relations) either is or is not the ideal of industrial civilization. If it is, there can be no permanent halting place between these antagonistic lines notwithstanding metaphysical doctors attempt it in Single Tax and Nationalism. Statecraft may dictate the straddling policy of Ensign Stebbins who announced that he was “in favor of prohibition, but agin’ its enforcement;” or priestcraft direct attention from present ills by preaching resignation coupled with post obit drafts on the Bank of New Jerusalem; but the social student should ever keep his gaze on the ideal end and with voice and pen only advocate such measures as will not only tend thitherward, bit which will remove rather than preserve obstructions. Neither in plethoric nor emasculated tariffs, prohibition, inspection of factories, mines, ships, houses, bakeries, and markets; not in compulsory education nor vaccination, use of ballot prayer-mills, etc., lies the remedy. These, and countless others are but makeshifts to reconcile the new with the old, twilight propositions of those whose eyes do not perceive the beauties daylight alone can fully reveal. They are based on the retained superstition that State authority has no assignable limit, and demanding for it blind faith; it is a survival of past forms of thought, a diluted phase but lineal descendant of the old dogma that “the king can do no wrong”, and involving the fiction of “divine right” in the maxim: “vox populi, vox dei” spread out to cover half the whole plus one! Power no more resides in a definite number than in one, and all alleged “reforms” based upon this superstition derive their weapons from the armories of militancy, from the Bismarckian right wing down to the collectivist left wing of Tax-shifters and Nationalists.

So far we have endeavored to show that the course of progress in social affairs is from the militant type to the industrial, from regnant authority to individual sovereignty, from compulsion to voluntary agreement, from fixity to plasticity. If this be the goal, and this is the foundation stone of Anarchy, we must ascertain why obstacles meet us at every turn, why the law of equal freedom is inoperative, why abstract equity is summoned to give way to concrete privilege, in what forms militant measures still reign. We must seek where privilege still lingers entrenched, in what their correlative restrictions consist, and how they promote discord requiring the exercise of arbitrary force to preserve things as they are and thus subordinate progress to uniformity. We should always seek to first determine what is equitable, then the nature of the difficulties to be overcome, and the desirability rather than the feasibility of attaining such ends. The “practical man” is not the temporary adjustor of relations on false bases. When demands are aligned with progressive development, when ideas are based upon fundamental principles of social rectitude, we may well leave fears of their application to the time-serving crowd whose vision cannot penetrate the twilight. If history shows that in all social evolution ideas have ever worked down from the brain f the thinker to the muscles of the restricted, if the John Browns have always followed the Garrisons, shall we denounce the ideas or the obstacles which prevented their application? Or favor the ideas and be “agin” their realization? Let us consider what these obstacles are. And here we are brought to the consideration of Economics, which dominates the thought of the century and determines the nature of all systems, of all laws, of all institutions.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

One of the elements of Proudhon's social theory which sometimes strikes people as odd or objectionable is his emphasis on "collective force" and his insistence on the existence of collective beings or individuals. I've had some understandably skeptical responses to my claim that Proudhon's philosophy is essentially a philosophy of individualism—but encompassing individuals at every conceivable scale. That is, of course, a bit of a simplification—even a simplism—if we neglect to mention that, for Proudhon, individualism had a tendency to lead into socialism, and vice versa. Recall, for instance, that he expected an absolutely free and individualistic society, based on "complete insolidarity," to lead more-or-less straight to communism. The theory of collective individuals is among the elements that have not been developed much by mutualists after Proudhon (although some of his French followers did pursue the question), but one of the assumptions of the "two-gun" rereading of the tradition is that very little of the original mutualist synthesis was lost, however much it may have been fragmented and scattered among the various anarchist and libertarian schools. That assumption is, of course, not a priori, but is based on having discovered those various threads, sometimes in the most seemingly unlikely places.

Consider, for example, this treatment of the egoism of collectives, from The Philosophy of Egoism, by James L. Walker (Tak Kak.)

IV

Beside individuals we encounter groups variously cemented together by controlling ideas; such groups are families, tribes, states and churches. The more nearly a group approaches the condition of being held together by the interest of its members without constraint of one exercised over other members, the more nearly does the group approximate to the character of an Ego, in itself. Observation and reflection show that the group, or collectivity, never yet composed wholly of enlightened individuals joining and adhering in the group through individual accord, has always fallen short of the approximation which is conceivable for the group to the independent Egoistic character. The family, tribe, state and church are all dominated physically or mentally by some individuals therein. These groups, such as they have been known in all history, never could have existed with the disproportionate powers and influence of their members but for prevailing beliefs reducible to ignorance, awe and submission in the mass of the members.

With this explanation and corresponding allowance, the group may be spoken of as approximately Egoistic in its character. Even when least swayed by individual members, the family, the nation and the church are thoroughly selfy. These composite individualities, as it is the fancy of some writers to consider them, are appealed to in vain to furnish an exception to the Egoistic principle. When Jack imposes upon the ignorance of Jill or upon habits acquired during mutual aid, and Jill is too trusting to trace the transaction back to fundamental elements and calculations of mutual benefit, the matter is readily laid to Jack’s selfishness, which of course lauds its victim’s welcome compliance; but when the family demands a heavy sacrifice of each member, attention is mostly drawn by Moralists to the advantage of the family and the need of such sacrifices, never to the phenomenon of a ruthless form of Egoism in the family, imposing upon its members who have felt some of the advantages and then yielded to pretensions which will not bear analysis, or tracing back in an actual account of loss and gain. Thus it is said to the man that he needs a wife, to the woman that she needs a husband, and to the children that they needed parents and will need obedience from their own children by and by. On the strength of these views various sacrifices of the happiness of man, woman and youth may be effected while they do not inquire precisely what they do need individually and how they can get it at least cost of unhappiness.

The family, attempting to become an Ego, treats its members as an Ego naturally treats available organic or inorganic matter. The supine become raw material. The person has the power to resign self-care and allow himself to be seized upon and worked up as material by any of the other real or would-be Egos that are in quest of nutriment and of bases of operations. The greater would-be Ego, the “social organism,” reinforces the family demand with persuasion that hesitates at no fallacy, but first plies the individual with some general logic as to our need of each other, then with flattery, how it will repay him for inconvenience by praise, external and internal, all the while exerting a moral terrorism over every mind weak enough to allow it, and all to subjugate the real Ego to the complex would-be but impossible Ego. For not the good of the family, but of itself, is the object of the state and of the “social organism.” The state prates of the sacredness of the family, but treats it with scant courtesy when its own interest conflicts with the family interest. The “social organism” reinforces the family against the individual and the state against the family, this already threatening the family, and obviously it will next threaten the state so far as this can be distinguished from the community; that is, the “social organism” will have no permanent use for separate nations.

But in speaking thus we should not forget that the group, or collectivity, reflects the will of some master minds, or at the widest the will of a large number under the influence of certain beliefs. Either one or two or three horses may draw a plow, and its motions will be different. The complexity of motion from three horses is certainly a phenomenon to be studied, but the way is not to disregard the elementary motive forces which form the result by their combination; and so it is with society. Its phenomena will be according to conditions of information and to circumstances which determine the direction of personal desires. The certainty of desire and aversion as motives, founded in self-preservation, is found in the nature of organic as distinguished from inorganic existence. All desires and dislikes, acting and counteracting, make the so-called social will,—a more convenient than accurate abstraction. To make of it an entity is a metaphysical fancy. Unity of will is the sign of individuality. The semblance of a social self, apart from individuals, obviously arises from the general concurrence of wills. They could not do otherwise than run along parallel lines of least resistance, but the intellectual prism separates the blended social rays.

The church is an important group, under the theological belief. The primitive character of its dominant idea finds its complementary expression in the simple and transparent Egoism of its immediate motives. A personal ruler, judge and rewarder existing in belief, commands and threatens. The person sacrifices part of his pleasure to propitiate this master because he fears his power. Habits supervene and the investigating spirit is terrorized both by personal belief and the fear of other fear-stricken believers, watchful and intolerant. The hope of heaven and fear of punishment are of the simplest Egoism. Morality on the same plane includes the fear of man and hope of benefit from man, complicated with belief in reciprocal enforcement of ecclesiastical duties, and this as a duty. Becoming metaphysical it is doubtless more difficult of analysis, but this secondary or transition stage of mind is already disposed of as a whole by philosophy, so that the evolutionist predicts the passage of its phenomena and their replacement by positive ideas of processes. The metaphysical stage will pass away though its formulas be entirely neglected by the advancing opposition. In fact, spell-bound and mystified man is freed by courage to break off from the chain of phantasies which has succeeded to the chain of theological fear. In this progress example counts suggestively and even demonstratively, and new habits of positive, specific inquiry give the intellect mastery of itself and of the emotions which had enslaved it.

To sum up this part of the subject, let those who preach anti Egoistic doctrines in the name of deity, society or collective humanity, tell us of a deity who is not an Egoistic autocrat, or who has worshipers who do not bow down to him because they think it wisest to submit; of a family which sacrifices itself to the individuals and not the individuals’ hopes and wishes to itself; of a community or political or social state which departs from the rule of self-defence and self-aggrandizement; of any aggregation, pretending to permanence, that is not for itself and against every individuality that would subtract from its power and influence; of a collective humanity that is not for itself, the collectivity, though it were necessary to discourage and suppress any individual freedom which the collectivity did not think to be well disposed toward the collectivity or at least certain to operate to its ultimate benefit. Self is the thought and aim in all. Selfiness is their common characteristic. Without it they would be elemental matter, unresisting food for other growths.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Here's a translation of an article from Le Libertaire, originally published as "L’autorité. — La Dictature," April, 1859. I've also recently translated his poem, "To the Ci-Devant Dynastics." I think the difficulties, and the resulting rough spots, in both translations will be fairly obvious.

Down with the Bosses!

by Joseph Déjacque

April, 1859

We are no longer in the fabled times of Saturn, when the father devoured his children, nor in the times of Herod, when one massacred an entire generation of frail innocents—which, after all, did not prevent Jesus from escaping the massacre, or Jupiter the devouring. We live in an era where we no longer kill children much by the sword or the teeth, and where it appears natural enough that the young bury the old. Hercules is dead; why seek to resuscitate him? One can at the most only galvanize him. The club is less mighty than saltpeter, saltpeter is less mighty than the electric battery, and the electric battery is less mighty than the idea.

To every idea, present and to come, welcome! Authority had reigned so long over men, that it has taken such possession of humanity. It has left garrisons everywhere in the mind. Even today, it is difficult, other than in thought, to chip it away from top to bottom. Each civilizée is a fortress for it, which, under the guard of prejudices, stands hostile to the passage of that invading Amazon, Liberty. Thus, those who believe themselves revolutionaries and swear only by liberty, proclaim nonetheless the necessity of dictatorship, as if dictatorship did not exclude liberty, and liberty dictatorship. What big babies there are, truth be told, among the revolutionaries!—and big babies who cling to their daddy—for whom the democratic and social Republic is necessary, doubtless, but with an emperor or a dictator—it's all one—for the governor; people mounted sidesaddle, and faced towards the rump, on their donkey's carcass, and who, their eyes fixed on the perspective of progress, move away from it as fast as they approach it,—the feet in this position galloping in the opposite direction ahead of the head. These revolutionaries, bare-necked politickers, have preserved with the imprint of the collar, the moral stain of servitude, the stiff neck of despotism. Alas! They are only too numerous among us. They call themselves republicans, democrats and socialists, and they have fondness, they have love only for authority in the arms of iron: more monarchistic in reality than the monarchists, who beside them could nearly pass for anarchists.

Dictatorship, whether it is a hydra with a hundred heads or a hundred tails, whether they are autocratic or demagogic, can certainly do nothing for liberty: it can only perpetuate slavery, morally and physically. It is not by regimenting a people of helots under a yoke of iron, since there is iron, by imprisoning them in a uniform of proconsular wills, that intelligent and free men can result. All that which is not liberty is against liberty. Liberty is not a thing that can be allocated. It does not pertain at the whim of whatever personage or committee of public safety that orders it, that makes a gift of it. Dictatorship can cut off the heads of men, but it cannot make them increase and multiply; it can transform intelligences into corpses, but it cannot transform cadavers into intelligences; it can make the slaves creep and crawl under its boots, like maggots or caterpillars, flattening them under his heavy tread,—but only Liberty can give them wings. It is only through free labor, intellectual and moral labor, that our generation, civilization or chrysalis, will be metamorphosed into a bright and shiny butterfly, will take on the human type and continue its development in Harmony.

Many men, I know, speak of liberty without understanding it; they have neither the science of it nor even the sentiment. They never see in the demolition of the reigning Authority anything but a substitution of names or persons; they don't imagine that a society could function without masters or servants, without chiefs and soldiers; in this they are like those reactionaries who say: "There are always rich and poor, and there always will be. What would become of the poor without the rich? They would die of hunger!" The demagogues do not say exactly that, but they say: "There have always been governors and governed, and there always will. What would become of the people without government? They would rot in bondage!" All these antiquarians, the reds and the whites, are just partners and accomplices; anarchy, libertarianism disrupts their miserable understanding, an understanding encumbered with ignorant prejudices, with asinine vanity, with cretinism. Plagiarists of the past, the revolutionaries retrospective and retroactive, the dictatorists, those subservient to brute force, all those crimson authoritarians who call for a saving power, will croak all their lives without finding what they desire. Fellows to the frogs who asked for a king, we see them and will always see them change their Soliveau for a Grue, the government of July for the government of February, the perpetrators of the massacres of Rouen for those of the massacres of June, Cavaignac for Bonaparte, and tomorrow, if they can, Bonaparte for Blanqui... If one day they cry: "Down with the municipal guard!" it is in order to cry at the next instant: "Long live the guard mobile!" Or they swap the guard mobile for the imperial guard, as they would swap the imperial guard for the revolutionary battalions. Subjects they were; subjects they are; subjects they will be. They neither know what they want nor what they do. They complained yesterday that they did not have the man of their choice; they complain the next day of having too much of him. Finally, at every moment and every turn, they invoke Authority "with his long, sharp beak, helved on his slender neck" [au long bec emmanché d’un long cou], and they find it surprising that it crunches them, that it kills them!


Whoever calls himself revolutionary and speaks of dictatorship is only a dupe or a rogue, an imbecile or a traitor: imbecile and dupe if he advocates it as the auxiliary of the social Revolution, as a mode of transition from the past to the future, for it is always to conjugate Authority in the present indicative; rogue and traitor if he only envisions it as a means of taking their place in the budget and of playing the representative in all modes and at all times.

How many dwarves are there, indeed, who would like nothing better than to have official stilts: a title, a salary, some representation to pull themselves out of the quagmire where ordinary mortals flounder and give themselves the airs of giants. Will the common people always be stupid enough to provide a pedestal for these pygmies? Will they always be told: “You speak of suppressing those elected by universal suffrage, to throw the national and democratic representation out the windows, but what will you put in its place? For finally, something is necessary, and someone must command: a committee of public safety, then? You do not want an emperor, a tyrant, this is understood, but who will replace it: a dictator?... because everyone can not drive, and there must be one who devotes himself to govern others..." Eh! Gentlemen or citizens, what good is it to replace it if it is only to replace it? What is needed is to destroy evil and not displace it. What does it matter to me whether he bears one name or another, whether he is here or there, if, under this mask or that appearance, he is still and always in my way.—One removes an enemy; one does not replace it.

Dictatorship, the sovereign magistracy, the monarchy, so to speak,—for to recognize that the Authority which is evil can do good, is this not to declare oneself monarchist, to sanction despotism, to renounce the Revolution?—If one asks them, these absolute partisans of brutal force, these advocates of demagogic and compulsory authority, how they would exercise it, in what manner they will organize this strong power: some will respond to you, like the late Marat, that they want a dictator in ball and chains, and sentenced by the people to work for the people. First let us distinguish: either the dictator acts by the will of the people, and thus will not really be a dictator, and will only be like a fifth wheel on a carriage; or else he will really be a dictator, will have he leads and whip in his hands, and he will act only according to his own good pleasure, which is to say for the exclusive profit of his divine person. To act in the name of the people is to act in the name of everyone, isn't it? And everyone is not scientifically, harmonically, intelligently revolutionary. But I admit, in order to conform to the thought of the blanquists, for example—that tail of carbonarism, that ba-be-bou-vist freemasonry, those invisibles of a new species, that society of secret...intelligences,—that there is a people and a people, the people of the initiated brothers, the disciples of the great popular architect, and the uninitiated. These affiliates, these outstanding characters, do they always agree among themselves? Let one decree be issued on property, or the family—or you-name-it—some will find it too radical, and others not radical enough. A thousand daggers, for the moment, are raised a thousand times a day against the dictatorial slavery. Whoever would accept a similar role would not have two minutes to live. But he would not accept it seriously, he would have his coterie, all the men scrabbling for gain who will squeeze around him, and would be for him a consecrated battalion of manservants in order to have the left-overs of his authority, the crumbs of power. Then perhaps he can indeed command in the name of the people, I do not deny it, but without fail, against the people. He will deport or have shot all those who have libertarian impulses. Like Charlemagne or whatever other king, who measured men by the height of his sword, he would decapitate all the intelligences that surpassed his level, he would forbid all progress which goes further than him. He will be like all men of public safety, like the politicals of 93, followers of the Jesuits of the Inquisition, and he will propagate the general dumbing-down, he will crush individual initiative, he will make the night of the dawning day, cast shadows on the social idea. He will plunge us back, dead or alive, into the charnel house of Civilization, and will make for the people, instead of intellectual and moral autonomy, an automatism of flesh and bone, a body of brutes. Because, for a political dictator as for a Jesuit director, what is best in man, what is good, is the corpse!...

Others, in their dream of dictatorship, differ somewhat from these, in that they do not want the dictatorship of one alone, of a one-headed Samson, but the jawbones of a hundred or a thousand donkeys, a dictatorship of the small wonders of the Proletariat, deemed intelligent by them because they have reeled off one day or another some banalities in prose or verse, because they have scribbled their names on the polling lists or on the registers of some small politico-revolutionary chapel; the dictatorship finally of heads and arms hairy enough to compete with the Ratapoils, and with the mission, as usual, to exterminate the aristocrats or the philistines? They think like the others, that the evil is not so much in the liberticidal institutions as in the choice of tyrants. Egalitarians in name, they are for castes in principle. And by putting the workers in power, in the place of the bourgeois, they do not doubt that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Put the workers in power! In truth, we need only to think back. Haven’t we had Albert in the provisional government? Is it possible to see anything more idiotic? What was he, if not a plastron? In the constituent or legislative assembly we have had the delegates from Lyons; if it was necessary to judge the represented by the representatives, that would be a sad specimen of the intelligence of the workers of Lyon. Paris gave us Nadaud, a dull nature, intelligent enough for a porter, who dreamed of transforming his trowel into a presidential scepter,—the imbecile! Then also Corbon, the reverend of the Atelier, and perhaps much the least Jesuitical, for he, at least, was not slow to cast off the mask and to take his place in the midst of, and side by side with, the reactionaries.—As on the steps of the throne the lackeys are more royalist than the king, so in the echelons of official or legal authority the republican workers are more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie. And that is understood: the freed slave who becomes master always exaggerates the vices of the planter who has trained him. He is a disposed to abuse his command just to the extent that he has been prone or forced into submission and baseness by his commanders.

A dictatorial committee composed of workers is certainly the thing one could find most inflated with self-importance and nullity and, consequently, the most anti-revolutionary. If one could take seriously the notion of public safety, it is first and in every occasion to unseat the workers from all governmental authority, and then and always to oust as much as possible from society governmental authority itself. (Better for power to have suspected enemies than doubtful friends.)

Official or legal authority, by whatever name one decorates it, is always false and harmful. Only natural or anarchic authority is true and beneficial.

Who had authority in fact and in law, in 48? Was it the provisional government, the executive commission, Cavaignac or Bonaparte? None of the above. For, if they had violent force in hand, they were themselves only instruments, the meshed gears of the reaction; thus, they were not motors, but machines. All the governmental authorities, even the most autocratic, are only that. They function at the will of a faction and in the service of that faction, except for the accidents of intrigues, and the explosions of compromised ambition. The true authority in 48, the authority of universal safety cannot be thus not in the government, but, as always, outside the government, in individual initiative: Proudhon was its most eminent representative (among the people, I mean, not in the Chamber). It was in him that was personified the revolutionary agitation of the masses. And for that representation, he had no need of legalized title or mandate. His sole title came to him from his work, his science, his genius. His mandate, he did not hold it from another, from the arbitrary suffrages of brute force, but from itself alone, from conscience/consciousness and from the spontaneity of his intellectual force. Natural and anarchic authority had any share of influence to which it was entitled. And that is an authority which has only to make de prétoriens, for it is the dictatorship of the Intelligence: it stirs and it invigorates. Its mission is not to garrotter or to shorten men, but to but to grow them all the height of the head, but to develop in all of them the force of expansion of their mental nature. It does not produce, like the other, slaves in the name of public liberty, it destroys slavery in the name of private authority. It does not impose itself on the plebs by crenellating itself in a palace, by armoring itself with iron mail, by riding among its archers, like the feudal barons;—it is asserted in the people, as stars become apparent in the firmament, by shining on its satellites!!

What greater power would Proudhon have had being a governor? Not only would he have not had more of it, but he would have had much less, supposing even that he could have preserved in power his revolutionary passions. His power coming to his from his brain, all that which would have been of a nature to impede the labor of his brain would have been an attack on his power. If he had been a dictator, in boots and spurs, armed from head to toe, invested with the suzerain sash and cockade, he would have lost to politicking with his entourage all the time that he employed to socialize the masses. He would have made reaction instead of revolution. See instead the chatelaine of the Luxembourg, Louis Blanc, perhaps the best-intentioned in all the provisional government, and yet the most perfidious, the one who has delivered the sermonized workers to the armed bourgeois; he has done all the preachers in vestments or authoritarian badges have done, preached Christian charity to the poor in order to save the rich.

The titles, the government mandates are only good for the non-entities who, too cowardly to be anything by themselves, want to be seen. They have no reason to be, except for the reason of these runts. The strong man, the man of intelligence, the man who is everything by labor and nothing by intrigue, the man who is the son of his works and not the son of his father, of his uncle or of any patron, has nothing to sort out with these carnivalesque attributions; he despises and hates them as a travesty which will sully his dignity, as something obscene and infamous. The weak man, the ignorant man, who still has the feeling for Humanity, must also fear them; he needs for that only a little common sense. For if every harlequinade is ridiculous, it is more horrible when it carries a stick!

Every dictatorial government, whether it be understood in the singular or the plural, every demagogic Power could only delay the coming of the social Revolution by substituting its initiative, whatever it may be, its omnipotent reason, its civic and inevitable will to anarchic initiative, to the reasoned will, to the autonomy of each. The social revolution can be made only by the organ of all individually; otherwise it is not the social revolution. What is necessary then, that towards which it must tend, is to give each and everyone the possibility, that is to say in the necessity of acting, in order that the movements, communicating with each other, give and receive the impetus of progress and thus increase the force tenfold and a hundredfold. What is necessary in the end, is as many dictators as there are thinking beings, man or women, in the society, in order to shake it, to rise up against it, to pull it from its inertia,—and not a Loyola in red hat, a general politics to discipline, that is immobilize one another, to settle on their chests, on their hearts, like a nightmare, in order to suppress the pulsations, and on their forehead, on their brain, as an compulsory or catechismal instruction, in order to torment its understanding.

Governmental authority, dictatorship, whether it is called empire or republic, throne or chair, savior of order or committee of public safety; whether it exists today under the name of Bonaparte or tomorrow under the name of Blanqui; whether it comes out of Ham or Belle-Ile; whether it has in its insignias an eagle or a stuffed lion... dictatorship is only the violation of liberty by a corrupted virility, by the syphilitic; it is a cesarian sickness innoculated with the seeds of reproduction in the intellectual organs of popular generation. It is not a kiss of freedom, a natural and fruitful manifestation of puberty, it is a fornication of virginity with decrepitude, an assault on morals, a crime like the abuse of the tutor towards his pupil, it is a humanicide!

There is only one revolutionary dictatorship, only one humanitary dictatorship: it is the intellectual and moral dictatorship. Is not everyone free to participate there? It is enough to want it to be able to do it. There is no need apart from it, and no need, in order to make it recognized, for battalions of lictors nor of trophies of bayonets; it advances escorted only by its free thoughts, and has for scepter only its beam of enlightenment. It does not make the Law, it discovers it; it is not Authority, but it makes it. It exists only by the will of labor and the right of science. He who denies it today will affirm it tomorrow. For it does not command the maneuver by buttoning itself up in inactivity, like the colonel of a regiment, but it orders the movement by preaching by example, and demonstrates progress by progress.

— Everyone marching in step! says the one, and it is the dictatorship of brute force, the animal dictatorship.

— Let he who loves me follow me! says the other, it is the dictatorship of force intellectualized, the hominal dictatorship. One has the support of all the shepherds, all the herders, all those who command or obey in the fold, all that which is domiciled in Civilisation. The other has for it individualities made men, decivilized intelligences. One is the last representation of the modern Paganism, the eve of final closure, its farewells to the public. The other is the debut of a new era, its entry onto the scene, the triumph of Socialism. The one is so old that it touches the tomb; the other is so young that it touches the cradle.

— Old one! It is the Law, — it is necessary to perish!

— It is the law of nature, child! — you will grow!!

New York, April 1859

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Johnson's (Revised) Universal Cyclopaedia (1886) contained the following explanation, by its creator, of the science of "universology:"

Universol´ogy is the name given to a universal science covering the whole ground of philosophy, of the sciences in their general aspects—in which sense it is called “sciento-philosophy”—and of social polity, or the collective life of the human world. As a philosophy, in the more common and general or less precise use of that term, the system is called “integralism,” as that of Comte is called “positivism;” as a new science—in the exact sense as a new scientific method and as the philosophy of science—it is especially known as “universology;” and as a social polity—”the universal institute of humanity” (universal government, universal religion, universal social organization, etc.)—it is called the “pantarchy.” Sciento-philosophy is the name which applies to the system especially in so far as it is a philosophy of the sciences, or a new philosophical system based on and derived from the objective point of view of the special sciences.

Universology claims to be reconciliative of all systems of philosophy, by virtue of positive new discovery and of the unity which it, for the first time, establishes between philosophy and science, and between both of these and the domains of art, religion, and practical life. Universology claims to be “a single and central science among the sciences, and that from which the integral education of mankind should hereafter take its departure. It embraces those laws of being which are common to all sciences and to all departments or domains of being, and which, when known and systematized, constitute the unity of the sciences in a sense alike new, peculiar, and important. Universology is based on analogy, resting in turn on the discovery and demonstration of a unific element in things otherwise diverse from each other through all spheres— not, therefore, analogy in a vague poetic sense, as mere superficial resemblance, nor in an occult and mystical sense, nor, in fine, in the narrow technical sense to which it has been confined in comparative anatomy as contrasted with homology. It is analogy in that essential sense in which it underlies all other possible analogies. Analogy, in the broad or universological sense, includes both homology and analogy in the narrow scientific sense, together with nil resemblances which are fundamental, or such as grow out of an underlying unity of system (of outlay, organotaxis or functions) in all spheres of being; or such, in other words, as rest upon the existence of a real, permanent, and traceable unific clement in the midst of the overlying diversity of phenomena. The universologist is, therefore, by no means, one who claims to know everything, as is sometimes mistakenly supposed, but merely one who known certain newly-discovered principles and laws of science which are common to all the sciences, and which serve to systematize and harmonize the sciences and the details within the several sciences, as well as—when applied in the practical sphere—to regulate the affairs of human life.”

The three fundamental principles of universology, from which the whole logical and actual evolution of being is then to be rigorously deduced, furnishing all the sciences and the details within the sciences, are unism, duism, and trinism, defined as follows; Unism is the principle or spirit of the number one, duism of the number two, and trinism of the number three. Unism is not mere unity, nor duism mere duality, nor trinism mere trinity. If we were to consider a handful of printer's types, unity in respect to this collection of objects would mean either the handful as one, or a single one among the types, or each of the types in turn as a single one: and duality, in this connection, would mean either some two among the types, or any two among the types, until the whole was exhausted by these couplings, unism, as relating to this same collection of objects, would, on the contrary, mean no one of the ideas above attributed to unity, but a different idea, still related to unity—namely, the capacity of these types to be united into printer's forms which produce the printed page; so duism does not mean either of the ideas above attributed to duality, but another idea, which is, however, also related to or allied with two-ness—namely, the capacity of these types for being separated and distributed, each one apart from every other one, as a preparation, it may be, for other new combination or unity. So, again, trinism does not mean a mere trinity, which would consist of any three types united, but it means another idea, compounded of the unism and the duism, and related, therefore, to one and two, and indirectly therefore to three. Trinism is, in other words, the new and higher unity of the unism and the duism; that is to say, of the capacity of the types to be united for a unitary purpose, and to be separated or distributed for a dispartive purpose—the compound character, in other words, of this collection of objects enabling them to act in two opposite and contradictory methods, hinging, nevertheless, upon the inherent unity in the constitution of each type, Unism, duism, and trinism are, therefore, three qualities which inhere in. or pertain to, every typo individually, and the sum of which qualities is the total character of the type. They are, nevertheless, qualities which are derived from quantitative discriminations, and specifically from one, two, and three; but they must by no means be confounded with the common ideas of unity, duality, and trinity.

Duism has a close relationship with Spencer's “differentiation,” but it differs from it in the fact that it is the lowest or most elementary term of differentiation; that it offers, for that reason, the broadest generalization of the idea; and that it is, at the same time, more fundamentally exact. Unism and trinism are confusedly represented by Spencer's “integration.”

Unism and duism crop out and reappear under many forms, and in the absence, heretofore, of any sufficiently compendious generalization, they have received a variety of namings; thus, unism is called unity, sameness, centralizing or centripetal tendency, gravitation, arrival, conjunction, thesis or synthesis, integration, combination, contraction, generality, simplicity, etc. It is the tendency to unite or toward unity, or the manifestation of the presence or results of that tendency, in thousands of modes in every sphere of being. Duism is called diversity, difference or variety, decentralizing or centrifugal tendency, repulsion, departure, separation, antithesis, analysis, differentiation, diffusion, expansion, specialty, complexity, etc. It is the tendency to disparting or dividing, or the manifestation of the presence or results of that tendency in thousands of modes in every sphere of being. Trinism is the principle symbolized by the totality of being, or of any particular being. It is compounded of unism and duism as its factors, constituents, or elements. Hence it is a cardinated or hingewise principle, entity, or manifestation, the type or representative of all-concrete or real being, unism and duism being abstract elements of being merely.

All orderly numbers capable of count or of falling into regular scries constitute collectively unismal number, being characterized by unity in the sense in which we speak of the unity of a poem, a play, or other work of art. All chaotic and irregular numbers are then duismal, and the totality of number, embracing these two opposite aspects under one head or in one domain, is trinismal. Within the unismus of number—that is to say, within the domain of orderly numbers—the odd numbers, headed by the number one, are unismal; the even numbers, headed by the number two, duismal; and the combined series of odd and even numbers, headed by the number three, is trinismal. So all orderly, regular, or commensurable form is unismal; all disorderly, irregular, and incommensurable form is duismal; and the total domain of form as constituted of these two is trinismal. But within the proper unisma or domain of regular form, all round form, that which is constituted around one centre or regulative point, is unismal; all elongated form, the lowest term and type of which is the straight line, as that which is constituted with reference to two regulative points (the ends of the line), is duismal; and regularly modulated form, as Hogarth's line of beauty, triangular forms, and the like, as being constituted by reference to three regulative points, is trinismal form. To these elementary varieties all other forms are reducible.

In respect to position, the perpendicular, as central and uniaxial, is again unismal: the horizontal, measured by two axes, is duismal; and the incline from perpendicularity to horizontality, as relating at the same time to the one axis and to the two axes, is trinismal. As all these, however, are orderly, they are within the larger unismus of position, the corresponding duismus then being disorderly or chaotic position, and the larger trinismus being the totality of this domain of being.

It results from what has been said that orderly numeration, orderly form, and orderly position are three special instances of unism, and fall together into a new class or domain of being, which is the general unismus: that disorderly or chaotic numbers, disorderly or chaotic form, and disorderly or chaotic position are special instances of duism, and fall together into another special class or domain, which is the duismus of being at large; and that the conjunction of orderly and disorderly number, the conjunction of orderly and disorderly form, and the conjunction of orderly and disorderly position are special instances of trinism, and fall, in like manner, into a new class or domain, which is the trinismus of being at large. Unism, duism, and trinism become, therefore, the basis of a new and crosswise distribution and classification, taking in, as in this instance, a part of each particular sphere of being, as of number, of form, and of position, and uniting it with a corresponding part or portion of each of the other related spheres or departments of being.

And, again: within the unismus, odd numbers, round forms, and perpendicular positions are thrown together as allied analogically with each other; oven or regular numbers, even or regular forms, and horizontal postures or positions (also called “even,” then meaning level), are thrown in like manner into a special class as related analogically with each other; and finally, the combined series of numbers, odd and even, modulated form, partly round and partly elongated, and pyramidal or dome-like position, convergent from base to apex, are likewise thrown into a new special class or domain, as also analogously related to each other. This cross-division, as allied with classification, is analogous with comparative science, which takes a part out of each of the sciences compared, and classifies anew with reference to the relationship of these parts. The further signification and importance of this new basis of universological classification can only be exhibited in the special treatises devoted to the subject.

Abstract morphology is to universology, and to the rectified classification of all spheres, what the mathematical element is in geography, establishing definite lines of latitude and longitude, or what Mercator's projection is to navigation. It furnishes types and models for every variety of conception, and maps them out with a wonderful precision. Uprightness of character and the inclinations of the mind are no longer figures of speech, but scientific verities relating the phenomena of mind to the domain of form. Ethics, the science of government, sociology at large, and even theology and religion, are by this new method rendered rigorously amenable to scientific treatment. In a word, universology claims to be literally the science of the universe, or of all possible departments of thought, fully in accordance with the idea implied in its name.

STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Here's another working translation, part of the material for a project on propaganda by deed:

EULOGY FOR RAVACHOL

Paul Adam

In these times, miracles and saints seem set to disappear. We can easily believe that contemporary souls lack the spirit of sacrifice. The martyrs of the century have always been obscure citizens, maddened by the din of political words, and then gunned down without mercy, in 1830, 1848, and 1871, for the benefit of certain parliamentary posts that some violent and shifty advocates had thus prepared; and it was even imprudent to claim that no wish of individual interest committed these unfortunate combatants to seek, themselves, arms in hand, an electoral profit.

The parades of the two chambers with their daily scandals, their syndicates of sugar-makers, of distillers, of beer venders, of winemakers, of grain brokers and livestock breeders, reveal to us, time and again, the motives of universal suffrage. There were Méline and Morelli, senator Le Guay... Also all these battles of the Parisian streets, all the histories of the rue Transnonain or of Satory end by appearing to us as simple quarrels of merchants in fierce competition.

Our souls, lacking complexity, would probably still be displeased to follow brusque plays of these marionettes; and politics would have been banished completely from our preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol.

Whatever the invective of the bourgeois press and the tenacity of the magistrates have been able to do to blacken the act of the victim, they have not succeeded in persuading us of his falsehood. After all the judiciary debates, chronicles, and appeals to legal murder, Ravachol properly remains the proponent of the great idea of the ancient religions which would advocate seeking individual death for the good of the world; the denial of self, the sacrifice of life and reputation for the exaltation of the poor and humble. He is plainly the restorer of the essential sacrifice.

To have affirmed the right of existence at the risk of allowing himself to be contemned by the herd of the civic slaves and to bring on himself the ignominy of the scaffold, to have conceived as a technique the suppression of the useless in order to sustain an idea of liberation, to have had that audacity to conceive, and that devotion to accomplish, is that not sufficient to merit the title of Redeemer?

Of all the acts Ravachol, there is one perhaps more symbolic in itself. In opening the sepulcher of that old man and by going to seek, groping on sticky hands, on the cadaver the jewel capable of sparing from hunger, for some months, a family of paupers, he demonstrated the shame of a society which adorns its carrion sumptuously while, in one year alone, 91,000 individuals die of starvation within the frontiers of the rich country of France, without anyone thinking anything of it, except him and us.

Precisely because his attempt was useless, and that cadaver was found stripped of adornment, the meaning of the act becomes more important still. It is stripped of all real profit; it takes the abstract form of a logical and deductive idea. From that affirmation that nothing is owed to those who have no immediate need, it is proven that for every need a satisfaction must respond. It is the very formula of Christ: To each according to their needs, so marvelously conveyed in the parable of the father who paid at the same price the workers who entered his vineyard at dawn, those who came at noon and those who hired on at night. The work does not merit a wage; but the need demands satiety. You must not give in the hope of a lucrative recognition, or for a labor useful to you, but by the love of your fellow alone, in order to satisfy your hunger for altruism, your thirst for the good and the beautiful, your passion for harmony and universal happiness.

If one reproaches Ravachol for the murder of the hermit is there not, each day, an argument to gather, among the various facts of the gazette? Is he, indeed, more guilty in this than society, which allows to perish in the solitude of the garrets beings as useful as the student of the Beaux-Arts recently found dead in Paris, lacking bread. Society kills more than assassins: and when the man brought to bay by the greatest misery arms his despair and strikes, in order not to succumb, isn’t he the legitimate defender of a life for which would be charged, in an instant of pleasure, some careless parents? So long as there exist in the world to suffer slow starvation up to the final exhaustion of life, theft and murder will remain natural. No justice can logically be opposed and to punish unless it is declared loyally and without other reason the force crushes weakness. But if a new force is raised before its own, it must not blacken the adversary. It is necessary for it to accept the duel and manage the enemy so that in the days of its own defeat, it finds mercy in the New Force.

Ravachol was the champion of that New Force. First he exposed the theory of his acts and the logic of his crimes; and there is no public declamation capable of convincing him of straying or of error. His act is the consequence of his ideas, and his ideas were born of the lamentable state of barbarity or stagnant humanity.

Ravachol saw sorrow around him, and he has exalted the sorrow of others by offering himself in sacrifice. His incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the vigor of his acts, his courage before inevitable death raise him up to the splendors of legend. In this time of cynicism and irony, a Saint is born to us.

His blood will be an example from which will spring new courage and new martyrs. The great idea of universal altruism will flower in the red pool at the foot of the guillotine.

A fruitful death has been accomplished. An event of human history is marked in the annals of the people. The legal murder of Ravachol opens a new era.

And you artists who, with an eloquent brush, recount on the canvas your mystic dreams, here is offered a grand subject for the work. If you have understood your era, if you have recognized and kissed the threshold of the future, it is for you to trace out in a pious triptych the Life of the Saint, et his demise. For a time will come when in the temples of Real Fraternity, one will place your stained glass window in the loveliest place, in order that the light of the sun passing through the halo of the martyr, lights the recognition of men free of selfishness on a planet free from property.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Here's one of William B. Greene's letters to the Worcester Palladium which was not incorporated into either Equality or the 1850 Mutual Banking. Thanks again to Brady Campbell for the research assist on these. A number of my questions from two years ago remain, but I'm back at the work of transcribing and collating the mutual bank writings, so perhaps we can clear most of them up soon.

PLUTOCRACY

The term Plutocracy occurs in the Democratic State Address: it is derived from the words Plutus (the god of wealth, mammon) and krateo, (to hold, or govern); and signifies a government of wealth. An aristocracy is a government by a privileged class; a democracy is a government by the people; a plutocracy is an organization of society in which the government is administered by, and for the advantage of, the wealthy classes of the community. A Plutocracy is a Mammonocracy.

On the bureau of the English house of Commons, there is a sacramental book, a political Gospel, which expresses the thought upon which the whole governmental policy of England is founded: that book is the "Spirit of the Laws," by Montesquieu. Why have the English adopted this French book for their political Gospel? Let us open the book, and read!

"There are always"--says Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, liv. XI, ch.6--"in a State, certain persons distinguished by birth, wealth, or honors. But if they are confounded among the people, and if they have only the same vote which other men possess, the common liberty would be their slavery; and they would have no interest to defend this liberty, because the greater portion of the resolutions would be against them. The part therefore which they have in the legislation, ought to be in proportion to the other advantages they have in the State; which will happen if they form a body having the right to arrest the enterprises of the people, as the people has the right to arrest theirs. Thus the legislative power will be confided to the body of the Nobles, and to the body which will be chosen to represent the people, and these bodies will assemble apart, and have separate views, and interests." This is Montesquieu's formula of the government of England, a formula whose accuracy is acknowledged by the English themselves.

The government of England is not built up on the idea of right, but on the fact of the unjust distribution of rank, wealth, and honor, which now obtains; and it has for aim and purpose, the perpetuation of the present injustice though all coming generations:--the government of England is therefore an aristocracy.

The English constitution does not recognise equality, but, on the contrary, consecrates inequality; it does not recognise virtue, but consecrates privilege:--the government of England is therefore, an tyranny.

The principle of the English Constitution organises the national power in favor of money, and not in favor of money, and not in favor of man:--the government of England is, therefore, a Plutocracy.

The English government is founded on privilege and on inequality; and its artifice consists in giving to the privileged classes a part in legislation proportionate to the other privileges they possess in the State.

The English government may be defined as being a Tyranny--Aristocracy--Plutocracy; one and indivisible, and yet triple: it is three in one, and one in three, and they mystery of iniquity.

If our Constitution ever degenerates, it will be by becoming gradually conformed to that of England. It will become first Plutocratic, and then Aristocratic; for Plutocracy paves the way for Aristocracy, even as Aristocracy paves the way for Tyranny.

The Plutocrats are they who desire to see the right of voting guarded (as they say) by a property qualification, in order that holders of property may have a part in legislation proportionate to the other advantages they possess in the State. The Plutocrats are they who are opposed to the Secret Ballot, because the secret ballot would take from them the power of intimidating dependent voters, and thus take from them the part in legislation proportionate to the other advantages in the State, which they now possess.

A rich man, even if he possesses millions of dollars, is not for that reason a Plutocrat; but he becomes a Plutocrat so soon as he endeavors to seize upon political power proportionate to the advantages he possesses in other respects.

("Plutocracy," by OMEGA [William Batchelder Greene]. Worcester Palladium. Wednesday, 7 November 1849.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIALISM.

By Pierre Leroux

[continued from previous post...]

III.

One can paint a portrait equally hideous and true of man in the state of absolute individuality and of man in the state of absolute obedience. The principle of authority, even disguised under the good name of devotion, is no better than the principle of egoism, hiding itself under the good name of liberty.

We also reject with all the forces of our soul Catholicism under all its disguises and in all its forms, whether it attaches itself again, by I know not what puerile hopes, to the old debris which are at Rome with the ruins of so many centuries, or whether, by who knows what jesuitism [escobarderie], it pretends to incarnate itself anew in Robespierre, become the legitimate successor of Gregory VII and the inquisition. And at the same time we regard as a scourge, no less fatal than papistry, the present form of individualism, the individualism of English political economy, which, in the name of liberty, makes men rapacious wolves among themselves, and reduces society to atoms, leaving moreover everything to arrange itself at random, as Epicurus said the world is arranged. For us, the papal theories of every sort and the individualist theories of every species are equally false. They could be fatal, if they were not equally powerless; but papistry, dead for some many centuries, will not prevail against the entire modern era, and the modern era, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, carries in itself the promise and the seed of a society, and is not the destruction and negation of every society.

Liberty and Society are the two equal poles of social science. Do not say that society is only the result, the ensemble, the aggregation of individuals; for we will arrive at what we have today, a dreadful pell-mell with poverty for the greatest number. Theoretically you would have still worse; for, society no longer existing, the individuality of each has no limits, and the reason of each has no rule: you would arrive at moral skepticism, at general, absolute doubt, and in politics at the exploitation of the good by the malicious, and of the people by some rascals and some tyrants.

But do not say any more that society is everything and that the individual is nothing, or that society comes before the individuals, or that the citizens are not anything but some devoted subjects of society, functionaries of society who must find, for good or ill, their satisfaction in all that which contributes to the social aim; do not make of society a sort of large animal of which we would be the molecules, the parts, or the members, of which some would be the head, the others the stomach, the others the feet, the hands, the nails or the hair. Instead of society being the result of a free and spontaneous life for all those who compose it, will not want the life of each man to be a function of the social life that you would have imagined: for you will arrive by that path only at brutalization and despotism; you would arrest, you would immobilize the human spirit, all while pretending to lead it.

Do not attempt to bring back to us the government of the Church; for it is not in vain that the human spirit for six centuries against that government, and has abolished it.

Do not attempt to apply to our era that which was suitable in previous eras, the principle of authority and sacrifice; for the authority and self-sacrifice of the previous life of Humanity aimed precisely to arrive at individuality, at personality, at liberty. That was good in the past, but it was good precisely on the condition that it would lead to a goal, and that once Humanity arrived at that goal, it would cease to be, and that this government of the world would make place for another.

We are even today the prey of these two exclusive systems of individualism and socialism, pushed back as we are from liberty by that which claims to make it reign, and from association by that which preaches it.

Some have posited the principle that every government must one day disappear, and have concluded from it that every government must from now on be confined to the narrowest dimensions: they have made of government a simple gendarme charged with responding to the complaints of the citizens. Moreover, they have declared the law atheist in any case, and have limited it to ruling the disagreements of individuals with regard to material things and the distribution of goods according to the present constitution of property and inheritance. Property thus formed has become the basis of that which remains of society among men. Each, retired on his bit of land, became absolute and independent sovereign; and all social action is reduced to making each remain master of the plot of land that inheritance, labor, chance, or crime had obtained for him: Each by himself, each for himself. Sadly, the result of such a renunciation of all social providence is that each does not have his bit of land, and that the portion of some tends always to increase, and that of the others to diminish; the well-demonstrated result is the absurd and shameful slavery of twenty-five million men over thirty.

Others, on the contrary, seeing evil, have wanted to cure it by an entirely different process. Government, that imperceptible dwarf in the first system, becomes in this one a giant hydra which embraces in its coils the entire society. The individual, on the contrary, absolute sovereign and without control in the first, is no longer anything by a humble and submissive subject: he was once independent, he could think and live according to the inspirations of nature; he became a functionary, and only a functionary; he is regimented, he has an official doctrine to believe, and the inquisition at its door. Man is no longer a free and spontaneous being, he is an instrument who obeys in spite of himself, or who, fascinated, responds mechanically to the social action, as the shadow follows the body.

While the partisans of individualism rejoice or console themselves on the ruins of society, refugees that they are in their egoism, the partisans of socialism, (2) marching bravely to what they call an organic era, strive to discover how they will bury every liberty, all spontaneity under what they call organization.

The first, entirely in the present and without future, have come as well to have no tradition, no past. For them the previous life of Humanity is only a dream without consequence. The others, carrying in the study of the past their ideas of the future, have taken up with pride the line of the catholic orthodoxy of the Middle Ages, and they have said anathema to all of the modern era, to Protestantism and to Philosophy.

Ask the partisans of individualism what they think of the equality of men: certainly, they will keep themselves from denying it, but it is for them a chimera without importance; they have no means of realizing it. Their system, on the contrary, has for consequence only the most unspeakable inequality. From this point their liberty is a lie, for it is only the smallest number who enjoy it; and society becomes, as a result of inequality, a den of rascals and dupes, a sewer of vice, suffering, immorality and crime.

Ask the partisans of absolute socialism how they reconcile the liberty of men with authority, and what they make, for example, of the liberty to think and to write: they will respond to you that society is a grand being of which nothing can disturb the functions.

We are thus between Charybdis and Scylla, between the hypothesis of a government concentrating in itself all the lights and all human morality, and that of a government deprived by its very mandate of all light and all morality; between an infallible pope on ones side and and a vile gendarme on the other.

The first call liberty their individualism, they will gladly call it a fraternity: the others call their despotism a family. Preserve us from a fraternity so little charitable, and let us avoid a family so intrusive.

Never, it is necessary to avow it, have the very bases of society been more controversial. If one speaks of equality today, if one shows the misery and absurdity of the present mercantilism, let one blacken a society where the disassociated men are not only strangers among themselves, but necessarily rivals and enemies, and all those who have in their heart the love of men, the love of the people, all those who are children of Christianity, Philosophy and the Revolution, become inflamed and approve. But let the partisans of absolute socialism come to outline their tyrannical theories, let them speak of organizing us in regiments of scientists and regiments of industrials, let them go as far as declaring against the liberty of thought, at that same instant you feel yourself repulsed, your enthusiasm freeze, your feelings of individuality and liberty rebel, you start back sadly to the present from dread of that new papacy, weighty and absorbent, which will transform Humanity into a machine, where the true living natures, the individuals, will no longer be anything by a useful matter, instead of being themselves the arbiters of their destiny.

Thus one remains in perplexity and uncertainty, equally attracted and repulsed by two opposite attractors. Yes, the sympathies of our era are equally lively, equally energetic, whether it is a question of liberty or equality, of individuality or association. The faith in society is complete, but the faith in individuality individuality is equally complete. From this results an equal impulse towards these two desired ends and an equal increase of the exclusive exaggeration of one or the other, an equal horror of either individualism or of socialism.

That disposition, moreover, is not new; it already existed in the Revolution; the most progressive men felt it. Take the Declaration of Rights of Robespierre: you will find formulated there the most energetic and absolute manner the principle of society, with a view to the equality of all; but, two lines higher, you will find equally formulated in the most energetic and absolute manner the principle of the individuality of each. And nothing which would unite, which harmonizes these two principles, placed thus both on the altar; nothing which reconciles these two equally infinite and limitless rights, these two adversaries which threaten, these two absolute and sovereign powers which both [together] rise to heaven and which each [separately] overrun the whole earth. These two principles once named, you cannot prevent yourself from recognizing them, for you sense their legitimacy in your heart; but you sense at the same time that, both born from justice, the will make a dreadful war. So Robespierre and the Convention were only able to proclaim them both, and as a result the Revolution has been the bloody theater of their struggle: the two pistols charged one against the other have fired.

We are still at the same point, with two pistols charged and [pointed] in opposite directions. Our soul is the prey of two powers that are equal and, in appearance, contrary. Our perplexity will only cease when social science will manage to harmonize these two principles, when our two tendencies will be satisfied. Then an immense contentment will take the place of that anguish.

IV.

In waiting for that desired moment, if one asks us for our profession of faith, we have just made it, and we are ready to repeat it; here it is: we are neither individualists nor socialists, taking these words in their absolute sense. We believe in individuality, in personality, in liberty; but we also believe in society.

Society is not the result of a contract. For the sole reason that men exist, and have relations between themselves, society exists. A man does not make an act or a thought which does not concern more or less the lot of other men. Thus, there is necessarily and divinely communion between men.

Yes, society is a body, but it is a mystical body, and we are not its members, but we live in it. Yes, each man is a fruit on the tree of Humanity; but the fruit, in order to be the product of the tree, is no less complete and perfect in itself; he contains in germ the tree which has engendered him; he becomes himself the tree, when the other will fall from old age under the shock of the winds, and it will be him who will bring new blood to nature. Thus each man reflects in his breast all of society; each man is in a certain manner the manifestation of his century, of his people and of his generation; each man is Humanity; each man is a sovereignty; each man is a law, for whom the law is made, and against which no law can prevail.

Because I live bodily in the atmosphere, and I cannot live an instant without breathing, am I a portion of the atmosphere? Because I cannot live in any way without being in relation and in communion with the external world, an I a portion of that world? No; I live with this world and in this world: that is all.

And just so, because I live in the society of men and by that society, am I a portion, a dependency of that society? No, I am a liberty destined to live in a society.

Absolute individuality has been the belief of the majority of the philosophers of the Nineteenth Century. It was an axiom in metaphysics, that there existed only individuals, and that all the alleged collective or universal beings, such as Society, Homeland, Humanity, etc., were only abstractions of our mind. These philosophers were in a grave error. They did not understand what is tangible by the senses; they did not comprehend the invisible. Because after a certain amount of time has passed, the mother is separate from the fruit that she carried in her womb, and because the mother and her child form then two distinct and separate beings, do you deny the relation which exists between them; do you deny what nature shows you even by the testimony of your senses, to know that that mother and that child are without one another beings that are incomplete, sick, and threatened with death, and that the mutual need, as well as the love, make from them one being composed of two? It is the same for Society and Humanity. Far from being independent of all society and all tradition, man takes his life in tradition and in society. He only lives because he as at one in a certain present and in a certain past. Each man, like each generation of men, draws his sap and his life from Humanity. But each man draws his life there by virtue of the faculties that he has in him, by virtue of his own spontaneity. Thus, he remains free, though associated. He is divinely united to Humanity; but Humanity, instead of absorbing him, is revealed in him.

If there are still in the world so many miserable and vicious men, of we are all affected by vice and misery, that reveals to us the ignorance and immorality which still afflicts Humanity. If Humanity was less ignorant and more moral, there would no longer be so many miserable and vicious beings in the world.

We are all responsible to one another. We are united by an invisible link, it is true, but that link is more clear and more evident to the intelligence than matter is to the eyes of the body.

From which it follows that mutual charity is a duty.

From which it follows that the intervention of man for man is a duty.

From which follows finally a condemnation of individualism.

But from that follows as well, and with an equal force, the condemnation of absolute socialism.

If God had desire that men should be parts of Humanity, he would have enchained them to one another in one great body, as the members of our body are connected to one another. To desire to enchain men thus, would have been as if, having recognized the invisible link that unites the mother and child, and which makes only one being of the two, you would desire to deny, because of that, their personality and enchain them to one another. You would return them by this to the previous state where they made strictly only one being; and, by reason of what they are now, you would constitute a state that is monstrous and as abnormal the state of absolute separation where you would have first desired to hold them. They are two, but they are united; there is relation and communion between them, but not identity. The one being who reunites them is God, who lives at once in the one and the other; and if he has separated them, it is in order that they should each have their individual life, even though they are connected to one another, and that under the relation that unites them they make only one single being. What is more, it is clear that the common life which unites them will be as much more energetic, as their individual lives are more grand. If the mother is happy, the child will be happy; and if the soul of the child is opened to enthusiasm and to virtue, the love of the mother will be will be exalted in it. Thus the social body will be made more happy and more powerful by the individuality of all its members, than if all men had been enchained to one another.

We arrive thus at that law, as evident and as certain as the laws of gravitation: "The perfection of society is the result of the liberty of each and all."

At the end of the day, to adopt either individualism or socialism, is to not understand life. Life consists essentially in the divine and necessary relation of individual and free beings. Individualism does not comprehend life, for it denies that relation. Absolute socialism does not comprehend it better; for, by distorting that relation, it destroys it. To deny life or to destroy it, these are the alternatives of these two systems, of which one, consequently, is no better than the other.

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(2) It is clear that, in all of this writing, it is necessary to understand by socialism, socialism as we define it in this work itself, which is as the exaggeration of the idea of association, or of society. For a number of years, we have been accustomed to call socialists all the thinkers who who occupy themselves with social reforms, all those who critique and reprove individualism, all those who speak, in different terms, of social providence, and of the solidarity which units together not only the members of a State, but the entire Human Species; and, by this title, ourselves, who have always battled absolute socialism, we are today designated as socialist. We are undoubtedly socialist, but in this sense: we are socialist, if you mean by socialism the Doctrine which will sacrifice none of the terms of the formula: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Unity, but which reconciles them all. (1847.) — I can only repeat here, with regard to the use of the word Socialism in all of this extract, what I said previously (pages 121 and 160 of this Volume). When I invented the term Socialism in order to oppose it to the term Individualism, I did not expect that, ten years later, that term would be used to express, in a general fashion, religious Democracy. What I attacked under that name, were the false systems advanced by the alleged disciples of Saint-Simon and by the alleged disciples of Rousseau led astray following Robespierre and Babœuf, without speaking of those who amalgamated at once Saint-Simon and Robespierre with de Maistre and Bonald. I refer the reader to the Histoire du Socialisme (which they will find in one of the following volumes of this edition), contenting myself to protest against those who have taken occasion from this to find me in contradiction with myself. (1850.)

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INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIALISM.

By Pierre Leroux

(1834.—After the massacres on the Rue Transnonain.)

At times, even the most resolute hearts, those most firmly fixed on the sacred belief of progress, come to lose courage and to feel full of disgust at the present. In the 16th century, when one murdered in our civil wars, it was in the name of God and with a crucifix in the hand; it was a question of the most sacred things, of things which, when once they have procured our conviction and our faith so legitimately dominate our nature that it has nothing to do but obey, and even its most beautiful appanage disappears thus voluntarily before the divine will. In the name of what principle does one today send off, by telegraph, pitiless orders, and transform proletarian soldiers into the executioners of their own class? Why has our epoch seen cruelties which recall St. Bartholemew? Why have men been fanaticized to the point of making them coldly slaughter the elderly, women, and children? Why has the Seine rolled with murders which recalls the arquebuscades of window of the Louvre? It is not in the name of God and eternal salvation that it is done. It is in the name of material interests.

Our century is, it seems, quite vile, and we have degenerated even from the crimes of our fathers. To kill in the manner of Charles IX or Torquemada, in the name of faith, in the name of the Church, because one believes that God desires it, because one has a fanatic spirit, exalted by the fear of hell and the hope of paradise, this is still to have in one's crime some grandeur and some generosity. But to be afraid, and by dint of cowardice, to become cruel; to be full of solicitude for material goods that after all death will carry away from you, and to become ferocious from avarice; to have no belief in eternal things, no certainty of the difference between the just and the unjust, and, in absolute doubt, to cling to one's lucre with an intensity rivaling the most heated fanaticism, and to gain from these petty sentiments energy sufficient to equal in a day the bloodiest days of our religious wars, this is what we have seen and what was never seen before.

What indeed is the principle conquerors of the day have put forward? In the name of what idea have they declared in advance that they would bequeath to posterity the example of a decimated generation? And what is the drive that they have made play to gain that victory? It is neither an idea nor a principle. Everyone knows it. It is not a secret for anyone that the great words order and justice today only conceal the interests of the shops. Business is bad, and it is the innovators, it is said, that stand in its way: war then against the innovators. The workers of Lyon associate in order in order to maintain the rate of their salary: war, then, and war to the death, against the works of Lyon. Always, at the bottom of all of this, are the interests of the shops. In the days of mourning, so often renewed these past three years, the people have been told: here is a holy, just, legitimate idea, by virtue of which you can kill men. It is not so. But on the eve of each riot one cries to the people: Tomorrow your profit will be diminished, your daily receipts will be less, your material satisfaction will be compromised And that has been enough, and we have seen the shopkeepers in hunting gear, armed with double-barreled rifles, to aim more accurately and to kill two instead of one, go merrily to hunt among the blocks. Is there in such a spectacle something to trouble our convictions, and to make us doubt progress; and, since we are condemned to civil war, must we long for civil war as our ancestors knew it, atrocious but religious, deliberately bathing itself in blood, but with eyes lifted towards heaven? In that fury which, according to Bonald, often sent the innocent and the guilty, pell-mell, before their eternal judge, because it deliberately sacrificed the earth to heaven, we must regret the presence of the monster egoism, which has nothing of God, which, like the harpies, has only the hunger of its belly!

In past times, there was the nobility, and there was the clergy: the nobility had a maxim not to occupy itself with lucre; the clergy condemned usury, and regarded as inferior the condition of merchants. There were certainly men then who knew no other morality than their own selfish interests, and no other reason for things than their calculating tables; but they had not set the tone and did not lay down the law for society; they were not the arbiters and legislators. If they wished to rise that far, and to apply their narrow rules to things in general, they were ridiculous, and the poets availed themselves gladly of the comedy and satire, where they came immediately below the lackeys. Today these men enjoy the leading role; the very same society has no other law, no other basis nor end, than the satisfaction of their affairs. Humanity has not lived and suffered to bring about the reign of the merchants. Jesus Christ once chased the merchants from the temple: there are today no other temples than those of the merchants. The palace of the Bourse has replaced Notre Dame; and we know no other blazon than the double-entry cash-books. One passes from a boutique to the Chamber of Deputies, and one carries in public affairs the spirit of the sales counter. Our ancestors made crusades: we, we wisely calculate that that cost the bourgeois the conquest of Algiers, and we will gladly abandon to the English the civilization of Africa, if it gets a little expensive. The zeal of St. Vincent de Paul appears stupid to the general councils: is it not a revolting iniquity to charge the rich for the upkeep of the children that the poor abandon! Since money is everything, and the order of the bourgeois has replaced nobles and priests, is it astonishing that the blood of one bourgeois does not appear to us overpaid by the blood of a thousand proletarians, and is it not completely natural put the interests of the shops on a level with the blood of men? I kill, says the merchant, because I have been disturbed in my affairs: it is a compensation that is due to me for the loss that I feel. By this account, Shylock was right to want to carve human flesh: had it not been purchased?

Seen in this way, our century could not be more base. Material interests, there is the great watchword of society; and many innovators have themselves ignominiously eliminated from their mottoes the moral and intellectual amelioration of the people, in order to preserve only their material betterment.

Is it the case that we will sink more and more in this way, and that the shame may be reserved for France that, having proclaimed to the world the brotherhood of man, it transforms itself into what Napoleon has called with scorn a nation of shopkeepers, supported in their avaricious domination by the facile courage of an army of stipendiaries?

We know of noble hearts, of high intelligences, which fear it. We fall back, they cry, into Roman corruption and into the moral of the barbarians: of what use to us are eighteen hundred years of Christianity, and the conquests of science and industry?

It is to these generous, but discouraged, hearts, that I intend to respond, in occupying myself with political economy, that is, with the material aspect of society. I will attempt first, today, to expose for them the sense of that greediness which shows itself, it is true, among all the classes, but which, among men of power, struts about so hideously, sheltered by the bayonets of our soldiers; and in the subsequent articles, I will attempt to demonstrate that if the social question presents itself in our time primarily as a question of material wealth, it is because the human sciences are very close to finding the solution.

II

We say, then, that that exclusive preoccupation with material things which reigns today, that species of domination by egoism and the material, is nothing which must surprise or discourage us. In all periods of renewal, the renovation of material things has been one of the forms of progress. Every great human evolution is at once material, moral, and intellectual, and cannot not have these three aspects. To imagine that Christianity, for example, or any other great religious revolution, has related solely in its principles what is called heaven and not to the things of the earth, to morals or ideas, and not to interests, would be an absurd illusion, conceivable only by those who know the foundation of Christianity only by the sermons of their priest, but impossible for whoever has glanced at history. Christianity has been able to say: "My kingdom is not of this world; but by doing so it has powerfully altered the material constitution of that world, out of which it would direct the contemplation of men, towards a mysterious future. In the presence of pagan society, founded on individualism and slavery, Christianity posed the Essene way of life and the community of good; and from that new form given to material life resulted the dissolution of pagan society, the overthrow of the Roman world, and, as a result, the uselessness of slavery and its abolition. In the Protestant era, wasn't something analogous seen? Didn't we then see Christianity, attempting to regenerate itself, struggle for earthly goods against the Church, holder of those goods? Material interests played a huge role in the Reformation. The Reformation began in the 14th century with a violent and general struggle in Europe against the religious orders. It was the religious orders, that society in community without women and children, which, consequently, was only an exception and allowed to subsist outside of it the great, the true society, had however amassed such an enormous portion of the property, that the other society could no longer live; it was necessary then to recapture from it the land and all the instruments of labor that it had monopolized. Thus in the greatest and most exalted epochs, one finds again the question of material life.

But today it is evident that that which was only a secondary characteristic of previous revolutions must become a principle characteristic. Indeed, what do we want and where do we tend, on the faith of all the prophecies? The one who truly follows Jesus Christ with an intelligent heart, and not as a copyist without intelligence, does not say so absolutely that the kingdom of God is not on earth.(1) He understands that the epoch of realization approaches more and more. The stoicism of Zeno and the Christian stoicism are with reason relegated to their place in history. These two doctrines, or rather that doctrine, is today without social value. That was the debut of an immense career that Humanity has had to follow up to us. But where we have arrived today, heaven and earth begin to be without connection and without relation; and, instead of returning us toward the point of departure, towards the detachment and the retreat into ourselves of Jesus Christ and of Zeno, we must, by the efforts of our thought and the energy of our soul, transform the earth in such a way that the justice of heaven reigns there, in order one day to find that heaven so promised to our wishes.

The idea has been elaborated and preached by Christianity to all men, of a better world than the one which existed, of a world of equality and fraternity, of a world without despots and without slaves. Christianity has raised up humanity by hope; it has mystically announced its destiny; it has connected to the memories of its cradle, to its primitive and natural liberty, to its traditions of a past golden age, of Eden and of the native parade, the firm and assured sentiment of a golden age to come, of a paradise on earth, where the good will reign after the defeat of evil, and where man, redeemed by the divine word, will again find happiness, and enjoy an unalterable felicity. And, at that prophecy, one sees human society divide itself in two: the religious society, indifferent to the present enjoyments of the earth, or only using them in order to practice complete equality, community, individual non-property, as symbol of what will one day be the justice of heaven; and the secular society, which continua, under the teachings of the other and under its spiritual government, human life such as one had known it previously. Now, by Protestantism and by Philosophy, the religious society has been destroyed, and there is today only one society. The consequence, I repeat, isn't it clear and evident? Isn't it obvious that the principles of the world prophesied and awaited for so many centuries by the religious society must be realized more and more in the only society that exists today? Or else Humanity would have declined and degenerated, Christianity would have been an imposture and a chimera, and everything, in the eighteen hundred years which have passed, would only be comedy and deception. The earth, then, is promised to justice and equality.

Christianity, Reform, Philosophy, follow one another like the acts of a drama which approaches its dénouement. Those who consider history on in a casual manner, and page by page, must often find contradictory and incoherent that which is harmonic and continuous. Seeing the Reformation succeed Catholicism, and Philosophy succeed the Reformation, how many people are shocked, and see there only negation, discord and uncertainty! It is because they do not understand the series and the generation of things. So for them, there is death, there is nothingness, in these alternations and these contrasts, while for us, it is life. Their eyes offended by deep darkness, there where a dazzling light shines in ours. For what contradiction is there between the successive of a single drama, between the connected and coherent phases of a single evolution? It is only necessary to rise up enough to grasp and contemplate all at once the spirit of evolution in its entirety; and for anyone who is enlightened, that effort is not difficult. That alleged anarchy of Catholic Christianity, of the Reformation, and of Philosophy, succeeding and combating each other by turns, is not a very obscure enigma, the sense of which would be difficult to discover. We see Christianity first raise above the world its mystical paradise, like the seed which begins to form in the air, and which then waits until the winds spill it on the ground. The Reformation came after, which spread the promise to all of society, and, by laying waste to all pious retreats where the spiritual life had been concentrated, made only one single people, that it raises to spiritual dignity. Then in its turn comes Philosophy, which further extends this level, and which finally, explaining the prophecy, interprets the reign of God on earth as perfectibility. Christianity, Protestantism, and Philosophy, have thus driven towards the same end, and accomplished by various phases one single work. We are the last wave that the hand of God has pushed up to here on the shore of time: but the consequence of all the previous progress has not escaped us, and that obvious competition of three great phases which divided the centuries which preceded us is the token of all the progress to come.

Thus the earth, I repeat, is promised to justice and equality. Material goods are in themselves neither good nor bad. All the metaphysicians have come to see in matter and in body the limit of forces, the place where finite intelligences meet and are mutually revealed. Bodies and matter are the field of our faculties, the necessary means of their exercise, the milieu in which they are manifested. That there is in us, and in each of us, a force, created or uncreated, which animates us, constitutes us, and survives the destruction of what we call our body, is for me an obvious truth; but it is always the case that the force, either in this life, or in our previous or future lives, exerts itself only through the intermediary of bodies, precisely because it has limits and it is finite. The Christians, in the good days of Christianity, and even during the history of Christianity, have never understood the activity of the soul at the end of time without the resurrection of the body; and it has always been of the belief that man is, according to the expression of Bossuet, a soul and a body united together, an intelligence destined to live in a body. The Manicheans alone, exaggerating and distorting spiritualism, have entered into the error of regarding matter as absolute evil; and, by that same error, they fell inevitably under the empire of evil, in wanting to escape it.

Thus, whether we appeal to religious traditions and to the previous life of Humanity, or whether we consult only modern reason and the general agreement of the men of our era; far from condemning the use of material goods, we must see that none of our most noble faculties can be exercised without the mediation of these goods.

From this is follows that, all having been called to the spiritual life and to the dignity of men by the words of the philosophers, all must soar, and that legitimately, towards the conquest of material goods.

It is his dignity, it is his capacity as a man, it is his liberty, it is his independence, that the proletarian demands, when he aspires to possess material goods; for he knows that without these goods he is only an inferior, and that engaged, as he is, in the labors of the body, he partakes more of the condition of the domestic animals than that of man.

It is the same sentiment which pushes those who these goods to preserve them. Of course, we are not the apologists of the wealthy classes, we are with the people, and we will always be for the poor against the privileges of the wealthy; but we know that, whatever the softness and the egoism which reign in these classes, men absolutely corrupted and bad are the exception. In the present struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, that is of those who do not possess the instruments of labor against those who possess them, the bourgeoisie represents even, at first glance, more obviously than the proletarians, the sentiment of individuality and liberty. The wealthy possess that liberty, and they defend it, while the proletarians are so unhappy and so deprived of it, that a tyrant who promised to free them by enriching them could perhaps, in their ignorance, make of them for some time his slaves.

We find then good and legitimate that tendency of those who possess liberty and individuality to preserve it; but couldn't they find equally just and legitimate the demands of those who do not possess them, and want to?

There is, we say, the sense and the justification of that struggle for material goods, which seems, at first glance, the dominant character of our era, and which would dishonor it if one did not consider what it reveals, and if one had not studied the religious necessity scope of it. That demand for material goods is not at all immoral: very far from that, it is the result and the consequence of all the previous progress of Humanity.

Certainly, the philosophers who only hold as good, in human nature, the side of devotion, must find our era deplorable in all regards. For pure devotion, where will they find it? In their hearts, doubtless, and in the hearts of a certain number of generous men who take up the cause of the people. But society, viewed en masse, and in its truest aspect, did not meet their expectations. Devotion, as they sanctify it, they will find it neither in the wealthy classes nor among the poor, neither in the bourgeoisie nor among the proletarians. The first want to preserve, and the others to acquire: where is the devotion?

It is that pure devotion, however noble it may be, is only an individual passion, or, if you wish, a particular virtue of human nature, but is not human nature in its entirety. A man who, in all his life, will be posed from the standpoint of devotion, would be an insane being; and a society of men for whom the single rule would be devotion, and who would regard as bad every individual act, would be an absurd society. Thus, every theory which would found itself on devotion as on the most general formula of society, and who would deduce then from that expression some laws and institutions that is would have a hope of applying with force to society, would be false and dangerous.

But, on the contrary, a general principle which represents and expresses complete human nature, is the principle of liberty and individuality.

Our fathers put on their flag: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Let their motto still be our own. They did not conclude from I know not what social system to the individual; they did not say: Society must inevitably be organized in such and such a manner, and we are going to chain the citizen to that organization. They said: Society owes satisfaction to the individuality of all, it is the means of liberty for all.

The sentiment of liberty, as the Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution have felt and promulgated them, is an immense progress over the devotion or devoutness of Christianity, and it would be a regression to desire today to despotically organize society according to the particular views that one may have, instead of founding it on the principles of individuality and liberty.

Proclaim the system that will best satisfy the individuality and liberty of all, and do not fear that the devotion of the people would be lacking for you; for such an aim will be felt by all, and it is the only one which could excite devotion today. But devotion for its own sake would be as absurd a theory as the art for art's sake of certain litterateurs.

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(1) Jesus, in the Gospel, did not say, "My kingdom is not of this world; that was the bad translators who, by suppressing three words in one phrase of St. John, have made it say this. Jesus said literally, "My kingdom is not yet of these times." And as his kingdom, as it is explained in the same passage, is the reign of justice and truth, and as it adds that this kingdom will come on the earth, it follows that, very far from have prophesied that the principles of equality will never be realized on earth, Jesus on the contrary prophesied their realization, their reign, their arrival.

[continued in next post...]

Note: Thanks to buermann for the proofreading assist.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

New York, 1874: Claude Pelletier, who liked to sign his books backwards, was developing his system of Atercratie—anarchy by a name with none of the baggage of the original—in a series of French-language texts, drawing heavily on familiar figures like Proudhon and Pierre Leroux. His Socialist Soirees of New York lays out the basics of atercratie, but he also wrote a long play about the Hussites which included quite a bit of commentary on 19th century socialists. And he compiled one of the various socialist dictionaries which were produced in the period. The project of producing a political program by defining keywords is one with a long history. Daniel Colson's Petit lexique philosophique de l'anarchisme: de Proudhon à Deleuze is a modern example. The Belgian "rational socialists" produced a fascinating dictionary in which many of their critiques of Proudhon were incorporated into the definitions. There is something illuminating, and frequently delightful, in dipping into some potentially innocuous entry, and finding what deep political implications it raised for the compilers. This entry, from the single volume (Vol. 2) of Pelletier's dictionary that I have been able to track down, is fairly pedestrian stuff, compared to some entries, but is probably useful to those who have yet to encounter this particular form of political tome. Here, for you edification, is the definition of "quarry:"

QUARRY. Location dug in the ground, where on extracts by means of shafts and galleries, or even from a single level, stone, coal and other minerals, such as lead, copper, gold, silver, etc...

Today the quarries which should belong to the nation, are abandoned to capitalists who exploit them for their own personal interests; and their private interest drives them to convert them into a monopoly in order to reap enormous profits, by augmenting, as it says in the entry for MONOPOLIZATION, the sale price of their product, and reducing the wages of their workers. It follows that they become millionaires in a few years and that against the discomfort and misery into which they cast the laborers gives rise to strikes, jealousies, hatred, and recriminations which sooner or later lead to hateful disputes and bloody conflicts: witness the coal miners’ societies of Pennsylvania and the vengeances of the Molly-Maguires.

All this would not occur if we were willing to recognize that what nature has produced and given freely to all, should not be the exclusive property of a man or of a small society of capitalists.

It is said that many of the things have been discovered only because private interests were in play and that many quarries, shafts and mines would not have been exploited, if the companies had not obtained some advantages which come to reassure them a bit about the random threats to their capital.

This is true; but it is true only because industry and its transactions rest on private credit instead of revolving on a social credit, as described in the entries BANK, CAPITAL, CREDIT and others in this Dictionary.

As long as Societies do not furnish the instruments of labor and the substratum of the products to the citizens whose industrial function will be to extract or transform them, the natural riches of the globe, which are the patrimony of all, will belong to a few of the rich and will serve to separate the people into different classes. This is obvious.

The people will be happy and free only when the oligarchs of capital, the idlers, soldiers, priests, spies and other parasites have disappeared from our midst, not as a result of a violent revolution; but by that of a new economic arrangement of the productive forces of society.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.