Men Against the State

Oscar B. Johannsen

[Reprinted from Fragments, Spring, 1995]

As the American State gains greater power over the individual, and as the invasion of personal rights grows ever more irritating, people are becoming increasingly restive over this cancerous growth. Too much of the tradition of freedom still motivates Americans for them not to react to the oppressive hand of Big Government as it invades business, and social and personal life. If nothing else, the alphabetical agencies which have been spawned have become so obnoxious that it was inevitable mat a reaction would ensue. The youthful libertarian movement is but one manifestation of this reaction, and the growing resistance by business to the red tape of regulatory agencies is another.

Seeking means to combat this menace of monolithic government, the literati among the populace are apt to turn to America's 19th Century literary giant, Henry Thoreau, inasmuch as his "Civil Disobedience" was and is today a clarion call for the individual to stand up to the State.

But an important segment of the people, particularly among the young, whether they are aware of it or not, have greater empathy with other 19th Century American anti-statists who were more outspoken than Thoreau. Possibly without realizing it, many of the young antistatists are echoing the thinking of such American radicals of the 19th Century as Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin R. Tucker, and others not quite so well known. The people of this group, who have been characterized as individualist anarchists, come to life in Dr. James J. Martin's scholarly monograph, Men Against the State. This work should be read by all anti-statists, for it points up not only the fallacies but the wisdom of much of the thinking of these radicals.

These 19th Century anarchists were not the bomb-throwing crackpots usually associated in the minds of people when anarchism is mentioned. On the contrary, they were highly intelligent and socially motivated individuals who abhorred violence, just as the typical young libertarian of today does.

The philosophy which they espoused was a belief in the ability of men to establish a non-coercive, voluntary cooperative society. Possibly Benjamin R. Tucker summed up the abstract details of this philosophy in his anti-statist remedy: "Free access to the world of matter, abolishing land monopoly: free access to the world of mind, abolishing idea monopoly; free access to an untaxed and unprivileged market, abolishing tariff monopoly and money monopoly, - secure these, and all the rest shall be added unto you. For liberty is the remedy of every social evil, and to Anarchy the world must look at last for any enduring guarantee of social order."

Much of this is essentially the thinking implicit in present-day thought of young libertarians. So, if this is anarchism, these young people are anarchists at heart, but probably would recoil from being so labeled, for the word "anarchist," as everyone knows, has attained an unenviable, pejorative connotation.

For the most part, the 19th Century anti-statists had no definitive picture of the type of society or the social organizations which would evolve in a stateless society. Their efforts were primarily devoted to exposing the fallacies of governmental interventions then existing and attempting to influence the masses by showing the superiority of a non-coercive society. In essence, their argument was mat most of the social problems which existed were caused by the State, and that its reduction or elimination would mean the elimination or at least the reduction of these problems. They fought the growing Institutionalism of their day, and championed individual initiative.

A similarity which is quite striking appears in the writings and activities of the anti-statists of this generation, for they are primarily devoted to attacking Big Government. The assumption is mat the elimination of such interference would result in a society in which the individual would be best able to attain his maximum potential, if he so desired. What type of society might ensue is not too often alluded to, although David Friedman, son of the Nobel prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, in The Machinery of Freedom, does give some indication of what he believes would evolve.

If today's libertarian thinkers are finding themselves, in effect, redoing the work of their 19th Century forbears, a question naturally arises: Why were these older radicals so unsuccessful; for the State is now greater and more obnoxious than in their day?

No doubt, any number of apologies might be offered. But to this writer, the principal reason is the faulty economic underpinning of most of their work. Many of them evolved unsound economic and monetary theories, such as Lysander Spooner's mortgage-backed currency. As with most of today's libertarian thinkers, they were most adept in criticizing the invasion of privacy and in decrying the loss of freedom. But practical economic policies seem to elude them.

In particular, while they recognized the necessity of land being freely accessible, even so astute a student of the land problem as Joshua K. Ingalls did not come up with a workable solution. Instead of seeing in Henry George's work an answer to this problem, they attacked George, for they feared that his solution would increase rather than decrease the power of the State.

It is to be hoped that today's Men Against the State will not make the mistake of their anarchistic ancestors. Instead, if they will acquire that fundamental knowledge of man's relationship to the land and the practical answer required in modern society to enhance that relationship, the possibility exists that success, rather than failure, will crown the efforts of this generation of antistatists.