Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (1980)

2

THE GOAL OF ANARCHISM: COMMUNAL INDIVIDUALITY

The perplexing conjunction in anarchist theory of praise for freedom and use of an at least somewhat coercive censure has received varied explanations. To embarrassed friends of anarchism, such as George Woodcock, this conjunction is an oversight. 'Anarchists accept much too uncritically the idea of an active public opinion.' They 'have given insufficient thought to the danger of. . . the frown of the man next door becoming as much a thing to fear as the sentence of the judge'. Had they looked more closely into censure, Woodcock here implies, they would never have endorsed it, because they would then have found it too appalling. Henri Arvon, more detached in his view of anarchists, explains their espousal of both freedom and public censure as a quirk. Anarchists are guilty of a 'strange gageure' in 'wishing to maintain individual autonomy while also imposing social discipline'. And the acerbic Marxist George Plekhanov, as part of his campaign to discredit anarchists, finds that in seeking liberty while using censure they are 'running away from an insurmountable logical difficulty'.1

These explanations for why anarchists espouse both liberty and a censure that is at least residually coercive, though plausible, are uninviting, because they impugn the integrity of anarchism as systematic thought. If any of them is valid, the conjunction by anarchists of praise for liberty with use of censure lacks theoretical support, for it cannot be warranted theoretically, as an oversight, a quirk, or a mistake. Before resorting to these discrediting explanations for the espousal by the anarchists of liberty and censure, the possibility of explaining it within the terms of their theory deserves to be explored. It is the thesis of this chapter that not freedom but community and individuality are the anarchists' chief goals and that these goals require censure. In an anarchist society, where these goals are realized, liberty is necessary, to be sure, but so is censure. Censure and liberty, rather than being unreconcilable opposites, work as complements to merge the goals of anarchism into a single complex value, which it is apt to call communal individuality.

THE NORMATIVE STATUS OF INDIVIDUALITY AND COMMUNITY IN ANARCHIST THOUGHT

Individuality as conceived by anarchists consists of traits of character that mark a well-developed self. Anarchists disagree about the marks of individuality and on whether it is generic or unique. For Godwin and Proudhon individuality is generically defined as traits of personality, such as rationality and emotional sensitivity, which are characteristic of all mankind.2 Bakunin shares this generic view of individuality, but he also sometimes sees it as personally defined, in a way more fully articulated by Kropotkin, who describes it as 'the full expansion. . . of what is original' in men, 'an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies'.3 The disagreement among anarchists concerning the particular marks of individuality means they do not all aim for the same specific kind. But since they all believe that individuality, however specified, involves growth of personality, there is no reason why, understood as self-development, it cannot be their aim.

The conceptions of community advanced by anarchists are just as various as their conceptions of individuality. For Godwin the model of a community is a conversation. For Proudhon and Bakunin it is a productive enterprise. Kropotkin's model of a community embraces not only productive enterprises, but every kind of cooperative association. The differences among these varied models of community are telling and cannot be ignored. They provide a basis for the scheme worked out in the next chapter for classifying anarchism into types. But the differences in the anarchists' conceptions of community must not obscure the similarities. Although the contexts in which anarchists see community as occurring are rather different, the relations they envisage among its members are much the same. Godwin describes the members of a community as engaged in a 'free and unrestrained opening of the soul', a 'reading of each other's minds'.4 Each member of a Proudhonian community 'recognizes his own self in that of others'.5 I cannot participate in the community Bakunin seeks without finding 'my personality reflected as if by numerous mirrors in the consciousness. . . of those who surround me'.6 And the member of Kropotkin's community is immersed in 'the perception of his oneness with each human being'.7 What these descriptions show about relations in an anarchist community is that they involve reciprocal awareness. Each member of such a community knows not only what the others think, but also that they know what he is thinking. Awareness in an anarchist community is reciprocal, because each understands his fellows as he understands himself.8 Just as the theme of self-development unifies the anarchists' various conceptions of individuality, so does the theme of reciprocal awareness unify their conceptions of community. It is just as impossible to claim that anarchists all seek a particular form of community as that they all seek a particular form of individuality. But since they share the belief that community involves reciprocal awareness, community conceived as such awareness can be their common goal.

Individuality and community, understood as self-development and reciprocal awareness, are not merely possible goals of anarchism. They, and not freedom, are the goals anarchists really seek. The easiest way to show this is by tracing the normative relationship in anarchist theory between individuality, community, and freedom. The warm praise that anarchists give freedom makes it seem their chief aim. But examination of their writings shows that they actually treat it as subordinate. Freedom is prized by anarchists more as a means to individuality and community than as a final end.

Godwin and Proudhon explicitly subordinate freedom to individuality. 'To be free is a circumstance of little value' for Godwin, 'without the magnanimity, energy and firmness', which he associates with individuality; 'liberty is chiefly valuable as a means to procure and perpetuate this temper of mind'.9 Freedom has the same subordinate place for Proudhon, since he too views it as an aid to self-development, rather than as an inherent good. 'I have not made liberty my motto, because liberty is an indefinite, absorbing force that may be crushed.' 'The function of liberty is to carry the individual beyond all influences, appetites and laws . . . to give him what might be called a supernatural character.'10 Bakunin and Kropotkin are less explicit about the normative relationship between freedom and individuality, but they certainly suggest that freedom is subordinate. Thus Bakunin praises liberty for enabling man to become 'his own creator', and Kropotkin portrays it as an historical source of 'individual originality'.11 Neither says explicitly that individuality has more value. But by consigning freedom to the status of a means to individuality, they imply that it has lesser worth.

Freedom is also subordinated by the anarchists to community. Thus, although Proudhonian anarchy is to provide 'all the liberty one could want', it must also furnish 'something more important than liberty: sincere and reciprocal enlightenment'.12 Bakunin likewise warns against giving freedom in an anarchy too high a place. It must not usurp 'the superior claim of solidarity, which is and will always remain the greatest source of social goods'.13 And Kropotkin follows his predecessors in requiring that 'the liberty of the individual' in a state of anarchy 'be limited by. . . the necessity, which everyone feels, of finding cooperation, support and sympathy among his neighbors'.14

Since individuality and community take precedence over freedom as the final destination of the anarchists, they cannot be called libertarians in the usual sense of seeking freedom above all else. While freedom might be maximized in their good society, this cannot be because such maximization is their main intention. But before investigating whether anarchists, despite their non-libertarian intention, maximize liberty nonetheless, an issue of internal coherence in their thought must be faced. By committing themselves equally to individuality and community, anarchists raise doubts whether their chief aims are consistent. For, lacking a principle to adjudicate between individuality and community, how can they judge situations where the courses these norms prescribe conflict?15

To meet this objection anarchists deny the possibility of conflict; they view each of their aims as dependent on the other for its full achievement. Bakunin, for example, thinks that 'the infinite diversity of individuals is the very cause, the principal basis, of their solidarity' and that solidarity serves in turn as 'the mother of individuality'.16 The other anarchists all more or less explicitly agree. For all of them communal awareness springs from developed individuality, and developed individuality depends in turn on a close-knit common life. For all of them, community and individuality, as they develop, intensify each other and coalesce.17

Anarchists do not merely assert that individuality and community are reinforcing; they give reasons for this claim. According to Godwin, individuality, in the form of mental independence, supports community by drawing people toward each other. It is 'the grand fascination, by which we lay hold of the hearts of our neighbors'.18 An intellectually independent person is more appealing than a person with conventional ideas. The attraction others feel for him moves them to learn what he is thinking and to reveal their own states of mind. In a society where individuality of Godwin's sort is well developed, awareness is thus reciprocal, and community prevails. Bakunin, whose view of individuality is less generic than Godwin's, offers a different reason why it supports community. Developed individuals, for Bakunin, are distinctive: each has some characteristic(s) the others lack. This diversity draws them into 'a collective whole, in which each completes the others and has need of them'.19 Being various in personality, developed individuals depend more on one another to satisfy their needs than do individuals with similar personalities. Their bonds of mutual dependence encourage developed individuals to explore each other's character and thus to experience communal awareness. Proudhon and Kropotkin make the same case for how individuality supports community, by appealing to the attraction and dependence among developed individuals as reasons why their mutual awareness is so intense.20 But Kropotkin also has a different argument. Among the marks of individuality that he mentions are 'social inclinations and instincts of solidarity'.21 Hence well-developed individuals, having sociable desires, are disposed toward communal existence. In the words of Marc Guyeau, admired by Kropotkin as 'unconsciously anarchist', such individuals 'live too much to live alone'. They harbor 'an expansive force, ever ready to break out of the narrow casing of the self'.22 The other side of the thesis that individuality and community are reinforcing is the claim that community supports individuality. Anarchists offer arguments for this aspect of their thesis too. One such argument, advanced by Kropotkin, is that reciprocal awareness is an element of individuality. Even so strong a personality as Goethe would have found that community enlarged his self. 'He would have lost none of his great personal poetry or philosophy', but he would 'have gained . . . a new aspect of the human genius. (Consider his joy in discovering mutual reliance!) His whole being and individuality having developed in this new direction . . . another string would have been added to his lyre.'23 If community would have added to Goethe's personality, it can certainly add to selves of less developed persons.

In arguing for community as a support for individuality, anarchists claim it not only as a constituent of the self, but also as a cause of the self's growth. Thus Godwin holds that the reciprocity of awareness in a community elicits mutual trust, and that this trust encourages the growth of intellect. Participants in a community are confident enough to 'compare their ideas, suggest their doubts, examine their mutual difficulties' openly, all of which improve their understanding.24 The reciprocity of awareness among members of a community is also seen by Godwin as causing emotional development. 'Emotions are scarcely ever thrilling and electrical, without something of social feeling.'25 Since such feeling is intense in a community, it encourages emotional life to flourish.

The arguments of the anarchists for viewing individuality and community as reinforcing may suffice to rebut the objection that these goals must conflict. But it is one thing to show the consistency of the anarchists in seeking communal individuality, and another to show that they design their good society to achieve it. The main thesis of this chapter, which now must be defended, is that the anarchists' commitment to communal individuality requires them to introduce into their good society the strange amalgam of censure and liberty that is so usually thought a scandal.

LIBERTY, CENSURE AND INDIVIDUALITY

Though anarchists do not aim for liberty above all else, it is important to them as a means for reaching the goals they do seek. Liberty plays an especially important part for anarchists as a means to individuality. Several of them comment generally on how liberty fosters individuality, but Godwin best explains its utility for this purpose.28 He points out that the intellectual independence associated by all anarchists with individuality requires freedom, being unachievable unless the thought and action of individuals are substantially unrestrained. Freedom is also needed to support the emotional element in individuality, which includes the capacity for strong and subtle feelings, and the will to express them. In an atmosphere of freedom 'the more delicate affections . . . have the time to expand themselves'.27 Moreover, we then strongly desire to express these feelings, not only because they are powerful, but because our freedom makes their expression safe. 'Our thoughts and words', not 'beset on every side with penalty and menace', can be openly communicated.28

Freedom is not the only condition identified by anarchists as encouraging individuality. They also stress the need for public censure: to stimulate self-consciousness, to enrich personality, and to direct emotions into channels that are strengthening to the self. Godwin offers the clearest argument for the claim, upheld by several anarchists, that public censure, by stimulating self-consciousness, encourages individuality. 'We have never a strong feeling' for our traits of character, 'except so far as they are confirmed to us by the suffrage of our neighbors'. If no one sets out deliberately to tell me what he thinks of my conduct, I will have a weak self-image, because our sense of self depends 'upon the consent of other human understandings sanctioning the judgment of our own'.29 Since I cannot be fully aware of myself as an individual without being subject to others' deliberate judgment, and since such judgment, if unfavorable, amounts to censure, censure is indispensable for individuality. No one can know himself completely as an individual unless he feels it.

The second way that censure supports individuality for the anarchists is by providing a rich store of the thoughts and feelings that are the materials from which the self develops. Persons subject to public censure encounter ideas and emotions with a vividness that they would miss in isolation, or even in a society where spontaneous social influence, rather than censure, prevails. These ideas and emotions are a mental treasure which they can draw on to enrich their personalities.30

The final and most subtle of the anarchists' arguments for the claim that censure encourages individuality concerns its effects on the emotions. Anarchists are anxious about the harm to self-development caused by uncontrolled emotions and believe that public censure can prevent it. A person unrestrained by social influence cannot be an individual, says Bakunin, because without its help 'he cannot subordinate his instincts and die movements of his body to the direction of his mind'.31 But social influence, whether spontaneous or deliberately applied as censure, is more than a restraint upon the passions, keeping them out of reason's way. Anyone affected by it, according to Proudhon, 'rids himself of his primitive savagery', to be sure. But he also develops his individuality. 'Without losing his animality, which he makes more delicate and beautiful, . . . he raises himself from a passion-ridden to a moral condition; . . . he enlarges his self, he augments and enlivens his faculties.'32 Social influence and public censure are thus viewed by anarchists as helping us to cultivate our feelings. They help us grow as individuals by releasing us from the grip of confining emotions which they redirect into channels nourishing to an independent self.

By arguing that censure as well as liberty is needed for individuality, the anarchists require their good society to make use of both. This requirement would not restrict freedom in a state of anarchy if censure could sufficiently encourage individuality by giving reasons. But censure cannot support individuality in the ways envisioned by the anarchists by means of reasoned argument alone. It cannot stimulate self-consciousness in the persons it affects without sometimes rebuking, and thus coercively hindering, their conduct. It cannot enrich their personalities or cultivate their emotions without coercively permeating their minds. Since censure must issue penalties and be internalized in order to promote the anarchists' kind of individuality, it is bound to diminish their kind of freedom. Censure curtails freedom in a state of anarchy in order to make individuality flourish.

LIBERTY, CENSURE AND COMMUNITY

Anarchists argue that censure must curtail liberty not only to maximize individuality, but also to maximize community. One way that censure supports community, in their view, is by opening the opportunity to enter other minds. Reciprocal awareness cannot occur among people who conceal their sentiments, because guarded minds are closed to public view. But since censure involves the frank disclosure of opinions, those who engage in it gain at least the chance for the access to one another's consciousness on which the possibility of reciprocal consciousness depends.33

But even among people who express their sentiments, reciprocal awareness may be lacking, because they express them partially, or imprecisely, or because others misinterpret what they say. In none of these cases is their awareness mutual, because others understand them differently from the way they understand themselves. Accuracy in the disclosure and interpretation of thoughts and feelings is thus crucial to the anarchists for achieving their communitarian ideal. Public censure is one means they rely on to secure these kinds of accuracy.

Since persons who censure one another express their opinions with unusual candor, they are remarkably able to note discrepancies between their own words and thoughts. Their awareness of these discrepancies not only helps correct them: it also makes them difficult to maintain. For the only way knowingly to maintain a difference between what one thinks and what one says is by deliberate deception, which calls for 'great mastery in the arts of ambiguity and evasion, and such a perfect command of countenance as shall prevent it from being an index to our real sentiments'.34 Such deception is always difficult. In a society which practices censure it is virtually impossible, because each member of such a society is under others' constant scrutiny. Nor is it likely that, in such a society, expressions of opinion will be misread. Since each can rely on others to communicate accurately, there is small need to interpret what they say. The confidence engendered among persons who treat each other honestly encourages community by making generally available an accurate expression of each individual's sentiments.

As for how liberty contributes to community, anarchists see it as both an indirect support, encouraging traits of character which in turn aid mutual awareness, and as a direct support. Rationality is perhaps the most salient of the character traits beneficial to community which anarchists, using the usual liberal arguments for free expression, see as nurtured by freedom. Their argument for how liberty directly supports community is less familiar. No matter how forthright I may wish to be, I cannot enter into relations of mutual awareness if my thought or (communicative) action is too restrained. For, to the extent that they are impeded, I am kept from knowing others' sentiments or expressing my own. Understanding this, anarchists value free expression not only as aiding rationality, but also on the ground, too often overlooked, that it opens the way to communal relations. Awareness tends to grow more mutual when people enjoy liberty to think and speak.35

But while anarchists see that freedom helps attain community, they also see that freedom, in order to help attain it, must be limited by censure. For if censure is to support community by opening minds and preventing deceit, it must interfere somewhat with freedom of expression. Thus the anarchists' perplexing espousal of both censure and freedom is explained as much by their desire for community as by their desire for individuality. Censure, for the anarchists, can foster neither of these objectives unless conjoined with freedom; and freedom can only foster them when censure is imposed on it as a restraint.

HOW FREE IS ANARCHY?

Once it is recognized that the anarchists' chief aim is communal individuality, the previously unsettled issue, whether anarchy or legal government is more liberating, can be resolved. For the fact that anarchists aim for communal individuality does more than explain why their good society makes use of censure: it also suggests how to measure, more accurately than before, how much this censure curtails freedom. In a full-fledged anarchist society, where communal individuality is complete, the censure needed to prevent misbehavior allows more freedom than legal government does, because individuality and community both reduce the need for censure that is coercive. It will be remembered that of the three ways in which anarchist censure controls behavior, only its sanctions and internalization coerce. Now the censure imposed in an anarchist society, while working partially through sanctions and internalization, can work for the most part through the noncoercive giving of reasons, because the individuality and community that characterize such a society make control by rational censure unusually effective.

All the anarchists defend some version of the thesis that a developed individual is more amenable to reasoned argument, and more cooperative, than a person whose individuality is weak. Godwin, for whom individuality consists mainly in 'exercising the powers of . . . understanding', must believe that it opens us to the sway of reason.36 What is less obvious is his belief that individuality fosters cooperation. A developed individual has 'a generous consciousness of [his] independence' which, far from isolating him, leads him to identify with others.37 The later anarchists accept Godwin's point about individuality being rational, but do not stress it, being more concerned to elaborate his hint that individuality stimulates cooperation. Proudhon, for instance, dwells on how a person's concern for others deepens as he grows more individual. Individuality is a 'feeling that overflows the self, and though intimate and immanent in our personality, seems to envelop it along with the personalities of all men'.38 Kropotkin only elaborates on Proudhon when he describes the strong individual as 'overflowing with emotional and intellectual energy'. If your self is well developed, 'you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others'.39 Thus anarchist individuals, being unusually rational and cooperative, can be more readily controlled without coercion than persons whose individuality is weak.

The reciprocal awareness among the members of an anarchy, as well as their individuality, explains why reasoned argument so effectively controls their conduct. Where community is lacking, control must be more coercive because it is then more difficult to concert action voluntarily. Each person, unaware of others' sentiments or of what they think of him, regards his neighbors with a distrust that provokes deception and kindles hatred.40 But where awareness is reciprocal, 'hatred would perish from a failure in its principal ingredient, the duplicity and impenetrableness of human actions'.41 Reciprocity of consciousness elicits reciprocity of trust, which tends to develop into reciprocal benevolence.42 The confidence and kindliness among members of an anarchist community encourage the same cooperative relations as their individuality. Being psychologically in touch with one another, participants in anarchy can regulate their conduct less with sanctions or internalization and more with reasons, than persons unconnected by communal ties.

Having examined the implications of the anarchists' objectives for the amount and type of censure in their regime, we can settle the issue left open in the previous chapter of whether anarchy or legal government is more liberating. The conclusion of that chapter was that anarchy is more liberating, if its censure is rational enough to compensate for the main sources of its greater coercion: the unpredictability of its sanctions and the interference of its internalization with thought. Now the burden of the analysis presented in this chapter is that the communal individuality which pervades anarchy diminishes the need to control behavior with unpredictable sanctions and internalized thought control. By engendering mutual trust, cooperative attitudes and susceptibility to arguments, it enables censure to achieve what little regulation of behavior is required mainly by giving reasons. Thus the individualizing communality of anarchist society makes it markedly freer than legal government, whose remote officials coerce more harshly with general, permanent laws.

This conclusion might be contested on the ground that legal government is perfectly compatible with individuality and community. Since these are the attributes that make anarchy more libertarian, a legal government that has them must be just as free.

If communal individuality under legal government could be as great as under anarchy, the claim that anarchy is more liberating might be false. But legal government suffers from disabilities which arrest communal individuality's growth. For one thing, it uses physical sanctions which, so far as they arouse more hostility and resentment than the psychological sanctions used by anarchy, impede the development of communal individuality more.43 The characterizing traits of legal government compound the difficulty of developing communal individuality in its jurisdiction. The remoteness of its officials and the permanence and generality of its controls cause it to treat its subjects as abstract strangers. Such treatment is the very opposite of the personal friendly treatment under which communal individuality best grows.

But it would be unfair to rest the case for the greater freedom of an anarchy on a comparison between a fully developed anarchist society and a deficient legal government. If the anarchist is allowed an ideal setting in which to test the coerciveness of censure, then law must be put to the test in an equally well-developed legal society, where strong individuality, harmonious communality and great amenability to reason also reign. It is because communal individuality is so complete in an ideal anarchy that it can rely on reasoned argument to the near exclusion of coercive internalization and rebuke. Why could not the law, in a similarly ideal legal society, replace physical coercion with reasoned argument to a similar extent?

If the control exercised by legal government was not incurably remote, permanent and general, perhaps it could do this. Its remoteness can certainly be appreciably diminished by increasing the proportion of officials to subjects and by bringing both groups into close contact. But since even officials who are intimate with their subjects must, in a legal government, control with laws, they are simply unable to enter very far into particularized face-to-face discussion with their subjects concerning the merit of specific acts. Legal government, to the extent that it gives reasons for obedience, addresses them to the merit of following its fixed, general rules. It argues that its dissenting subject, even if he deems a particular legally prescribed act harmful, should do it nonetheless, because of the value derived from its general performance. Since legal government is prevented by the inescapable generality and permanence of its controls from taking as much advantage as anarchy can of the potential offered by communal individuality for diminishing coercion through the giving of specific reasons, we must conclude that even when the two are compared on equally ideal grounds, anarchist society must be deemed more free.

Though the standard interpretation of the anarchists as libertarians is mistaken, it properly calls attention to the importance of freedom in their model of a good society. Where this interpretation goes wrong is in explaining freedom's importance for the anarchists as arising from its status as their chief value. The analysis of anarchist theory presented in this chapter shows how to make viewing it as libertarian acceptable. Though anarchists provide more freedom in their good society than legal government (the most promising alternative) provides, they do not set out to do so. They provide it, not as a pre-eminent good, but as a concomitant of the communal individuality that is their first concern. So long as freedom is recognized as being, for anarchists, a valued by-product of their search for communal individuality, there is no harm in describing them as libertarians. For their libertarianism then stands forth in its true light, as a libertarianism not of direct intention, but of oblique effect. Those who have followed William Proby in denouncing anarchists as freedom's secret enemies have been misguided, but not because freedom is the anarchists' most cherished good. Viewing anarchists as single-minded devotees of freedom is also erroneous. Anarchists are certainly not enemies of freedom, but their friendship is mediated and indirect.

This chapter has provided a general analysis of how anarchists think individuality and community are related. We have found their arguments persuasive for the claim that in an anarchy the reinforcing merger of these values maximizes freedom. But no general analysis can establish concretely how community and individuality merge for anarchists, because each anarchist would merge them somewhat differently. Hence the concreteness of anarchist theory, which, it will be remembered, is where it exceeds Marx's in promise, can only be appreciated through investigating the particular anarchists' diverse conceptions of this merger. Since each anarchist's conception is a modulated application of a general theory which all share, examining these conceptions will further clarify the structure of their thought. Learning how anarchists differ in their plans for communal individuality will give a more accurate grasp of their entire project.

Notes

1 George Woodcock, Anarchism (New York, 1962), pp. 84-5; Henri Arvon, L'anarchisme (Paris, 1968), p. 77; George Plekhanov, Anarchism and Socialism (Minneapolis, n.d.), pp. 51-2.

2 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Toronto, 1946), II, 500; Proudhon, De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l'Eglise (Paris, 1930-5). HI, 253.

3 Kropotkin, Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York, 1968), pp. 141, 123.

4 Godwin, Thoughts on Man (New York, 1969), p. 310.

5 Proudhon, Justice, I, 414.

6 Bakunin, OEuvres (Paris, 1895-1913), V, 321-2.

7 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (New York, 1925), p. 222.

8 Cf. Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston, 1968), pp. 180-5.

9 Godwin, Political Justice, I, 258-9.

10 Proudhon, Correspondance (Paris, 1874-5), XI, 301 (30 December 1861); Proudhon, Justice, III, 411.

11 Bakunin, OEuvres, III, 353; Kropotkin, Pamphlets, pp. 139, 167.

12 Proudhon, De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres (Paris, 1924), p. 155.

13 Bakunin, OEuvres, V, 149; cf. V, 187, where Bakunin says that independence which endangers solidarity is undesirable.

14 Kropodcin, Pamphlets, p. 63. Evidence that anarchists subordinate freedom to individuality and community does not prove unmistakably that the latter are their coequal overriding aims. They might rank others still higher. But since they do not say they do, since freedom is so often presumed to be their chief goal, and since they consider individuality and community to have greater worth, it is reasonable to say that they give them first place.

15 The problem of resolving the conflict, so troubling to anarchists, between "the claims of individuality and community is a version of the general problem in moral philosophy of how to relate the claims of the self to the claims of others. The anarchists' position on how to reconcile individuality and community might therefore be an alternative to more familiar views such as utilitarianism or Kantianism of how the conflict between self and others should be resolved. Examined from this perspective, which is not that of this book, anarchism might have value as a theory of ethics.

16 Bakunin, OEuvres, V, 150, 159; cf. IV, 385.

17 Godwin, Political Justice, II, 486; Proudhon, Justice, I, 304-5, 421, III, 253, IV, 302, Capacite, p. 222; Kropotkin, Pamphlets, pp. 5, 96, 141; Kropotkin, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. Martin Miller (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 297.

18 Godwin, Political Justice, I, 356.

19 Bakunin, OEuvres, V, 150; cf. Proudhon, Justice, IV, 264.

20 Proudhon, Justice, III, 253; Kropotkin, Selected Writings, p. 297.

21 Kropotkin, La science moderne et l'anarchie (Paris, 1913), p. 332.

22 Marc Guyeau, Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction (Paris, 1893), pp. 96, 98. See Kropotkin, Pamphlets, p. 108, for Kropotkin's judgment on Guyeau.

23 Deny Novak, 'Une lettre inedite de Pierre Kropotkine a Max Nettlau', International Review of Social History, 9 (1964), p. 274.

24 Godwin, Political Justice, II, 295; cf., II, 505.

25 Ibid., I, 311; cf. Kropoddn, Pamphlets, p. 96.

26 Bakunin, OEuvres, III, 235, 253, IV, 248; Proudhon, Justice, III, 253; Godwin, Political Justice, II, 409.

27 Godwin, Political Justice, II, 486.

28 Ibid., II, 216.

29 Ibid., I, 329-30; cf. Proudhon, Justice, IV, 366; Bakunin, OEuvres, I, 181, 277, V, 321. I would still have some self-image since, as indicated earlier (cf. ch. 1, p. 16), spontaneous social pressure, not deliberate censure, suffices to create a self.

30 Proudhon, 'Cours d'economie politique', 1-12(4) unpublished manuscript. Reference to the page number is assigned to the manuscript by Pierre Haubtmann in his unpublished thesis 'La philosophic sociale de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon' (Faculte des lettres et des sciences humaines de Paris, 1961); Bakunin, OEuvres, I, 290.

31 Bakunin, OEuvres, I, 278.

32 Proudhon, 'Cours', 1-7(6). It must be admitted that this part of their argument fails to show that individuality is best supported by deliberate censure as contrasted with spontaneous social pressure.

33 Godwin, Political Justice, II, 273-4; Kropotkin, Pamphlets, p. 137.

34 Godwin, Political Justice, I, 340.

35 Ibid., II, 497.

36 Ibid., II, 500.

37 Ibid., I, 137.

38 Proudhon, Justice, III, 175, cf. I, 316, 395, 423, IV, 264.

39 Kropotkin, Pamphlets, p. 109.

40 Godwin, Political Justice, I, 333; Kropotkin, Pamphlets, p. 140.

41 Godwin, Political Justice, I, 335.

42 Kropotkin, Pamphlets, pp. 53, 95.

43 Godwin, Political Justice, I, 179-80, II, 340-1, 374; Proudhon, Justice, IV, 371.