Benjamin Tucker Quotes (1854-1939)

“Anarchism … may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.”

“We designate by the term "State" institutions that embody absolutism in its extreme form and institutions that temper it with more or less liberality. We apply the word alike to institutions that do nothing but aggress and to institutions that, besides aggressing, to some extent protect and defend. But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.”

“The idea that Anarchy can be inaugurated by force is as fallacious as the idea that it can be sustained by force. Force cannot preserve Anarchy; neither can it bring it.”

“We designate by the term "State" institutions that embody absolutism in its extreme form and institutions that temper it with more or less liberality. We apply the word alike to institutions that do nothing but aggress and to institutions that, besides aggressing, to some extent protect and defend. But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.”

“Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.”

“From the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century, Benjamin F. Tucker led the Individualists. Born into a prosperous Massachusetts family and educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tucker never quite managed to subdue his elitism. He began his anarchist career while in his teens, and in 1875, when he was twenty-one, became associate editor of The Word, Ezra Heywood's anarchist-feminist journal. In 1881 he founded Liberty, which quickly became the most important Individualist journal. Tucker derived his economic and political ideas principally from two sources: Josiah Warren and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon, the French printer whom all anarchists considered their intellectual father, developed an economic and social system that abolished government while it emphasized economic equality. Proudhon believed that such equality could be achieved only if individuals were left free to work out with each other the kinds of social and economic relationships most compatible with the autonomy of each. Josiah Warren was an American inventor who independently developed similar ideas. Warren spent most of his life devising social experiments in which his ideas could be tested, in the hope of proving that individuals could live together harmoniously without interference from the state...it was Tucker who brought their ideas together in Liberty and whose efforts attracted a solid core of followers and sympathizers.”

“Tucker opposed violent revolution and believed in the achievement of his goals by education: When all are rational egoists, none will submit to exploitation, and by passive resistance they will starve out the state and the monopolists.”