Demanding the Impossible. Peter Marshall
this verbal distinction is peculiar to English, most anarchists reject the Roman sense of libertas as popular government embodied in a republican constitution. Their principal concern is with freedom from external political authority. They do not accept like Locke that the State is necessary to protect individual liberty. They equally reject Rousseau’s notion of civil liberty in which one can be legitimately forced to obey the laws one makes for oneself. They have no truck with Hegel’s idealist definition of liberty as ‘necessity transfigured’ so that the individual somehow realizes his ‘higher self in obeying the law of the State.
On the contrary, anarchists believe that genuine freedom can only be achieved in a society without the State. They therefore embrace the traditional socialist freedoms such as freedom from want and insecurity as well as the liberal freedoms of expression, thought, assembly and movement. When they talk about economic freedom, they mean both the liberal sense of freedom from the economic controls of the State and the socialist sense of freedom from economic hardship. The alleged ‘freedom’ of the few on the other hand to exploit and to command is not a desirable form of freedom since it leads to oppression. They are thus the most coherent and consistent advocates of freedom.
Some anarchists have taken up Rabelais’ motto ‘Do what you will!’ Faure insists that ‘the man who does not do what he wants, only what pleases him and which suits him, is not free.’8 But few anarchists believe that one should do what one wants whatever the consequences. Elisée Reclus sees in anarchism the ‘right to act according to one’s own agreement, to do “what one wants”’, but adds immediately ‘while associating one’s will to those of other men in all collective works’.9 Similarly, Godwin makes a distinction between freedom and licence. He rejects the positive right to do as we please on the grounds that we have a permanent duty to contribute to general happiness. Freedom from constraint (except that of reasons presented to the understanding) is of the utmost importance, but ‘moral independence’ is always injurious.10 We should therefore be free from political constraints, not moral constraints. Godwin’s position resembles Spinoza’s description of a free man as one who lives according to the dictates of reason alone. Bakunin went even further to argue that the idea of absolute independence from natural law is a ‘wild absurdity’, the brainchild of metaphysicians: ‘absolutely self-sufficient freedom is to condemn oneself to nonexistence’.11 As with Marx and Engels, freedom for Bakunin involves control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on a knowledge of natural law.
Anarchists are not therefore immoralists asserting absolute freedom for themselves alone. They do not, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, believe that it is right to assert one’s independence whatever it may cost and wherever it may lead, or maintain that the greatest good is ‘one’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness …’12 To see freedom entirely in personal terms in this way would seem to justify the kind of self-assertion which leads to the oppression or exploitation of others.
Malatesta argued for instance that the simple desire to be free to do as one pleases is not enough to make an anarchist: ‘That aspiration towards unlimited freedom, if not tempered by a love for mankind and by the desire that all should enjoy equal freedom, may well create rebels who, if they are strong enough, soon become exploiters and tyrants, but never anarchists.”13 Malatesta believed that men are not naturally harmonious, and that living together in society involves a limitation on freedom since we must sacrifice desires which are irreconcilable with those of others. He called for freedom as the power to do as one wishes with the important proviso that it must be ‘freedom for everybody and in everything, with the only limit of the equal freedom for others’. 14
Even the most extreme individualist anarchist Max Stirner does not entirely reject morality and believes voluntary co-operation with other rational egoists desirable. While refusing to accept binding moral rules imposed from without, anarchists look to some form of morality to replace political authority. Kropotkin looked to our innate moral sense as a compass in a free society, and argued that moral principles should replace man-made laws as a guide to human conduct. Even the arch-individualist Benjamin Tucker insisted on a moral code, even if he did reduce the only moral law to ‘Mind your own business’.15
To adopt moral rules for oneself is not therefore inconsistent with anarchism. Government, with its laws, restricts our freedom by the threat of force, but if a person imposes rules on himself he is not being compelled but acting voluntarily. Freedom in the sense of government by reason is quite acceptable. As Tucker wrote: ‘If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny’.16 The idea of ruling oneself rather than being ruled by others is implicit in the anarchists’ advocacy of self-government and self-management. The whole thrust of the anarchist argument for social freedom is that the absence of laws would not lead to a state of moral chaos or disorder since people are capable of governing themselves.
Nevertheless, they do not accept that rational freedom in the sense of governing oneself through constraints imposed from within is enforceable in any way. It is not for the community to compel one to obey the general will; anarchists will have no truck with Rousseau’s pernicious paradox that it is possible to ‘be forced to be free’.17 On the other hand, they would accept Kant’s view of autonomy as self-imposed rules which have been freely chosen for oneself.
The anarchist stress on personal morality does not of course mean a commitment to past values. Kropotkin sees the value of age-old patterns of co-operation and mutual aid, but would like to combine them with a modern sense of individuality. Most anarchists call, like Nietzsche and Emma Goldman, for a transvaluation of values, a going beyond existing definitions of good and evil, to forge a new morality for a free society.18
While rejecting man-made laws, all the classic anarchist thinkers except Stirner recognize the force of natural law as a way of achieving social cohesion in the absence of government and man-made laws. Godwin believed that the universe was governed by universal laws and believed that truth is always victorious over error. He was convinced that morality is independent of positive institutions; that it is ‘immutably true’ that whatever tends to procure a balance of happiness and pleasure is to be desired.19 Proudhon too based his whole case for anarchy on the existence in nature and human nature of immanent justice which was revealed through his moral sense.
Bakunin presented himself as a ‘scientific’ anarchist and argued that natural law is the foundation of our liberty. He celebrated the liberty which consists in the full development of our potential. ‘the liberty which recognizes no other restrictions than those which are traced for us by the laws of our own nature’. But according to Bakunin these are no real restrictions since ‘these laws are not imposed on us by some outside legislator, beside us or above us; they are immanent in us, inherent, constituting the very basis of our being, material as well as intellectual and moral; instead, therefore, of finding them a limit, we must consider them as the real conditions and effective reason for our liberty.’20
Kropotkin, too, argued that anarchism should be based on the method of modern science. He believed the same laws governed nature and society, especially the law of sociability, which gave rise to a social instinct in animals and humanity and enabled them to survive in the struggle for existence and develop a moral sense. Although Malatesta criticizes the attempt to make anarchism ‘scientific’, since this would deny free will, he still recognized ‘the great law of solidarity, which predominates