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The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 sparked off one of the greatest political debates in British history. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) fell as a bombshell amongst radicals like Thomas Paine, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake. Wollstonecraft made one of the first replies to Burke, in her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and then went on to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which established her reputation as the first great feminist. She made a powerful plea that mind has no gender and that women should become independent and educated beings. But although she attacked hereditary distinctions and economic inequality, she still looked to a reformed government to protect natural rights.
Paine also used the language of natural rights in his celebrated Rights of Man (1791–2), but his libertarian sensibility took him to the borders of anarchism. The son of a Quaker staymaker of Thetford, Norfolk, he had tried his trade in London before becoming an excise-man in Lewes, Sussex. His Quaker background undoubtedly encouraged his plain style and egalitarian sentiments, as well as his confidence in the ‘inner light’ of reason and conscience to lead him to truth and virtue. He liked to boast that ‘I neither read books, nor studied other people’s opinions. I thought for myself.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He believed that man was fundamentally good, and saw the world as a garden for enjoyment rather than as a valley of tears. Above all, he valued personal liberty: ‘Independence is my happiness,’ he wrote in his maturity, ‘and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’
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Paine was a man of his industrial age. He adopted Newton’s view of the world as a machine governed by universal laws. Applying the same analytical method to society and nature, he felt that both could be refashioned according to reason. Just as he spent many years designing an iron bridge, so he tried to redesign society on the same simple and rational principles. He was a mechanical and social engineer: ‘What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers’, he wrote, ‘may be applied to Reason and Liberty: “Had me”, he said, “a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.”’
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Dismissed from service in Lewes, Paine decided to try his luck in the American colonies. On his arrival, he rapidly threw himself into the social and political struggles of the day. He wrote articles in a direct and robust style which advocated female emancipation and condemned African slavery and cruelty to animals. In 1775, he called eloquently for an end to the legal and social discrimination against women:
Even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy [women are] constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods; robbed of freedom and will by the laws; slaves of opinion which rules them with absolute sway and construes the slightest appearances into guilt; surrounded on all sides by judges who are at once tyrants and their seducers … for even with changes in attitudes and laws, deeply engrained and oppressing social prejudices remain which confront women minute by minute, day by day.
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It was however only in the following year that Paine came to prominence with his pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the first work to argue for the complete independence of the thirteen colonies from England. He advocated a people’s war to throw off the English yoke and hoped America would become a land of freedom, thereby offering an inspiration to the peoples living under European tyrannies. His internationalism and love of freedom come across in his rousing call:
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyrrany, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is over-run with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her.—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
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The experience of the American Revolution had a marked effect on Paine. He was deeply impressed by the orderly nature and decorum of American society after the dissolution of the colonial government before the establishment of a new constitution. In his famous opening to Common Sense, Paine like later anarchists distinguished between society and government. He felt that they are not only different, but have different origins:
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worse state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver.
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But despite the example of the American colonists organizing their own affairs peacefully without government, Paine believed that it was necessary for the people to make a social contract in order to set up a minimal government on the secure basis of a constitution which would guarantee the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
After the successful outcome of the American War of Independence, Paine returned to England with hopes of building his iron bridge. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 renewed his revolutionary fervour and Burke’s apostasy led him to write his Rights of Man. It was, he recognized, ‘an age of Revolutions, in which every-thing may be looked for’.
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Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, had maintained that government and society are complex, fragile and organic entities based on the wisdom of ancestors and could only be interfered with at great peril. He dismissed the ‘clumsy subtlety’ of a priori political theorizing (which he had indulged in boldly in his Vindication) and suggested that if scholars no longer enjoyed the patronage of the nobility and clergy, learning would be ‘trodden down under the hoofs of the swinish multitude’.
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Paine spoke on behalf of and to the ‘swinish multitude’, rejecting Burke’s apology for ‘the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was not a particularly original thinker and adopted the liberal commonplaces of eighteenth-century political theory developed from Locke. But he developed them in a more libertarian and democratic direction. If what he said was not particularly new, how he said it undoubtedly was. Where the accepted language of political discourse was elegant and refined, Paine chose to write in a direct, robust, and simple style which all educated working people could understand. He refused to be ‘immured in the Bastille of a word’ and threatened the dominant culture by his style as well as the ruling powers by his arguments.
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The First Part of the Rights of Man principally consists of a history of the French Revolution and of a comparison between the French and British constitutions. Paine is mainly concerned here to assert the rights of man against arbitrary and hereditary power. He bases his doctrine of natural rights on the alleged original equality and unity of humanity and argues that they include ‘intellectual rights’ and ‘all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But Paine suggests like Locke that in the state of nature the individual does not have the power to enjoy these rights in security. He therefore recommends that individuals deposit their natural rights in the ‘common stock’ of civil society and set up a government which will protect them. The government itself has no rights as such and must be considered only as a delegated ‘trust’ which the citizens can always dissolve or resume for themselves. The only authority on which a government has a right to exist is on the authority of the people. The end of government is to ensure ‘the good of all’ or ‘general happiness’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As for engendering the Church with the State, as Burke recommended, Paine dismisses such a connection as ‘a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying and not of breeding up’.
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While these arguments were part of the common eighteenth-century liberal defence of government, in Part II of the Rights of Man Paine broke new theoretical ground which brought him to the verge of anarchism. At the end of Part I he acknowledged: ‘Man is not the enemy of Man, but through the medium of a false system of government.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He now returns to his distinction between society and government made at the opening of Common Sense and insists that:
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of a civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connexion which holds it together … Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.
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In a Rousseauist vein, Paine further maintains that man is naturally good but depraved by governments: ‘man, were he not corrupted by governments, is naturally the friend of man.’ Human nature therefore is not itself vicious.
Not only is a great part of what is called government ‘mere imposition’, but everything that governments can usefully do has been performed by the common consent of society without government. Indeed, ‘The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Looking back on the riots and tumult in English history, Paine argued, like modern anarchists, that they had not proceeded from ‘the want of government, but that government was itself the generating cause; instead of consolidating society it divided it … and engendered discontents which otherwise would not have existed.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But Paine does not look backward to some mythical golden age of social harmony, rather forward to a more civilized society. He suggests as a general principle that ‘the more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Since all the great laws of society are laws of nature, it follows for Paine that civilized life requires few laws.
But unlike his contemporary William Godwin, Paine did not carry his bold reasoning to the anarchist conclusion that government is always an unnecessary evil. He felt as long as the natural wants of man were greater than his individual powers government would be necessary to ensure freedom and security. He therefore proposed a minimal government – no more than a ‘national association’—with a few general laws to protect the natural rights of man. Its end is limited and simple, to secure ‘the good of all, as well individually as collectively’. Paine had a definite preference for republican and representative government based on majority rule, and he wished to anchor it firmly in a constitution. He even praised the American Constitution as ‘the political bible of the state’.
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By calling on the British people to follow the American and French to form a new social contract and set up a limited government based on a constitution, Paine ultimately departs from the anarchist tradition. At the end of the Rights of Man, he even gives a distributive role to government by proposing that it helps to educate the young and support the old through a progressive inheritance tax.
While Paine has been called the father of English socialism, he was in fact a staunch advocate of business enterprise: universal and free commerce would extirpate war. He never advocated economic equality and thought private property would always remain unequal. His capitalist way of thinking led him to defend representative government in terms of a limited company with citizen shareholders: ‘Every man is a proprietor in government, and considers it a necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest, because it affects his property.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In his last major work, Agrarian Justice (1797), he did not call, like his contemporary Thomas Spence, for the nationalization and common ownership of land but for a society of small landowners to be achieved through a land tax of ten per cent. Paine’s final vision was of a representative and republican democracy of independent property owners in which every citizen has an equal opportunity to develop his talents.
Paine developed liberal theory to the threshold of anarchism but he did not cross over. In fact, he was the greatest spokesman for bourgeois radicalism, exhorting the rising middle class to take over the State from the monarchy and aristocracy. But, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, he recognized the ability of people to govern themselves and thereby contributed to the pool of ideas and values out of which anarchism and socialism were to spring.
PART THREE Great Libertarians (#ulink_a190890b-6084-5898-8594-7ff488bbdfc9)
Government is begotten of aggression, by aggression.
HERBERT SPENCER
I call it the State where everyone, good or bad, is a poison-drinker: the State where universal slow suicide is called – life.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
That government is best which governs not at all.
HENRY THOREAU
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
OSCAR WILDE
11 French Libertarians (#ulink_3c69a305-424d-5efc-a9b8-a64ba8011850)
IN FRANCE THE DIFFERENCE between libertarian and anarchist was not clearly defined and the terms were often used interchangeably. De Sade and Fourier were both libertarian in the sense that they wished to expand human freedom, but they were not always anarchist in wanting to abolish the State completely. De Sade for a time during the French Revolution entertained the idea of a society without law, although in the end called for a minimal State. Fourier was one of the most original Utopian thinkers of the nineteenth century and his vision of a free society inspired many later anarchists and anticipated social ecology.
Marquis de Sade
The spirit of free enquiry sparked off by the Enlightenment led to increasingly bold questioning of existing social and moral laws in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The boldest thinker of them all was the Marquis de Sade. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade of course is remembered for his perversity, and sadism is associated with an abnormal pleasure in cruelty. In fact, the picture of de Sade as a monster is largely the work of prudish and puritanical moralists who have never read his books. The imaginary portraits of de Sade as a dashing Casanova are as inaccurate as his reputation: he was a plump little man with fair hair, blue eyes and a tiny mouth.
De Sade’s writings were denied official publication by the French courts as late as 1957 and are still not widely available. This is unfortunate, for de Sade was not only an arch-rebel but a highly original thinker. His contribution to an understanding of sexual psychopathology is well-known; less recognized is his importance as a social philosopher. Poets have most appreciated his libertarian genius: Swinburne called him ‘That illustrious and ill-requited benefactor of humanity’, while Apollinaire declared that he was ‘the freest spirit that has yet existed’.
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De Sade knew of the tyranny of men at first hand, both from within himself and from others. After completing a Jesuit education, which endowed him with a lifelong hatred of religion, he acquired various military ranks and served in the Seven Years’ War. The experience made him a staunch opponent to offensive war. After his marriage at twenty-three in the presence of the King and Queen and most of the higher members of the Court, his sexual escapades landed him in prison in 1778.
Although de Sade conscientiously explored all imaginable extensions of sexual pleasure, his known behaviour (which includes only the beating of a housemaid and an orgy with several prostitutes) departs greatly from the clinical picture of active sadism.
(#litres_trial_promo) From 1778, with no legal charge brought against him, de Sade spent all but ten of the remaining thirty-seven years of his life in close confinement. In prison, he drew on his experiences to write in earnest, partly in self-justification, partly in wish-fulfilment. Throughout this time, his wife supported him with courage and devotion.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution, de Sade had been held for five years in the notorious ‘Tour de la Liberté’ of the Bastille. One of seven prisoners left, he was removed eleven days before the people of Paris stormed it. The Constituent Assembly released him on Good Friday in 1790. The relative freedom of the press at the time enabled him to publish the following year Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu which had been written in 1788.
De Sade actively supported the republicans, and served in the revolutionary ‘Section des Piques’ and was elected president of his group. In 1792, he wrote a pamphlet entitled Idée sur la mode de la sanction des loix which proposed that all laws brought forward by the representatives should be directly voted on by the populace at large. His proposal was based on his awareness of the ability of power to corrupt: ‘I have studied men and I know them; I know the difficulties that they make in giving up any power that is granted to them, and that nothing is more difficult than to establish limits to delegate power.’
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In 1791, de Sade wrote An Address of a Citizen of Paris to the King of France, calling on Louis XVI to respect the powers entrusted to him by men who are ‘free and equal according to the laws of Nature’. Ironically, the republican de Sade was arrested again for his alleged royalist sympathies. He was released after the fall of Robespierre in 1794. During the following seven years of freedom, he published in 1797 the ten volumes of his bomb-shell La Nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu suivie de l’histoire de Juliette sa soeur. He was rearrested in 1801 and Napoleon’s ministers had all the copies that could be found destroyed. No authoritarian government could allow the exposures of the mechanisms of despotism contained in them and de Sade was confined to an asylum for the rest of his life. A quarter of his entire output, ranging from plays to short stories were burnt during Napoleon’s rule.
Although de Sade has been remembered for his erotica, he appears in his writings more preoccupied with religion than sex. Indeed, far from being an amoralist, he was not only obsessed by moral issues but had a powerful conscience. He called honour ‘man’s guiding rein’. He had a profound and continuous awareness of the difference between good and evil, had no delusions about the ‘roses and raptures of vice’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like Blake and Nietzsche, he wanted to go beyond existing definitions of good and evil and to forge his own ethical code. And like the philosophes, he tried to follow nature, arguing that the experience of pleasure is a sign that we are acting in accordance with our own nature and nature as a whole: ‘All acts which give pleasure … must be natural and right.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He who abandons himself most to the promptings of nature will also be the happiest. In this sense, de Sade was a consistent hedonist.
In his metaphysics, de Sade was a militant atheist and philosophical materialist, completely opposed to the tyranny of the Church and the repressive nature of Christian doctrine. The Christian God, with his threat of divine retribution, is for de Sade too immoral and base to be acceptable. In place of God, he puts Nature as the prime mover of the universe.
The attributes of nature are not entirely clear in de Sade’s writing. At first nature appears as a beneficent force: the law of nature is interpreted as ‘Make others as happy as you wish to be yourself.’ But gradually in his work, nature begins to turn into a sort of malevolent goddess – a ‘cruel stepmother’—so that the law of nature degenerates into: ‘Please yourself, no matter at whose expense.’
(#litres_trial_promo) De Sade eventually came to believe that nature is fundamentally destructive (its sole object in creation is to have the pleasure of destruction) and proceeds by corruption. It follows that by satisfying his destructive instincts man is following nature. This is the metaphysical and moral foundation of sadism: if making others feel pain gives pleasure, it is natural and right. To be moral in the conventional sense is to oppose nature; existing virtue is therefore unnatural and the result of a false education.
In his politics, de Sade challenged the fundamental premisses of European civilization. He had a very low opinion of politics; it is a ‘science born of falsehood and ambition’ which teaches ‘men to deceive their equals without being deceived themselves’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In every book, he stresses that society is divided into two antagonistic classes founded on property. Anticipating Proudhon, he defines property as ‘a crime committed by the rich against the poor’. The origin of the right of property is in usurpation: ‘the right is in origin itself a theft, so that the law punishes theft because it attacks theft’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Speaking from direct experience, de Sade knew that the lawcourts only dispense justice in favour of the wealthy: ‘The laws of a people are never anything but the mass and the result of the interests of the legislators.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As for war between nations, it is simply authorized murder in which hired men slaughter one another in the interests of tyrants: ‘The sword is the weapon of him who is in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and stupidity.’
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In place of the existing class-ridden and unjust society, de Sade proposed several alternatives at different stages in his life. Before the outbreak of the French Revolution, in the second volume of Aline et Valcour, written in 1788 and published in 1795, he depicted a Utopia in the city of Tamoe in the South Seas. The king Zamé had as a young man visited Europe and found that the greatest causes of misery were private property, class distinctions, religion and family life. He therefore chooses to avoid these ills by making the State control manufacture and employ all the people. All have equal commodities and comforts, and there is no prison or death penalty.
After witnessing the rise to power of Robespierre, the strengthening of the French State, and the Terror which followed, de Sade had second thoughts about the beneficial role of the State in society. In Juliette, written in 1794 and published in 1797, he tackled the question of government and law head on and concluded that anarchy is best. In a conversation between two Italians, one interlocutor rejects the social contract a la Rousseau since it serves only the general will but not particular interests. He goes on to reject the restraint of law:
Let us convince ourselves once and for all that laws are merely useless and dangerous; their only object is to multiply crimes or to allow them to be committed with impunity on account of the secrecy they necessitate. Without laws and religions it is impossible to imagine the degree of glory and grandeur human knowledge would have attained by now; the way these base restraints have retarded progress is unbelievable; and that is the sole service they have rendered to man.
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The passions, he maintains, have done more good to mankind than laws. Indeed, individuals who are not animated by strong passions are merely mediocre beings: ‘Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.’ We should therefore do away with laws: if man returns to a state of nature, he would be far happier than is possible under the ‘ridiculous yoke’ of the law. There is absolutely no need for laws to obtain justice, for nature has given man the instinct and necessary force to get justice for himself. The universal law which nature imprints in every heart is ‘to satisfy ourselves to refuse our passions nothing, whatever the cost to others’. If this means oppressing another, the oppressed would have the right to revenge himself, and could check the oppressor. As a result, ‘I have far less reason to fear my neighbour’s passion than the law’s injustice.’ Anarchy therefore has nothing to do with despotism and is best:
Tyrants are never born in anarchy, you only see them raise themselves up in the shadow of the laws or get authority from them. The reign of laws is therefore vicious and inferior to anarchy; the strongest proof of my proposition is the necessity a government finds itself in to plunge itself into anarchy when it wishes to remake its constitution.
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In the last volume of Juliette, the theme is taken up again at length and another Italian declares: ‘Give man back to Nature; she will lead him far better than your laws.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It is the conclusion towards which the most daring thinkers of the Enlightenment were groping.
De Sade did not however leave it at that. Conscious of the immediate practical task of remaking French society, and concerned at the authoritarian direction the French Revolution was taking, he include in his Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) a long address entitled Frenchmen, a further effort if you wish to be Republicans! It offers a political programme for a ‘free State’; a State which he would like to keep to a minimum. As such it is a synthesis of his two earlier positions.
The address continues to reject religion completely. De Sade calls on his fellow countrymen to replace the ‘theistic follies’ introduced by the ‘infamous Robespierre’ with social precepts to be taught by a system of national education. Although he would give the State this task to perform it still would have little power as a legal order. A new society would develop new morals and in a State based on liberty and equality there would be practically no crimes to be punished. The laws which might remain should be ‘so element and so few that all men whatever their character can comply with them’.
(#litres_trial_promo) At a time when the French government had just pronounced the respect of private property, de Sade maintained that there should only be a law which punishes not the robber but the man who is careless enough to let himself be robbed.
De Sade always insisted that crimes are committed out of want or passion, and the best way to avoid them is to eradicate the interest in breaking the law. As for those who commit crime because it is a crime, one should try and win them by kindness and honour. Above all, the death penalty should be abolished forever. Although murder is a horror, de Sade recognized that some killing may be necessary to defend a country and as such should be tolerated in a republic. As a crime of passion, however, it should not be revenged by another judicial murder.
As for those crimes motivated by lust (including rape, sodomy and incest), de Sade suggests that the ‘it is less a question of repressing this passion in ourselves than in regulating the means by which it can be satisfied in peace.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He therefore recommends public brothels where people can satisfy their wishes to command and be obeyed. To avoid public disorder, de Sade advocates unbridled promiscuity: ‘give free play to these tyrannous desires, which despite himself torment him [man] ceaselessly’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The satisfaction of physical love as a natural passion should not be bound by marriage bonds, false modesty or even that love – called the ‘madness of the soul’—which is selfish and exclusive.
(#litres_trial_promo) And consistent with his doctrine of complete equality, de Sade insists that women should have the equal opportunity and the same licence as men to satisfy their own desires:
no act of possession can ever be exercised on a free person; it is as unjust to possess a woman exclusively as it is to possess slaves; all humans are born free and with equal rights; let us never forget that; consequently no sex can have a legitimate right to the exclusive possession of another, and no sex or class can possess the other exclusively.
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De Sade’s attitude to sex has often been misunderstood. He was the first to recognize the overwhelming importance of sex: ‘Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, it lends strength to them all.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But sadism is not merely a branch of sex. It has been defined more broadly as ‘the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The crucial point is that the action is willed and that any act which produces visible and audible changes in another has a component of sexual pleasure. It so happens that for de Sade pleasure tends to be pain diminished, and pain is the absolute. It is easier to affect people by pain than pleasure, by destruction than creation, but this does not mean that constructive sadistic pleasure is not possible. And while he shows that the object of power is pleasure (which consists in applying sanctions to those in one’s control), de Sade’s egalitarian morality made him see all those who seek or acquire such power as evil.
Having witnessed the excesses of the nobles before the French Revolution and the Terror of the revolutionaries, he was fully aware of the desire for domination in human beings and wanted it to be channelled into sexual activity rather than cause social havoc. It is extremely difficult to follow de Sade in his fantasies of torture, murder and arson but at least he had the courage and frankness to recognize the existence of such desires and tried to sublimate them. Both the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet have acknowledged positively the cathartic function of the sexual cruelty described by de Sade.
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