[1333] “The anarchists want to see free unions established, resting upon mutual affection and based upon respect for one’s self and for the dignity of others. And in that sense, in their desire to show respect and affection for all the members of the association, they are inimical to the family,” (Élisée Reclus, loc. cit., pp. 145-146.)
[1334] Der Einzige, p. 229.
[1335] Cf. Idée générale de la Révolution, p. 281, and p. 342: “Revolution follows revelation. Reason aided by experience reveals to us the nature of the laws which govern society as well as nature, and which in both cases are simply the laws of necessity. They are neither made by man nor imposed by his authority. They have only been discovered step by step, which is a proof of their independent existence. By obeying them a man becomes just and noble. Violation of them constitutes injustice and sin. I can suggest no other motive for human actions.”
[1336] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. iii, p. 51.
[1337] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. iii, p. 55.
[1338] “In general we may say that man’s general life is almost entirely governed by what we call good sense.” (Ibid., vol. iii, p. 50.)
[1339] Ibid., vol. iii, p. 51.
[1340] La Société future, p. 303.
[1341] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. i, pp. 286, 298, 277.
[1342] Bakunin on his death-bed confessed to his friend Reichel that “all his philosophy had been built upon a false foundation. All was vitiated because he had begun by taking man as an individual, whereas he is really a member of a collective whole” (quoted by Guillaume, Œuvres, preface to vol. ii, p. 60). In his Philosophie du Progrès (Œuvres, vol. xx, pp. 36-38) Proudhon writes as follows: “All that reason knows and maintains is that the individual, like an idea, is really a group. All existence is in groups, and whatever forms a group also forms a unit, and consequently becomes perceptible and is then said to exist. In accordance with this general conception of being, I think it possible to prove the existence of positive reality and up to a certain point to demonstrate the laws of the social being or of the humanitarian group, and to establish a proof of the existence of an individuality superior to collective man and still quite other and different from his individual self.” The same idea frequently comes up in different connections, e.g., in the Petit Catéchisme politique at the end of vol. i of La Justice dans la Révolution, and in Idée générale de la Révolution.
Kropotkin thinks that man has always lived in society of one kind or another. “As far back as we can go in the palæo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies, in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals.” (Mutual Aid, p. 80). “Man did not create society; society is older than man.” (The State, its Historic Rôle, p. 6; London, 1898.) Jean Grave, on the other hand, thinks that “the individual was prior to society. Destroy the individual, and there will be nothing left of society. Let the association be dissolved and the individuals scattered, they will fare badly and will possibly return to savagery, their faculties will decay and not progress, but still they will continue to exist.” (La Societé future, pp. 160-162.) Grave’s view is essentially his own and does not square with those of either Kropotkin, Bakunin, or Proudhon, the real founders of anarchy. It is, moreover, quite obvious that their theories are really much nearer the truth, for it is as impossible to conceive of society without the individual as it is to conceive of the individual without society. The individual, as Bakunin emphatically declares, is a fiction, or an abstraction, as Walras would say. Many people find it difficult to accept this doctrine. But it seems the only one that tallies with the facts, whether of nature or of history. We can no more imagine the individual without society than we can a fish without water. Deprived of water, it is not only less of a fish, but it is no longer a fish at all—except a dead one.
[1343] Bastiat speaks of this error of confusing government and society as being the worst that has ever befallen the science. The State problem he defines as follows: “How to inscribe within the great circle which we call society that other circle called government.” Dunoyer in so many words expresses the same idea.
[1344] Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 414. Cf. also Paroles d’une Révolté, p. 221.
[1345] This idea finds frequent expression both with Reclus and Kropotkin. “The fact that we have instituted, regulated, codified, and encompassed with constraints and penalties, with gendarmes and jailers, the larger part of our more or less incoherent collection of political, religious, moral and social conceptions of to-day in order to enforce them upon the citizens of to-morrow is in itself sufficiently absurd, and it is bound to have contradictory results. Life, which is always improving and renewing itself, can never submit to regulations which have been drawn up in some period now past.” (Reclus, loc. cit., pp. 108-9.) “Anarchist society,” writes Kropotkin, “is one to which any pre-established, crystallised form of law will always be repugnant. It is also one which looks for harmony, which can only be temporary and fugitive perhaps, in the equilibrium between the mass of different forces and influences of every kind which pursue their course without the slightest deflection, and which because they are quite untrammelled beget reaction and arouse those activities which are favourable to them when they move in the direction of progress.” (L’Anarchie, pp. 17, 18.)
[1346] Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
[1347] Proudhon had already set the problem as follows: “Can we find a method of transacting business that will unite divergent interests and identify individuals with the general well-being, replace the inequality of nature by equality of education, and remove all political and economic contradictions; when each individual will be at once both producer and consumer, citizen and sovereign, ruler and ruled; when liberty will always expand without involving any counter-loss; when the well being of each will grow indefinitely without involving any damage to the property, the labour, or the revenue of any of his fellow-citizens, or of the State itself, without weakening the interests he has in common with his fellow-men, without alienating their good opinion or destroying their affection for him?” (Idée générale, p. 145.) Says Jean Grave: “Were society established on natural bases, individual and general interests would never conflict.” (Société future, p. 156.)
[1348] La Société future, p. 16. “We cannot disguise the fact,” says Kropotkin, “that if complete liberty of thought and action were once given to the individual we should see some exaggerations, possibly extravagant exaggerations, of our principles.” (Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 413.)
[1349] “The only great and all-powerful authority at once rational and natural that we can respect is the public spirit of a collective society founded upon equality and solidarity, upon liberty and respect for the human qualities of all its members. It will be a thousand times more powerful than all your authorities, whether divine, theological, metaphysical, political, or juridical, whether instituted by Church or by State; more powerful than all your criminal codes, all your jailers and hangmen.” (Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. iii, p. 79.)
[1350] Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 414. This is also one of the favourite doctrines of the Liberals.
[1351] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p. 206.
[1352] Grave, op. cit., p. 297. Proudhon is even more severe. “By making a contract you become a member of the fraternity of free men. In case of infringement, either on their side or on yours, you are responsible to one another, and the responsibility might even involve excommunication and death.” (Idée générale, p. 343.)
[1353] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 17.
[1354] “In our opinion, and speaking strictly, there is no such thing as a really idle person. There are a few individuals, perhaps, who have not developed as they might have done and whose activity has never found a proper outlet under existing conditions. In a society where everyone would be allowed to choose his own sphere of work the idlest people would be found doing something.” (J. Grave, La Société future, pp. 277-278.) Kropotkin writes in the same strain (Conquest of Bread, chapter on Objections).
[1355] Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 414; Conquest of Bread, p. 156. The anarchists show no desire to expand the Phalanstère, but prefer the family life.
[1356] Conquest of Bread, p. 204.
[1357] Conquest of Bread, p. 130.
[1358] Ibid., p. 133.
[1359] Élisée Reclus, L’Évolution, etc., pp. 136-137.
[1360] Conquest of Bread, p. 83.
[1361] Cf. Grave, La Société future, ch. 14, La Valeur. The anarchists frequently complain that their ideas are generally mutilated by the economists. To read this chapter is to realise the amount of intelligence which they display when interpreting their adversaries’ doctrines!
[1362] L’Évolution, p. 154. Kropotkin says: “Those who wish the triumph of justice, who really want to put the new ideas into practice, understand the necessity for a terrible revolution which would sweep away this canker and revive the degenerate hearts with its invigorating rush, bringing back habits of devotion, of self-negation, and of heroism, without which society becomes vile, degraded, and rotten.” (Paroles d’un Révolté, p. 280.)
[1363] Bakunin, in Sozial-politischer, p. 297.
[1364] Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 297.
[1365] Kropotkin, quoted by Eltzbacher, p. 236. “Revolution, once it becomes socialistic, will cease to be sanguinary and cruel. The people are not cruel. It is the privileged classes that are cruel. People are ordinarily kind and humane, and will suffer long rather than cause others any suffering.” (Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. iii, pp. 184-185.) The same idea runs through Sorel’s Réflexions sur la Violence.
[1366] Bakunin, Sozial-politischer, pp. 335 and 353.
[1367] Sozial-politischer, p. 361. The proclamation was addressed to Young Russia just after the Tsar Alexander II had accepted the challenge of Liberalism by emancipating the serfs. But he immediately proceeded to revive the cruel system of espionage and repression carried out by his father Nicholas I, and so roused the indignation of the more advanced leaders, who thought that they had in him a hero who would open the golden gates of liberty. Bakunin at the time was under the influence of an unscrupulous fanatic of the name of Netchaieff, whose savage and revolting passion for the execution of criminal deeds in the name of revolution had completely captivated him. Later on he vigorously reproved such acts, and declared that they ought to be suppressed.
[1368] Ibid.
[1369] Bakunin, Sozial-politischer, p. 332.
[1370] Réflexions sur la Violence, p. 253.
[1371] Paroles d’un Révolté, pp. 17-18.
[1372] Réflexions sur la Violence, p. 218.
[1373] Berth, Les Nouveaux Aspects du Socialisme, p. 3.
[1374] Réflexions sur la Violence, introduction.
[1375] Ibid., p. 237.