Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (112 page)

I
N
THIS
CENTURY
,
THERE
have been few outstanding libertarian thinkers but libertarian thought has been remarkably profound and varied. It has been enriched by intellectuals as diverse as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell and the novelist Aldous Huxley, the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford and the linguist theoretician Noam Chomsky, and the French writer Albert Camus and the social thinker Michel Foucault. They have taken socialism or liberalism to the borders of anarchism, and occasionally stepped over. As States east and west have grown more centralized, militarized, and bureaucratic they have held up the vision of a free society as the ultimate ideal.

Bertrand Russell was attracted to anarchism and remained a lifelong libertarian despite his espousal of the idea of a World State to end war between nations. At the age of twenty-three, the young aristocrat was described by Beatrice Webb in 1895 as ‘anarchic’, and he later confessed to a temperamental leaning towards anarchism.
¹
In 1938, the Spanish secretary of the IWMA included all his works in a bibliography to an encyclopaedia article on anarchism because, as Gerald Brenan’s wife put it, ‘they have the “tendency” as old Anarchists say.’
²

Russell knew what anarchism stood for. In his
Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism
(1918), written just before he was imprisoned for denouncing the validity of the First World War, he included on the title page the sentiments of Lao-Tzu:

In an informed and thoughtful discussion, he defines anarchism as the theory which is opposed to ‘every kind of forcible government’. Liberty is the supreme good of the anarchist creed, and liberty is sought by ‘the direct road of abolishing all forcible control over the individual by the
community’.
³
Russell endorsed such a view and argued that anarchism should be ‘the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate’.
⁴
He felt that anarchism is particularly strong in matters of science and art, human relations and the joy of life.

However, he still felt that for the time being it was impossible to realize such an ideal. In an earlier work on
Principles of Social Reconstruction
(1916), he had acknowledged that the State and private property are the two most powerful institutions of the modern world. But while he wished to show how harmful and unnecessary many of the powers of the State were, he still held it useful for bringing about the substitution of law for force in human relations: ‘The primitive anarchy which precedes law is worse than law.’
⁵
The State also had a positive role in ensuring compulsory education and sanitary measures and in diminishing economic justice.

Despite close consideration of Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s arguments against government and the State, Russell still concluded in
Roads to Freedom
that some coercion by the community is unavoidable in the form of law and that the State is a necessary institution for certain limited purposes. Without government, the strong would only oppress the weak. Of all the ideologies treated, he came down in favour of guild socialism. But it remained his belief that ‘the free growth of the individual must be the supreme end of a political system which is to refashion the world’.
⁶
In a review, the anarchist journal
Freedom
(founded by Kropotkin and others) quoted at length from
Roads to Freedom
, recommended it as a Very readable book’, and observed that Russell’s work showed Very strong leanings to anarchism in its constructive proposals’.
⁷

Russell visited Russia in the summer of 1920 where he met several prominent anarchists, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman who showed him around Moscow, as well as Bolshevik leaders. His book
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
(1920) which resulted from the visit was a critical account of his experiences at a time when, on the Left, it was considered a kind of treachery for a socialist to criticize the Bolshevik dictatorship.

When Goldman sought political refuge in Britain two years later, Russell took up her case with the Home Office, informing them that she would not engage ‘in the more violent forms of Anarchism’.
⁸
At a dinner in Oxford to welcome her, the only person to applaud her vehement attack on the Soviet government was Russell.
Freedom
reported that his was by far the best speech (along with William C. Owen’s): ‘Mr Russell, who has the most acute philosophical mind in England, made the most complete avowal of anarchist convictions of the evening.’
⁹

Russell, however, still kept his distance from the anarchists. He refused to help Goldman in her efforts to form a committee to aid Russian political
prisoners since he was not prepared to advocate an alternative government in Russia which might be even more cruel. He wrote to Goldman: ‘I do not regard the abolition of all government as a thing which has any chance of being brought about in our life times or during the twentieth century.’
¹⁰
He was clearly worried about his utilitarian position nonetheless, and went on to condemn the Bolsheviks’ appalling treatment of their political opponents. When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, he was forced to conclude that they had been condemned unjustly on account of their political opinions.

Russell’s libertarian stance and his reluctance to follow it to anarchist conclusions were rooted in his view of humanity and the universe. He was well aware of the logical error known as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, committed by Kropotkin and many other anarchists, of drawing arguments from the laws of nature as to what we ought to do, for to imitate nature may merely be slavish. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that ‘if Nature is to be our model it seems that the anarchists have the best of the argument. The physical universe is orderly, not because there is a central government but because every body minds its own business.’
¹¹

As an atheist and atomist, Russell had a dark vision of humanity despite his hopes for a better world. He considered man to be the outcome of an ‘accidental collocation of atoms’ destined to meet extinction in the vast death of the solar system. Only on the ‘firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built’.
¹²
But although man has a strangely accidental and ephemeral position in the universe, it does not mean that he cannot struggle to improve his lot.

As a humanist, Russell was interested in expanding human freedom and happiness. The task however is not easy. While man had evolved to be the most rational and creative of animals, prepared even to engage in unpleasant activities as means to desirable ends, he was still prey to destructive and aggressive desires. These natural impulses cannot be eradicated, thought Russell, only channelled into less injurious outlets. The theme runs throughout Russell’s work as a disruptive undertow in the bright stream of rational thought. In his work on
Power
(1938), written as the Nazis were preparing for war, Russell suggests, like Hobbes before him, that among the infinite desires of man the chief are those for power and glory. Morality is therefore needed to restrain ‘anarchic self-assertion’.
¹³

Russell was never a complete pacifist and supported the war against Nazi Germany, but the experience only made him more pessimistic about human possibilities. After the war, he even called on the United States to threaten the Soviet Union in order to enforce international agreement about atomic weapons. In the Preface to the 1948 edition of
Roads to Freedom
, he said that if he were to write it again, he would be much less sympathetic
towards anarchism. In a world of scarcity, ‘only stringent regulations can prevent disastrous destitution’. Moreover, the totalitarian systems in Germany and Russia had led him to take a ‘blacker view’ of what men are likely to become without ‘forcible control over their tyrannical impulses’.
¹⁴

In his Reith Lectures, published in 1949 as
Authority and the Individual
, Russell argued that human nature had not changed much over the centuries and that we instinctively divide mankind into friends and foes, co-operating with the one and competing with the other. He therefore sees the need for government, whose primary aim should be ‘security, justice and conservation’. In this Russell remains a liberal, calling for the protection of life and property since law is ‘an indispensable condition for the existence of any tolerable social order’.
¹⁵
Taking up an idea he launched as early as 1916, Russell further advocated the creation of a World State to bring about unity between nations and to prevent war.

In the late fifties and early sixties, Russell became involved once again with anarchists in the Committee of 100 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Since lawful persuasion had proved ineffectual, the veteran dissident now called again for non-violent direct action and large-scale civil disobedience. But he remained estranged from the anarchist movement, for he considered that British unilateral disarmament and subsequent multilateral disarmament could be achieved by strong national governments and eventually by a world government. As anarchists pointed out, the venerable philosopher thereby tried to place the responsibility for disarmament in the very hands of the people and institutions who were responsible for armament in the first place.
¹⁶

The passionate sceptic became even more cynical in his old age. Meditating on the progressive school he had helped set up with his wife Dora, he wrote in his autobiography: ‘To let the children go free was to establish a reign of terror, in which the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable. A school is like the world: only government can prevent brutal violence.’
¹⁷

Nevertheless, despite the parting of the ways from the anarchists over the unruly nature of man, Russell’s writings were profoundly libertarian. He remained throughout his life a staunch defender of freedom of thought:

His free thinking was not only apparent in works like
Sceptical Essays
(1928) and
Why I am Not a Christian
(1957) but also in
Marriage and Morals
(1929) where he called for the liberation of Woman and promoted the value of a
healthy sex-life. He wrote widely on education. His
The Conquest of Happiness
(1930) recalls the title and some of the contents of Kropotkin’s
Conquest of Bread.
In his marvellous essay ‘In Praise of Happiness’ (1932), he roundly rejected the Protestant Ethic (urging the Young Man’s Christian Association to start a campaign to induce the young to do nothing) and argued that the road to happiness lies in ‘the organized diminution of work’.
¹⁹
Equally his celebration of ‘useless’ knowledge echoes the thoughts of many an anarchist since Godwin on the value of leisure and free enquiry.

Russell’s writings achieved an enormous circulation in many languages. They acted as a great liberating influence on generations of readers in their call for greater personal and social freedom and the joyful flowering of human personality. Even in the political field, he insisted that the necessary evil of government should be kept to a minimum, and that individuality, personal initiative and voluntary organization should be allowed to flourish. As a public figure, he was ready to stand up for the beliefs he held, even if it meant going to prison in their defence. One of his last campaigns was to end
War Crimes in Vietnam
(1967). His own varied life, which straddled the twentieth century, exemplified his maxim that the best life is ‘that which is most built on creative impulses, and the worse that which is most inspired by love of possession’.
²⁰

Amongst earlier British libertarians this century, the novelist Aldous Huxley stands out boldly. He was born in 1894, the grandson of T. H. Huxley, and, after being educated at Oxford, he settled in California in 1937. Huxley called himself a decentralist but his analysis of power and authority, his hatred of war, and his vision of a free society are undoubtedly anarchist in spirit. In his anti-utopian novel
Brave New World
(1932), he depicted the direction in which Western science and society seemed to be developing, with human embryos conditioned to collectivism and passivity. Order is achieved by creating a society of robots for whom happiness is synonymous with subordination. A ‘savage’ who has educated himself by reading Shakespeare and believes in free moral choice is unable to cope with the new world and eventually commits suicide.

In
Ends and Means
(1937), Huxley expressed his own philosophy more directly: the ultimate ‘end is the free person who is non-attached — non-attached to desires, possessions, exclusive love, wealth, fame, and status, even to science, art, speculation and philanthropy. Such an ethic assumes the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world. To realize this libertarian ideal, Huxley insists, like Tolstoy, that good ends can only be achieved by good means.