Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible

Spencer considered existing societies to be of ‘the semi-militant semi-industrial type’, whereas genuine freedom could only exist in an industrial society based on voluntary co-operation and competition. The socialists however wanted to recreate a military society based on compulsory cooperation. If they got their way, the ultimate result would be like the rigid and tyrannical society of ancient Peru. 21

Spencer’s criticisms of existing liberalism and socialism were made, like Mill’s, from the point of view of individual freedom. In his political theory, he consistently opposed what he called ‘Over-Legislation‘(1853), so much so that T. H. Huxley accused him of ‘Administrative Nihilism’. 22 In reply, Spencer claimed that the term might apply to Humboldt, whom he had never read, but certainly not to him. 23 Nevertheless, Spencer looked to a society in which laissez-faire , economic competition, voluntary co-operation, and the division of labour would ensure autonomy and general well-being.

But although Spencer pitches the individual against the State, he does not call for its abolition. As Kropotkin observed, he does not endorse all the conclusions about government which ought to be drawn from his system of philosophy. 24 Spencer’s individualism was formulated in The Proper Sphere of Government (1842) where he argued like Humboldt and Mill that the duty of the State only lies in the protection of its citizens against each other. It may direct its citizens for security – both against external hostility and internal aggression – and for the enforcement of contract. But it should confer nothing beyond the opportunity to compete freely. Its function is ‘simply to defend the natural rights of men – to protect person and property, to prevent the aggression of the powerful on the weak; in a word, to administer Justice’. 25

Spencer wanted to make the State more efficient as a ‘negatively regulative’ body in preventing aggression and administering justice. Unlike Proudhon (whom he mentions), Spencer held that

within its proper limits governmental action is not simply legitimate but all-important … Not only do I contend that the restraining power of the State over individuals, and bodies or classes of individuals, is requisite, but I have contended that it should be exercised much more effectually, and carried out much further, than at present. 26

Later in his life, Spencer gave the State a more positive role in promoting the moral law, that is the ‘law of equal freedom’ in which ‘every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal rights of every other man.’ 27

Spencer was as far removed from socialism as he was from genuine anarchism. He may have been a bold critic of the excessive power of the State, but he remained true to his background of middle-class provincial radicalism. 28 He feared the demands of the working class which he felt would lead to ‘degeneracy’, and what is even worse, to ‘communism and anarchism’. Any attempt to bring about equal return for labour, he argued, leads to communism – then would come ‘anarchism and a return to the unrestrained struggle for life, as among brutes’. 29

Spencer undoubtedly anticipates modern anarcho-capitalists in his individualism, his economic laissez-faire , and his distrust of the powers of the State. Possessive individualism is the final premiss of his political thought. 30 For all his fine libertarian expressions, Spencer ultimately remains a spokesman for early industrial capitalism rather than modern anarchism. But while it may be a small irony of history that his tomb opposite Karl Marx’s resplendent bust in Highgate Cemetery, London, is neglected and overgrown, his libertarian vision still lives on.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, anarchism exerted a considerable influence amongst radical literary circles. British intellectuals and artists were undoubtedly influenced by the liberal tradition of individualism found in the work of John Stuart Mill and Spencer, but their response to the triumph of capital and empire led them to a deeper analysis of exploitation and a more radical remedy. The clamour of the growing anarchist movement on the Continent also crossed the English Channel, and some of the more distinguished exponents like Prince Kropotkin took political refuge in the comparatively tolerant atmosphere of Britain.

Although the poet Edward Carpenter did not call himself an anarchist, his highly personal form of libertarian socialism comes very close to it. Kropotkin was the leading anarchist spokesman in Britain at the time, and Carpenter contributed to his journal Freedom , but the poet perceived in him a ‘charming naïveté which summed up all evil in one word “government”’. Nevertheless, Henry W. Nevinson, to whom this remark was made, wrote about Carpenter: ‘By temperament, if not by conviction, he was a complete anarchist, detesting all commandments, authority and forms of government.’ He believed moreover that ‘external law’ must always be false and only acknowledged the internal law of self-expression. 31

The key to Carpenter’s libertarian socialism is to be found in his attitude to personal affections: he wanted a society in which men and women could be lovers and friends. He wanted to release what he called ‘The Ocean of Sex’ within each person. To this end, he urged the creation of ‘The Intermediate Sex’, a new type of being combining the male and the female, which would appear in Love’s Coming of Age (1897)—dismissed predictably by Bernard Shaw as ‘sex-nonsense’. Like many anarchists at that time, Carpenter turned to anthropology to back up his call for a new kind of humanity and he wrote a study of social evolution entitled Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk (1914). While he was far more radical than Spencer, he shared his evolutionary outlook and belief in social progress.

In his analysis of the causes of modern civilization, Carpenter followed Rousseau and Shelley in thinking that it corrupted and disintegrated natural man. The institution of private property in particular broke up the unity of his nature and drew him away from his true self and made him prey to every form of disease. Civilization founded on property had introduced: ‘slavery, serfdom, wage-labour, which are various forms of the domination of one class over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and the policeman’. 32 Having destroyed the organic structures of earlier society, the institution of property had thus given rise to strong central government which was ‘the evidence in social life that man has lost his inner and central control, and therefore must result to an outer one’. 33 Crime moreover is a symptom of social illness, poverty, inequality and restriction. 34

But all is not lost and there is a cure for civilization. If every person were linked organically to the general body of his fellows, then no serious disharmony would occur. Carpenter thought it possible for a free and communist society to exist without external government and law which are only ‘the travesties and transitory substitutes of Inward Government and Order’. Anarchy could therefore exist with no outward rule as ‘an inward and invisible spirit of life’. 35

Carpenter returned to this theme in his Non-Governmental Society (1911), a work which deeply impressed Gandhi and Herbert Read. Like Kropotkin, Carpenter was convinced that human societies can maintain themselves in good order and vitality without written law and its institutions. Indeed, he felt that custom, which takes a gender form and is adaptable to the general movement of society when exerting pressure on individuals, is far superior to law. A study of ‘native races’ showed that the competition and anxiety of modern society need not exist if people were left to themselves. A ‘free non-governmental society’ could then emerge which would be practicable because it was vital and organic: