Voluntaryism
Encyclopedia
Voluntarism, or voluntaryism, is a philosophy
according to which all forms of human association should be voluntary. This moral principle is called the non-aggression principle
, which prohibits the initiation of aggressive force or coercion. The word 'initiation' is used here to make clear that voluntaryism does not oppose self-defense
.
As government is defined as a monopoly on the initiation of aggressive force and coercion in a given geographical region, voluntaryists call for its abolition. One of the goals of voluntaryism is the replacement of the government or state
by a voluntary society in which autonomous self-determination is had by each individual and in which association among people occurs by mutual consent
. A voluntary society entails a stateless society
; voluntaryism entails (or is compatible with) a variety of anarchist positions, and is often compared to anarchism without adjectives
.
Voluntaryists advocate radical stateless pluralism. While voluntaryists as individuals have particular values and preferences for stateless socioeconomic arrangements, voluntaryism as a philosophy does not specify the arrangements that a society without government ought to embrace; only that initiative force be abandoned in bringing about such arrangements, so that individuals and communities may flourish. For example, many voluntaryists advocate societal arrangements in which property rights exist and are respected, which they regard as compatible with non-coercion and part of pre-institutional natural law
. On the other hand, some voluntaryists may be non-propertarians
, believing that inhabitants of a society can voluntarily choose cooperative arrangements of land and resources that are not privatized. What both camps of people would agree on, insofar as they are voluntaryists, is that no initiation of aggressive force or coercion should be used to bring about or maintain either arrangement, and neither should be forced on the other.
Voluntaryists believe that consensual and volunteer-based action itself should be the means to achieve the goal of a stateless society, rather than initiation of force
. Voluntaryist movements are distinct in their rejection of both electoral politics and initiative violence as means by which to bring about a voluntary society. Because voluntaryists consider electoral politics to be counterproductive or immoral, they prefer to dismantle the state by non-political means such as secession
, self-defense
, counter-economics
, civil disobedience
and education
, rather than voting
.
justification for voluntaryism can be based both on consequentialist and deontological normative ethics, as well as a priori reasoning. Since voluntaryists hold that the means must be consistent with the end, the goal of a purely voluntary society must be sought voluntarily. Voluntaryists assert that people cannot be coerced into freedom. Voluntaryists often advocate the use of the (stateless) free market
, education, persuasion, and non-violent resistance as the primary ways to change people's ideas about the state
and their behavior toward it. Voluntaryists insist that since all tyranny and governments are grounded upon popular acceptance, wholly voluntary means are sufficient and, in fact, the only way to attain a voluntaryist society.
A typical argument for voluntaryism is grounded on two axioms. First, the self-ownership
axiom holds that each person is and ought to be in control of his or her own mind and body, having autonomous self-determination. Second, the homesteading
axiom holds that each person by the application of his or her own labor
to un-owned resources thereby becomes its rightful and legitimate owner
. However, geo-anarchists have the alternative axiom that one may homestead possession but not the rent of land, which would be shared equally, by community agreement.
Voluntaryists begin with the assumption that human action represents behavior aiming at an improvement over the current state of affairs (from the individual actor's point of view). Therefore, voluntaryists reason, every market
transaction is intended to be (and normally achieves) an improvement in satisfaction and benefits both parties to the exchange. Thus, both parties to a trade improve their state of affairs. Voluntaryists argue that on the free and unhampered market this occurs millions of times each day, the cumulative effect being the prosperity and high standard of living
that people experience in a free market
economy
. From a voluntaryist perspective, government intervention and central planning (based on compulsion) can only force some people to do what they would otherwise not choose to do, and thereby lessens their satisfaction and impedes economic progress.
Voluntaryists also argue that although certain goods and services are necessary to human survival, it is not necessary that they be provided by the government. Voluntaryists oppose the state because, in their view, it uses coercive means in the collection of revenues and in outlawing would-be service providers, and they deny that any form of coercion is compatible with voluntaryism. According to voluntaryists, the coercionist always proposes to compel people to do something they ordinarily wouldn't do, usually by passing laws or electing people to office. These laws and officials ultimately depend upon physical violence for enforcement. Voluntaryism does not require of people that they violently overthrow the government or use the electoral process to change it; it merely perceives the solution in the action of voluntarily refusing to support a government and obey its orders, whereupon voluntaryists expect that it will collapse by itself.
theory, relying upon the self-ownership
and homesteading
axioms, condemns all invasive acts and rejects the initiation of force. Free market anarchists, in particular, assert that the state acts aggressively when it engages in taxation and coercively monopolizes the provision of certain public services
such as the roads, courts, police, and armed forces. It is this anarchist outlook that the state is inherently and necessarily an invasive institution—which distinguishes the anarchist from other libertarians.
Many late 20th and early 21st Century voluntaryists based their thinking upon the ideas of Murray Rothbard
and Robert LeFevre
. Rothbard maintained, first, that every government "presumes to establish a compulsory monopoly of defense (police and courts) service over some geographical area. So that individual property owners who prefer to subscribe to another defense company within that area are not allowed to do so"; and, second, that every government obtains its income by stealing, euphemistically labeled "taxation." "All governments, however limited they may be otherwise, commit at least these two fundamental crimes against liberty and property."
What especially distinguishes voluntaryists from other free-market anarchists is their stance on strategy, especially their reliance on nonviolence
and non-electoral means to achieve an anarchist society. Like many Europe
an and American
anarchists during the 19th and 20th Centuries, voluntaryists shun involvement with electoral politics. Rejection of the political means is based on the premise that governments depend on the cooperation of those they rule. Etienne de la Boetie
, a mid-16th Century Frenchman, who was the first to make this voluntaryist point, called for peaceful non-cooperation and non-violent resistance to the state. Despite the advocacy of violence by a number of anarchists throughout history, most anarchists have sought to persuade people, rather than coerce them. Le Boetie's call for peaceful resistance has been echoed by contemporary anarchists, as well as by a significant number of those who were anarchist, such as Leo Tolstoy
and Thoreau
, or have been described as near-anarchist in their thinking, such as Gandhi.
(?1614–1657) and Richard Overton
(?1600–?1660s) who "clashed with the Presbyterian puritans, who wanted to preserve a state-church with coercive powers and to deny liberty of worship to the puritan sects." The Levellers were nonconformist in religion and agitated for the separation of church and state. The church to their way of thinking was a voluntary associating of equals, and furnished a theoretical and practical model for the civil state. If it was proper for their church congregations to be based on consent, then it was proper to apply the same principle of consent to its secular counterpart. For example, the Leveller 'large' Petition of 1647 contained a proposal "that tythes and all other inforced maintenances, may be for ever abolished, and nothing in place thereof imposed, but that all Ministers may be payd only by those who voluntarily choose them, and contract with them for their labours." One only need substitute "taxes" for "tythes" and "government officials" for "Ministers" to see how close the Levellers were to the idea of a voluntary state.
The Levellers also held tenaciously to the idea of self-proprietorship. As Richard Overton wrote: "No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no mans [sic]." They realized that it was impossible to assert one's private right of judgment in religious matters (what we would call today liberty of conscience) without upholding the same right for everyone else, even the unregenerate. The existence of a State church in England caused friction since the time of the Levellers because there were always those who opposed its religious doctrine or their forced contributions towards its support.
, and the schools were to be supported largely from funds raised out of local taxation. Nonconformists, mostly Baptists and Congregationalists, became alarmed. They had been under the ban of the law for more than a century. At one time or another they could not be married in their own churches, were compelled to pay church rates against their will, and had to teach their children underground for fear of arrest. They became known as voluntaryists because they consistently rejected all state aid and interference in education, just as they rejected the state in the religious sphere of their lives. Three of the most notable voluntaryists included the young Herbert Spencer
(1820–1903), who published his first series of articles "The Proper Sphere of Government," beginning in 1842; Edward Baines, Jr., (1800–1890) editor and proprietor of the Leeds Mercury; and Edward Miall
(1809–1881), Congregationalist minister, and founder-editor of The Nonconformist (1841), who wrote Views of the Voluntary Principle (1845).
The educational voluntaryists wanted free trade in education, just as they supported free trade in corn or cotton. Their concern for "liberty can scarcely be exaggerated." They believed that "government would employ education for its own ends" (teaching habits of obedience and indoctrination), and that government-controlled schools would ultimately teach children to rely on the State for all things. Baines, for example, noted that "[w]e cannot violate the principles of liberty in regard to education without furnishing at once a precedent and inducement to violate them in regard to other matters." Baines conceded that the then current system of education (both private and charitable) had deficiencies, but he argued that freedom should not be abridged on that account. Should freedom of the press be compromised because we have bad newspapers? "I maintain that Liberty is the chief cause of excellence; but it would cease to be Liberty if you proscribed everything inferior." The Congregational Board of Education
and the Baptist Voluntary Education Society are usually given pride of place among the Voluntaryists.
(1838–1906). Herbert served a two-year term in the British House of Commons
, but after meeting Herbert Spencer
in 1874, decided not to run for re-election. He noted:
Herbert wrote "State Education: A Help or Hindrance?" in 1880, and began using the word "voluntaryist" to label his advocacy of "voluntary" taxation. He began publishing his journal, The Free Life (Organ of Voluntary Taxation and the Voluntary State) in 1890. Herbert was not a pure voluntaryist because, although he held that it was possible for state revenues to be generated by offering competitive services on the free market, he continued to advocate a single monopolistic state for every given geographic territory, Some of his essays are titled "The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life" (1897), and "A Plea for Voluntaryism," (posthumously, 1908).
, where both Massachusetts and Connecticut started out with state churches, many people believed that they needed to pay a tax for the general support of religion – for the same reasons they paid taxes to maintain the roads and the courts. It was simply inconceivable to many of them that society could long exist without state support of religion. Practically no one considered the idea that although governmentally supplied goods and services (such as roads, or schools, or churches) might be essential to human welfare, it was not necessary that they be provided by the government.
There were at least two well-known Americans who espoused voluntaryist causes during the mid-19th century. Henry David Thoreau
's (1817–1862) first brush with the law in his home state of Massachusetts came in 1838, when he turned twenty-one. The State demanded that he pay the one dollar ministerial tax, in support of a clergyman, "whose preaching my father attended but never I myself." When Thoreau refused to pay the tax, it was probably paid by one of his aunts. In order to avoid the ministerial tax in the future, Thoreau had to sign an affidavit attesting he was not a member of the church.
Thoreau's overnight imprisonment for his failure to pay another municipal tax, the poll tax
, to the town of Concord was recorded in his essay, "Resistance to Civil Government," first published in 1849. It is often referred to as "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," because in it he concluded that government was dependent on the cooperation of its citizens. While he was not a thoroughly consistent voluntaryist, he did write that he wished never to "rely on the protection of the state," and that he refused to tender it his allegiance so long as it supported slavery. He distinguished himself from "those who call[ed] themselves no-government men": "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government," but this has been interpreted as a gradualist, rather than minarchist, stance given that he also opened his essay by stating his belief that "That government is best which governs not at all," a point which all voluntaryists heartily embrace.
One of those "no-government men" was William Lloyd Garrison
(1805–1879), famous abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator. Nearly all abolitionists identified with the self-ownership
principle, that each person – as an individual – owned and should control his or her own mind and body free of outside coercive interference. The abolitionist called for the immediate and unconditional cessation of slavery because they saw slavery as man-stealing in its most direct and worst form. Slavery reflected the theft of a person's self-ownership rights. The slave was a chattel with no rights of its own. The abolitionists realized that each human being, without exception, was naturally invested with sovereignty over him or her self and that no one could exercise forcible control over another without breaching the self-ownership principle. Garrison, too, was not a pure voluntaryist for he supported the federal government's war against the States from 1861 to 1865.
Probably the most consistent voluntaryist of that era was Charles Lane
(1800–1870). He was friendly with Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thoreau. Between January and June 1843 a series of nine letters he penned were published in such abolitionist’s papers as The Liberator and The Herald of Freedom. The title under which they were published was "A Voluntary Political Government," and in them Lane described the state in terms of institutionalized violence and referred to its "club law, its mere brigand right of a strong arm, [supported] by guns and bayonets." He saw the coercive state on par with "forced" Christianity. "Everyone can see that the church is wrong when it comes to men with the [B]ible in one hand, and the sword in the other." "Is it not equally diabolical for the state to do so?" Lane believed that governmental rule was only tolerated by public opinion because the fact was not yet recognized that all the true purposes of the state could be carried out on the voluntary principle, just as churches could be sustained voluntarily. Reliance on the voluntary principle could only come about through "kind, orderly, and moral means" that were consistent with the totally voluntary society he was advocating. "Let us have a voluntary State as well as a voluntary Church, and we may possibly then have some claim to the appeallation of free men."
Late 20th and early 21st century libertarians readily draw a parallel between the disestablishment of state church
es and the abandonment of the state itself. Although the label "voluntaryist" practically died out after the death of Auberon Herbert
, its use was renewed in late 1982, when George H. Smith
, Wendy McElroy
, and Carl Watner
began publishing The Voluntaryist. George Smith suggested use of the term to identify those libertarians who believed that political action and political parties (especially the Libertarian Party) were antithetical to their ideas. In their "Statement of Purpose" in Neither Bullets nor Ballots: Essays on Voluntaryism (1983), Watner, Smith, and McElroy explained that voluntaryists were advocates of non-political strategies to achieve a free society. They rejected electoral politics "in theory and practice as incompatible with libertarian goals," and argued that political methods invariably strengthen the legitimacy of coercive governments. In concluding their "Statement of Purpose" they wrote: "Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through education, and we advocate the withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which state power ultimately depends."
: . The masthead of The Voluntaryist, perhaps, best epitomizes the voluntaryist outlook: "If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself." This statement penned by Mahatma Gandhi
urges that the world can only be changed one person at a time, and then, only if that person wills it, making it appealing to many voluntaryists. The only thing that the individual can do, voluntaryists hold, "is present society with 'one improved unit'." Albert Jay Nock expressed this point as follows: "[A]ges of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method …, that is, the method of each 'one' doing his very best to improve 'one.'" Voluntaryists believe that this is the quiet, peaceful, patient way of changing society because it concentrates on bettering the character of men and women as individuals. The voluntaryist hope is that as the individual units change, the improvement of society will take care of itself. In other words, "if one take care of the means, the end
will take care of itself."
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
according to which all forms of human association should be voluntary. This moral principle is called the non-aggression principle
Non-aggression principle
The non-aggression principle , or NAP for short, is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate...
, which prohibits the initiation of aggressive force or coercion. The word 'initiation' is used here to make clear that voluntaryism does not oppose self-defense
Self-defense
Self-defense, self-defence or private defense is a countermeasure that involves defending oneself, one's property or the well-being of another from physical harm. The use of the right of self-defense as a legal justification for the use of force in times of danger is available in many...
.
As government is defined as a monopoly on the initiation of aggressive force and coercion in a given geographical region, voluntaryists call for its abolition. One of the goals of voluntaryism is the replacement of the government or state
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
by a voluntary society in which autonomous self-determination is had by each individual and in which association among people occurs by mutual consent
Consent
Consent refers to the provision of approval or agreement, particularly and especially after thoughtful consideration.- Types of consent :*Implied consent is a controversial form of consent which is not expressly granted by a person, but rather inferred from a person's actions and the facts and...
. A voluntary society entails a stateless society
Stateless society
A stateless society is a society that is not governed by a state. In stateless societies, there is little concentration of authority; most positions of authority that do exist are very limited in power and are generally not permanently held positions; and social bodies that resolve disputes through...
; voluntaryism entails (or is compatible with) a variety of anarchist positions, and is often compared to anarchism without adjectives
Anarchism without adjectives
Anarchism without adjectives , in the words of historian George Richard Esenwein, "referred to an unhyphenated form of anarchism, that is, a doctrine without any qualifying labels such as communist, collectivist, mutualist, or individualist. For others, .....
.
Voluntaryists advocate radical stateless pluralism. While voluntaryists as individuals have particular values and preferences for stateless socioeconomic arrangements, voluntaryism as a philosophy does not specify the arrangements that a society without government ought to embrace; only that initiative force be abandoned in bringing about such arrangements, so that individuals and communities may flourish. For example, many voluntaryists advocate societal arrangements in which property rights exist and are respected, which they regard as compatible with non-coercion and part of pre-institutional natural law
Natural law
Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
. On the other hand, some voluntaryists may be non-propertarians
Propertarianism
The term propertarianism has been used to describe various views regarding private property. Those holding positive views on property rights may be described as propertarian. Conversely, others opposed to private property may be described as non-propertarian or...
, believing that inhabitants of a society can voluntarily choose cooperative arrangements of land and resources that are not privatized. What both camps of people would agree on, insofar as they are voluntaryists, is that no initiation of aggressive force or coercion should be used to bring about or maintain either arrangement, and neither should be forced on the other.
Voluntaryists believe that consensual and volunteer-based action itself should be the means to achieve the goal of a stateless society, rather than initiation of force
Initiation of force
The initiation of force is the start, or beginning, of the use of physical and/or legal coercion, violence, or restraint. This is to be distinguished from retaliatory force and violence...
. Voluntaryist movements are distinct in their rejection of both electoral politics and initiative violence as means by which to bring about a voluntary society. Because voluntaryists consider electoral politics to be counterproductive or immoral, they prefer to dismantle the state by non-political means such as secession
Secession
Secession is the act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or especially a political entity. Threats of secession also can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals.-Secession theory:...
, self-defense
Self-defense
Self-defense, self-defence or private defense is a countermeasure that involves defending oneself, one's property or the well-being of another from physical harm. The use of the right of self-defense as a legal justification for the use of force in times of danger is available in many...
, counter-economics
Counter-economics
Counter-economics is a term originally used by Samuel Edward Konkin III and J. Neil Schulman, libertarian activists and theorists. Konkin defined it as "the study and/or practice of all peaceful human action which is forbidden by the State." The term is short for "counter-establishment economics"...
, civil disobedience
Civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. It is one form of civil resistance...
and education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
, rather than voting
Non-voting
Non-voting is a strategy employed by various radical libertarians and anarchists who wish to promote a free society yet who view voting to be either unethical or impractical...
.
Overview
The moralMoral
A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim...
justification for voluntaryism can be based both on consequentialist and deontological normative ethics, as well as a priori reasoning. Since voluntaryists hold that the means must be consistent with the end, the goal of a purely voluntary society must be sought voluntarily. Voluntaryists assert that people cannot be coerced into freedom. Voluntaryists often advocate the use of the (stateless) free market
Free market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
, education, persuasion, and non-violent resistance as the primary ways to change people's ideas about the state
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
and their behavior toward it. Voluntaryists insist that since all tyranny and governments are grounded upon popular acceptance, wholly voluntary means are sufficient and, in fact, the only way to attain a voluntaryist society.
A typical argument for voluntaryism is grounded on two axioms. First, the self-ownership
Self-ownership
Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to G...
axiom holds that each person is and ought to be in control of his or her own mind and body, having autonomous self-determination. Second, the homesteading
Homestead principle
The homestead principle in law is the concept that one can gain ownership of a natural thing that currently has no owner by using it or building something out of it...
axiom holds that each person by the application of his or her own labor
Manual labour
Manual labour , manual or manual work is physical work done by people, most especially in contrast to that done by machines, and also to that done by working animals...
to un-owned resources thereby becomes its rightful and legitimate owner
Property
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
. However, geo-anarchists have the alternative axiom that one may homestead possession but not the rent of land, which would be shared equally, by community agreement.
Voluntaryists begin with the assumption that human action represents behavior aiming at an improvement over the current state of affairs (from the individual actor's point of view). Therefore, voluntaryists reason, every market
Market economy
A market economy is an economy in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system. This is often contrasted with a state-directed or planned economy. Market economies can range from hypothetically pure laissez-faire variants to an assortment of real-world mixed...
transaction is intended to be (and normally achieves) an improvement in satisfaction and benefits both parties to the exchange. Thus, both parties to a trade improve their state of affairs. Voluntaryists argue that on the free and unhampered market this occurs millions of times each day, the cumulative effect being the prosperity and high standard of living
Standard of living
Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods , or measures of health such as...
that people experience in a free market
Free market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
economy
Market economy
A market economy is an economy in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system. This is often contrasted with a state-directed or planned economy. Market economies can range from hypothetically pure laissez-faire variants to an assortment of real-world mixed...
. From a voluntaryist perspective, government intervention and central planning (based on compulsion) can only force some people to do what they would otherwise not choose to do, and thereby lessens their satisfaction and impedes economic progress.
Voluntaryists also argue that although certain goods and services are necessary to human survival, it is not necessary that they be provided by the government. Voluntaryists oppose the state because, in their view, it uses coercive means in the collection of revenues and in outlawing would-be service providers, and they deny that any form of coercion is compatible with voluntaryism. According to voluntaryists, the coercionist always proposes to compel people to do something they ordinarily wouldn't do, usually by passing laws or electing people to office. These laws and officials ultimately depend upon physical violence for enforcement. Voluntaryism does not require of people that they violently overthrow the government or use the electoral process to change it; it merely perceives the solution in the action of voluntarily refusing to support a government and obey its orders, whereupon voluntaryists expect that it will collapse by itself.
Voluntaryism and anarchism
LibertarianLibertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
theory, relying upon the self-ownership
Self-ownership
Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to G...
and homesteading
Homestead principle
The homestead principle in law is the concept that one can gain ownership of a natural thing that currently has no owner by using it or building something out of it...
axioms, condemns all invasive acts and rejects the initiation of force. Free market anarchists, in particular, assert that the state acts aggressively when it engages in taxation and coercively monopolizes the provision of certain public services
Public services
Public services is a term usually used to mean services provided by government to its citizens, either directly or by financing private provision of services. The term is associated with a social consensus that certain services should be available to all, regardless of income...
such as the roads, courts, police, and armed forces. It is this anarchist outlook that the state is inherently and necessarily an invasive institution—which distinguishes the anarchist from other libertarians.
Many late 20th and early 21st Century voluntaryists based their thinking upon the ideas of Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
and Robert LeFevre
Robert LeFevre
Robert LeFevre was an American libertarian businessman, radio personality, and primary theorist of autarchism.-Early life:...
. Rothbard maintained, first, that every government "presumes to establish a compulsory monopoly of defense (police and courts) service over some geographical area. So that individual property owners who prefer to subscribe to another defense company within that area are not allowed to do so"; and, second, that every government obtains its income by stealing, euphemistically labeled "taxation." "All governments, however limited they may be otherwise, commit at least these two fundamental crimes against liberty and property."
What especially distinguishes voluntaryists from other free-market anarchists is their stance on strategy, especially their reliance on nonviolence
Nonviolence
Nonviolence has two meanings. It can refer, first, to a general philosophy of abstention from violence because of moral or religious principle It can refer to the behaviour of people using nonviolent action Nonviolence has two (closely related) meanings. (1) It can refer, first, to a general...
and non-electoral means to achieve an anarchist society. Like many Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an and American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
anarchists during the 19th and 20th Centuries, voluntaryists shun involvement with electoral politics. Rejection of the political means is based on the premise that governments depend on the cooperation of those they rule. Etienne de la Boetie
Étienne de La Boétie
Étienne de La Boétie was a French judge, writer, anarchist, and "a founder of modern political philosophy in France." He "has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships."-Life:"La Boétie was born in...
, a mid-16th Century Frenchman, who was the first to make this voluntaryist point, called for peaceful non-cooperation and non-violent resistance to the state. Despite the advocacy of violence by a number of anarchists throughout history, most anarchists have sought to persuade people, rather than coerce them. Le Boetie's call for peaceful resistance has been echoed by contemporary anarchists, as well as by a significant number of those who were anarchist, such as Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
and Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
, or have been described as near-anarchist in their thinking, such as Gandhi.
Levellers
Voluntaryism has a long tradition in the English-speaking world, at least as far back as the Leveller movement of mid-17th Century England. The Leveller spokesmen John LilburneJohn Lilburne
John Lilburne , also known as Freeborn John, was an English political Leveller before, during and after English Civil Wars 1642-1650. He coined the term "freeborn rights", defining them as rights with which every human being is born, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or human law...
(?1614–1657) and Richard Overton
Richard Overton
Richard Overton was an English pamphleteer and Leveller during the Civil War. Little is known of the early life of Overton, but he is believed to have matriculated at Queens' College, Cambridge, before working as an actor and playwright in Southwark. Here he picked up Leveller sympathies, and...
(?1600–?1660s) who "clashed with the Presbyterian puritans, who wanted to preserve a state-church with coercive powers and to deny liberty of worship to the puritan sects." The Levellers were nonconformist in religion and agitated for the separation of church and state. The church to their way of thinking was a voluntary associating of equals, and furnished a theoretical and practical model for the civil state. If it was proper for their church congregations to be based on consent, then it was proper to apply the same principle of consent to its secular counterpart. For example, the Leveller 'large' Petition of 1647 contained a proposal "that tythes and all other inforced maintenances, may be for ever abolished, and nothing in place thereof imposed, but that all Ministers may be payd only by those who voluntarily choose them, and contract with them for their labours." One only need substitute "taxes" for "tythes" and "government officials" for "Ministers" to see how close the Levellers were to the idea of a voluntary state.
The Levellers also held tenaciously to the idea of self-proprietorship. As Richard Overton wrote: "No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no mans [sic]." They realized that it was impossible to assert one's private right of judgment in religious matters (what we would call today liberty of conscience) without upholding the same right for everyone else, even the unregenerate. The existence of a State church in England caused friction since the time of the Levellers because there were always those who opposed its religious doctrine or their forced contributions towards its support.
Educational voluntaryism
Voluntaryists also became involved in another controversy in England, from about the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s. In 1843, Parliament considered legislation which would require part-time compulsory attendance at school of those children working in factories. The effective control over these schools was to be placed in the hands of the established Church of EnglandChurch of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
, and the schools were to be supported largely from funds raised out of local taxation. Nonconformists, mostly Baptists and Congregationalists, became alarmed. They had been under the ban of the law for more than a century. At one time or another they could not be married in their own churches, were compelled to pay church rates against their will, and had to teach their children underground for fear of arrest. They became known as voluntaryists because they consistently rejected all state aid and interference in education, just as they rejected the state in the religious sphere of their lives. Three of the most notable voluntaryists included the young Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
(1820–1903), who published his first series of articles "The Proper Sphere of Government," beginning in 1842; Edward Baines, Jr., (1800–1890) editor and proprietor of the Leeds Mercury; and Edward Miall
Edward Miall
Edward Miall was an English journalist, apostle of disestablishment, founder of the Liberation Society, and Liberal Party politician.Miall was born at Portsmouth...
(1809–1881), Congregationalist minister, and founder-editor of The Nonconformist (1841), who wrote Views of the Voluntary Principle (1845).
The educational voluntaryists wanted free trade in education, just as they supported free trade in corn or cotton. Their concern for "liberty can scarcely be exaggerated." They believed that "government would employ education for its own ends" (teaching habits of obedience and indoctrination), and that government-controlled schools would ultimately teach children to rely on the State for all things. Baines, for example, noted that "[w]e cannot violate the principles of liberty in regard to education without furnishing at once a precedent and inducement to violate them in regard to other matters." Baines conceded that the then current system of education (both private and charitable) had deficiencies, but he argued that freedom should not be abridged on that account. Should freedom of the press be compromised because we have bad newspapers? "I maintain that Liberty is the chief cause of excellence; but it would cease to be Liberty if you proscribed everything inferior." The Congregational Board of Education
Congregational Board of Education
The Congregational Board of Education was set up in 1843 "to promote popular education, partaking of a religious character and under no circumstances receiving aid from public money administered by Government." ....
and the Baptist Voluntary Education Society are usually given pride of place among the Voluntaryists.
Auberon Herbert
Although educational voluntaryism failed to stop the movement for compulsory schools in England, voluntaryism as a political creed was revived during the 1880s by another Englishman, Auberon HerbertAuberon Herbert
Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was a writer, theorist, philosopher, and "19th-century individualist anarchist." A member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Herbert was the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl, and father of the 9th Baron Lucas...
(1838–1906). Herbert served a two-year term in the British House of Commons
British House of Commons
The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which also comprises the Sovereign and the House of Lords . Both Commons and Lords meet in the Palace of Westminster. The Commons is a democratically elected body, consisting of 650 members , who are known as Members...
, but after meeting Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
in 1874, decided not to run for re-election. He noted:
Herbert wrote "State Education: A Help or Hindrance?" in 1880, and began using the word "voluntaryist" to label his advocacy of "voluntary" taxation. He began publishing his journal, The Free Life (Organ of Voluntary Taxation and the Voluntary State) in 1890. Herbert was not a pure voluntaryist because, although he held that it was possible for state revenues to be generated by offering competitive services on the free market, he continued to advocate a single monopolistic state for every given geographic territory, Some of his essays are titled "The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life" (1897), and "A Plea for Voluntaryism," (posthumously, 1908).
Usage in the U.S.
Although there was never an explicit "voluntaryist" movement in America until the late 20th century, earlier Americans did agitate for the disestablishment of government-supported churches in several of the original thirteen states. These conscientious objectors believed mere birth in a given geographic area did not mean that one consented to membership or automatically wished to support a state church. Their objection to taxation in support of the church was two-fold: taxation not only gave the state some right of control over the church; it also represented a way of coercing the non-member or the unbeliever into supporting the church. In New EnglandNew England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
, where both Massachusetts and Connecticut started out with state churches, many people believed that they needed to pay a tax for the general support of religion – for the same reasons they paid taxes to maintain the roads and the courts. It was simply inconceivable to many of them that society could long exist without state support of religion. Practically no one considered the idea that although governmentally supplied goods and services (such as roads, or schools, or churches) might be essential to human welfare, it was not necessary that they be provided by the government.
There were at least two well-known Americans who espoused voluntaryist causes during the mid-19th century. Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
's (1817–1862) first brush with the law in his home state of Massachusetts came in 1838, when he turned twenty-one. The State demanded that he pay the one dollar ministerial tax, in support of a clergyman, "whose preaching my father attended but never I myself." When Thoreau refused to pay the tax, it was probably paid by one of his aunts. In order to avoid the ministerial tax in the future, Thoreau had to sign an affidavit attesting he was not a member of the church.
Thoreau's overnight imprisonment for his failure to pay another municipal tax, the poll tax
Poll tax
A poll tax is a tax of a portioned, fixed amount per individual in accordance with the census . When a corvée is commuted for cash payment, in effect it becomes a poll tax...
, to the town of Concord was recorded in his essay, "Resistance to Civil Government," first published in 1849. It is often referred to as "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," because in it he concluded that government was dependent on the cooperation of its citizens. While he was not a thoroughly consistent voluntaryist, he did write that he wished never to "rely on the protection of the state," and that he refused to tender it his allegiance so long as it supported slavery. He distinguished himself from "those who call[ed] themselves no-government men": "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government," but this has been interpreted as a gradualist, rather than minarchist, stance given that he also opened his essay by stating his belief that "That government is best which governs not at all," a point which all voluntaryists heartily embrace.
One of those "no-government men" was William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United...
(1805–1879), famous abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator. Nearly all abolitionists identified with the self-ownership
Self-ownership
Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to G...
principle, that each person – as an individual – owned and should control his or her own mind and body free of outside coercive interference. The abolitionist called for the immediate and unconditional cessation of slavery because they saw slavery as man-stealing in its most direct and worst form. Slavery reflected the theft of a person's self-ownership rights. The slave was a chattel with no rights of its own. The abolitionists realized that each human being, without exception, was naturally invested with sovereignty over him or her self and that no one could exercise forcible control over another without breaching the self-ownership principle. Garrison, too, was not a pure voluntaryist for he supported the federal government's war against the States from 1861 to 1865.
Probably the most consistent voluntaryist of that era was Charles Lane
Charles Lane (transcendentalist)
Charles Lane was an English-American transcendentalist, abolitionist, and early voluntaryist. Along with Amos Bronson Alcott, he was one of the main founders of Fruitlands.-Fruitlands:...
(1800–1870). He was friendly with Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thoreau. Between January and June 1843 a series of nine letters he penned were published in such abolitionist’s papers as The Liberator and The Herald of Freedom. The title under which they were published was "A Voluntary Political Government," and in them Lane described the state in terms of institutionalized violence and referred to its "club law, its mere brigand right of a strong arm, [supported] by guns and bayonets." He saw the coercive state on par with "forced" Christianity. "Everyone can see that the church is wrong when it comes to men with the [B]ible in one hand, and the sword in the other." "Is it not equally diabolical for the state to do so?" Lane believed that governmental rule was only tolerated by public opinion because the fact was not yet recognized that all the true purposes of the state could be carried out on the voluntary principle, just as churches could be sustained voluntarily. Reliance on the voluntary principle could only come about through "kind, orderly, and moral means" that were consistent with the totally voluntary society he was advocating. "Let us have a voluntary State as well as a voluntary Church, and we may possibly then have some claim to the appeallation of free men."
Late 20th and early 21st century libertarians readily draw a parallel between the disestablishment of state church
State church
State churches are organizational bodies within a Christian denomination which are given official status or operated by a state.State churches are not necessarily national churches in the ethnic sense of the term, but the two concepts may overlap in the case of a nation state where the state...
es and the abandonment of the state itself. Although the label "voluntaryist" practically died out after the death of Auberon Herbert
Auberon Herbert
Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was a writer, theorist, philosopher, and "19th-century individualist anarchist." A member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Herbert was the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl, and father of the 9th Baron Lucas...
, its use was renewed in late 1982, when George H. Smith
George H. Smith
George Hamilton Smith is an American author, editor, educator and speaker.-Biography:Smith grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, and attended the University of Arizona for several years before leaving without a degree; he relocated to Los Angeles during 1971. With the help of libertarian editor Roy A...
, Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy is a Canadian individualist anarchist and individualist feminist. She was a co-founder along with Carl Watner and George H. Smith of The Voluntaryist in 1982.-Sex-positive:...
, and Carl Watner
Carl Watner
Carl Watner is an American author and historian of libertarian studies, and a voluntaryist. He has written articles for Reason magazine, The Libertarian Forum, and The Journal of Libertarian Studies....
began publishing The Voluntaryist. George Smith suggested use of the term to identify those libertarians who believed that political action and political parties (especially the Libertarian Party) were antithetical to their ideas. In their "Statement of Purpose" in Neither Bullets nor Ballots: Essays on Voluntaryism (1983), Watner, Smith, and McElroy explained that voluntaryists were advocates of non-political strategies to achieve a free society. They rejected electoral politics "in theory and practice as incompatible with libertarian goals," and argued that political methods invariably strengthen the legitimacy of coercive governments. In concluding their "Statement of Purpose" they wrote: "Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through education, and we advocate the withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which state power ultimately depends."
The Voluntaryist
The Voluntaryist newsletter, which began publication in late 1982, is one of the longest-lived libertarian publications in the world. Edited and published by Carl Watner since 1986, the most significant articles from the first 100 issues were anthologized in book-length form and published as . Another voluntaryist anthology made a case for non-votingNon-voting
Non-voting is a strategy employed by various radical libertarians and anarchists who wish to promote a free society yet who view voting to be either unethical or impractical...
: . The masthead of The Voluntaryist, perhaps, best epitomizes the voluntaryist outlook: "If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself." This statement penned by Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , pronounced . 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement...
urges that the world can only be changed one person at a time, and then, only if that person wills it, making it appealing to many voluntaryists. The only thing that the individual can do, voluntaryists hold, "is present society with 'one improved unit'." Albert Jay Nock expressed this point as follows: "[A]ges of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method …, that is, the method of each 'one' doing his very best to improve 'one.'" Voluntaryists believe that this is the quiet, peaceful, patient way of changing society because it concentrates on bettering the character of men and women as individuals. The voluntaryist hope is that as the individual units change, the improvement of society will take care of itself. In other words, "if one take care of the means, the end
will take care of itself."
See also
- AgorismAgorismAgorism is a political philosophy founded by Samuel Edward Konkin III and developed with contributions by J. Neil Schulman that holds as its ultimate goal bringing about a society in which all "relations between people are voluntary exchanges – a free market." The term comes from the Greek...
- AnarchismAnarchismAnarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
- Anarcho-capitalismAnarcho-capitalismAnarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
- LibertarianismLibertarianismLibertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
- Market anarchismMarket anarchismFree-market anarchism refers to an individualist anarchist philosophy in which monopoly of force held by government would be replaced by a competitive market of non-monopolistic organizations providing security, justice, and other defense services...
- Murray RothbardMurray RothbardMurray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
- Rule of lawRule of lawThe rule of law, sometimes called supremacy of law, is a legal maxim that says that governmental decisions should be made by applying known principles or laws with minimal discretion in their application...
- Rule According to Higher LawRule according to higher lawThe rule according to a higher law means that no written law may be enforced by the government unless it conforms with certain unwritten, universal principles of fairness, morality, and justice...
- Voluntary associationVoluntary associationA voluntary association or union is a group of individuals who enter into an agreement as volunteers to form a body to accomplish a purpose.Strictly speaking, in many jurisdictions no formalities are necessary to start an association...
- Voluntaryist literature