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Title: Pioneering Egoist Texts Author: Sidney E. Parker Language: en Topics: egoism Source: Retrieved 11/09/2021 from https://archive.org/details/EnemiesOfSocietyAnAnthologyOfIndividualistEgoistThought/
Every man is an egoist — whoever ceases to be one becomes a thing. He
who pretends it is not necessary to be one is a thief. Anselme
Bellegarrigue
The only consistent philosophical basis for anarchist individualism is
conscious egoism, which finds its most radical and extensive expression
in Max Stirner’s pioneering epic The Ego and His Own. Stirner’s work,
however, is not easy to read, but for many years it was the only durable
account of philosophical egoism available. Now, with the reissue of
James L. Walker’s long-neglected classic The Philosophy of Egoism and
John Badcock’s Slaves to Duty, it is possible to approach The Ego and
His Own by an easier route. Together with the first of The Libertarian
Broadside Series, Stirner’s The False Principles of Our Education, they
provide a fitting supplement to, and an illuminating comment on,
Stirner’s magnum opus.
Walker deservedly earned the title of “Father of Egoism” in the USA. By
his early twenties he was expounding an embryonic form of egoism and had
reached substantially the same conclusions as Stirner before he heard of
the latter in 1872. Under the pseudonym of Tak Kak he Opened a debate on
the subject in the columns of Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty in the 18803 and
succeeded in carrying most of the Tuckerites, including Tucker himself,
into the egoist camp. The bulk of The Philosophy of Egoism however,
appeared serially in the magazine Egoism, published by Georgia and Henry
Replogle from 1890-1898. In 1905, it was published in its entirety by
Walker's widow, a year after his death from smallpox in Mexico.
When the book first appeared it was described in Liberty as “no more
concise exposition of the philosophy of egoism has ever been given to
the world. In this book Duty, Conscience, Moralism, Right and all the
fetishes and superstitions which have infested the human intellect since
man ceased to walk on four feet, are annihilated, swept away, relegated
to the rubbish heap of the waste of human intelligence that has gone on
through the progress of the race from its infancy.”
Little has appeared in the English language since then to alter this
judgment. Indeed, reading Walker in the light of certain recent
”egoists” one sees how he stands head and shoulders above them,
particularly those who retail constipated moralisms from under the sign
of the Randian Revelation. How Walker would have been amused by their
interminable mental gymnastics over “rights” and ”force” which resemble
nothing so much as the legendary medieval debates on how many angels
could dance on the point of a needle. For him both ”right” and ”force”
were expediencies to be claimed or exercised as an individual saw fit—
and had the power!
In a style alternating between the magisterial and the pithy, and lit
and lightened with flashes of telling eloquence, walker launches
broadside after broadside at the ramparts of altruistic idealism. Every
type of ”supernal altruist” from the priest to the moralizing
freethinker, from Nietzsche (yes, Nietzsche who wanted us to live for
the Overman!) to the quasi-individualist Herbert Spencer, comes under
his withering fire. I am tempted to quote from many passages in which he
deftly turns the tables on the anti-egoists and shows how nearly 2,000
years of Iudeo-Christianity has covered what Stirner called ”the noble
nature of egoism” with the rancorous slime of the self-sacrificed, but I
will content myself with only one in which Walker is replying to some of
his critics writing in “libertarian papers”:
Many show absolutely no understanding of Egoism. It is an affair of
objective classification of acts, they suppose. Thus if I have an apple
and eat it, that is Egoism, they suppose. if I give the apple to my
friend, that is Altruism, they suppose. How simple! Then I, being an
Egoist and liking to see some of my friends eat my apples, must not
indulge this pleasure unless I can stand certain persons’ charges of
inconsistency. Let me give them a point: I select my friends. My apples
are not for everybody to help himself. Let me give them another point:
The man who eats his own apple, not because he likes it, but because he
thinks it is Egoistic to eat it—not to talk of duty—is only a deluded
Egoist, by which I mean that he has missed being an Egoist in the
definite sense in which I am using the word in these closing chapters.
As James J. Martin remarks in his foreword: Walker was one of “the
giants of philosophical egoism”.
Badcock’s essay ”Slaves to Duty” nearly suffered the same fate as
Walker’s book, but was saved from complete neglect by Laurance Labadie
who reprinted it in 1938. First delivered as a lecture in 1894 to the
London South Place Junior Ethical Society, it appeared shortly
afterwards as a pamphlet. Badcock subjects the ”duty” spook to a
thorough investigation and after he has finished it there is not enough
left to give even a modicum of consolation to the most credulous member
of the Society for Psychical Research.
Since I have written the Introduction to this corrected and annotated
edition I will leave it at that— adding, however, that the appendix is a
much needed reprint of John Beverley Robinson's little 1915 masterpiece
” Egoism”- I doubt if anyone else has surpassed Robinson in compressing
so much about egoism into just four pages.
The fourth of the Libertarian Broadside Series consists of three of
Benjamin Tucker’s most pertinent essays: “State Socialism and
Anarchism”, “The Attitude of Anarchism Towards Industrial Combinations”
and the personal, little-known, “Why I Am An Anarchist”. For anyone
wanting to grasp the salient ideas of Tucker’s interpretation of
anarchism, these essays can be recommended. Tucker was a stylish writer
and always presented his case with impeccable polish.
The essays are preceded by an outstanding Introduction by James J.
Martin, which, for me, was the most important part of the booklet:
particularly since Martin is the greatest living "authority” on Tucker's
life and ideas.
After paying tribute to Tucker's intellectual eminence and literary
ability, Martin goes on to consider the relevance of Tuckerism today.
This is a crucial question for anarchist individualists, since Tucker
and his contemporaries not only lived, as Martin puts it, in a ”mainly
stable world State system at the height of the era of world
colonialism", but were necessarily strangers to our air-conditioned
nightmare of nuclear weapons, concentration camps, gas chambers, and the
sophisticated repressive techniques of modern collectivist manipulators.
The corporate, corporation and warfare states were largely smudges on
the horizon when they were most active in formulating their ideas. The
problem of the individual versus organized collectives loomed large
seventy years ago, but its growth since then has been so staggering that
one cannot conceive of its solution, even if one were convinced that
individualism could become the active concern of the majority of
mankind. As the hero of Paul Herr’s novel Journey Not to End, remarks:
”The true radical in the Age of Organization is a hermit in a cave.”
An exaggeration, perhaps, but a pardonable one!
Martin asks what can be done now in this “Age of Organization”.
Intellectually, those of the opposition who claim Tucker as a precursor,
simply repeat the critiques of the past “disguised by present day
fashionable stylistic conventions”. Actively, there have been no
significant operational improvements on the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries:
One would be inclined to conclude from the evidence at hand that no new
day in the affairs of men is about to dawn. An interminable period of
Statist nighttime lies ahead, during which the matter of individual
survival will supersede all other goals. It remains to be seen whether
radical political activity along the traditional lines of mass politics,
which always runs the risk of succeeding and thereupon creating an even
worse State, or anonymous individualist philosophical strategies, best
lend themselves to meeting the objective adequately.
Not a conclusion to commend itself to those who, seeking utopia, at the
same time seek to cripple individualism within the fetters of mass
politicking. But for those who are beyond such stupidities, for the
remnant who understand what individualism is really about, such
strategies will be among the first of their priorities. From “internal
exile" to the desperate heroism of militant illegalism, the options lie
open. What each will do is up to each...Individualist strategies are the
products of individuals — not of groups or parties.