Quadrant

“ All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle that, though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.
Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things. ”

“ Society had created for itself definite organs, originally by simple division of labor, for the provision of its common interests. But these organs, at the head of which is the power of the State, had in the course of time, and in the service of their own separate interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into its masters. And this is true not only of the hereditary monarchy, but also of the democratic republic. Nowhere do the "politicians" form a more distinct and more powerful subdivision of the nation than in the United States. ”

“ The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole; in ancient times, the State of slave-owning citizens; in the middle ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. ”

“ Purify as we may the vision of the commonalty it must still be common; and by no process of free evolution can an academy be established whose acting judgment shall he far removed from that of the mass out of which it has sprung. Elevation and distinction are by the very necessity of things, the characteristics of a few. The words themselves imply a contrast between individuals and the majority, and a strict Socialist might detect in them the obnoxious principle of separation. ”

“ Authority has two bases, upon which, to stand firm, it must be supported, like man upon two feet; these are unity or centralisation, and the distinction of ranks. The corresponding bases of liberty are equality, and independence. The spirit of unity or centralisation is already beginning to appear in several of the United States. ”

“ IX. Free association, liberty, which confines itself to the maintenance of equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchanges, is the only form of society possible, just, and true.
“X. Politics is the science of liberty; the government of man by man, under whatever name it may disguise itself, is oppression. ”

“ In the case of such states, the heart of the people, as estimated from generation to generation, has been sound, and the heads of their rulers wise. The laws have gradually been adapted to promote individual liberty, and not to impair it; and the province of government has been so mapped out as to make the government an institution conducive to the good of the people, and not a mere organ for the sacrifice of a nation to a class. ”

“ But what does the State hold as the representative of the Race?—all its Citizens, without a single exception. Were there some Individuals either not taken into account at all in the common purpose, or not taken into account with all their powers, while the rest were included,—then the former would enjoy all the advantages of the union without bearing all the attendant burdens, and there would thus be inequality. Only where all without exception are taken into account, is equality the result. ”

“ But what usurper from the beginning ever essayed a task so hopeless as the subversion of a state in which there were no classes or interests to set against one another, a state in which there was no aristocracy and no populace, a state the stability of which represented the equal and entire stake in life of every human being in it? ”

“ I now propose to try to find out whether there is any class in society which lies under the duty and burden of fighting the battles of life for any other class, or of solving social problems for the satisfaction of any other class; also, whether there is any class which has the right to formulate demands on "society"—that is, on other classes; also, whether there is anything but a fallacy and a superstition in the notion that "the State" owes anything to anybody except peace, order, and the guarantees of rights. ”

“ An Anarchistic journal, expounding the doctrine that in Equal Liberty is to be found the most satisfactory solution of social questions, and that majority rule, or democracy, equally with monarchical rule, is a denial of Equal Liberty. ”

“ But a State transcends its proper function, when it interferes with those Equal Rights, [Pg 39] whether civil or political, which by the Declaration of Independence and repeated texts of the National Constitution are under the safeguard of the Nation. The State is local in character, and not universal. Whatever is justly local belongs to its cognizance; whatever is universal belongs to the Nation. But what can be more universal than the Rights of Man? ”

“ The Empire has yielded to the Monarchy, the Monarchy to the Republic, the Republic to the Empire again, and that once more to the Republic, but the Code which embodies the principle of equality before the law has remained. Fundamentally the social equilibrium has been stable. ”

“ In making Equality the fundamental principle, underlying Liberty itself, I follow reason and authority. Clearly, where all are equal, there can be no Slavery. Equality makes Slavery impossible, while it broadens Liberty into that community of right which is the essence of Republican Government. ”

“ This plan of constitution was painted with the colors of a glowing fancy. First, to free every people, and then to unite all free peoples! None to be oppressed by the other. Each to be left to choose his own way to prosperity, speak his own tongue, cultivate his own land. ”

“ He would urge us onward in our merely intellectual career, unmindful of the lesson, which the pages of history logically teach, which the principles we have pointed out unerringly confirm, that intellectual development, religious liberty, civil freedom, social equality, unbalanced and unregulated by the centralization, consolidation, moral force, religious responsibility, and the tendencies which belong to the principle of unity, push irresistibly toward disintegration, and end inevitably in political revolution, national disruption, and social anarchy. ”

“ Let us consider now the type of nation which from our present point of view is the most interesting, the type which approximates most nearly to a solution of the problem of civilisation, to the reconciliation of individuality with collectivity, to the synthesis of individualist and collectivist ideals; that in which the rights and wills of individuals are not forcibly subordinated to those of the State by the power of a governing class, and in which the deliberative side of the national mind is well developed and effective. ”

“ It would then, according to the Judge, not be desirable that free labor should prevail everywhere, for that would create uniformity, and uniformity would be the death of freedom.
And now mark that wonderful muddle of nonsense in the head of that “greatest of living statesmen.” [Laughter.] Our liberties rest upon our Federal system of government; our Federal system of government rests upon the variety of institutions; that variety of institutions consists of there being slavery in some of the States. ”

“ Then, when the people had obtained possession of the government, reforms would begin: return to the primitive commune, substitution of an equal and free family for the moral and oppressive family; absolute equality, civil, political and economic; individual independence guaranteed, thanks to the possession and the integral product of the instruments of work ”

“ It was against such a form of society that our ancestors revolted; they had a new theory of government, and established a new form—a republic, owned and run by its citizens, all standing on an equal plane. The process of evolution in the political world is still going on, and some day we shall see a world-wide federation of republics, in which the human race will share equal rights. ”

“ Recognizing the social antagonism of classes at the bottom of all political struggles, it applied itself to the study of the conditions under which one class of society can and must be called on to represent the whole of the interests of a nation, and thus politically to rule over it. ”

“ These two foundation rocks are the divine design that all men should be equal and free; and the certain corollary that governments among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The equality of freemen when they stand apart, and their free consent, when they join in a political league—these are the immovable pillars [35] of character and order among intelligent men. Upon such foundations this government has been placed. That sure basis the South assailed. ”

“ Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right. This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. ”

“ Are they themselves really harmonious in theory and in practice? Does scope for individual development, for example, consort with the idea of equality? Is popular sovereignty a practicable basis of personal freedom, or does it open an avenue to the tyranny of the mob? Will the sentiment of nationality dwell in unison with the ideal of peace? Is the love of liberty compatible with the full realization of the common will? ”

“ Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Everyone of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly anyone of us has the idea of the State, as a working power. ”

“ Consider first, then, in any given case, “Are those in the minority seeking to keep or filch liberty from you, or only to obtain such liberty as is already yours? Are they seeking to set up equality of condition or inequality? ”

“ The highest stage of society towards which we are moving he calls liberty—that is, the synthesis of the thesis, community, and the antithesis, property—but “liberty is equality, because liberty exists only in the social state, and outside of equality there is no society.” ”

“ They ascertain politics as sequential, linear, and deterministic. They rejoice in promulgating ideals that correspond to the scale of humankind in which they guarantee the means that result in the efficiency of industrial and productive society. Liberté, egalité, fraternité are shorthand for rights of conscience, ownership, and individual legal status. They are an expression of accepted hierarchy and centralism to the degree that these could be rendered relative as need required. ”

“ Yet if society be, as I assume it to be, an organism operating on mechanical principles, we may perhaps, by pondering upon history, learn enough of those principles to enable us to view, more intelligently than we otherwise should, the social phenomena about us. What we call civilization is, I suspect, only, in proportion to its perfection, a more or less thorough social centralization, while centralization, very clearly, is an effect of applied science. ”

“ Comrades, more than a hundred years ago the founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, explained that the State was incompatible with liberty, that the State was an instrument of repression of one class by another. They explained that for true freedom ever to exist the State must wither away. ”

“ We have now seen that the current discussions about the claims and rights of social classes on each other are radically erroneous and fallacious, and we have seen that an analysis of the general obligations which we all have to each other leads us to nothing but an emphatic repetition of old but well-acknowledged obligations to perfect our political institutions. ”

“ The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism. ”

“ Any effort toward class legislation or class division is an appeal to passion, prejudice or cupidity. It is the work of demagogues, be they labor leaders, politicians or so–called social–justice reformers. The spirit of a republic is to recognize the equality of all before the law. ”

“ That a nation may manifest itself in its unity, it must be centralized in its religion, centralized in its justice, centralized in its army, centralized in its agriculture, industry, and commerce, centralized in its finances,—in a word, centralized in all its functions and faculties; the centralization must work from the bottom to the top, from the circumference to the centre; all the functions must be independent and severally self-governing. ”

“ Such a unity is neither the mere sum of isolated individuals, nor a mere majority ruling by numbers: but the fraternal and organic commonwealth which brings all classes and all rights from their particularistic independence into an ideal identity and indifference109. Here all are not merely equal before the laws: but the law itself is a living and organic unity, self-correcting, subordinating and organising, and no longer merely defining individual privileges and so-called liberties. ”