Virtual Reading Groups (VRGs) are a way to learn better together.

Participants meet online for an hour each week to discuss pre-assigned and freely supplied readings with the guidance of a scholar. VRGs are meant to provide a safe setting for exploring ideas and reaping the gains from intellectual exchange. Mutual respect and curiosity are expected.

Each session will be recorded so others can listen to our conversations. There is limited space so not every applicant will be accepted. All accepted applicants will be emailed further instructions on how to participate. Consistent (though not flawless) attendance is expected.

APPLICATION DEADLINE:

January 13, 2021

GROUP LEADER:

Dr. Roderick T. Long

GROUP MEETING DATES & TIMES:

Tuesdays, 1/19 - 2/23, 5pm EDT

Jan 19, 5pm EDT
Jan 26, 5pm EDT
Feb 2, 5pm EDT
Feb 9, 5pm EDT
Feb 16, 5pm EDT
Feb 23, 5pm EDT

GROUP DESCRIPTION:

The history of anarchism in the United States often focuses on a) advocates of communism or collectivism, who were b) predominantly European immigrants drawing mainly on European intellectual traditions. But 19th-century America also saw the emergence of a more homegrown, individualist-oriented strain of anarchism that saw itself as the continuation and fulfillment of the principles of the American Revolution.

These early American individualist anarchists drew freely on classical liberal thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer for inspiration; but while dependent on the classical liberal tradition they also engaged critically with it and happily borrowed ideas from socialist thinkers like Robert Owen and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. (While identifying “the” founder of a movement tends to be somewhat arbitrary, the thinker with the strongest claim to be the founder of the American individualist anarchist movement is Josiah Warren, an early enthusiast for Owen’s experimental communist communities until living in one converted him to extreme individualism.)

The individualist anarchists held that mainstream classical liberals had failed to apply their principles consistently, and that doing so would reveal the power of the capitalist class as the product not of market exchange but of government interference with market exchange. Despite being defenders of free markets, private ownership, and economic laissez-faire, many of them called themselves “socialists” to express their solidarity with labour in its conflict with capital; and some (e.g., Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Batchelder Greene, and by one account Lysander Spooner) were even members of the First International. But the anarchists came into conflict just as often with conventional socialists, frequently accepting their identifications of social problems but rejecting most of their solutions as authoritarian infringements on production and trade.

Many of the individualist anarchists got their start in the abolitionist movement, and were subsequently led to expand their focus from the rights of slaves against slaveowners to those of women against men, labourers against employers, and individuals against the state, seeing these various struggles as both akin and mutually reinforcing.

The individualist anarchists were in many ways forerunners of the modern libertarian movement, and some of them – Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, for example – were a major influence on thinkers like Murray Rothbard. But in their economic doctrines and social attitudes these 19th-century thinkers often diverge from conclusions popular with most free-market proponents today, instead offering perspectives more similar (though not necessarily identical) to those of “free-market anti-capitalists” and “left-wing market anarchists,” today, such as Kevin Carson and Gary Chartier.

The 19th-century American individualist anarchists thus offer today’s libertarians and classical liberals a vision of a different direction in which free-market principles can be developed, and raise fundamental questions about property rights, wealth and poverty, competition and cooperation, the nature of the family, the nature of the state, the administration of justice, and the rights and duties of the individual.