DAVID T. wn:cl( alist anarchism, however, usually deny that cotntnunity or society have even the secondary substantiality accorded to them in the communist or syndicalist versions. In the present world (it is held) society and community are fictions by which some individuals, cooperating for the purpose, justify their violent domination and exploitation of others; while what might be mistakenly regarded as community or society in a condition of true freedom would actually be no more than the sum of the unhindered actions of individuals and their associations. For individualists, the mutually advantageous cooperation of individuals would be achieved through an agreed-upon medium or principle of exchange and other conventions intended to guarantee maximally the self-sovereignty of the individual. But it is the plain intended consequence of the individualists' proposals that the ends identified here earlier as socialist be achieved - if one regards collective ownership as but one proposed means for the abolition of classes and of kinds of property, governmentally legitimated and protected, that make possible the exploitation of person by person. The American individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews («The Science of Society,> 1848), while rejecting the forms in which democracy and socialism were usually conceived, wrote that the sovereignty of the individual represented the fulfillment of the spirit of both, and the later individualist Benjamin Tucker held that individualism was that species of socialism which chose the way of liberty against the way of «invasive autority,> to which latter, he thought, the anarchist communists, wittingly or unwittingly, succumbed. And if the principle that every person decides correctly expresses the communist and syndicalist versions of anarchism, the self-sovereignty dear to individualists is given full recognition. There is however plainly a tension between thinking of a society of free individuals and thinking of a society of free individuals, particularly if in the first case 'society' might better be placed in quotation marks; and to opt for one or the other is to invite pratical and psychological consequences, perhaps just because one's choice reflects one's sense of what is more painfully lacking in one's world. In an ethic of Individualism, with its economic corrolaries, Kropotkin saw something reminiscent of capitalist apologetics for the aggressive and acquisitive and exploitative individual; in Kropotkin's visions of communism the individualists saw the absorption of the individual into a sovereign whole. 48
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