Stephen Pearl Andrews is one of those thinkers who kept such an open mind he let his brains fall out. Born in 1812, Pearl Andrews was one of the more prominent individualist anarchists, alongside Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and Josiah Warren. His life’s philosophical work, which began with a fascination with libertarianism, and ended with socialist economic theories on the value of labour, covered a number of diverse fields, and he was known all over the English-speaking world as a great polymath. Notably, Pearl Andrews is known to have spoken 32 languages, invented the word “scientology”, and was the first to publish Karl Marx’s ‘Communist Manifesto’ in the United States. Perhaps most remarkably of all, Pearl Andrews became an ardent abolitionist upon emigration to the newly founded Republic of Texas. In an attempt to prevent Texas’ becoming a slave state, he travelled to Great Britain and nearly succeeded in convincing Parliament that the Texan government was offering up the country for sale. They had almost completely accepted his story, and were prepared to offer a deal, when delegates from the lone star republic arrived in London to contradict him.
Despite his many eccentricities, Stephen Pearly Andrews was a brilliant man, and his individualist anarchist philosophy has inspired thousands to join the libertarian cause. Here are ten great quotes from this very interesting component of America’s libertarian tradition:
Stephen Pearl Andrews
1) “Just in proportion as the effort is less and less made to reduce men to order, just in that proportion they become more orderly, as witness the difference in the state of society in Austria and the United States. Plant an army of one hundred thousand soldiers in New York, as at Paris, to preserve the peace, and we should have a bloody revolution in a week; and be assured that the only remedy for what little of turbulence remains among us, as compared with European societies, will be found to be more liberty. When there remain positively no external restrictions, there will be positively no disturbance”
2) “The true lesson of political wisdom is simply this: that no interests should ever be entrusted to a combination which are too important to be surrendered understandingly and voluntarily to the guidance of a despotism. Government, therefore, in the present sense of the term, can never, from the very essential nature of the case, be compatible with the safety of the liberties of the people, until the sphere of its authority is reduced to the very narrowest dimensions”
3) “What, then, society has to do is to remove the obstructions to this universal self-election, by every Individual, of himself, to that function which his own consciousness of his own adaptation prompts him to believe to be his peculiar God-intended office in life. Throw open the polls, make the pulpit, the schoolroom, the workshop, the manufactory, the shipyard, and the storehouse the universal ballot-boxes of the people. Make every day an election day, and every human being both a candidate and a voter, exercising each day and hour his full and unlimited franchise.”
4) “Much that is relatively good is only good as a necessity growing out of evil. The greater good is the removal of the evil altogether. The alms-house and the foundling hospital may be necessary and laudable charities, but they can only be regarded by the enlightened philanthropist as the stinking apothecary’s salve, or the dead flies, applied to the bruises and sores of the body politic. Admitted temporary necessities, they are offensive to the nostrils of good taste.”
5) “The same causes that are upheaving the thrones of Europe are disturbing the domestic tranquillity of thousands of families among us. Red Republicanism in France, African Slavery in America, and the mooted question of the rights of women are one and the same problem. It is the sole question of human liberty, or the Sovereignty of the Individual.”
6) “Government of all sorts is adverse to freedom. It destroys the freedom of the subject, directly, by virtue of the fact that he is a subject; and destroys equally the freedom of the governor, indirectly, by devolving on him the necessity of overlooking and attempting, hopelessly, to regulate the conduct of others,-a task never yet accomplished, and the attempt at which is sufficiently harassing to wear the life out of the most zealous advocate of order.”
7) “It is only when each individual atom of the dusky mineral is disintegrated from every other, held in complete solution, and allowed to obey, without let or hindrance, the law of its own interior impulse, that each shoots spontaneously to its own place, and that all concur in voluntary union to constitute the pellucid crystal or the sparkling diamond of the mines. So in human affairs, what is feared by the timid conservative as the dissolution of order is, in fact, merely the preliminary stage of the true harmonic Constitution of Society,-the necessary analysis to its genuine and legitimate synthesis.”
8) “It must not be understood that disconnection of interests implies, in the slightest degree, an isolation of persons. A hundred or a thousand men may be engaged in the same shop, and still their interests be entirely individualized. Such is the case now under the present wages system. The labourers in a manufacturing establishment, for example, have no common interest, no partnership, no combined responsibilities. Their interests are completely individualized, and yet they work together. This is all right.”
9) “It cannot be rightly said that any man has a right to do wrong; but every man has the right to the freedom to do wrong. In other words, he has the right not to be interfered with in the exercise of his own judgment of right, although it may lead him to do what all the world pronounce wrong, provided only that he acts at his own cost, that is, that he do not throw the burdensome consequences of his acts on others.”
10) “Individual property is based on the right of the Individual to the products of his own labor. But if the product of my labour is my own, no one can decide the terms on which I shall part with it but myself. The right of exchanging it at pleasure is involved in the right of ownership. The attempt to establish a compulsory law for this purpose is a gross violation of my acknowledged Sovereignty”