WEBVTT NOTE The First American Anarchist: Josiah Warren 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.540 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.540 --> 00:00:13.100 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:13.100 --> 00:00:21.760 On an evening in 1871, or perhaps 1872, a young MIT student named Benjamin R. Tucker 4 00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:27.800 attended a lecture somewhere in the Boston-Cambridge area, a lecture at which he met a much older 5 00:00:27.800 --> 00:00:30.840 Tucker Mann named Josiah Warren. 6 00:00:30.840 --> 00:00:36.240 Tucker was only 17 or 18 at the time, and his encounter with Warren, who was in his 7 00:00:36.240 --> 00:00:40.960 early 70s, was a fateful, even a life-changing one. 8 00:00:40.960 --> 00:00:45.800 After devoting a half-dozen years to further thought about the ideas Warren introduced 9 00:00:45.800 --> 00:00:51.560 to him that evening, young Tucker embarked upon an ambitious program of publishing involving 10 00:00:51.560 --> 00:00:56.960 both books and periodicals that occupied him for the next 30 years. 11 00:00:56.960 --> 00:01:02.080 During those years, through his publications, he succeeded in creating, and then leading, 12 00:01:02.080 --> 00:01:08.680 what I have often described here on Mises.org, as the first, the original, American libertarian 13 00:01:08.680 --> 00:01:09.880 movement. 14 00:01:09.880 --> 00:01:12.860 Josiah Warren never lived to see any of this. 15 00:01:12.860 --> 00:01:19.540 He died in 1874, not long after his fateful meeting with the young Benjamin Tucker. 16 00:01:19.540 --> 00:01:25.200 He was 76 years old at the time of his death, which took place in Princeton, Massachusetts, 17 00:01:25.200 --> 00:01:30.740 A small town fifteen or twenty miles north of Worcester, around fifty or sixty miles 18 00:01:30.740 --> 00:01:33.280 west of Boston as the crow flies. 19 00:01:33.280 --> 00:01:37.160 Tucker, at this time, was still only nineteen years old. 20 00:01:37.160 --> 00:01:43.440 Yet the theories he built the first libertarian movement around in the 1880s and 90s were 21 00:01:43.440 --> 00:01:48.740 essentially the theories he first heard enunciated when he was a student at MIT in the early 22 00:01:48.740 --> 00:01:54.620 1870s, the theories he first heard from the lips of Josiah Warren. 23 00:01:54.620 --> 00:02:00.180 Tucker worked on those ideas extensively during the three decades of his publishing career. 24 00:02:00.180 --> 00:02:05.680 He expanded upon them, worked out their implications, found ways to popularize them. 25 00:02:05.680 --> 00:02:10.520 But they remained, fundamentally, Warren's ideas. 26 00:02:10.520 --> 00:02:15.040 Josiah Warren was born in Boston in 1798. 27 00:02:15.040 --> 00:02:20.640 An apparent natural talent for music showed itself early on, and he was playing professionally 28 00:02:20.640 --> 00:02:24.420 in local bands by the time he was in his mid-teens. 29 00:02:24.420 --> 00:02:30.340 At 20, he married and decided, as his biographer William Bailey puts it, to set out from his 30 00:02:30.340 --> 00:02:34.220 native place to improve his fortunes in the West. 31 00:02:34.220 --> 00:02:38.940 In those days, the city of Cincinnati was quite on the verge of civilization, with the 32 00:02:38.940 --> 00:02:44.460 vast unknown beyond, and when Warren reached it, he decided to settle there and pursue 33 00:02:44.460 --> 00:02:48.340 his vocation as an orchestra leader and teacher of music. 34 00:02:48.340 --> 00:02:54.020 His talents soon gained him an honorable professional repute, which extended beyond the city, but 35 00:02:54.020 --> 00:02:56.300 and he had other interests. 36 00:02:56.300 --> 00:02:59.100 This, if anything, is an understatement. 37 00:02:59.100 --> 00:03:05.000 In addition to his lifelong enthusiasm for music, Warren was an inveterate tinkerer. 38 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:10.300 He seldom came upon any machine or device or system that he didn't think he could improve 39 00:03:10.300 --> 00:03:11.540 in some way. 40 00:03:11.540 --> 00:03:13.820 And often enough, he was right. 41 00:03:13.820 --> 00:03:19.100 Bailey reports that Warren devoted his leisure time to mechanical pursuits for about five 42 00:03:19.100 --> 00:03:21.100 The Theory of Money and Credit 43 00:03:49.100 --> 00:03:53.140 17 years old, Robert Owen came to town. 44 00:03:53.140 --> 00:03:59.160 Owen was a British industrialist and social reformer, born in Wales in modest circumstances 45 00:03:59.160 --> 00:04:05.060 in 1771, and now in 1825 in his mid-fifties. 46 00:04:05.060 --> 00:04:09.660 He was a self-made man, having worked his way up from clothier's apprentice to the 47 00:04:09.660 --> 00:04:14.300 fabulously wealthy owner of an international textile business. 48 00:04:14.300 --> 00:04:20.820 As an enthusiastic reader, Owen became devoted in the 1890s, when he was in his 20s, to 49 00:04:20.820 --> 00:04:26.820 the ideas of the English utilitarian philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. 50 00:04:26.820 --> 00:04:31.780 But as the years went by, he found himself drifting more and more away from Bentham's 51 00:04:31.780 --> 00:04:34.340 views and toward communism. 52 00:04:34.340 --> 00:04:38.900 He came to believe that the introduction of labor-saving machinery into the workplace 53 00:04:38.900 --> 00:04:44.320 This was the chief cause of economic misery, and that the best remedy for this situation 54 00:04:44.320 --> 00:04:50.140 was to be found in a mode of society in which workers would feel united and would experience 55 00:04:50.140 --> 00:04:55.340 solidarity with their fellows, while machinery was de-emphasized. 56 00:04:55.340 --> 00:05:00.660 And his way of uniting workers was by arranging for them to live communally. 57 00:05:00.660 --> 00:05:05.820 Robert Owen stands near the beginning of a long line of businessmen who believed their 58 00:05:05.820 --> 00:05:13.820 and their skill at commerce suited them well to the task of figuring out a way to fix what was wrong with human social relations in general. 59 00:05:13.820 --> 00:05:21.820 He knew exactly how everything about the ideal community should be done, right down to the population density. 60 00:05:21.820 --> 00:05:34.820 He believed, as the Wikipedia article on Owen summarizes it, that communities of about 1200 persons each should be settled on quantities of land from 1000 to 1500 acres, 61 00:05:34.820 --> 00:05:41.380 all living in one large building in the form of a square with public kitchen and mess rooms. 62 00:05:41.380 --> 00:05:47.220 Each family should have its own private apartments and the entire care of the children till the age 63 00:05:47.220 --> 00:05:52.660 of three, after which they should be brought up by the community. Their parents would have 64 00:05:52.660 --> 00:05:59.300 access to them at meals and all other proper times. All property in these communities should 65 00:05:59.300 --> 00:06:02.740 should be communally owned, Owen believed. 66 00:06:02.740 --> 00:06:07.860 Work and consumption should both be based on the precept, from each according to his 67 00:06:07.860 --> 00:06:14.260 ability, to each according to his need, though that exact phrase had not yet been coined. 68 00:06:14.260 --> 00:06:19.180 Owen underwrote the cost of launching such a community in Scotland, and then undertook 69 00:06:19.180 --> 00:06:24.940 an American lecture tour he hoped would drum up enthusiasts for the very similar utopian 70 00:06:24.940 --> 00:06:50.420 Warren was mightily impressed by Owen. 71 00:06:50.420 --> 00:06:55.160 Up to this time, he seems not ever to have entertained the notion that his passion for 72 00:06:55.160 --> 00:07:00.700 tinkering might be extended to so vast a canvas as all of human society. 73 00:07:00.700 --> 00:07:06.760 But after all, if he could improve a machine, a device, a system, then why not try his hand 74 00:07:06.760 --> 00:07:08.760 at improving society? 75 00:07:08.760 --> 00:07:12.840 First he decided he should give Robert Owen's ideas a fair trial. 76 00:07:12.840 --> 00:07:15.020 They certainly sounded persuasive. 77 00:07:15.020 --> 00:07:21.700 And so it was that in 1825, at the age of 27, Josiah Warren, the successful inventor 78 00:07:21.700 --> 00:07:28.840 and commercial exploiter of a popular lamp, sold his factory after only two years of operation, 79 00:07:28.840 --> 00:07:35.360 packed up his young family, and took his place as one of 900 or so Owenites who had decided 80 00:07:35.360 --> 00:07:40.920 to become part of the founding population of New Harmony, Indiana. 81 00:07:40.920 --> 00:07:46.880 The utopian community failed pretty quickly. In fact, according to James J. Martin in his 82 00:07:46.880 --> 00:07:52.400 classic work Men Against the State, failure of its main objective was admitted less than 83 00:07:52.400 --> 00:07:57.480 a year and a half after the first confident measures towards central organization had 84 00:07:57.480 --> 00:08:03.880 been taken. Numerous reasons have been advanced for this. The absence of Owen at critical 85 00:08:03.880 --> 00:08:09.800 times, preoccupation with the externals of organization and petty strife. More important 86 00:08:09.800 --> 00:08:15.320 Perhaps was the fact that too much of the tangible and material portion of the venture 87 00:08:15.320 --> 00:08:20.680 represented something for which the rank and file of the community felt no attachment, 88 00:08:20.680 --> 00:08:26.440 it being the contribution of the leader and not the product of the labor of the group. 89 00:08:26.440 --> 00:08:32.080 This last observation of Martin's is closely related to Warren's own ideas about why New 90 00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:34.640 Harmony had proved a disaster. 91 00:08:34.640 --> 00:08:40.000 As Martin writes, Warren made a quick and incisive deduction as to the cause of the 92 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:45.400 debacle, which placed him at once in a camp far removed from that in which the faithful 93 00:08:45.400 --> 00:08:48.040 Owenites would henceforth gather. 94 00:08:48.040 --> 00:08:53.640 He felt that the common property scheme of the new Harmony colony virtually guaranteed 95 00:08:53.640 --> 00:08:58.320 the submergence of the individual within the confines of the community. 96 00:08:58.320 --> 00:09:02.880 The consequences of such a procedure, said Warren, were inevitable. 97 00:09:02.880 --> 00:09:08.480 Not only was individual initiative stifled by failure to provide a place within the structure 98 00:09:08.480 --> 00:09:14.320 for personal rights and interests beyond the sphere of religious matters, but the elimination 99 00:09:14.320 --> 00:09:20.320 of individual property rights resulted in almost total dissipation of responsibility 100 00:09:20.320 --> 00:09:27.340 for the occurrence of individual incapacity, failure, and shortcomings of other kinds. 101 00:09:27.340 --> 00:09:32.860 Reflecting on his experience at New Harmony some years later, Warren wrote that it appeared 102 00:09:32.860 --> 00:09:38.160 He concluded that it was nature's own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us. 103 00:09:38.160 --> 00:09:45.260 Our united interests were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances, 104 00:09:45.260 --> 00:09:47.740 and the instinct of self-preservation. 105 00:09:47.740 --> 00:09:54.780 He concluded that society must be so converted as to preserve the sovereignty of every individual 106 00:09:54.780 --> 00:10:01.600 inviolate, and it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, 107 00:10:01.600 --> 00:10:07.600 and all other arrangements, which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty 108 00:10:07.600 --> 00:10:14.800 to dispose of his or her person and time and property in any manner in which his or her 109 00:10:14.800 --> 00:10:22.100 feelings or judgment may dictate, without involving the persons or interests of others. 110 00:10:22.100 --> 00:10:29.920 And so it was that in May of 1827 a sadder, wiser, but not at all discouraged Josiah Warren, 111 00:10:29.920 --> 00:10:33.800 still not yet 30 years old, returned to Cincinnati. 112 00:10:33.800 --> 00:10:38.500 He set about making arrangements to earn his living as a musician and music teacher as 113 00:10:38.500 --> 00:10:44.980 he had before, but now social reform was in his blood, and within only a few weeks he 114 00:10:44.980 --> 00:10:51.320 plunged headlong into another utopian experiment based on the ideas of Robert Owen. 115 00:10:51.320 --> 00:10:56.840 This one was a retail store at the corner of 5th and Elm Streets in what is now downtown 116 00:10:56.840 --> 00:10:58.240 Cincinnati. 117 00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:03.360 All the goods offered for sale in Warren's store were offered at the same price the merchant 118 00:11:03.360 --> 00:11:10.120 himself had paid for them, plus a small surcharge, in the neighborhood of four to seven percent, 119 00:11:10.120 --> 00:11:11.880 to cover store overhead. 120 00:11:11.880 --> 00:11:17.040 Cost, the limit of price, was one of Warren's favorite slogans. 121 00:11:17.040 --> 00:11:23.560 But, you ask, was this meager four to seven percent markup also supposed to include the 122 00:11:23.560 --> 00:11:24.560 store's profit? 123 00:11:24.560 --> 00:11:25.920 No, it wasn't. 124 00:11:25.920 --> 00:11:30.920 The store didn't make any profit at all, in the conventional sense. 125 00:11:30.920 --> 00:11:36.200 Let William Bailey explain in a little more detail how Warren's store worked. 126 00:11:36.200 --> 00:11:41.120 Bailey notes that the people in and around Cincinnati in the waning years of John Quincy 127 00:11:41.120 --> 00:11:47.960 Adams' presidency called Warren's establishment the Time Store, not because it gave credit 128 00:11:47.960 --> 00:11:53.840 or sold goods on installments, but on account of the peculiar and original method adopted 129 00:11:53.840 --> 00:11:58.360 to Fix and Regulate the Amount of the Merchant's Compensation. 130 00:11:58.360 --> 00:12:03.880 This was determined on the principle of the equal exchange of labor, measured by the time 131 00:12:03.880 --> 00:12:09.560 occupied, and exchanged hour for hour with other kinds of labor. 132 00:12:09.560 --> 00:12:10.560 Let us illustrate. 133 00:12:10.560 --> 00:12:14.800 A clock hangs in a conspicuous place in the store. 134 00:12:14.800 --> 00:12:18.000 In comes the customer to make his purchases. 135 00:12:18.000 --> 00:12:23.760 All goods are marked with the price in plain figures, which is their cost price, plus 136 00:12:23.760 --> 00:12:30.120 It's a nominal percentage to cover freight, shrinkage, rent, etc., usually about 4 cents 137 00:12:30.120 --> 00:12:31.520 on the dollar. 138 00:12:31.520 --> 00:12:36.440 The purchaser selects what he needs, with not over much assistance or prompting from 139 00:12:36.440 --> 00:12:40.260 the salesman, and pays for the same in lawful money. 140 00:12:40.260 --> 00:12:45.580 The time spent by the merchant in waiting upon him is now calculated by reference to 141 00:12:45.580 --> 00:12:52.200 the convenient clock, and in payment for this service the customer gives his labor note, 142 00:12:52.200 --> 00:12:59.500 Something After This Form, Due to Josiah Warren on Demand, 30 Minutes in Carpenter Work, John 143 00:12:59.500 --> 00:13:07.200 Smith, or Due to Josiah Warren on Demand, 10 Minutes in Needle Work, Mary Brown. 144 00:13:07.200 --> 00:13:13.080 The storekeeper thus agreed to exchange his time for an equal amount of the time of those 145 00:13:13.080 --> 00:13:14.940 who bought goods of him. 146 00:13:14.940 --> 00:13:18.960 Profits, in the customary sense, there were none. 147 00:13:18.960 --> 00:13:23.680 This is a very close approximation to what we see happening in retail establishments 148 00:13:23.680 --> 00:13:29.360 in Eric Frank Russell's libertarian science fiction novel The Great Explosion. 149 00:13:29.360 --> 00:13:35.240 The people running those fictional retail establishments call themselves GANDs and claim 150 00:13:35.240 --> 00:13:39.980 to base their political economy on the works of Mohandas K. Gandhi. 151 00:13:39.980 --> 00:13:42.800 But all I can say is you could have fooled me. 152 00:13:42.800 --> 00:13:47.700 I can't help but wonder whether Eric Frank Russell read an account of Josiah Warren's 153 00:13:47.700 --> 00:13:59.020 In any case, Warren's Time Store was a success in the sense that, for more than two years, 154 00:13:59.020 --> 00:14:04.740 it paid its own bills and those of Warren's family, and, after it had closed its door, 155 00:14:04.740 --> 00:14:09.600 its proprietor, according to Bailey, found himself financially in the same position as 156 00:14:09.600 --> 00:14:10.900 at the beginning. 157 00:14:10.900 --> 00:14:16.300 He chose to close the Time Store despite the fact that it was prospering, because he wanted 158 00:14:16.300 --> 00:14:33.300 Warren attempted to devote his own time and his other resources to the establishment of a utopian community, something like new harmony, but based on his principle of individual sovereignty, rather than on from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. 159 00:14:33.300 --> 00:14:48.300 Warren attempted to create several such communities during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, the best known of which, Modern Times, was located on Long Island, about 40 miles from New York City. 160 00:14:48.300 --> 00:14:51.300 None of them was an unqualified success. 161 00:14:51.300 --> 00:14:57.300 William Bailey comments that though Warren's utopian communities could be said to have failed, 162 00:14:57.300 --> 00:15:02.300 failed, it should be understood that they did not fail in the sense that New Harmony, 163 00:15:02.300 --> 00:15:06.600 Brook Farm and numerous other socialistic experiments failed. 164 00:15:06.600 --> 00:15:12.200 The pioneers of modern times had no trouble over property or forms of government. 165 00:15:12.200 --> 00:15:18.100 Each owned his house and land, and, by mutual understanding, political authority was dispensed 166 00:15:18.100 --> 00:15:19.100 with. 167 00:15:19.100 --> 00:15:24.380 None felt responsible for the behavior of his neighbors, and only aggressive or invasive 168 00:15:24.380 --> 00:15:27.820 of Conduct was resisted by combined action. 169 00:15:27.820 --> 00:15:32.780 The main cause of the non-success of the village was the scarcity of employment other than 170 00:15:32.780 --> 00:15:34.820 that of agriculture. 171 00:15:34.820 --> 00:15:39.220 Capital was needed to start factories for the manufacture of articles for which there 172 00:15:39.220 --> 00:15:41.880 was a demand in the outside world. 173 00:15:41.880 --> 00:15:45.060 The pioneers had but little resources. 174 00:15:45.060 --> 00:15:51.220 There was an attempt, Bailey reports, by one Edward D. Linton to set up a paper box 175 00:15:51.220 --> 00:15:56.580 Manufactory, which promised to furnish the demand for labor that was no less desirable 176 00:15:56.580 --> 00:16:01.500 for the prosperity of the place than essential to its growth in numbers. 177 00:16:01.500 --> 00:16:08.020 But this enterprise was checked by the disastrous financial panic of 1857, which in New York 178 00:16:08.020 --> 00:16:14.900 City alone, where the product of Mr. Linton's factory was marketed, threw upwards of 20,000 179 00:16:14.900 --> 00:16:16.420 persons out of work. 180 00:16:16.420 --> 00:16:21.620 And before the effects of the ensuing industrial depression had cleared away, the country was 181 00:16:21.620 --> 00:16:27.820 in the throes of civil war, and all hope of regenerating society for the time being was 182 00:16:27.820 --> 00:16:29.100 dissipated. 183 00:16:29.100 --> 00:16:34.260 In the end, of course, the original aims of the pioneers were gradually lost sight of 184 00:16:34.260 --> 00:16:37.380 in the inevitable struggle for existence. 185 00:16:37.380 --> 00:16:43.460 George Woodcock, the noted historian of anarchism, who calls Josiah Warren the first American 186 00:16:43.460 --> 00:16:50.340 in Anarchist, writes that modern times maintained its mutualist character for at least two decades, 187 00:16:50.340 --> 00:16:56.580 eventually turning into a more or less conventional village with cooperative tendencies. 188 00:16:56.580 --> 00:17:02.460 Woodcock's opinion of Warren's importance in the history of anarchist thought is widely 189 00:17:02.460 --> 00:17:03.700 shared. 190 00:17:03.700 --> 00:17:09.460 Peter Marshall, the prominent English historian of anarchism, calls him the first real American 191 00:17:09.460 --> 00:17:15.660 Anarchist, and William O. Reichert, in his book Partisans of Freedom, a Study in American 192 00:17:15.660 --> 00:17:21.300 Anarchism, describes Warren as the chief architect of libertarianism. 193 00:17:21.300 --> 00:17:26.540 And we have seen the impact Warren had during his last years on a young and impressionable 194 00:17:26.540 --> 00:17:30.940 Benjamin R. Tucker, and what ultimately came of that. 195 00:17:30.940 --> 00:17:35.600 William Bailey notes that Warren throughout his life remained obscure. 196 00:17:35.600 --> 00:18:03.560 Warren believed that statute laws are at best hindrances and must be swept away, not by 197 00:18:03.560 --> 00:18:09.520 by violence, but by the slowly evolved sense of justice and equity which would eventually 198 00:18:09.520 --> 00:18:13.080 undermine all surviving forms of authority. 199 00:18:13.080 --> 00:18:19.080 Also, Warren believed in the benefits of the diversity that would be an inescapable product 200 00:18:19.080 --> 00:18:21.680 of any truly free society. 201 00:18:21.680 --> 00:18:27.480 Differences, he wrote, like the admissible discords in music, are a valuable part of 202 00:18:27.480 --> 00:18:28.860 our harmony. 203 00:18:28.860 --> 00:18:35.620 It is only when the rights of persons or property are actually invaded that collisions arise. 204 00:18:35.620 --> 00:18:42.220 These rights being clearly defined and sanctioned by public opinion, and temptations to encroachments 205 00:18:42.220 --> 00:18:47.520 being withdrawn, we may then consider our great problem practically solved. 206 00:18:47.520 --> 00:18:53.700 With regard to mere difference of opinion in taste, convenience, economy, equality, 207 00:18:53.700 --> 00:19:00.440 For even right and wrong, good and bad, sanity and insanity, all must be left to the supreme 208 00:19:00.440 --> 00:19:07.640 decision of each individual, whenever he can take on himself the cost of his decisions, 209 00:19:07.640 --> 00:19:14.280 which he cannot do while his interests or movements are united or combined with others. 210 00:19:14.280 --> 00:19:21.340 It is in combination or close connection only that compromise or conformity is required. 211 00:19:21.340 --> 00:19:30.500 Peace, Harmony, Ease, Security, Happiness will be found only in individuality. 212 00:19:30.500 --> 00:19:34.220 That was Josiah Warren, and this is Jeff Riggenbach.