Victor Yarros Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Victor Yarros, “Benjamin R. Tucker—The Man”

August 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Of Benjamin R. Tucker, the founder and leading exponent of individualist. philosophical Anarchism, I have written elsewhere. Of Tucker the man, little has been written by anyone, and I propose to record here impressions and recollections of him based on many years close association with him, personal as well as intellectual and ideological.

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Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”

August 11, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Benjamin R. Tucker’s rather sudden conversion to Max Stirner’s philosophy of Egoism was a calamitous accident. There is nothing in common between individualist and philosophical Anarchism as Tucker developed it on the foundations laid by Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Warren, Spooner, Spencer, Herbert, Green and Andrews, and Stirner’s German political metaphysics. Some of Tucker’s adherents uncritically swallowed. Egoism and persuaded themselves that it was a corollary, if not a logical deduction from anarchistic premises. This was a gross error. Egoism is half platitudinous, half fallacious.

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Victor Yarros, “Why I, as an Anarchist, Will Not Work with Socialists” (1890)

June 6, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] WHY I, AS AN ANARCHIST, WILL NOT WORK WITH THE SOCIALISTS. BY VICTOR YARROS. I find it exceedingly difficult to comply with the editor’s request for a comparatively brief statement of the reason “Why I, as an Anarchist, will not work with Nationalists, Socialists, and Single-taxers.” I doubt not that the editor realizes fully as well as I do the utter absurdity of the question; and if he has put it and has solicited an answer, it must be because the confusion in the mind of what we love to style “the public” is so […]

Victor Yarros, “Anarchistic Socialism” (1889)

November 17, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

State Socialists are in the habit of charging the Anarchists with a partiality for middle-class ideas and institutions, and nothing is more common than the statement that we wish to retain the bourgeois arrangements, while endeavoring to give them an ideal flavor. Our teachings are taken to be identical with those of the individualistic economists of the Cobden-Bastiat school, and we are constantly told that the principles of individualism, inaugurated and embodied by the great revolution in France, have been tried and found wanting, have been condemned and utterly discredited by life itself. Our present social evils are alleged to […]

Victor Yarros, “Anarchism: What it Is and What it Is Not” (1893)

August 30, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

IT was an observation of John Stuart Mill’s that to know a thing it is necessary to realize, not only what it is, but also what it is not. Applying this definition or test to that passage of Mr. Thomas B. Preston’s paper on “Are We Socialists?” (ARENA, December) in which he states and criticises the principles of anarchism, we find ourselves entitled to affirm that Mr. Preston scarcely possesses such familiarity with, and comprehension of, the essential doctrines of anarchism as would justify confident criticism of that school. What is anarchism, and who are the anarchists? Loosely speaking, there […]