25 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
25 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
"Anarchy," Tucker insisted, "means a slow growth of the principles of liberty
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and justice; the gradual dropping of the 'thou shalts' and the 'thou shalt
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nots' of laws and consitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be
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governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than by
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compulsion from without..." And the first step in this procedure, he held,
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is to disabuse oneself of the idea that government, even when that government
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takes the form of parliamentary democracy functioning after the principle of
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majority rule and minority rights, is capable of assuring the individual
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freedom or of brining about a condition of harmonious relations among people.
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If mankind is ever to realize justice in its actual social relations, the
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notion that the individual citizen has a moral obligation to the State must
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be completely abandoned. We anarchists, Tucker proclaimed, "look upon all
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obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as
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obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed."
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And this means nothing less than that the State, which is to say formal
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government itself, must be discarded as an instrument of social control.
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William O. Reichert; "Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty",
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anthology by Michael Coughlin Press. Pages 170-171.
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