The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. - Review - book review

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  July, 2000  

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Mackay, John Henry. 1999 [1891]. The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Mark A. Sullivan, ed. Autonomedia Black Triangle, Brooklyn, New York. ISBN 1 57027 066 X.

We sometimes get the impression that between Marxism and Cambridge economics there was really nothing else of much importance in the social sciences during the late Victorian period in English history. However, there were, of course, the individualist anarchists, the arch foes of the communist socialists and indeed of all socialist planners past, present, and future. The editor of this end of the nineteenth century Mackay book, Mr. Mark A. Sullivan, deserves our praise for bringing Mackay's classic back into print in a handsome and useful form at the end of this twentieth century.

The history of this book and its many translations and editions is fully documented in the essays that are attached as front and end matter to this new edition. There are even pictures of the line of books leading up to Mackay's book and useful portraits of P. J. Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, and others who battled against the central planning inherent in the socialist philosophies that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century.

Contemporary writers H. Kennedy, E. Mornin, S. Presley, and P. L. Wilson bring out connections between this book, his "other life" as a distinguished lyrical poet and his radical turn toward Stirnerite anarchism after 1890. Sullivan summarizes Mackay as follows: "Mackay was, if nothing else, an individualist who consequently felt compassion for and unity with the unemployed and working people he described and championed" (p. xxxv).

Mackay was born in Greenock, Scotland in 1864 to a Scottish father and German mother. After his father's death, the mother took the young Mackay to Hamburg where he received a first-rate German collegiate education. Mackay's native language was therefore German and his writings were made available to the English-speaking world only in translation.

It seems that in his later life, Mackay's individualism took a more far-reaching turn after he discovered the hypnotic rhythms of Max Stirner's egoism. Stirner holds first place in the pantheon of libertarian individualists for his consistent and unqualified debunking of the liberal shibboleth of loving humanity. Such exhortations are the railings of hypocrites who selfishly skewer non-believers with the power they all-the-time possess. Stirner's special philosophy argues in the starkest and most memorable language that no creative person can consistently sacrifice his personality for an ideal and permanently remain a truly creative person. Better to live true to the excesses of self wherever it takes one emotionally or sexually--community be damned! But will naked egoism lead to tooth and claw social chaos?

Mackay joined with the philosophical "anarchists" and especially the American publisher, editor, and anarchist writer Benjamin R. Tucker. Indeed, it was Tucker who arranged for the English translation of Mackay's Die Anarchisten: Kulturgemaelde aus dem Ende des XIX. Jahrhunderts. Tucker had (1907) arranged for the translations of Stirner's work as well. The G. Schumm translation of Mackay's Anarchists was published in Boston in 1891 and is the basis for this 100-year-later edition under review. The book reads like a novel in which the main character, Carrard Auban, resides in London and attends workingman rallies where the specter of a globalized working class movement is slowly taking place. Conversation topics range from philosophy to indignation about the injustices of the day. The injustices following the Haymarket riots in Chicago (1887) are intense matters for discussion in the workingman halls. Auban offers a description of these debates and what must be one of the most memorable eyewitness accounts o f the bloody Trafalgar Square massacre in which the mounted police rode their steeds over the rallying workers and "in an instant, the places where just now not a stone could have fallen on the ground, were strewn with rags and tatters, crushed hats, broken canes" (p. 167). Auban laments how this heroic battle against authority ended the "right to free speech on Trafalgar Square" (p. 167).

Auban's individualist anarchist position is contrasted with the communist anarchist position espoused by another character, Otto Trupp. Carrard Auban engages Trupp in several debates about the true anarchist position and exposes the communists as just another brigand of authoritarian socialists who wish to control and regulate production in the name of their peculiar definition of the community. A worker should not cast off one coercive hierarchy for still another one. A true anarchist wishes to found a society on the nonaggression principle, that is, the absence of the initiation of violence in a territorial area. Self-defense is allowed and encouraged, but normally the free expression of egoism will guarantee that important things will get done. Voluntary associations for mutual solidarity will emerge--society is created by the free expression of wants and creative expression, not by the orders of authority or paternal caring by wealthy protectors of the public interest.