The Voluntaryist Spirit
by Carl Watner
From Issue 124 - 1st Quarter, 2005
[Author's Introduction of February 2004: This hitherto
unpublished essay was first written in June 1983, and
then revised in August of that same year. It sat for two
decades (receiving only limited private circulation) until
it was read by Peter Ragnar of Avalon Mint and Roaring
Lion Press. At Peter's request it was re-edited with
a view to posting on the world wide web. The author
wishes to thank Alan Koontz (editing of 1983) aid Julie
Watner (editing of 2004) for their timely assistance in
commenting on this essay]
Voluntaryism is a dual doctrine, having both a
positive and a negative side. As a brand of anarchism
it is the doctrine that all coercive government (what
most people would refer to as "the State") should be
voluntarily abandoned; that all invasions of individual
self-ownership rights should cease. This is its
negative side. Its positive side is that all the affairs
of people should be conducted on a voluntary basis.
It does not argue for the specific form that voluntary
arrangements will take; only that the sovereignty of
the individual must remain intact, except where the
individual coerced has already aggressed upon the
sovereignty of another non-aggressive individual.
To voluntaryists, this dual doctrine represents a
means, an end, and an insight. The end, predicated
upon a theory of self-ownership and just property
titles, is a peaceful anarchy, an all voluntary society.
All the affairs of people, both public and private,
should be carried out by individuals or their voluntary
associations. The means to reach such an endstate
must be consistent with the goal sought. As
shall be demonstrated, it is in fact the means that
determine the end. So only voluntary methods of
persuasion,
education, and nonviolent resistance to
State criminality may be used to bring about voluntaryist
goals. People cannot be coerced into freedom.
Finally,
voluntaryism is a realization about the nature
of political society, viz., that all States are
grounded upon general popular acceptance and require
the cooperation of their victims.
These three aspects of
voluntaryism mutually
reinforce each other. The very goal of an all-voluntary
society suggests its own means. The attempt to
use governmental or political processes to reform or
abolish the evils of coercion is not a voluntaryist
means because it rests on coercion. The distinguishing
marks of
voluntaryism — that it is at once both
nonviolent and non-electoral in its efforts to convince
people to voluntarily abandon the State — set it apart
from all other methods of social change. The voluntaryist
insight into the nature of political power does
not permit people to violently overthrow their government
or even use the electoral process to change
it, but rather points out that if they shall withdraw
their cooperation from the system, it will no longer
be able to function or enforce its will.
The voluntaryist spirit is thus an attitude of mind
or a sense of life, if you will, which animates those
engaged in the struggle for the recognition of self-ownership
rights and the demise of the State. It is
the passionate, disinterested love of justice for its
own sake, regardless of the consequences which the
struggle brings to one personally. It is a knowledge
that if one takes care of the means that the end will
take care of itself. It is an understanding that the
morality and principles of voluntary interaction with
other self-owners is the only practical manner of living
life upon this earth. It is an epistemological rejection
of violence, a knowledge that coercion can
never rationally convince. Come what will, wherever
the chips may fall,
voluntaryism seeks the perfect
way but it differs from other philosophies of life in
seeking it with utter disinterestedness. Right means
are an end in themselves, their own reward.
There is a great deal of affinity between what has
been called "the aristocratic spirit" and the voluntaryist
spirit. Writing in the March 1920 issue of THE
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, Hanford Henderson
defined the former "as the love of excellence for its
own sake, or even more simply as the disinterested
passionate love of excellence. The aristocrat, to deserve
the name, must love excellence everywhere and
in everything." Continuing on, Henderson wrote:
He must love it in himself, in his own beautiful
body, in his own alert mind, in his own
illuminated spirit and he must love it in others;
must love it in all human relations and
occupations and activities, in all things in
earth or sea or sky. And this love must be so
passionate that he strives in all things to attain
excellence, and so tireless that in the end
he arrives. But not even the hope of Heaven
may lure him. He must love and work disinterestedly,
without the least thought of reward,
enamored only of the transcendent
beauty of excellence, and quite unregardful
of himself.
Both the aristocratic spirit and the voluntaryist
spirit demand the highest effort of the individual. It
is a contradiction to say that aristocracy or
voluntaryism asks for privilege, which can only be upheld
by violence. Coercive grants of power are contrary
both to the doctrine of perfection and voluntary
means. What the aristocrat and the voluntaryist want
is that people come to share their attitudes toward
life. Neither "may accept nothing which others may
not have upon precisely the same terms, and the
terms are unremitting, passionate effort.... It is not
a matter of birth, or occupation, or
education. It is
an attitude of mind carried into daily action. ..."
Terence MacSwiney, an early 20th Century Hibernian
patriot, referred to the voluntaryist spirit
as "a moral force", "that great virtue of mind and
heart that keeps a man unconquerable above every
power of brute strength." "A man of moral force is he
who, seeing a thing to be right and essential and
claiming his allegiance, stands for it as for tne truth
unheeding of any consequence. It is not that he is a
wild person, utterly reckless of all mad possibilities...
and indifferent to any havoc that may ensue. No, but
it is a first principle of his, that a true thing is a good
thing, and from a good thing rightly pursued can follow
no bad consequence. And he faces every possible
development with conscience at rest — it may be with
trepidation for his own courage in some great ordeal,
but for the nobility of the cause and the beauty of
the result that must ensue, always with serene faith.'
Although neither Henderson nor MacSwiney
would have considered themselves anarchists, they
did realize that this mind cast made for a laissez-faire
attitude, particularly in such fields of endeavor
as
education and industry. The aristocratic spirit
seeks excellence in variety and resists the tendencies
towards enforced uniformity in all areas of life.
It looks for a multiform and varied excellence. "The
aristocratic world is not one of dead levels, but a world
of varied interests and constant promise and
unfaltering progress. It is, in a word, the world of
evolution." In fact, it is only in a voluntaryist setting
that the aristocratic spirit can truly operate. The attempt
to coerce must inevitably vitiate such a spirit.
For as Henderson concludes, the teaching that the
end justifies the means is not at all in harmony with
the aristocratic spirit. "The whole event must be excellent,
the means as well as the end. ... It is only in
the disinterested quest of excellence that anything
notable can be accomplished.... Disinterestedness is
the essential condition of success."
MacSwiney, too, understood the importance of
means and ends in the Irish struggle against England.
"A fight that is not clean-handed will make victory more
disgraceful than any defeat." He maintained that Ireland
could not win her independence by "base methods"
and that no physical victory could compensate for
a spiritual defeat. He also noted that every sphere of a
man's life is interconnected with the rest. Therefore he
claimed that the secret of strength was the development
of individual character in every activity of life. In
an interesting comment on means and ends, he noted
that "the middle of the day has a natural connection
with the beginning of the day and the end of the day,
and in whatever sphere a man finds himself, his acts
must be in relation to and consistent with every other
sphere.... One cannot be an honest man in one sphere
and a rascal in another. ... Everything that crosses a
man's path in his day's round of little or great moment
requires of him an attitude towards it, and the conscious
or unconscious shaping of his attitude is determining
how he will proceed in other spheres not in
view."
Voluntaryism relies heavily on the means-end insight
to justify its own position. Indeed, without any
formal guidelines as to the shape that an all-voluntary
society will take, voluntaryism necessarily concentrates
exclusively on the means. Voluntaryism is means-oriented,
not goal-oriented because all it objects to is the
initiation of coercion against the non-invasive person.
So long as the means are peaceful, respectful of self-ownership
and property titles, the ends cannot be criticized
from the voluntaryist perspective. This is not to
imply that the only standard of judging human behavior
is whether or not it is voluntary. Certainly some
behavior may be irrational, vicious, immoral, religious,
irreligious, (etc., etc.) but the first question the voluntaryist
asks is: "Is it truly voluntary?" The voluntaryist
spirit attacks the State on precisely this basis: although
certain government goods or services may be
essential, it is not essential that they be provided by
government. Whether we object to what governments
do (i. e., the provision of whatever product or public
service, whether it be public schools, the post office,
etc.) is beside the point. Voluntaryists oppose the State
because it relies on force for its very existence. We oppose
the State because of its means, regardless of its
ends.
The means orientation of voluntaryism is not
unlike the concept of disinterested attachment associated
with the aristocratic spirit. Similarly, it relates
to the Hindu doctrine of nonattached action which
relies on the paradox "that one cannot travel on the
path unless one has become the path itself." Indeed,
although one must have an ultimate goal and destination
in life, one's attachment to it eventually becomes
irrelevant and disappears. One's concern must
be with the next step rather than the summit. Only
in such a fashion can the exhilaration of the climb
become an end in itself rendering unimportant the
attainment of the peak. That is why the means to
the goal become more important than the goal itself
and why the means then become the test of progress.
"To travel on the proper path" is more important than
arriving at one's destination. Thus full effort becomes
the measure of victory rather than the attainment
of one's goal. The effort is within our power and control;
the end is not.
The means-end insight encompasses many important
points, the least of which is the commonplace
observation that the means one uses must be consistent
with the goal one seeks. It is impossible in the
nature of things to wage a war for peace or to fight
politics by becoming political. Gandhi, who might be
considered one of the true aristocrats of all times,
understood that "there is a great mystery concealed
in the fact that the means are more important than
the ends." As he wrote:
They say means are after all means. I
would say means are after all everything. As
the means, so the end. There is no wall of separation
between means and ends. We have limited
control over means and some over the
ends. Realization of the goal is always in exact
proportion to that of the means. ... Our
progress towards the goal is always in exact
proportion to the purity of the means. This
method may appear to be long, perhaps too
long, but I am convinced, it is the shortest.
Since the means are the only things we have to
work with, they are at least as important as the actual
ends we seek. Means to be means must be within
our reach. As John Dewey explained it, "the end is
merely a series of events viewed at a remote stage
and a means is merely the series viewed at an earlier
one." Means must be viewed as intermediate
steps but because of this the one closest to us must
be considered the most important. The most important
means is the next one, the next step in the series
of intermediate actions we take to finally arrive
at our destination. If we take a false route, even
though we know where we wish to go, we will never
get there. To finish our journey we must not only
begin it but we must begin it in the proper direction
and this means attention to the means. "To reach an
end we must take our minds off from it, and attend
to the act which is next to be performed."
The idea that the ends can justify the means actually
has the process in reverse order. Since the ends
pre-exist in the means (like begets like, we shall reap
as we have sowed), no end can ever justify a means.
What actually happens is that the means not only justify
what they accomplish, but they guarantee it. 'What
today is, makes tomorrow what it shall be." As Gandhi
and many others have said: "take care of the means
you employ and the end will take care of itself." The
Rom (the gypsies) have a saying that "the road leading
to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it
is essentially a part of it" and this readily explains why
impure means must result in an impure end.
Different means must inevitably bring about different
ends for the simple reason that they lead one
down different paths. For the voluntaryist concern
with an all-voluntary society, this necessitates both
eschewing the electoral process as well as revolutionary
violence. Neither of these routes can even approximate
voluntaryist goals because they depart
from the voluntaryist spirit. The existence of a voluntaryist
society depends on a change in attitude,
an improvement in the moral tone of the people who
comprise it. Therefore our means must be voluntary,
for moral ends can only be attained by moral means.
Our means must be as pure as our ends.
Emma Goldman, in her analysis of the Russian
Revolution, written in the early 1920's, realized that
"today is the parent of tomorrow." The means used to
prepare for the future becomes its cornerstone and
therefore she held that the means used to bring about
social change must always harmonize with its purpose:
There is no greater fallacy than the belief
that aims and purposes are one thing, while
methods and tactics are another. This conception
is a potent menace to social regeneration.
All human experience teaches that methods
and means cannot be separated from the ultimate
aim. The means employed become,
through individual habit, and social practice,
part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence
it, modify it, and presently the aims
and means become identical.... The whole history
of man is continuous proof of the maxim
that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts
means to sink into the depths of utter
demoralization.
The voluntaryist holds that "the only way to freedom
is 'by' freedom." This path does not dictate what
specific form the economic system of voluntaryism will
take. Its only guidelines are that the resultant system
be voluntary, which already implies a respect for self-ownership
and just property titles. A regime of proprietary
justice allows all economic systems to compete
on a voluntary basis and there is no reason why voluntary
cooperatives could not exist side by side with voluntary
communes or voluntary capitalist companies.
How people choose to conduct their voluntary affairs
in the absence of the State is up to them.
In advocating an all voluntary society, voluntaryists
place the burden of proof on those who wish to
justify any form of the coercive State. The advocate
of any form of invasive coercion — State or non-State
— is in a logically precarious position. Coercion does
not convince, nor is it any kind of argument at all. In
fact, the initiation of invasive force is a confession of
the failure of the invader's persuasive powers. As
William Godwin said, "if he who employs coercion
against me could mould me to his purposes by argument,
no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me
because his argument is strong, but he really punishes
me because he is weak."
The epistemological bias against violence is an
essential part of the voluntaryist spirit. Those in the
position of initiating violence are in a morally and
logically indefensible position. As Godwin added,
"Force is an expedient, the use of which is much to
be deplored. It is contrary to the nature of the intellect,
which cannot but be improved by conviction and
persuasion. It corrupts the man that employs it, and
the man upon whom it is employed." The burden of
proof rests on the advocates of violence (or the State)
because "liberty, or the absence of coercion, or the
leaving of people to think, speak, and act as they
please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a
favorable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient
always lies and wholly lies on those who
wish to abridge it by coercion."
Voluntaryist arguments proceed against State
coercion by criticizing the means, regardless of the
ends. Health care or vaccination may be important,
but if they are to be achieved by force (the means)
they "ipso facto" become tainted. If those who advocate
compulsory vaccination or State health care
must rely on force to accomplish their goals, then
there is something drastically wrong with their ends.
Vaccination or health care is either good or bad. Its
goodness removes the need for compulsion and its
badness destroys the right to coerce those who oppose
it. Coercion never convinces, never brings about
a change of mind.
Similar arguments may be applied against the
State itself. Either it is good or bad. Its goodness
should avoid the need to apply invasive force (for it
should be possible to persuade people of its goodness)
and its badness already speaks for itself. If a government
cannot rely wholly on voluntary support, then
it deserves not to exist. Statists, in their anxiety to
coerce others, already demonstrate their own lack of
faith in the prescription they suggest.
On the other hand, the voluntaryist spirit is permeated
with peaceful, nonviolent means. Voluntaryism
is certainly not the cure all or end all of social
evils, but to the extent that people can be persuaded
to embrace the voluntary principle, it offers the best
of all possible worlds. Voluntaryism is not to be compared
with the model of perfection, it is only offered
as the most satisfactory among competing theories.
Voluntaryists do not operate on the principle that
everyone necessarily knows his or her own best interest,
but only that everyone should have the right
to pursue his or her interests as they deem best.
"What is being asserted is the right to act with one's
own person and property and not the necessary wisdom
of such action." So long as you "do your own
thing" with your "own" person and property you in
no way violate the spirit of voluntaryism.
The claim that governments have a monopoly on
knowledge is implicit in the arguments of statists.
However, given the fact that every individual person
is a unique human being, it is highly unlikely that
any monopolistic government could engineer or plan
a society better than the outcome of the workings of
the voluntary principle. Governments have no exclusive
monopoly on knowledge or any exclusive monopoly
of the knowledge of facts which would enable
them to run an economy. In fact, they would have no
need to resort to the use of force if their services were
voluntarily desired. The very fact they must initiate
force to sustain themselves proves they are unwanted
and undesired by at least some of the people within
their purview.
The fact that the State coercively monopolizes the
administration of justice (courts, police, and law code
in a given geographic area) makes the State, and its
employees, automatically suspect. If there are certain
natural laws of justice, then there is no reason for government
to become a coercive monopolist. Because the
principles of justice are grounded in objective, natural
laws, they fall within the province of human knowledge;
by all who choose to study them and reason them
out. Just as we do not require a government to dictate
what is right or wrong in steel-making, so we do not
require a government to dictate standards and procedures
in the realm of justice. If it is possible to verify
objectively that one legal procedure is valid, and another
not, then it does not matter who employs the
procedure in question. We should look to reason and
fact; not to government. On the opposing hand, if there
is no such thing as natural law and natural justice,
then government could certainly not claim to administer
a thing which did not exist. In such case there would
be no need for government.
Austrian economics, bolstered by the arguments
developed by Ludwig von Mises, has long argued that
economic calculation under central government planning
is impossible. Since profit and loss serve as the
central guide for directing the flow of resources, the
government of a centrally planned economy has no
rational way of calculating because it has sabotaged
or destroyed the market pricing system. This inability
to make rational economic decisions saps the vitality
of any economic system and is inherent in all
forms of government intervention. Despite their
seeming ability to "direct" and "fine-tune" the
economy, government employees and politicians have
no special means of obtaining knowledge, any different
from those of others. No one has a monopoly of
knowledge and no single group or person has a monopoly
on the truth, honesty, or fair play. As we have
seen of government itself, the very fact that a centrally
planned economy needs to initiate force to sustain
itself indicates that it is not the most efficient
method of social and economic organization. As
Murray Rothbard has asked, "if central planning is
more efficient, why has it never voluntarily come
about through the creation of one big firm?"
Voluntaryists, seeing all forms of government as
invasive 'per se', nonetheless realize that the State is
just one form of coercive monopoly which sustains itself
by the use of force, albeit legitimized in the eyes of
many. An examination of how to attack coercive monopoly
on the market should shed light on how to undermine
State power. After all, the problem with government
is exactly the same problem as with any other
coercive monopoly. The voluntaryist insight points out
that all businesses depend on the cooperation, support,
and patronage of their customers. The ultimate weapon
of both consumers and producers on the market is the
option of expressing their indignation by not purchasing
from or selling to, boycotting, ostracizing, and not
cooperating with the would-be or actual monopolist.
In fact, all market activity on the free market can be
interpreted as a variety of nonviolent resistance against
those with whom one does not wish to deal. An understanding
of monopoly theory applies not only to private
monopolies but to any situation where one group
has acquired control over the means of production over
a large area.
The voluntaryist spirit attacks government and
coercive monopolies where it hurts them the most: it
destroys whatever legitimacy they lay claim to and
urges the withdrawal of the consent and cooperation
on which all organizations depend. The "popular
health movement" of the 1830's and 1840's in the
United States illustrates this attitude at work in two
distinct ways. First, it shows what incredible diversity
can come about when a government does not
attempt to monopolize knowledge and coerce people
into accepting its authority. Second, it demonstrates
the integral nature of freedom. As one medical historian
has explained: "A people accustomed to govern
themselves... want no protection but freedom of inquiry
and freedom of action. It was the spirit of the
times to throw all fields of business and professional
endeavors open to unrestricted competition — why
not medicine among the rest?... Hence medicine, with
all other human activities, must take its chances in
the grand competitive scramble characteristic of the
age." If Americans were entitled to religious freedom,
why not medical freedom as well?
"The freedom to discover truth" is what competition
is all about. It is only through voluntary exchanges
that the truth of the market place can be
discovered. "The subjectivity of human wants implies
that only individuals participating in an exchange
can be the legitimate judge of their own interests.
Competition is a learning process" where self-ownership
and property rights "provide an incentive to
make individuals responsible for their mistakes and
give them an incentive to learn." It is only under voluntaryism
that this learning process and self-responsibility
are able to exist.
The voluntary principle insures that while we may
have the possibility of choosing the worst, we also
have the right to choose the best. "By attempting to
compel virtue, we eliminate its possibility." Thus we
can see that "freedom is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for the achievement of virtue." Certainly
the price of moral freedom is the responsibility
of acting at one's own peril and this always includes
the possibility of failure. The voluntaryist
spirit, however, asserts that the real victory goes not
to those who win the battle but rather to those that
fought the best. As David Norton, the author of PERSONAL
DESTINIES, has explained, "moral nobility
is earned by the efforts of the individual. It comes
about in no other way, it is available to all persons,
and it is not a matter of birth but of individual effort."
He reminds us, "that if there is a chance for a
good life, the risk of a bad one must also be accepted."
The voluntaryist spirit, as we have seen, comprises
several diverse areas of libertarian thought.
It expresses the epistemological bias against violence
by arguing that rational persuasion is the only means
of judging success. In a very real sense, there are
only two relations possible among men — that of logic
and war. The person who does not accept physical
might as the expression of truth, who rejects the doctrine
that might makes right, demands logic instead
of force. The person who always demands proof and
who never assumes anything on faith alone therefore
always remains implicitly a voluntaryist. Such
a person refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of
government because it "wields the most violence," or
because "no human society has ever existed without
it," or because "there would be chaos without government
provision of law and order."
The resort to violence, in place of argument, is an
implicit confession that one's argument is weak and
unconvincing. This explains why freedom is better
than compulsion. To paraphrase the argument of a
19th Century English bishop, who preferred to see
Englishmen free (and possibly drunk) rather than
compulsorily sober, we say: With freedom, in the end
we might attain our highest desires, but on the other
hand, compulsion assures us that we would lose both
freedom and our most highly cherished ends. A poor
freedom is always better than a rich slavery.
Voluntaryism also emphasizes the importance of
self-ownership and just property titles, which form
the underlying basis for the very definition of voluntary
relationships with others. In fact, we can have
no concept of what it is to violate the rights of others,
nor can we even make the distinction between invasive
and non-invasive force without having an implicit
concept of justice, or a code of principles, which
defines what a man is due. In short, the very distinction
between voluntaryism and coercion depends
upon and presupposes a theory of justice in property
titles and people. "The principle of self-ownership
means we must treat all others with absolute respect
for their self-ownership. You literally have no claim
on the lives of others, nor they on you. You can only
relate to them when, where, and how they want you
to; otherwise you must let them be. You must treat
them with respect for their self-ownership rights or
not at all."
Voluntaryists have a clear understanding of the
nature of power (what they call "the voluntaryist
insight") — that all governments and human institutions
depend on the consent and cooperation of its
victims. A person who harbors the voluntaryist spirit
understands that he or she cannot be compelled to
do anything against his or her will. Such a person
may suffer the consequences of holding to his or her
belief, but as Corbett Bishop, a World War II conscientious
objector who fasted for over 400 days in government
prisons and hospitals, pointed out: Governments
know that they can terrorize individuals into
submitting to tyranny by grabbing the body as hostage
and thus hoping to destroy the spirit (of conscience
and resistance within the individual). But if
one repudiates the body and will have nothing to do
with it, the spirit remains free. This is the essence of
total non-cooperation with one's oppressors. The voluntaryist
spirit also reminds us of the stoics "who
were different from others" in refusing to allow pain
to disturb the equanimity of their minds and the
exercise of their reason.
There is the story of a Stoic who was captured
and told to renounce his beliefs. He refused
and was tortured. Still unable to make
him recant, his captors told him he would be
put to death. He answered they could do whatever
they wanted with his body but whatever
they did could not injure his philosophy. That
was in his mind and their authority, in its
physical and moral aspect, did not extend
[that far].
As the relator of this story continues, "Stoicism
was unique in that its martyrs did not go to death
believing their ideas would change the world." They
went to death because their integrity was worth more
to them than their existence. For life, if the courage
to die be lacking, is slavery. The man who is afraid to
die cannot possibly live up to his vision of the truth
because he fears for both his person and property.
Thus the only favorable course to those who uphold
voluntaryism is "to remain loyal to one's own integrity.
For man, as a moral agent, has an obligation to
value truth for its own sake, not for any supposed
benefits it might bring as a by-product."
The emphasis on the means-end insight in voluntaryism
explains why voluntaryists deem it necessary
to take action to achieve their goals. They
know they cannot run away from weakness, that
sometimes they must resist and disobey or else lose
their own self-respect. The voluntaryist spirit is a
passionate, disinterested quest for justice and truth.
Since all times are proper for pursuing what is right,
they realize that there is no time like the present;
that the first chance is always the best. They are not
bound by difficulties, but by justice. They must do
what they think right and let the consequences take
care of themselves. The love of truth is infectious.
One's ideals and ideas must be professed everywhere;
there is no escaping it and no middle way. If voluntaryism
is worth anything, it is worth the effort to
try to work towards it. The truth is something to be
done, not just something to be believed. The true secret
of freedom is the courage to resist. "No one ever
remains free who acquiesces in what they know to
be wrong." In the context of the voluntaryist critique
of the State, disobedience to invasive laws is the
greatest virtue.
It is said that a journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step, and the voluntaryist realizes that
only by beginning the long-term efforts to deligitimize
the State can any progress be made toward his or her
goal. As futile as a single step may seem, it is only by
taking that very first step that the journey towards
voluntaryism can be started. Those who are moved by
the voluntaryist spirit realize that they must do everything
humanly possible to move towards their goal.
People may not feel they have done everything they
can do until they have tried to do it.
It was Ludwig von Mises in his NOTES AND
RECOLLECTIONS who argued that it is a matter
of temperament how we shape our lives in the knowledge
of inescapable catastrophe. In high school he
had chosen a verse by Virgil as his motto: "Til ne cede
malis sed contra audientur ito." (Do not yield to the
bad, but always oppose it with courage.) In the darkest
hours of World War I he recalled this dictum:
Again and again I faced situations from
which rational deliberations could find no
escape. But then something unexpected occurred
that brought deliverance. I would not
lose courage even now. I would do everything
(I) could do. I would not tire in professing what
I knew to be right. ... I regret only my willingness
to compromise, not my intransigence.
Short Bibliography
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Ronald Duncan, SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAHATMA
GANDHI, Boston: Beacon Press, 1951.
Emma Goldman, MY FURTHER DISILLUSIONMENT IN
RUSSIA, Garden City, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924, see Chapter
XII, "Afterword".
William Grampp, ECONOMIC LIBERALISM, (Vol. 1: "The
Beginnings"), New York: Random House, 1965, pp. 11 and 26.
Hanford Henderson, "The Aristocratic Spirit", THE NORTH
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Arthur Wollaston Hutton, "The Moral Argument against
Compulsory Vaccination", THE HUMANITARIAN, Vol. 7, No. 3,
September 1895, pp. 177-185.
Raghavan N. Iyer, THE MORAL AND POLITICAL
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Press, 1973, esp. see Chapter 13, "Means and Ends in
Politics".
Terence MacSwiney, PRINCIPLES OF FREEDOM, Dublin:
The Talbot Press. 1921.
Ludwig von Mises, NOTES AND RECOLLECTIONS, South
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David Norton, PERSONAL DESTINIES, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974, see. p. 320.
Murray Rothbard, "Myth and Truth About Libertarianism",
MODERN AGE, Vol. 24, Winter 1988, pp. 9-15.
Richard Harrison Shryock, "Public Relations of the Medical
Profession in Great Britain and the United States: 1600-1870,"
ANNALS OF MEDICAL HISTORY (n.s.), VII, 1930, pp. 308-39,
esp. see pp. 319-23.
Carl Watner, TOWARDS A THEORY OF PROPRIETARY
JUSTICE, Baltimore: by the author, 1976.
Carl Watner (editor), I MUST SPEAK OUT: THE BEST OF
THE VOLUNTARYIST 1982-1999, San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes,
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