ABSTRACT
Benjamin R. Tucker, chief exponent of individualist anarchism or the doctrine of the stateless society, had his roots deep in Yankee idealism. Early in 1875 young Tucker, an enthusiastic anarchist, was back in Boston and eager to broadcast his beliefs to his fellow Americans. Tucker’s own contribution was his translation of Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions. Tucker’s own pungent paragraphs, under the title of “On Picket Duty,” extended across the first page. Although Tucker had valuable and devoted editorial assistance most of the time, Liberty was as much his personal publication as the Liberator was William Lloyd Garrison’s, and he brought it out as regularly and as frequently as he was able. A pacifist and intellectual, Tucker believed in the efficacy of the written word. To Tucker individual liberty, with its nineteenth-century emphasis on economic laissez-faire and personal self-reliance, was “both the end and means” of human happiness.
