ABSTRACT
The stoical Emile and the infallible Sovereign People are both figments that spring from a basically pantheistic or Manichaean view of life. Anarchism is incompatible with the recognition of the naturalness of social and communal life and of the essential, and not merely substitutional, function of authority: a recognition based on the belief in a personal God, the freedom of the will and the greatness of the part which contingency plays in the world. Authority can never take the form of an impersonal necessity; coercion is but an instrument of authority and cannot be identified with it as such. The notion of the existence of social ‘laws’ immanent in the course of social events and compulsive on the human will evident to the reason is irreconcilable with the principles of any non-determinist system. Anarchism and collectivism have at least one feature in common: the rejection of personal moral responsibility, which is the quality on which human freedom rests.
