Benjamin Tucker (April 17, 1854 - June 22, 1939) was an American publisher, journalist, propagandist, theorist, leading proponent of individualist anarchism in the 19th century, born at South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA. Tucker translated into English Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's classic work What is Property?
Benjamin Tucker's contribution to American anarchism was as much through his publishing as his own writing. In editing and publishing the anarchist periodical, Liberty ('The Mother, not the Daughter of Order'), Tucker both filtered and integrated the theories of such European thinkers as Herbert Spencer and Proudhon with the thinking of American individualist activists, Lysander Spooner, Ezra Heywood, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Greene and Josiah Warren, as well as the uniquely American freethought and free love movements in order to produce a rigorous system of philosophical or individualist anarchism.
Tucker shared with the advocates of free love and free thought a disdain for prohibitions on non-invasive behaviour and religiously-based legislation, but he saw the poor condition of American workers as a result of four state-maintained monopolies: the money monopoly, the land monopoly, tariffs, and patents.
For 27 years his journal Liberty served as a voice of individualist anarchism, opposed to the major anarchist communist and anarcho-syndicalist wings of the movement. Liberty published such works as George Bernard Shaw's first original article to appear in the United States, the first American translated excerpts of Friedrich Nietzsche.
It has been said that Liberty was the longest running anarchist journal (1881 - 1908) in American history until the Detroit publication The Fifth Estate surpassed its record.
External links[]
- [1] Tucker on Property, Communism and Socialism
- BlackCrayon.com: People: Benjamin Tucker
- Benjamin Tucker Anarchy Archives
- Benjamin Tucker, Liberty, and Individualist Anarchism by Wendy McElroy
- Benjamin Ricketson Tucker from "CLASSicalLiberalism" archive
- Benjamin Tucker and His Periodical, Liberty by Carl Watner
- Benjamin Tucker, Liberty and Taxation
- Memories of Benjamin Tucker by J. William Lloyd (1935)
- An Interview With Oriole Tucker Tucker's daughter reveals biographical information, by Paul Avrich