What Is Anarchism? Discuss.

Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

In response to my recent post about Emma Goldman’s essay on Anarchy, I have received a long comment from blogger Abandon TV, to which I would like to respond. You can see my post and his complete comment here.

Abandon TV begins with a statement of what he believes that Anarchism is:

I like to think of an ‘anarchic society’ as being the natural consequence of a society rejecting *the initiation of force* as a LEGITIMATE means to get things done. This does NOT mean an anarchic society would be magically free of all coercion or violence …. it just means that society has overwhelmingly rejected coercion and violence as a legitimate way for human beings to transact and interact with each other.

This definition is different from Emma Goldman’s. Goldman rejects property rights, laws and moral strictures, but she does not reject violence to demonstrate in a good cause: the propaganda of the deed. Goldman does not consider whether we need violence within an anarchic society to protect the weak and incompetent from the unconstrained actions of the strong. She is comfortable in the belief that freedom will produce only benign results. For example, when there is no private property, then by definition crimes against property cannot occur.

Abandon TV’s use of the expression “legitimate means” implies a system of rules under which actions are legitimate or not-legitimate, in other words, some implied constraints on action. The constraint may be on coercion but, like Goldman, he does not explain how rules are to be enforced, including the rule against coercion itself.

Now I’m willing to bet that you’d be prepared to debate me in an attempt to win me over. You might even be prepared to beg me to fund your scheme if it was really that important to you… but I bet you would NOT be prepared to *initiate force* against me, such as threatening me with violence …… or, if I still resisted, actually hiring armed thugs to drag me away from my family and lock me inside a cage for refusing to fund your scheme….

Resorting to coercion and violence to achieve one’s personal or political aims is, after all, the dictionary definition of terrorism. It is highly immoral. We all know this. We learn it in kindergarden “Don’t hit to get what you want… don’t steal to get what you want”

We did learn it in kindergarten, or even earlier. I also learned not to slurp with my straw in the bottom of the milk bottle. That restriction no longer has any force for me, but I still believe that it is wrong to steal just to get what I want – yet I might steal to protect myself or someone else. The restriction on stealing is not any more absolute than the do-not-slurp rule; it just has a different set point. However enforced, these rules come from some place.

Abandon TV equates personal violence – hiring armed thugs – with the violence of the state.

And obviously – in a moral sense – it makes no difference if you threatened me or kidnapped me *in person*, or if you hired some thugs dressed in matching blue costumes to do threaten or kidnap me *on your behalf*.

The “matching blue costumes” are the police or the military, acting on behalf of those who are in power, often with the support of the many who are not in power. Emma Goldman remarked this, saying that “the majority cannot reason; it has no judgment.” She was influenced by the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886, as I am influenced by the police riot at the Democratic National Convention, also in Chicago, in 1968. In both cases the police acted with the support of the political powers and the acquiescence of the public, with the police claiming to protect that public against still greater violence.

We see here the conflict between private action and public control. It’s an old story, so old that the Greeks told it. In Aeschylus’ play The Eumenides (“Furies”), after Orestes kills his mother he is pursued by the Furies. Their pursuit is often interpreted as his madness of guilt and grief over what he had done. That is not how Aeschylus resolved it, however. Orestes killed his mother as an act of necessary vengeance (she had killed his father, after all). His deed made him a matricide, a parent killer. Poor Orestes could not win. His acts were dictated by the gods, and the Eumenides also acted on behalf of the gods. Athena negotiated a settlement whereby in the future such difficult cases would be decided by the citizens of Athens, consulting together – in effect, a jury. Private vengeance, previously mandated by the gods, is replaced by control of such violence by the public, represented here by the citizens of Athens. This is generally regarded as progress.

It is almost impossibly difficult to establish fair social rules by which we can all live together, whether the dictating power is property, or religion, or government, or “the people” through some democratic process. After all, 15% of the population is left handed. If the 85% who are right handed decide that left-handedness must be eliminated, that would be the will of the majority – and it would be wrong. If it is so difficult to establish the standards for civil society, then the implied violence to enforce those rules is only part of a larger problem.

Abandon TV makes this very point when he points out that to choose those to make the laws is to choose coercion to enforce those laws. First the choice; then the violence.

One simply cannot ‘vote’ in a democracy, or *willingly* pay taxes, without advocating for coercion and violence be used against millions of other people to make them do things against their will and pay for things against their will….. advocating for coercion and violence to be used against others is what ‘voting’ means!

One does not ‘vote’ for a candidate or party to simply get into office. One ‘votes’ for a candidate or party to get into office and then impose various policies, laws and agendas onto everyone by force…. literally at gunpoint (disobey and they put you in a cage or just shoot you).

Like I said, anarchy is the natural consequence of rejecting *the initiation of force* as a legitimate way for anyone to behave in society.

When we reject force as a legitimate way to behave, what protects those who reject force from those who do not reject force? Emma Goldman does not explain; she believes that when we are freed from the restrictions of property, religion and government we will not have any reason not to behave well.

Abandon TV approaches this issue somewhat differently. He points out that the state is an abstraction that “the only thing that actually exists is PEOPLE.” Anarchic society does not reject rules or hierarchies, but it does reject violence. He says that it is the statist society which has no rules, only laws.

A law is not a rule. A law may indeed reflect a rule (including a moral rule), but it does not have to…. It *feels* like governments enforce those moral rules, but in reality governments maintain a VIOLENT MONOPOLY on the LEGAL right to VIOLATE those moral rules…… they grant themselves the legal right to steal (tax) and murder (wage war).

Abandon TV is a social and political libertarian. The rest of his comments are in praise of personal freedom and a condemnation of government when it restricts that freedom.

Here’s another observation….. except for where the state is involved, every transaction and interaction in our personal and business lives is ALREADY conducted in a state of anarchy. There is no authoritarian agency of coercion and violence dictating who we choose to have as friends, where we go for our holidays, what we wear, what we eat, who we marry, where we live, what career we have, what books we read, how we spend our weekends and so on. If any agency tried to dictate these things for you I’m sure you would be outraged and you’d protest.

I take his point, but the anarchic freedom he describes is not total, as Abandon TV will discover when he walks down the street naked or tries to marry his sister. He assumes some level of organization which makes it possible for us to eat and marry and choose a career, to go on holiday or read a book. We live in a complex world. We may not like it, but here is where we find ourselves. I am hungry. I go into the store which is well lighted (by whom?) and take money (from where?) to buy food which I assume is safe to eat. I want the freedom to do these things, but they represent very considerable constraints on the freedom of others who operate the power plant and issue the money and sell the food. Surely some means of coercion is implied by these constraints.

Abandon TV thinks, however, that government has no constructive role to play.

So what justification or benefit is there for a coercive and violent agency (such as a government) taking control, by force, of all the other aspects of our lives? (banking, currency, trade, transport, education, healthcare, welfare etc)

There is no justification and no benefit. Instead there is only chaos, destruction, war, misery, death, abuse, persecution, injustice, tyranny, hypocrisy, deceit, fraud, theft, violence and a great deal of confusion.

I wish I could believe that renouncing violence and removing the restrictions of property, religion, government and the use of force would lead us to the Promised Land, but I don’t. Imperfect as they are, our restrictions and the associated coercion have evolved over centuries of human experience as we all try to live together. We live within a system, but it is not immutable.

I think that anarchism is the power to say no. Anarchists say no to injustice, to property rights which benefit some at the expense of other, to war, to prison, to religious persecution. What each group of anarchists rejects derives from their historical experience. That is why there are so many different flavors of anarchist thought. Wikipedia lists many, from anarchic communism through anarcho-naturism and insurrectionary anarchism to platformism. In the rejection of conventional social and political arrangements, anarchism overlaps with utopian movements like the Oneida Perfectionists and the Shakers. The difference is that the utopians dreamed of – and in some cases built –a deliberately-designed alternative society. They opted out of what was and tried to construct something better. After they had said no, they said yes.

Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world],
but you are not free to desist from it either” Pirkei Avot

Emma Goldman, Anarchist

Having learned a great deal about the lives of anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman’s from Paul and Karen Avrich’s biography, Sasha and Emma, I am still baffled about anarchism itself. What is the meaning of this philosophy or movement to which they devoted their lives? A partial answer can be found in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (1917). The answer is partial because, while it is fairly clear what anarchism means to Goldman, it means something different to me.

Goldman is indignant. She detests cruelty, injustice and all limitations on individual liberty. She wants to destroy the restrictions, but she refuses to offer any specific remedies.

Anarchism, at least as I understand it, leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in harmony with its needs. Our most vivid imagination can not foresee the potentialities of a race set free from external restraints. How, then, can any one assume to map out a line of conduct for those to come?

She finds the source of enslavement in religion, in government, and in property.

 Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

She knows that individuals are good and that, when they are free to pursue their individual destinies, we will have a better world.

A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy.

I find here a parallel vision with socialism, but less prescriptive, less organized. This is the old dream of Eden where no man or woman toils at what is disagreeable. It reminds me of Bronson Alcott traveling on the ferry and refusing to pay the fare because money is corrupt. Without the corruption of money who would build or operate a ferry boat? In an anarchic society, who will hoe the potatoes or unclog the sewer system or get up in the night to tend a sick child? Goldman sees the power of organization only as the power to oppress, rather than the power to accomplish social good. In her vision, it is anarchism that stands for a utopian future.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

Like Henry Thoreau – who is sometimes tagged as an anarchist – Goldman relies on the strength of individual conscience to recognize and resist economic and social restrictions.

Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage.

Only those with “integrity, self-reliance, and courage” can defy and resist. Goldman, despite her belief in the individual, has no confidence in the mass of individuals.

Thus the very victims, duped, betrayed, outraged a hundred times, decided, not against, but in favor of the victor. Bewildered, the few asked how could the majority betray the traditions of American liberty? Where was its judgment, its reasoning capacity? That is just it, the majority cannot reason; it has no judgment. Lacking utterly in originality and moral courage, the majority has always placed its destiny in the hands of others. Incapable of standing responsibilities, it has followed its leaders even unto destruction.

This is the great inconsistency at the heart of anarchism. Anarchists believe that external authority is wrong and relies on the weakness of the masses. Since those masses cannot act on their own behalf, Goldman implies that the anarchists must be the leaders who liberate them. She justifies the Attentat, the propaganda of the deed, which will arouse the masses from their passivity and demonstrate the possibility of their liberation. Maybe so, but such deeds – for example, Alexander Berkman’s assault on Henry Clay Frick – mostly have served to convince rulers and the masses alike that anarchists are dangerous. “Anarchy” means literally “without ruler.” Goldman declares that the rulers of religion, government and property maintain their power by violence and the acquiescence of the ruled. She tells us that the anarchist leaders are different. She never acknowledges that, by embracing violent techniques, anarchy seems just like one more source of social control.

Thoreau’s Beans

When I read that important philosophical work, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, I find myself confronted by the details of cabin construction and hoeing beans. Expenses are carefully reported: $28.12 ½ for the cabin, plus Thoreau’s labor. As he says, “I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man.”

He needs these strict habits because he desires to be free. He explains that “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” He reduces his necessities to the minimum, so that he needs to exchange very little of his life for them, saying somewhat boastfully,

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

The beans are part of this business plan.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas and turnips.

The beans are for sale – Thoreau doesn’t even like beans, particularly.

In his accounting, Thoreau recognized income and outgo. The more he can reduce his outgo, the less income he will need and the more life he will have for himself: “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

Thoreau’s approach is still pursued by some today, as Simple Living.  Wikipedia: “Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice.” Another expression of the same desire to be free of the tyranny of things is today’s Small House Movement.   Thoreau wanted to be free to enjoy nature and write his books, to live in the moment. The economy described in Walden was his recipe for doing so.

This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.

Small house in Portland, approximately the size and shape of Thoreau’s cabin.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons

Concord: Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau

I love Concord, but even more I love its people: Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts. I have added a slideshow to the page devoted to my upcoming course on Louisa May Alcott. The slides accompany a lecture and discussion about what these Concord people contributed to life and literature in their time and ours. Video slide show.

The video links do not work in the slide show. Here they are:

• Bill Clinton reading The Concord Hymn
• Ralph Raldo Emerson’s poem Forbearance
• Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism
• Bronson Alcott, How Like an Angel Came I Down
• Thoreau and Walden, Civil Disobedience
• Sorry, you can’t play the music at the present time.

Milan Kundera, Slowness

In the 18th century a night of love  is savored, slowly, lengthened by art and artifice.

Why did she tell him she hadn’t brought the key? Why did she not tell him right off that the pavilion was no longer locked? Everything is composed, confected, artificial, everything is staged, nothing is straightforward, or in other words, everything is art; in this case: the art of prolonging the suspense, better yet: the art of staying as long as possible in a state of arousal.

A night of love and a novel can both be prolonged in a state of arousal/confusion/revelation. In this meditative, slow novel by Milan Kundera I find at least four plot lines and two centuries within its few pages. A man and his wife go to a French chateau, now a hotel. We learn the details of a story told in an 18th century novel set in this chateau. Today French entomologists assemble in the same place for a conference. A young man considers the “dance” of public intellectual before his unseen audience and also pursues a brief and unsuccessful love affair.

Confused by all of this I turned to Wikipedia (something I try to avoid before posting) to learn that Kundera likes to weave his own philosophical comments into his fiction. True. Driving to the chateau, Kundera asks,

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.

Behind the driver a car edges nervously, wanting to go faster, but Kundera proceeds deliberately, gazing back toward the 18th century. Later, the unfulfilled lover gets on his motorcycle and speeds away.

What I Read in August 2011

Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights. I’m not sure why I stayed with this book – all 450 pages of it – since I didn’t like it very much. By the author of The Finkler Question, it is a lengthy exploration of the lives of English Jews as observed and experienced by a disenchanted caricaturist (literally, he draws cartoons) in his middle years.

Charles H. Manekin, On Maimonides. This serves as a companion piece to Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides and is a much tougher read. I comment on the two books, along with one of Maimonides’ perplexities in Maimonides Maimonides.

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimajaro. Since I enjoyed A Moveable Feast, I thought I would give Hemingway’s this collection of his short stories a try. Too male and too mannered for me, but I enjoyed The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber because of what happened to Macomber after he shot the buffalo.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. Sarah, of A Rat in the Book Pile, and I have been reading this together and cross-posting in both of our blogs. So read and comment at either place:
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part II
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part III
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part IV

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Headless Corpse. Despite the grisly title, this is not a grisly book. It is a typical Maigret story. The Inspector considers a crime, he tries to understand the criminals, he eats a bit, he drinks a lot, he solves the mystery.

Martha Saxton, Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. Not too modern any more, this biography. Published in 1977, it is a feminist take on Alcott’s sometimes difficult life. More comments may follow as I proceed with my Alcott project.

Emile Zola, The Masterpiece. Considered the most autobiographical of his novels, in The Masterpiece Zola gives us the lives of writers and artists in 188s Paris. We learn of the price of success, as well as the costs of failure.

Maimonides Maimonides

This fall I will be co-leading in a course – Believe It or Not – in which we examine various sources of belief. I intend to speak about Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, born 1138). He interests me as a subject because of his efforts to reconcile philosophic truth with revealed truth, as in the Torah.

To learn about the man, I started with Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides. Nuland is a physician, best known for his book How We Die. After some historical and biographical background, Nuland passes rather rapidly over philosophy and theology to report on Maimonides’ medical opinions – not what I was looking for. I need some apparent conflicts between philosophy and revelation as a basis for discussion.

In Charles H. Manekin’s On Maimonides, I find an example:

With respect to creation, however, Maimonides and his philosophical authorities are on opposite sides of the fence. For his most admired authority, Aristotle, held that the world always existed in the way it does now, that it did not come into existence after not existing. Moreover, Aristotle’s conclusion seemed to follow inexorably from principles of his science….

Aristotle’s science was based on the concept of the celestial spheres and is outdated, but the issue is still relevant. If the findings of science seem to conflict with the revelations of your religious tradition, what can you believe?

Maimonides, faced with Aristotle’s opinion that the world is eternal, had to consider the opening verse of Genesis:

 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In my edition of the Bible, the note says

 Verse 1 is a majestic summary of the story of Creation: God is the beginning, nay, the Cause of all things.

This note seems to evade the eternity question. Surely if the Hebrew word actually means beginning, then it indicates a definite point in time and therefore “the heaven and the earth” did not exist previous to that. Seeking the translation of the Hebrew, I consulted knowledgeable in-laws and received this response from Cousin Isaac.

I think I can help a bit, starting with literal translation. The closer we get to Maimonidean philosophy, the further we’ll get from anything I can say anything useful about.

“In the Beginning” is a valid basic translation of “Bereishit,” according to traditional interpretations. That’s essentially how Onkelos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkelos) translates it in his authoritative, tradition-based Aramaic translation. The root of the word, I think most would agree, is R.A.Sh. (as opposed to B.R.A in the next word), which means “head.”

The next word, “Bara,” is I think universally taken to be the verb “created,” with the subject being God and the objects being the heaven and the earth.

I’m pretty sure that traditional normative Jewish belief and interpretation of this verse is indeed that God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else, and that the Universe did not exist until He created it, as reported here.

That is what Maimonides thought also, and he stood his ground, Aristotle to the contrary. So God is eternal, but the universe is not eternal, since it had a beginning and to be eternal is to have no beginning or end. Now we drill down to a deeper problem with language. We assign words to concepts we do not really understand and which therefore we cannot define with other words. As Cousin Isaac says, ”God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else”.  If I understand (!) Maimonides, we can say a stone or a man exists, but to say God exists draws on a different sense of exists. The stone or the man may cease to exist, so existence contrasts being with non being. Ceasing to exist is not possible for God because God is eternal. But then again, eternal is just a word we use. Since it doesn’t apply to anything we have experienced, we cannot conceive of its meaning.

Karl Marx: A Life

It’s a good idea to read a book about someone you have heard about but never encountered directly. Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx gave me that opportunity. Marx was a revolutionary firebrand in his youth, expelled from Germany, France and Belgium not once, but several times. He ended his life as a father and grandfather in suburban London, his basic ideas unchanged but his expression of them somewhat subdued. And in between these two points in this life we find The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital and Frederick Engels.

Marx devoted his university studies to philosophy and, when he took up the study of economics he continued to see the big picture:

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Wheen presents Marx as a philosopher who drew on a variety of sources:

In the British Museum, Marx had discovered a reservoir of data about capitalist practice — government Blue Books, statistical tables, reports from factory inspectors and public health officers…. But his other main source, less often noticed, is literary fiction…. How can capitalists shrug off their responsibility for the human casualties of technological progress? Putting aside his census figures, Marx turns to a speech from the dock by Bill Sykes on Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

Although Marx dabbled from time to time in revolutionary politics during his years in England, his heart seems to have been in his writing. After years of labor he brought out the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. The remaining two volumes were edited by Engels after Marx’s death. Intended as a scientific analyses of the structure of capitalism and the inevitability of crises within that structure, the emotional drive which led Marx to write it came from his concern for the situation of the workers in an industrializing economy.

Marx himself was not a worker. Born into a middle class family, his lawyer father could afford to send him to the university. He experienced enough poverty in his early days in England so as not to romanticize the proletarian life. Quite the contrary, he wanted his daughters to be educated as ladies. Engels was not a poor boy either — his father was a partner in a textile concern — and worked for years in the business to support Marx and his family. In this biography one sees a portrait of a brilliant but difficult man — his wife called him “my wild boar” — who struggled to describe the world he wanted to change.

Cathleen Schine, Rameau’s Niece

This is the third Cathleen Schine book I have read. The others were The Love Letter and The Evolution of Jane, and I did not post a separate comment on either of them. It seems unfair somehow to read so many of Schine’s books and not comment, so let’s try to be fair here.

Margaret Nathan, in Rameau’s Niece, reads much and remembers little.

Margaret was an authority on many things, with this one qualification — she had forgotten those many things as thoroughly as if she swilled daily from the river Lethe, morning, noon, and light, gulping, gargling, brushing her teeth with the waters of oblivion. Margaret suffered short-lived but all-consuming intellectual passions to which she gave herself over completely, becoming expert enough to be thoughtful.

Margaret does manage to remember, from time to time, that she is married to Edward, to me the much more attractive character of the two. Translating the genteel pornography of the Rameau’s Niece manuscript, Margaret learns that the desire to know is desire. Since she desires to know, then she must feel desire and so she looks for an object, not in Edward but in her dentist, the stranger on the plane, her friend Lily. Invited to Prague alone — Edward has teaching commitments — she blames him and his unavoidable absence for all these attractions. I really wanted to shake her sometimes.

Schine is using the same narrative technique she followed in The Love Letter, where all the puzzlements in the plot flowed from an accidentally discovered love letter. Here, Margaret is undone by a pseudo-philosophical treatise with lines like this:

I walked on, thinking of how, after a night of the give and take of rigorous philosophical discussion, of delving unrelentingly for knowledge and for truth, my pupil would wrap her figure, which was of perfect proportions, in a muslin nightgown and leave my room, turning back to the door, running back to me to to thank me for my efforts on her behalf, throwing her arms around my neck and covering me with kisses of gratitude. Truly, there is nothing so rewarding as the instruction of the young.

All this cutesy philosophy is the hook for Margaret’s instruction among the various kinds of desire. The joke, like the nightgown, wears a little thin.

The Subjection of Women

I was led to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), written with the assistance/inspiration of Harriet Taylor, by on-going commentary at A Year of Feminist Classics. This picture from Wikipedia is dated 1835 and the need at that time for long exposures for photographs makes them look unduly grim. The important message of this picture is that the two are together and that Mill credited Harriet Taylor with full partnership in the development of the ideas put forth in The Subjection of Women.

All too often, when men write about women, they assume the right to define and prescribe. Freud addressed his famous question “what does woman want?” to other men. Wollstonecraft pleaded that women would be “better” if they were only treated differently. Mill knows that what women want and what women are, good or bad, are irrelevant. He writes from a liberal view which assumes the men and women have equal rights, whatever their natures.  He states the proposition clearly:

That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

He recognizes that the legal position of women in England at that time reflects a codification of long-standing arrangements:

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.

The structure of his essay is this:

• Chapter 1 – an explanation of liberal principles
• Chapter 2 – the situation of married women
• Chapter 3 – equal opportunities for women, especially in employment
• Chapter 4 – social benefits from recognition of equal rights

I was particularly impressed by Chapter 2, where he describes the social and legal status of married women. Women had no separate legal existence and no rights to property. Not until an act of Parliament in 1882 did a married women in Britain gain the right to the fruits of her own labor.

The situation was the equivalent of chattel slavery (except a man could not sell his wife, only abuse her), a fact that was recognized in the United States, where the abolition movement and the women’s suffrage movement evolved together. Just as in the worst Jim Crow period of segregation, the legal system recognized the worst and least-qualified man as legally superior to every woman. A man who had no other status in the society was at least entitled to control his wife’s property and actions.

Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power.

Inherent conflict was built into every marriage:

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite.

Without power and with no rights to assert, women must prevail by the very harem techniques that Wollstonecraft identified in her Vindication of the Rights of Women. It is over 50 years later, but the problem continues.

During the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, many of us became aware that the oppressor was as entrapped in the system as the oppressed. To enforce privilege of one group over another — whether based on race or gender — demeans the humanity of both. Mill sees benefits for both sexes when equal rights are recognized.

And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint.