ent, from which I can withdraw my financial support if I do not
approve of its actions, is Proudhon's federation of groups in its
strictest form; perhaps it is even the practical outcome of Stirner's
_Union of Egoists_; at any rate Herbert, like Stirner, prefers the
unconditional acceptance of the principle of _laisser faire_, without
reaching it, like Proudhon, by means of the thorny circumlocution of a
complicated organisation of work. Carried into practice, Voluntarism
would be as like Anarchism as two peas. None the less we must not
undervalue the theoretical progress shown in the distinction quoted
above. Herbert approaches within a hair's-breadth of the standpoint of
Sociology, and what separates him from it is not so much the logical
accentuation of the social-contract theory as the indirect assumption
of it.

* * * * *

In America we find views similar to Auberon Herbert's.

The traces of Anarchist ideas in the United States go back as far as
the fifties. Joseph Dejacque, an adherent of Proudhon, and compromised
politically in 1848, edited in New York, from 1858-61, a paper, _Le
Libertaire_, in which he at first preached the collective Anarchism of
his master, but later--though long before Kropotkin--drifted into
communist Anarchism.

Side by side there also arose, almost, as it seems, independently of
Europe, an individualist school, the origin of which goes back
somewhere to the beginning of the century. Here the ideas of a free
society, such as Thompson had imagined and taught, found rapid and
willing acceptance, and were expanded, by men like Josiah Warren,
Stephen Pearl Andrews, Lysander Spooner, and others, to the idea of
"individual sovereignty," which to-day possesses its most important
champion in R. B. Tucker, the editor of the journal, _Liberty_, in
Boston, and which approaches most closely to Herbert's idea of the
"voluntary State."

PART III

THE RELATION OF ANARCHISM TO SCIENCE AND POLITICS

CHAPTER VII

ANARCHISM AND SOCIOLOGY: HERBERT SPENCER

Spencer's Views on the Organisation of Society -- Society
Conceived from the Nominalist and Realist Standpoint -- The
Idealism of Anarchists -- Spencer's Work: _From Freedom to
Restraint_.

When Vaillant was before his judges he mentioned Herbert Spencer,
among others, as one of those from whom he had