Anarchy 44/Not quite an anarchist

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Not quite an anarchist

JOHN CRUMP

Thomas paine … was never enough of an opti­mist to let his na­tural anar­chism run its full course. His con­tempor­ary, William Godwin, said in his “En­quiry Con­cern­ing Polit­ical Just­ice” (1793), “With what de­light must every well-in­formed friend of man­kind look for­ward to the dis­solu­tion of polit­ical gov­ern­ment, of that brute engine which has been the only per­en­nial cause of the vices of man­kind … and no other­wise to be re­moved than by its utter an­nihil­a­tion.” Paine takes a more neg­at­ive stance:— “Some writers have so con­founded so­ciety with gov­ern­ment as to leave little or no dis­tinc­tion be­tween them; where­as they are not only dif­fer­ent, but have dif­fer­ent ori­gins. So­ciety is pro­duced by our wants and gov­ern­ment by our wick­ed­ness … So­ciety in every state is a bless­ing, but gov­ern­ment even in its best state is but a neces­sary evil.”

  Thomas Hobbes thought that with­out gov­ern­ment “the life of man (would be) solit­ary, poor, nasty, brut­ish and short.” Paine took an op­pos­ing view; “Great part of that order which reigns among man­kind is not the ef­fect of Gov­ern­ment. It has its ori­gins in the prin­ciples of so­ciety and the na­tural con­sti­tu­tion of man.” In theory then Paine be­lieved that man was es­sen­tially a re­spons­ible being who should be per­fectly free, pro­vid­ing that his lib­erty did not in­fringe on an­other’s free­dom.

  He was scep­tical of the prac­tice of sub­ordin­at­ing the mass of men to the guid­ance of a few. We have seen that he clearly dif­fer­en­ti­ated be­tween so­ciety and gov­ern­ment in “Common Sense”, and he re­turns to this sub­ject in “The Rights of Man”, say­ing here “… so­ciety per­forms for it­self al­most every­thing ascribed to Gov­ern­ment.” He goes on to elabor­ate this theme, de­scrib­ing the state in America when there was no formal gov­ern­ment for more than two years fol­low­ing the out­break of the War of In­de­pend­ence. He main­tains that the dis­ap­pear­ance of gov­ern­ment there caused the flour­ish­ing of so­ciety, “com­mon inter­est pro­ducing com­mon secur­ity.”

  Here then there at first ap­pears to be a clear-cut posi­tion. Paine held that many of the activ­it­ies which gov­ern­ments con­cerned them­selves with were super­flu­ous. Not only were they un­neces­sary and a waste of time, but often defin­itely harm­ful. Pur­su­ing this line of argu­ment he writes—“But how often is the na­tural pro­pens­ity to so­ciety dis­turbed or de­stroyed by the oper­a­tions of Gov­ern­ment.” And again—“… in­stead of con­solid­at­ing so­ciety it (gov­ern­ment) di­vided it, it de­prived it of its na­tural co­he­sion, and en­gen­dered dis­con­tents and dis­orders which other­wise would not have existed.”