Auberon Herbert

Auberon Herbert, Part 1, Part 2 Yet to be posted
by Wendy McElroy,
Originally published by the highly recommended Future of Freedom Foundation

In his periodical Liberty, (May 23, 1885), the quintessential American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote of his British counterpart Auberon Herbert, “I know of no more inspiring spectacle in England than that of this man of exceptionally high social position doing battle almost single-handed with the giant monster, government, and showing in it a mental rigor and vigor and a wealth of moral fervor rarely equaled in any cause.”

Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert (1838–1906) was born into the ruling class. As the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon and brother to the 4th earl, Herbert attended both Eton College, which has traditionally been called “the chief nurse of England’s statesmen,” and St. John’s College, Oxford. He ran unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Conservative and later served as a Liberal in the House of Commons for Nottingham in the early 1870s. There, his sympathy for working people was evident through the support he rendered to fellow-politician Joseph Arch in the goal of forming the National Agricultural Labourers Union. Upon meeting the individualist philosopher Herbert Spencer in 1873, however, Herbert became cemented in his decision not to seek reelection. In an essay posthumously published in his book The Voluntaryist Creed (Oxford University Press, 1908), Herbert explained Spencer’s impact upon him:

As I read and thought over what he taught, a new window was opened in my mind. I lost my faith in the great machine [government]; I saw that thinking and acting for others had always hindered not helped the real progress; that all forms of compulsion deadened the living forces in a nation; that every evil violently stamped out still persisted, almost always in a worse form, when driven out of sight, and festered under the surface. I no longer believed that the handful of us however well-intentioned we might be spending our nights in the House, could manufacture the life of a nation, could endow it out of hand with happiness, wisdom and prosperity, and clothe it in all the virtues.

Herbert fully embraced the radical individualism Spencer expressed in his brief work The Man versus the State (1884). In the Illustrated London News (February 15, 1936) English author G.K. Chesterton wrote,

Herbert Spencer really went as far as he could in the direction of Individualism.... He left only the gallant and eccentric Auberon Herbert to go one step further; and practically propose that we should abolish the police; and merely insure ourselves against thieves and assassins, as against fire and accident.

Herbert also began to argue vigorously against the privileges of his own class. His book A Politician in Trouble about his Soul (1884), issued by the prestigious Chapman and Hall, who also published Charles Dickens, was dedicated to “The Workmen of Nottingham,” In the dedication, he wrote, May the day come, for us and for every other nation, when the politician, as we know him at present, shall be numbered amongst the fossils of the past, when we shall cease to desire to rule each other either by force or by trick, when we shall dread for the sake of our own selves the possession of power, when we shall recognize that there are such things as universal rights....

Published by mainstream periodicals such as Nineteenth Century, The Humanitarian, and Fortnightly Review, Herbert became the most influential British libertarian of his time. Today, however, he is perhaps best remembered for popularizing Voluntaryism — a political tradition maintaining that all human interaction should be voluntary and rejecting the initiation of force. The only justification for force is self-defense, including the defense of property.


The role of government

To the extent there is debate about Herbert’s beliefs, the focus is generally upon whether he was an anarchist. He consistently rejected the label. He wrote,

My charge against Anarchism is that it sees many forms of crime existing in the world, and it refuses to come to any settled opinion as to what it will do in the matter. If it says it will do nothing, then we must live under the reign of the murderer...; if it says it will have some form of local jury, then we are back into government again at once.

By contrast, “[in] voluntaryism the state employs force only to repel force — to protect the person and the property of the individual against force and fraud; under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them.”

In short, Herbert believed defensive force and the protection of property were legitimate roles for government or “a central agency.” The government would be financed solely by a “voluntary tax.” Payees would gain the privilege of voting; nonpayees would not have the franchise but could set up their own associations. Herbert doubted they would do so because the benefits of a “central agency” would be apparent to all. Thus, he called himself a “governmentalist” and, in 1879, once more attempted to join the House of Commons but failed.

The focus on the anarchism question loses the true importance of the man. During decades of toil for liberty, Herbert was one of the most influential anti-war voices in England; he was an eloquent and unique advocate of the working man; he acted as a foil to the emerging power of socialism; and, he argued against the worst aspects of 19th-century American libertarianism, including its rejection of capitalism, especially in the form of rent and interest. Although it is speculation, Herbert’s presence at the head of British libertarianism may have been what kept that movement on course in terms of embracing sound economic theory.

The foundation of Herbert’s political convictions was “the rights of self-ownership” which “express the limits of rightful and wrongful action.” These were the natural rights that a person had over his own body and the products thereof (property) against which no one else could properly aggress. Since they were based in man’s nature, these rights were possessed in equal measure by every man. Herbert declared, “If we are self-owners (and it is absurd, it is doing violence to reason, to suppose that we are not), neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government can have rights of ownership in other men.”


“The way of force and strife”

Herbert argued with particular vigor against the idea of majority rule, saying that “what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.” Regarding the phrase “the good of the greatest number,” Herbert exclaimed,

There never was invented a more specious and misleading phrase. The Devil was in his most subtle and ingenious mood when he slipped this phrase into the brains of men.... It assumes that there are two opposed “goods,” and that the one good is to be sacrificed to the other good — but ... liberty is the one good, open to all, and requiring no sacrifice of others; this false opposition (where no real opposition exists) of two different goods means perpetual war between men — the larger number being for ever incited to trample on the smaller number. I can only ask: Why are 2 men to be sacrificed to 3 men? We all agree that the 3 men are not to be sacrificed to the 2 men; but why — as a matter of moral right — are we to do what is almost as bad and immoral and short-sighted — sacrifice the 2 men to the 3 men?... [Liberty] does away with all necessity of sacrifice.” (Free Life, July 1898)

Herbert expressed his rejection of majority rule and “tribalism” through his active opposition to war. In the introduction to the 1978 edition of The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, the philosopher Eric Mack observed,

Following Spencer’s distinction between industrial and militant societies, Herbert continually emphasized the differences between two basic modes of interpersonal coordination. There is the “way of peace and cooperation” founded upon respect for self-ownership and the demand for only voluntary association. And there is the “way of force and strife” founded upon either the belief in the ownership of some by others or the simple reverence of brute force.

War was the pure expression of “the way of force and strife.” Herbert’s anti-war sentiments had a long history. Like many British aristocrats, he had held commissions in the army and served in India; in letters home, he criticized the British occupation. During the Prusso-Danish war (1864), he spent time observing action near the front line and was subsequently decorated by the Danish government for rendering aid to the wounded. He also directly observed the American Civil War (1861–1865), of which he wrote, “I am very glad that slavery is done away with, but I think the manner is very bad and wrong.”

In the 1870s, “jingoism” swept England in reaction to the Russo-Turkish War. Jingoism is extreme patriotism coupled with an aggressive foreign policy. The term came from the chorus of a popular pub song: “We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do/We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too/We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true/The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”

When the jingoists organized anti-Russia rallies in Hyde Park, Herbert became a driving force in organizing anti-jingoist ones. His anti-war stance was not only visceral from having witnessed the savagery of war, but also ideological. Mack explained,

Herbert repeatedly took anti-imperialist stands. He consistently called for Irish self-determination. In the early 1880s, he opposed British intervention in Egypt as a use of the power of the nation to guarantee the results of particular speculations. And, later, he opposed the Boer War.

Herbert was also cognizant that wars benefited the ruling class at the expense of common men, who were overwhelmingly the ones to fight and die .

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