Sumner's Anarchist Moment

by Liberty and Power

In 1941, economist Irving Fisher opined that William Graham Sumner"was one of the greatest professors we ever had at Yale, but I have drawn far away from his point of view, that of the old laissez faire doctrine. I remember he said in his classroom: 'Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.' That amused his class very much, for he was as far from a revolutionary as you could expect."

-- Irving Fisher before the Yale Socialist Club in 1941, quoted in Mark Thorton, The Economics of Prohibition (University of Utah Press, 1991), p. 17.

Hat tip Pierre Lemieux.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

David T. Beito - 2/20/2006

Lemieux's source says that Fisher's speech was in 1941, not 1911.

Roderick T. Long - 2/20/2006

By the way, you can read a bit more of the context here.

David T. Beito - 2/20/2006

I suppose Sumner would have regarded the corporatists as part of the socialist alignment, at least socialist by comparison with laissez faire. He certainly understood the dangers of corporatism as his prescient comments on the threat posed by plutocracy indicate.

William Marina - 2/20/2006

I must disagree with one of my favorite anti-imperialist, WG Sumner. The battle is not between Socialim and Anarchism, but rather against a global Corporatism triumphant from the US through Russia to China, and most significant points in between.
At its best it can show some compassion, at its worst it is imperialism unadulterated as Spengler understood. Certainly, it has captured both the dominant political parties in the US, where there is not much of a real choice, let alone an echo!

Charles Johnson - 2/20/2006

A fascinating quote and good to hear from Sumner. For an interesting compare and contrast, though, see Benjamin Tucker's State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ" (1888), where Tucker makes quite a similar argument, and indeed says something nearly identical, but construes the whole debate as a debate WITHIN "socialism," between state socialism ("which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice") and anarchistic socialism ("which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished"). Thus Tucker:

"The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism. There are, in fact, two currents steadily flowing from the center of the Socialistic forces which are concentrating them on the left and on the right; and, if Socialism is to prevail, it is among the possibilities that, after this movement of separation has been completed and the existing order have been crushed out between the two camps, the ultimate and bitterer conflict will be still to come. In that case all the eight-hour men, all the trades-unionists, all the Knights of Labor, all the land nationalizationists, all the greenbackers, and, in short, all the members of the thousand and one different battalions belonging to the great army of Labor, will have deserted their old posts, and, these being arrayed on the one side and the other, the great battle will begin. What a final victory for the State Socialists will mean, and what a final victory for the Anarchists will mean, it is the purpose of this paper to briefly state."

Tucker, of course, hoped for victory for the Anarchists.

I'd be interested to know how far the difference between Sumner and Tucker here over "socialism" is merely terminological, and how far it's substantive.

Kenneth R. Gregg - 2/19/2006

This is great! I always suspected that Sumner had it in him!