The first American anarchist, Josiah Warren, had two big ideas. The first he called “the sovereignty of the individual,” which would later be known as anarchism. And the second he called “cost – the limit of price,” which would later be known as mutualism.

The Sovereignty of the Individual is the same idea as what we now call the Non-Aggression Principle. Cost – the limit of price is the idea that goods and services ought to exchange for each other in accordance with their cost of production, rather than in accordance with their perceived value.

While these two ideas are distinct, Warren thought that they followed from a single broader principle called “Individuality,” which is why he held to both anarchism and mutualism.

We can see, then, that from its earliest days, anarchists were mutualists, but they did not hold that you had to be a mutualist to be an anarchist.

Josiah Warren wrote “If I should prove myself right in ninety-nine points in this work, do not, therefore, conclude that I am right in the hundredth without examination and your own sanction: that one point might be the one in which I was wrong or misunderstood.”

One of Josiah Warren’s followers, Stephen Pearl Andrews, wrote an important book detailing Warren’s philosophy titled “The Science of Society.” This work was commended by Warren himself as better than any of his own writings for explaining his thought.

The Science of Society is divided into parts, showing the distinctness of the two ideas presented. The first part is a transcription of a lecture Andrews gave in the winter of 1850 on The Sovereignty of the Individual and the second part is a written work on Cost the Limit of Price.

The preface to the second part and the afterword are especially useful in understanding the relationship Andrews and Warren saw between the two ideas.

In the preface, Andrews writes about the Cost the Limit of Price, “Still any view of the practical methods of working out the principle which may be here intimated is of course binding upon no one. I state the spirit in which the principle is at present entertained, so far as I know, by those who have accepted it. Every individual must be left free, whether as an inhabitant of the world at large, or of an equitable village, to act under the dictates of his own conscience, his own views of expediency, his own sense of what he can afford to sacrifice in order to abide by the principle rather than sacrifice the principle instead; or, in fine, of whatever other regulating influence he is in the habit of submitting his conduct to. He must be left absolutely free, then, to commit every conceivable breach of the principles of harmonic society. He who is in no freedom to do wrong can never, by any possibility, demonstrate the disposition to do right; besides, whether the absolute or theoretical right is always the practical or relative right, is at least a doubtful question in morals, which each individual must be allowed to judge of solely for himself,– as of every other question of morals and personal conduct whatsoever,– assuming the Cost. Hence, even in the act of infringing one of our circle of principles, the individual is vindicating another,– The Sovereignty of the Individual.”

After the book was published, it was criticized by The New York Tribune for its advocacy of cost the limit of price, which the critic thought contradicted his principle of the sovereignty of the individual. In later editions, Andrews added a postscript to the work, which included the criticism and Andrews’ reply.

Andrews writes “We do not deny your right to the product, and the full product of your labour. We allow you to retain the possession of it as long as you choose. Nay, further, if you determine to dispose of it, we do not require nor insist in any manner upon your disposing of it otherwise than upon any terms that you choose, if you can find a purchaser. We do not oppose a feather’s weight to your entire freedom. We commit no encroachment upon the fullest exercise of your Individual Sovereignty. We cannot do so consistently with ourselves. We admit your full title to the freedom; first, of not selling at all, and then of selling for any price, no matter how great the hardship to the purchaser.”
It is clear then that the early mutualist anarchists saw the sovereignty of the individual as more important than their cost principle and that you could be a proponent of the former without signing on to the latter.

Andrews also notes in the Science of Society that while the wages system was often criticized by various other reformers, this was not at all the objection that the anarchists had to then-existing capitalism.
Andrews writes “the ‘Wages System’ is essentially proper and right. It is right that one man employ another, it is right that he pay him wages, and it is right that he direct him absolutely, arbitrarily, if you will, in the performance of his labor, while, on the other hand, it is the business of him who is employed implicitly to obey,—that is, to surrender all will of his own in relation to a design not his own, and to conceive and execute the will of the other.”

While numerous communities and associations were tried in order to implement an approximation of Josiah Warren’s ideas, the most important development came when an 18-year old Benjamin Tucker met Josiah Warren at the New England Labor Reform League in 1872. Tucker became an inspired and committed believer in his ideas, and it was Tucker who formed the American anarchists into a real movement. It was also Tucker who chose the name anarchist for the movement, which he borrowed from a Frenchman, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who Tucker saw as promoting the same fundamental ideas he got from Warren.

But not all of the American anarchists were as impressed with Proudhon as Tucker was. In a review of Tucker’s translation of Proudhon’s “What Is Property?,” Stephen Pearl Andrews writes “There may be an ethical inhibition against abusing one’s own, but not rightly a social one; that is to say, a man’s neighbors should not be set upon him to decide when he is rightly using and when he is abusing what belongs to him by a perfect title. All that the law means here is that the decision on that point is best left to the individual; and the law of the land and the law of sociological right are in perfect harmony in that particular, and Proudhon is wrong.
This right of the free and unlimited disposition of what is really one’s own is, in this property domain, precisely that individual sovereignty which, without the name, Proudhon so vigorously defends, elsewhere, against communism; and the endangering of which is his grand objection to communism.”
Andrews also objects to using the word anarchy for his views on etymological grounds. Andrews concludes with “Proudhon belongs as definitively to the past, at this day, and to the mere history of ideas, as Ptolemy after Copernicus.”

In reply, Tucker writes that he thinks Andrews misunderstands Proudhon in thinking Proudhon favored “the forcible intervention of society to control the property relations of individuals.”

In any event, Warren and Proudhon, distilled and interpreted by Tucker, were dispatched to the American radical audience and the English-speaking world in 403 issues between 1881 and 1908, as well a short-lived German-language version. While Tucker never wrote a monograph, some of his most interesting and explanatory articles were compiled into a work called “Instead of a Book.”

Without a doubt, the most important development in mutualism, from the time when Josiah Warren first proposed his ideas, is the concept of mutual banking. The idea which was expressed by Proudhon, Greene, Spooner, and others, and which was advocated by Benjamin Tucker and his later disciples and followers, was that by dramatically reducing the interest rate, the supply of goods would so dramatically increase that their value would fall to their cost of production, making cost – the limit of price a superfluous moral standard, as no one could get more for their goods than cost even if they wanted.

Tucker most clearly distinguishes the concepts of mutualism (which he sees as a subset of socialism) and anarchism in Armies that Overlap. Tucker writes “a Socialist may or may not be an Anarchist, and an Anarchist may or may not be a Socialist. Relaxing scientific exactness, it may be said, briefly and broadly, that Socialism is a battle with usury and that Anarchism is a battle with authority. The two armies—Socialism and Anarchism—are neither coextensive nor exclusive; but they overlap.”

Tucker also criticized anarcho-communists as non-anarchists when he found their commitment to the sovereignty of the individual to be lacking, as well as praising supporters of capitalism as anarchists when they supported the sovereignty of the individual, like he did with Auberon Herbert. Tucker also considered The Law of Equal Freedom by capitalism-supporter Herbert Spencer as identical with Warren’s sovereignty of the individual and the doctrine of anarchism.

As Tucker puts it, “Anarchy is immeasurably indebted to Mr. Spencer for a phenomenally clear exposition of its bottom truths.”

The most important books written by Tucker’s disciples are Voluntary Socialism by Francis Tandy and What is Mutualism? by Clarence Swartz.

The four books: The Science of Society by Andrews; Instead of a Book by Tucker; Voluntary Socialism by Tandy; and What is Mutualism? by Swartz could be considered the four gospels of mutualist anarchism, and anyone who reads all four should consider himself well-read on mutualism.

The account just given is the traditional account of mutualism, but it has recently been challenged by a revisionist interpretation by Shawn Wilbur. Wilbur thinks that Tucker misinterprets or underemphasizes what Wilbur considers to be some of the most important parts of Proudhon’s thought and that while these American anarchists are all interesting, it is really a return to and reconsideration of Proudhon’s thought that is the key to mutualism.

Wilbur also thinks that the terms anarchism and anarchist should not be applied to anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-capitalists because he thinks, unlike what Tucker and the other contributors to Liberty thought, that the terms should be restricted to include only those that are opposed to rulership in a broader sense which he thinks anarcho-capitalists violate.

In reply, we submit that however you want to use terminology is less important than the content that the terminology conveys, and that these historical American anarchists, despite not being anarcho-capitalists, used the word anarchist in the same way that modern anarcho-capitalists use it and not the way that Wilbur uses it. And so anarcho-capitalists have a strong historical claim to their use of the word, but even more importantly to place the same theoretical importance on the sovereignty of the individual, the law of equal freedom, or the non-aggression principle, by whatever name you choose to call the same idea.

To learn more about the history of anarchism, check out our video “Yes, Anarcho-Capitalists are Anarchists.”