The Place of the Individual in Society

The Place of the Individual in Society

Emma Goldman's "The Place of the Individual in Society" argues that the modern crisis of capitalist industrialism, unemployment, war, and the decline of parliamentarism has driven people toward Fascism and other "strong" governments as false solutions. Goldman rejects both options, declaring herself opposed to dictatorship and Fascism as much as to parliamentary regimes, and reframes the real question as whether political government, the State itself, benefits mankind at all. She contends that civilization consists of the continual enlargement of individual liberty and the shrinking of external authority, and that the individual, not the State or "society," has always been the true source of progress, invention, and moral advance, usually achieved against the interference of authority rather than because of it. She distinguishes "individuality," the innate, ever-growing consciousness of self, from "rugged individualism," which she calls a disguise for the exploitation of the masses by the classes, citing America as its foremost example, where political tyranny is defended in individualism's name while genuine aspirations for freedom are branded "un-American." Goldman sketches an original human condition without States, in which people lived in families and small communities as a voluntary association for mutual protection and benefit, guided rather than ruled by elders. Political government, she argues, arose later as an instrument by which the stronger exploited the weaker, requiring the appearance of legitimacy, achieved through the manufactured "consent" produced by religion, education, and constitutionalism, resting on the dogma that man is inherently incompetent and evil. She insists the State is merely a name, an abstraction with no organic reality, no more sacred than a commercial company for working a coal mine, and that all human liberation has come through struggle against it rather than through it. She traces this liberation to individuals, the prophet, the seer, the idealist, who first conceived resistance and thereby paved the way for scientific, artistic, and social advance. By contrast, she describes government of every form, monarchy, republic, Fascist, Nazi, or Bolshevik, as inherently conservative and reactionary, driven to expand its own power and to suppress individuality out of fear, aided by a majority long drilled in "State worship" and by the crushing uniformity of modern mechanized life, which brands the nonconformist as "queer" and dangerous. She observes that even one's native land can feel alien to a person whose vision encompasses the whole world, and that since the advent of dictatorship the once-open world has become a prison. Quoting Friedrich Nietzsche's description of the State as "a cold monster," Goldman singles out British and American intelligentsia who romanticize the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in theory while remaining safely at home, and suggests they subconsciously sense that individuality, though persecuted, ultimately prevails. She invokes Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid as proof that co-operation, not the struggle for existence enshrined in "rugged individualism," has driven the survival and advance of species and societies. She criticizes the ongoing, purposeless struggle for physical survival despite overproduction and economic crisis, and describes both the worker and the "intellectual proletarian" as alienated from their labor, mere replaceable cogs, with the political fabric offering only "voting and tax-paying puppets." She defines true liberty as positive, the freedom actively to do and be, not merely freedom from constraint, which she notes can still mean starving to death, and holds that this liberty is the natural right of man rather than a grant from law or government, expressed through disobedience, rebellion, and revolution. Turning to the theory of economic determinism, more vulgarly called the class struggle, she rejects it as an inadequate, one-sided account of human motivation, arguing that an ideal, born of imagination and aspiration, drives human history alongside the economic factor, and notes that even some of its own adherents, chastened by its practical application in Russia, are beginning to reconsider the theory's neglect of the human element. Goldman concludes by naming Anarchism, understood as the philosophy of a new social order built on the released energies of the individual and the free association of liberated individuals, as the ideal she offers in place of both dictatorship and rugged individualism. She holds that Anarchism alone insists society exists to serve the individual rather than the reverse, and closes by anticipating the scorn of political parties and men scrambling for power, professing indifference to it, and affirming that man's yearning for liberation from all authority and power is eternal and must and will go on.

By Emma Goldman · First published 1940 · Genre: Political Philosophy, Anarchist Literature, Polemic · 5,566 words

First lines

The minds of men are in confusion, for the very foundations of our civilization seem to be tottering. People are losing faith in the existing institutions, and the more intelligent realize that capitalist industrialism is defeating the very purpose it is supposed to serve.

The world is at a loss for a way out. Parliamentarism and democracy are on the decline. Salvation is being sought in Fascism and other forms of "strong" government.

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anarchism · political philosophy · individualism · the state · government · authority · fascism · dictatorship · democracy · capitalism · marxism · economic determinism

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