Blackwell Reference Online

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Described in his day as “the chief American exponent of anarchism” ( Vizetelly 1911 : 15), Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was a writer, orator, translator, publisher, and controversialist associated with the individualist school of anarchism . He synthesized the mutualist philosophies of Josiah Warren , Pierre Joseph Proudhon , William Batchelder Greene, and Joshua King Ingalls with the egoism of Max Stirner, and derived from these a “plumb-line” anarchism that emphasized resistance to four key monopolies – in the domains of money and banking, land, tariffs, and patents – and non-violent social transformation. Born in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Tucker was of Quaker stock, but received much of his religious education in the congregation of free religionist William J. Potter. Inclined to free thought, he gravitated naturally, while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the Sunday meetings hosted by the Boston Investigator and the conventions of the New England Labor Reform League. At the latter he encountered “Josiah Warren, William B. Greene, Lysander Spooner , Ezra H. Heywood , and Sidney H. Morse … the pivotal point of my career.” Joining forces with these reformers, Tucker embarked on a career in anarchist journalism and publishing. Serving first as an editor on Heywood's The Word , he soon began his own venture. In its four-issue run, The Radical ... log in or subscribe to read full text