Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker doesn’t define the state as a neutral referee; he frames it as a specialized machine for trespass. Calling it “the principle of invasion” is a deliberate inversion of civics-class pieties: the state isn’t what stops coercion, it’s what standardizes it. The phrase “embodiment” matters too. He isn’t talking about occasional abuses or corrupt officials. He’s arguing the coercive core is the point, not the glitch.

The subtext is a hard-edged critique of legitimacy. Tucker piles up qualifiers that sound procedural and respectable - “assuming to act as representatives” - then undercuts them with the loaded alternative: “or masters.” That “or” is doing real work. In practice, he suggests, representation is often just mastery with better branding, a paper shield for compulsion. “Within a given area” lands like a quiet punchline: jurisdiction is just geography turned into moral permission, the idea that crossing an invisible border changes what can be done to you.

Context sharpens the intent. Tucker is writing out of late-19th-century American individualist anarchism, suspicious of monopoly power whether held by industrial capital or government. His era saw the state expanding its administrative reach while presenting itself as the democratic voice of “the entire people.” Tucker’s line refuses that collective ventriloquism. By making the state a “band of individuals,” he pulls it down from abstraction to a concrete clique: people with uniforms, titles, and the sanctioned right to initiate force. The rhetorical aim is to make that sanction feel not inevitable, but uncanny - a social custom dressed up as destiny.