Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Read

Read is doing a careful bit of rhetorical aikido: disarming the charge that anarchism is just chaos with a footnote in antiquity. He opens by refusing a tempting pedigree - no grandiose claim that modern anarchism descends from Roman law. That refusal matters. It signals intellectual hygiene, a poet-critic aware that movements love to launder themselves through respectable ancestors. By declining Roman jurisprudence, he dodges the conservative game where legitimacy is measured by lineage.

Then he pivots to the real move: anchoring anarchism in "the laws of nature" rather than "the state of nature". The distinction is doing heavy lifting. "State of nature" carries Hobbesian fumes: a brutal pre-political scramble that conveniently justifies Leviathan. Read rejects that framing without arguing it head-on. Instead he borrows the moral authority of "laws of nature" - not as physics, but as an ethical grammar: mutual aid, human sociability, the kinds of constraints that arise from living together even before (or without) formal institutions. It's a bid to rebrand anarchism as order without rulers, not disorder without rules.

Context sharpens the intent. Read, writing in the long shadow of two world wars and the bureaucratic modern state, treats "the state" as a producer of catastrophe as much as stability. His anarchism isn't romantic primitivism; it's a modernist suspicion of centralized power dressed in calm, almost legalistic phrasing. The subtext: if the state claims to be civilization's author, Read counters that the state is, at best, an interloper. The real authority precedes it - and can outlive it.