"Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth"
About this Quote
The sting in Tucker's line is how calmly he severs two ideas that liberals and conservatives alike love to conflate: liberty and a fair share. "Such security is equal liberty" reads like a concession to the language of rights - security as the precondition for freedom, and freedom as something that can be made equal in principle. But the second sentence pulls the rug: equal liberty does not automatically cash out as equal access to what actually sustains life. You can be equally "free" in the abstract while standing on radically unequal ground.
Tucker is writing from the churn of late-19th-century American individualist anarchism, when "liberty" was being sold as a moral halo around property, and industrial capitalism was busy turning land, credit, and infrastructure into chokepoints. His target isn't the melodrama of government tyranny; it's the quieter coercion of monopoly. If a handful of people can cordon off the earth - land and its productive opportunities - then the rest are formally unshackled and materially boxed in.
The phrase "use of the earth" is doing heavy work. It sidesteps moralizing about wealth and goes straight to first principles: who gets to occupy, cultivate, extract, build, and exclude. Tucker's subtext is a warning to fellow radicals and reformers: don't mistake civil guarantees or legal noninterference for economic justice. Equal liberty can be a well-lit hallway that still leads to locked doors.
Tucker is writing from the churn of late-19th-century American individualist anarchism, when "liberty" was being sold as a moral halo around property, and industrial capitalism was busy turning land, credit, and infrastructure into chokepoints. His target isn't the melodrama of government tyranny; it's the quieter coercion of monopoly. If a handful of people can cordon off the earth - land and its productive opportunities - then the rest are formally unshackled and materially boxed in.
The phrase "use of the earth" is doing heavy work. It sidesteps moralizing about wealth and goes straight to first principles: who gets to occupy, cultivate, extract, build, and exclude. Tucker's subtext is a warning to fellow radicals and reformers: don't mistake civil guarantees or legal noninterference for economic justice. Equal liberty can be a well-lit hallway that still leads to locked doors.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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