Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker is trying to rescue anarchism from its most predictable heckler: the guy who thinks “no state” means “no protection,” and therefore instant chaos. His move is surgical. He doesn’t deny the need for defense; he reassigns it. The State, in his framing, isn’t the only possible organizer of security - it’s just the one that monopolizes it through compulsion. By promising a “defensive association” on a voluntary basis, Tucker keeps the emotional reassurance people want (someone will still stand guard) while detonating the moral premise that coercion is necessary.

The subtext is a wager about human organization: that consent can be a stronger adhesive than law when the service is concrete and the threat is real. It’s also a provocation to liberals and conservatives alike. To the liberal: if you believe in freedom, why does it stop at policing and war? To the conservative: if you distrust government competence everywhere else, why treat it as uniquely righteous when it comes to violence?

The phrase “by any means that may prove necessary” is the tell. Tucker isn’t offering pacifist idyll; he’s conceding that force may still be used, just without a sovereign claiming a blank check. That’s both his defense and his vulnerability. Voluntary defense starts sounding like a market for violence, and Tucker is betting that competition and choice will discipline it better than monopoly. In late-19th-century America - a period of labor conflict, private militias, and deep suspicion of centralized power - that bet was not abstract philosophy. It was a counterproposal to the age’s very real machinery of repression.