Leadership Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker’s definition is engineered to detoxify “anarchism” before the reader’s reflexes can kick in. He doesn’t open with bombs or barricades; he opens with management. “All the affairs of men” reads like an administrative memo, not a manifesto, and that’s the point: he’s reframing anarchism as a theory of everyday coordination, not a romance of chaos. The provocation comes packaged as common sense.

The key maneuver is the pairing of “individuals” with “voluntary associations.” Tucker is preempting the standard charge that abolishing the State means atomized life or social breakdown. He’s arguing the opposite: that order is real, but it should be consensual. “Voluntary” does the heavy moral lifting here, quietly casting the State as the realm of coercion by default. If legitimacy comes from consent, then the State, which claims a monopoly on force and compels participation, becomes an ethical outlier rather than the natural backdrop of society.

Context matters: Tucker is writing in the late 19th-century American ferment of labor struggles, monopoly power, and a rapidly consolidating industrial economy. His anarchism isn’t anti-organization; it’s anti-privilege - especially the privileges the State grants and polices (property regimes, banking restrictions, corporate protections). The subtext is a wager that what people fear as “anarchy” is already how much of life works - cooperation, mutual aid, association - and that the State often functions less as a neutral referee than as an enforcer of entrenched advantage. The abolition he proposes is less a bonfire than a transfer of authority from compulsory institutions to chosen ones.