Benjamin Ricketson Tucker's contribution to American anarchism was as much through his publishing as his own writing. In editing and publishing the anarchist periodical, Liberty, Tucker both filtered and integrated the theories of such European thinkers as Herbert Spencer and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with the thinking of American individualist activists, Lysander Spooner, William Greene and Josiah Warren as well as the uniquely American Free Thought and Free Love movements in order to produce a rigorous system of philosophical- or individualist anarchism.
Tucker shared with the advocates of Free Love and Free Thought a disdain for prohibitions on non-invasive behavior and for religiously-based legislation, but he saw the poor condition of Amercian workers as a result of four state-maintained monopolies:
His focus for several decades became the state's economic control of how trade could take place, and what currency counted as legitimate. He saw interest and profit as a form of exploitation. Though not directly examples of coercion (or "invasion" as Tucker preferred to say), they were nevertheless artificially-inflated by the state-sponsored banking monopoly, which was in turn maintained through force. Any such state-sponsored interest and profit, Tucker called usury and he saw it as the basis for the oppression of labor.
He was the first to translate into English Proudhon's What is Property? and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own -- which Tucker claimed was his proudest accomplishment.
Liberty published the original work of Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Victor Yarros and Lillian Harman daughter of the Free-Love anarchist, Moses Harman.
Liberty also published such items as George Bernard Shaw's first original article to appear in the United States and the first American translated excerpts of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Tucker's periodical also served as the main conduit of Stirnerite Egoism, of which Tucker became a proponent. This lead to a split in American Individualism -- between the growing number of Egoists and the old guard of Spoonerian "Natural Lawyers". Egoism shared with Natural Law theory the rejection of coercive authority, involuntary legislation, and the notion of a "social contract", but it also rejected what had so far been the philosophical basis for individualism: the notion of an individual's "right" to be free from coercion. Egoists rejected moral philosophy in general, and saw anarchism not as rights-based, but as a pragmatic compromise in a system where each individual sought only self-interest. Having abandoned the philosophy of Lysander Spooner (as well as of Warren and Proudhon, who Tucker considered to have been the first anarchists), Liberty also abandoned the remaining advocates of natural rights, now considering their "moralism" to be old-fashioned and superstitious.
Born April 17, 1854 in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Died at age 85, June 22, 1939 in Monaco.
Free-Love anarchist, Ezra Heywood introduced Tucker to William Greene and Josiah Warren, author of True Civilization (1869).
At the convention, Tucker purchased Mutual Banking, True Civilization, and a set of Ezra Heywood's pamphlets.