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The Voluntaryist Creed: Being The Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1906, And A Plea For Voluntaryism
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
- GenresPhilosophyPolitics
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1908
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About the author
Auberon Herbert
52 books17 followersAuberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert (Highclere, 18 June 1838 – 5 November 1906) was a writer, theorist, philosopher, and "19th-century individualist anarchist."
A member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Herbert was the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl, and father of the 9th Baron Lucas. He promoted a libertarian philosophy (that several authors consider related to libertarian anarchism) and took the ideas of Herbert Spencer a stage further by advocating voluntary-funded "government" that uses force only in defense of individual liberty and property. He is known as the originator of Voluntaryism.
Herbert was Member of Parliament for the two member constituency of Nottingham between 1870-1874. He served as President of the fourth day of the first ever Co-operative Congress in 1869.
Government, he argued, should never initiate force but be "strictly limited to its legitimate duties in defense of self-ownership and individual rights", and to be consistent in not initiating force they should maintain themselves only through "voluntary taxation." He stressed that "we are governmentalists... formally constituted by the nation, employing in this matter of force the majority method"—however, using this force only in a defensive mode. He strongly opposed the idea that initiation of force may somehow become legitimate merely by constituting a majority, reasoning that "If we are self-owners (and it is absurd, it is doing violence to reason, to suppose that we are not), neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government can have rights of ownership in other men."
Herbert recommends a "central agency" to defend liberty and property that is funded by a "voluntary tax," calling it "government." In his essay "A Politician in Sight of Haven," Herbert does discuss the franchise, stating it would be limited to those who paid a voluntary "income tax," anyone "paying it would have the right to vote; those who did not pay it would be – as is just – without the franchise. There would be no other tax." The law would be strictly limited, of course, and the "government... must confine itself simply to the defence of life and property, whether as regards internal or external defence."
Herbert says that in "voluntaryism the state employs force only to repel force—to protect the person and the property of the individual against force and fraud; under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them."
A collection of Herbert's work, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays, was published by Liberty Classics in 1978.
A member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Herbert was the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl, and father of the 9th Baron Lucas. He promoted a libertarian philosophy (that several authors consider related to libertarian anarchism) and took the ideas of Herbert Spencer a stage further by advocating voluntary-funded "government" that uses force only in defense of individual liberty and property. He is known as the originator of Voluntaryism.
Herbert was Member of Parliament for the two member constituency of Nottingham between 1870-1874. He served as President of the fourth day of the first ever Co-operative Congress in 1869.
Government, he argued, should never initiate force but be "strictly limited to its legitimate duties in defense of self-ownership and individual rights", and to be consistent in not initiating force they should maintain themselves only through "voluntary taxation." He stressed that "we are governmentalists... formally constituted by the nation, employing in this matter of force the majority method"—however, using this force only in a defensive mode. He strongly opposed the idea that initiation of force may somehow become legitimate merely by constituting a majority, reasoning that "If we are self-owners (and it is absurd, it is doing violence to reason, to suppose that we are not), neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government can have rights of ownership in other men."
Herbert recommends a "central agency" to defend liberty and property that is funded by a "voluntary tax," calling it "government." In his essay "A Politician in Sight of Haven," Herbert does discuss the franchise, stating it would be limited to those who paid a voluntary "income tax," anyone "paying it would have the right to vote; those who did not pay it would be – as is just – without the franchise. There would be no other tax." The law would be strictly limited, of course, and the "government... must confine itself simply to the defence of life and property, whether as regards internal or external defence."
Herbert says that in "voluntaryism the state employs force only to repel force—to protect the person and the property of the individual against force and fraud; under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them."
A collection of Herbert's work, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays, was published by Liberty Classics in 1978.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 17, 2020
Someone recommended this essay at some point during my AFP days, and my very vague memory thinks it happened by a speaker at a conference or training session so that means it was someone quite high up in the organization. And I seem to remember it being recommended more than once. None of that particularly relevant to this review, but my half-memories drove me crazy through my reading.
Regardless, I understand the recommendation and pass it along: The Voluntaryist Creed is well worth the effort to track down.
Being unfamiliar with voluntaryist, I assumed the essay would involve why we volunteer or a plea for civic engagement. Nope! It is much more a plea for limited government. The lecture begins by analyzing the problem of placing people in authority (the 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' problem.) It then hones in on the individual and the importance of individual autonomy for empowerment and progress. It concludes by stating that the best way to combat autocratic regimes and help people is by allowing as much liberty as possible.
Some favorite quotes:
"Where there is a bad way, there is also a good way, if men once resolutely set themselves to find it."
"If power was worth winning, it must be worth using."
"There is I think one blessed fact that runs through all life--that if a thing is wrong in itself, it won't work. No skills, no ingenuity, no elaborate combination of machinery, will make it work. No amount of human artifice and contrivance, no alliance with force, no reserve of guns and bayonets, no nation in arms, even if almost countless in number, can make it work. So is it with our system of power. They don't work and they can't work. In no real sense, can you, as the autocrat, govern men; in no real sense, can the people imitate the autocrat and govern each other. The government of men by men is an illusion, an unreality, a mere semblance, that mocks alike the autocrat and the crowd that attempts to imitate him. We think in our amazing insolence that we can deprive our fellow men of their intelligence, their will, their conscience; we think we can take their soul into our own keeping; but there is no machinery yet discovered by which we can do what seems to us so small an easy a matter."
"Whenever men become merely copies and echoes of each other, when they act and think according to fixed and sealed pattern, is not all growth arrested, all bettering of the world made difficult, if not impossible? What hope of real progress, when difference has almost ceased to exist; when men think in the same fashion as a regiment marches; and no mind feels the life-giving stimulating impulse which the varying competing thoughts of others brings it?"
"Safety only lies in the constant difference which many living minds, looking from their own standpoint, in turn contribute. All unity, that exists by means of social or artificial restraint of differences, is slowly but inevitably moving towards its own destruction--a destruction that must finally involve much pain and confusion and disorder, because change and adaption have been so long resisted."
"The truth is that you can no more administer a whole nation than you can represent it. You cannot deal with human nature wholesale; you cannot throw it higgledly piggledy into one common lot, and let half a dozen men, no better or worse than ourselves, take charge of it. No universal system is a living thing: they all tend to become mere machines--machines of a rather perverse kind, that have incurable tricks of going their own way. We are apt to think that our machines dutifully serve and obey us; but in large measure we serve and obey them. They too have souls of their own, and command as well as obey. Unfortunately for us, progress and improvement are not amongst the things that great machines are able to supply at demand Their soul lies in mechanical repetition, not in difference; whilst progress requires not only faculties in the highest state of vital activity, but I might almost might say continual, mental dissatisfaction with what has already been achieved, and continual preparedness to invade new territory and attempt new victories."
"Our task is to make it clear to the whole nation that a great principle, that which involves the free use of faculties, the independence of every life, the self-guidance and self-ownership, the very manhood of all of us, that commands and constrains us to preserve the inviolability of property for all its owners--whoever they may be. The inviolability of property is not simply the material interest of one class who happen to-day to possess it, it is the supreme interest of all classes...Create the largest and most generous system of liberty, create--as you will do with it--the vital energizing spirit of liberty, and in a few short years the working classes would cease to be the propertyless class; would become with their great natural qualities the largest property-owner in the country. But this can only be, as they set themselves in earnest to make property instead of taking it..."
"It is for us to show that everything can be gained by voluntary effort and combination, and nothing can be permanently and securely gained by force."
"So long as we suppress that true life of the soul, so long as we deny to it the full measure of its freedom, we shall continue to strive and to quarrel and to hate, and to waste our efforts, as we have done through so many countless years, and shall never enter the fruitful path of peace and friendship that waits us."
Regardless, I understand the recommendation and pass it along: The Voluntaryist Creed is well worth the effort to track down.
Being unfamiliar with voluntaryist, I assumed the essay would involve why we volunteer or a plea for civic engagement. Nope! It is much more a plea for limited government. The lecture begins by analyzing the problem of placing people in authority (the 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' problem.) It then hones in on the individual and the importance of individual autonomy for empowerment and progress. It concludes by stating that the best way to combat autocratic regimes and help people is by allowing as much liberty as possible.
Some favorite quotes:
"Where there is a bad way, there is also a good way, if men once resolutely set themselves to find it."
"If power was worth winning, it must be worth using."
"There is I think one blessed fact that runs through all life--that if a thing is wrong in itself, it won't work. No skills, no ingenuity, no elaborate combination of machinery, will make it work. No amount of human artifice and contrivance, no alliance with force, no reserve of guns and bayonets, no nation in arms, even if almost countless in number, can make it work. So is it with our system of power. They don't work and they can't work. In no real sense, can you, as the autocrat, govern men; in no real sense, can the people imitate the autocrat and govern each other. The government of men by men is an illusion, an unreality, a mere semblance, that mocks alike the autocrat and the crowd that attempts to imitate him. We think in our amazing insolence that we can deprive our fellow men of their intelligence, their will, their conscience; we think we can take their soul into our own keeping; but there is no machinery yet discovered by which we can do what seems to us so small an easy a matter."
"Whenever men become merely copies and echoes of each other, when they act and think according to fixed and sealed pattern, is not all growth arrested, all bettering of the world made difficult, if not impossible? What hope of real progress, when difference has almost ceased to exist; when men think in the same fashion as a regiment marches; and no mind feels the life-giving stimulating impulse which the varying competing thoughts of others brings it?"
"Safety only lies in the constant difference which many living minds, looking from their own standpoint, in turn contribute. All unity, that exists by means of social or artificial restraint of differences, is slowly but inevitably moving towards its own destruction--a destruction that must finally involve much pain and confusion and disorder, because change and adaption have been so long resisted."
"The truth is that you can no more administer a whole nation than you can represent it. You cannot deal with human nature wholesale; you cannot throw it higgledly piggledy into one common lot, and let half a dozen men, no better or worse than ourselves, take charge of it. No universal system is a living thing: they all tend to become mere machines--machines of a rather perverse kind, that have incurable tricks of going their own way. We are apt to think that our machines dutifully serve and obey us; but in large measure we serve and obey them. They too have souls of their own, and command as well as obey. Unfortunately for us, progress and improvement are not amongst the things that great machines are able to supply at demand Their soul lies in mechanical repetition, not in difference; whilst progress requires not only faculties in the highest state of vital activity, but I might almost might say continual, mental dissatisfaction with what has already been achieved, and continual preparedness to invade new territory and attempt new victories."
"Our task is to make it clear to the whole nation that a great principle, that which involves the free use of faculties, the independence of every life, the self-guidance and self-ownership, the very manhood of all of us, that commands and constrains us to preserve the inviolability of property for all its owners--whoever they may be. The inviolability of property is not simply the material interest of one class who happen to-day to possess it, it is the supreme interest of all classes...Create the largest and most generous system of liberty, create--as you will do with it--the vital energizing spirit of liberty, and in a few short years the working classes would cease to be the propertyless class; would become with their great natural qualities the largest property-owner in the country. But this can only be, as they set themselves in earnest to make property instead of taking it..."
"It is for us to show that everything can be gained by voluntary effort and combination, and nothing can be permanently and securely gained by force."
"So long as we suppress that true life of the soul, so long as we deny to it the full measure of its freedom, we shall continue to strive and to quarrel and to hate, and to waste our efforts, as we have done through so many countless years, and shall never enter the fruitful path of peace and friendship that waits us."
June 29, 2025
great read! I'm an individualist anarchist mostly influenced by Lysander Spooner, Proudhon, and Benjamin Tucker, all of which are in the middle of the road of anarchist politics. Herbert is one of the foundation stones of right wing Anarcho capitalism, so I agree with a lot of him and disagree on a few things (mostly economics). He makes the most logical argument for a free market capitalist model. I agreed with him on the overall message of voluntaryism. Where Herbert and other Individualist and social anarchists are in complete agreement on are the absolute supremacy of Natural law, extremely limiting or abolishing the centralized State hierarchy and replacing it with a decentralized government, and that force is only justified as a last resort of self defence. Where I disagree with him is mostly economics, he advocated for unregulated free market capitalism, but his only defense of the worker class is that he says they have the right to strike and unionize, but they have no other rights, they are at the mercy of the proprietor class and the market. It's not a horrible model and better than what democrats or Republicans believe in on politics and economics, but I strongly agree with the individualist anarchists who say the workers should have control of the means of production (industrial property)and only small scale property rights are allowed for individuals, along with limiting the Trinity of usury (rent, interest, profit) like spooner and tucker advocated.
Altogether I greatly enjoyed this read, and yes Anarcho capitalists are real anarchists, they are just right wing economically who fail to realize that capitalism in any form leads to the exploitation of workers to a great deal even though free market capitalism is the best of all forms of capitalism. I personally believe in free market socialism which is similar (unregulated by the State, truly laissez faire the same as Anarcho capitalism), but it differs in having limits on usury democratically decided by the people through direct democracy and handing the means of production to the workers. I prefer individualist anarchism on political structure too cause ultimately it is a bottom up federalism of a decentralized network of local government practicing direct democracy.
Altogether I greatly enjoyed this read, and yes Anarcho capitalists are real anarchists, they are just right wing economically who fail to realize that capitalism in any form leads to the exploitation of workers to a great deal even though free market capitalism is the best of all forms of capitalism. I personally believe in free market socialism which is similar (unregulated by the State, truly laissez faire the same as Anarcho capitalism), but it differs in having limits on usury democratically decided by the people through direct democracy and handing the means of production to the workers. I prefer individualist anarchism on political structure too cause ultimately it is a bottom up federalism of a decentralized network of local government practicing direct democracy.
July 17, 2014
Very interesting! Even though its a little over 100 years old it could've easily been written today. Herbert describes the dangers involved when politicians believe they can rationally decide as to how a society should develop.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews