Murray N. Rothbard

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

– Murray N. Rothbard –

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Murray Bookchin

Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions created by urbanization, centralization, bureaucratic growth and statification were viewed as a vain counterdrift to “progress”—a counterdrift that could be dismissed as chimerical and reactionary. The anarchist was regarded as a forlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia for the peasant village or the medieval commune. His yearnings for a decentralized society and for a humanistic community at one with nature and the needs of the individual—the spontaneous individual, unfettered by authority—were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of a declassed craftsman or an intellectual “misfit.” His protest against centralization and statification seemed all the less persuasive because it was supported primarily by ethical considerations—by Utopian, ostensibly “unrealistic,” notions of what man could be, not by what he was. In response to this protest, opponents of anarchist thought– liberals, rightists and authoritarian “leftists”—argued that they were the voices of historic reality, that their statist and centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practical world. Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatever may have been the validity of libertarian and non-libertarian views a few years ago, historical development has rendered virtually all objections to anarchist thought meaningless today. The modern city and state, the massive coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, the later, more rationalized, systems of mass production and assembly-line systems of labor organization, the centralized nation, the state and its bureaucratic apparatus—all have reached their limits. Whatever progressive or liberatory role they may have possessed, they have now become entirely regressive and oppressive. They are regressive not only because they erode the human spirit and drain the community of all its cohesiveness, solidarity and ethico-cultural standards; they are regressive from an objective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint. For they undermine not only the human spirit and the human community but also the viability of the planet and all living things on it.

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