CHAPTER VI
GERMANY, ENGLAND, AND AMERICA
Individualist and Communist Anarchism — Arthur Mülberger — Theodor Hertzka's Freeland — Eugen Dühring's "Anticratism" — Moritz von Egidy's "United Christendom" — John Henry Mackay — Nietzsche and Anarchism — Johann Most — Auberon Herbert's "Voluntary State" — R. B. Tucker.
here is a well-marked geographical division, not only in the Anarchism of agitation, but also in Anarchist theory. The Anarchist Communism, to which the "propaganda of action" is allied, appears to be almost exclusively confined to the Romance peoples, the French, Spaniards, and Italians; while the Teutonic nations appear to incline more towards individualist Anarchism. If this geographical division is not quite exact, it must be remembered that these views themselves are not so clearly separated, and that the ideas of Proudhon rarely develop into pure Individualism as proclaimed by Stirner. The external distinction between Individualists and Communists is certainly marked most clearly by the condemnation of the foolish propaganda of action of the former; and in order to prevent the disagreeable confusion of their views with the perpetrators of bomb outrages, the theorists of Germany and England give their systems more harmless names, such as Free Land, Anticratism, United Christianity, Voluntarism, and so on. It is perhaps owing to this circumstance that States which supervise mental movements in the minds of their citizens so closely, so anxiously, as do Austria and Germany, allow the extension of the theoretical propaganda of a movement which is only distinguished from the doctrines of Kropotkin, as explained above, by a difference in formulating the common axiom on which they are based.
In the beginning of the seventies there appeared in Germany an eager worshipper of Proudhon, named Arthur Mülberger, born in 1847, who has practised since 1873 as a physician, and lately as medical officer in Crailsheim, and who has explained with great clearness separate portions of Proudhon's teaching in various articles in magazines and reviews.[48] Mülberger's writings have certainly chiefly an historical value; but he is one of the few who have not merely written about and criticised Proudhon, but have thoroughly studied him. He is accordingly, in spite of his somewhat partisan attitude as a supporter of Proudhon, certainly his most trustworthy and faithful interpreter.
Of all modern phenomena, which, according to Proudhon's assumption that complete economic freedom must absorb all political authority, should introduce Anarchy by means of economic institutions, the most important is undoubtedly the so-called "Free Land" movement, whose "father" is Theodor Hertzka. Born on the 13th July, 1845, at Buda Pesth, Hertzka studied law, but afterwards turned to journalism, in which he gained the reputation of the most brilliant journalist in Vienna. In the seventies he was editor of the Neue Freie Presse, and in 1880 he founded the Vienna Allgemeine Zeitung; but since 1889 he has been editor of the Zeitschrift für Staatsund Volkwirthschaft. His book Freeland, a picture of the society of the future (Freiland, ein Sociales Zukunftsbild), which appeared in 1889, had an extraordinary success, and produced a movement for the realisation of the demands and ideas therein expressed. The expedition which was sent out to "Freeland," after years of agitation, prepared at great expense and watched with the eager curiosity of all Europe, appears to-day, however—as was hardly to be wondered at—to have failed.