I May Have Found a New Hero

Voltairine de Cleyre. I've never heard of her, but in doing a search for information about Emma Goldman, I stumbled across her name. Goldman called her, "The most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced." I've been reading some of her writings on The Anarchist Archives. So far I like what I'm reading.

Now, I know most people today, especially many of those who call themselves Anarchists have precious little idea what Anarchism was/is really about, and I don't claim to be an expert, but basically I find all the revolutionary movements that bloomed in the 19th Century to be fascinating and inspiring. Whether 21st Century Americans want to believe it or not, Anarchism, Socialism, Communism, etc., were all the true children of the Enlightenment. Not Democracy and certainly not Capitalism.

Check this out:

"They [the founders] thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal. The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government, no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority, as the development of the States and United States governments has strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed."