Benjamin R. Tucker
| Benjamin Tucker | |
|---|---|
Benjamin Tucker, c. 1908.
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| Born |
April 17, 1854 South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | June 22, 1939 (aged 85) Monaco |
| Occupation | Editor, publisher, writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Subject | Political philosophy |
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (April 17, 1854 – June 22, 1939) was a proponent, in the 19th century, of American individualist anarchism, which he called "unterrified Jeffersonianism," and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.
Tucker was born on April 17, 1854, in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In 1872, while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tucker attended a convention of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston, chaired by William B. Greene, author of Mutual Banking (1850). At the convention, Tucker purchased Mutual Banking, Josiah Warren's True Civilization (1869), and a set of free-love anarchist Ezra Heywood's pamphlets. Afterwards, Heywood introduced Tucker to Greene and Warren. All three men would have a serious influence on Tucker's philosophical development. He also started a romantic correspondence with suffragette Victoria Woodhull around the same time, a relationship which lasted for three years.
Tucker made his editorial debut in libertarian circles in 1876, when Heywood published Tucker's English translation of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's classic work What is Property?. In 1877, Tucker published his first original journal, Radical Review, which ran for only four issues. From August 1881 to April 1908, he published the periodical, Liberty, "widely considered to be the finest individualist-anarchist periodical ever issued in the English language". In 1892, he moved the Liberty from Boston to New York.
Tucker said that he became an anarchist at the age of 18. Tucker's contribution to American individualist anarchism was as much through his publishing as his own writing. Tucker was also the first to publish an English translation of Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own – which Tucker claimed was his proudest accomplishment. Tucker also translated Mikhail Bakunin's book God and the State. In the anarchist periodical Liberty, he published the original work of Stephen Pearl Andrews, Joshua K. Ingalls, Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Dyer Lum, Victor Yarros, and Lillian Harman (daughter of the free love anarchist Moses Harman), as well as his own writing.
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