Liberty

The first issue of the radical individualist periodical Liberty (1881–1908) opened with the words,

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these three: but the greatest of these is Liberty. Formerly the price of Liberty was eternal vigilance, but now it can be had for fifty cents a year.

... Tucker used Liberty to forge an integrated philosophy of radical individualism from the diversity of issues, but the need for economic reform was always the framework ... Liberty ... became the nexus around which a distinctively individualist movement coalesced and revitalized.

Liberty first appeared on August 6, 1881, from Boston ... [I]n 1892, [it] moved to New York City, where it was published until its demise in 1907 ... Liberty's superscript was a quotation from Proudhon—"Liberty: not the daughter, but the mother of order." The maiden issue dealt with free thought, rights theory, and other anti-statist topics. Its commitment to connecting to the international community of radicals was evidenced by a portrait of the Russian nihilist martyr Sophie Perovskaya in the center of the front page. As in issues thereafter, the first page was entitled "On Picket Duty" ...

"It may be well to state at the outset," he declared of Liberty, "that this journal will be edited to suit its editor, not its readers." Despite this caveat, Liberty served as a relatively open forum for radical individualist debate ... Liberty's first major debate was an internal one among its own regular contributors over the newly emerging ideology of Stirnerite egoism. The debate was sparked by Stirner's pivotal work on law, property, and the state: The Ego and His Own. Sketching this debate provides a window into the tone and level of intellectual discussion Liberty promoted.

The list of contributors to Liberty reads like an honor roll of nineteenth-century individualism and libertarianism: Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Joshua K. Ingalls, John Henry Mackay, Victor Yarros, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe are a partial listing ... Tucker's journal served as the main conduit of Stirnerite egoism and radical Spencerian thought in America. Liberty was both an innovator in libertarian theory and a mainstay of the libertarian tradition. Liberty was remarkable for the consistently high quality of its content and for the clarity of its style.

In the opinion of Benjamin Tucker, editor of the pivotal individualist periodical Liberty, "Gertrude B. Kelly, ... by her articles in Liberty, has placed herself at a single bound among the finest writers of this or any other country." From her first article in Liberty (September 1885) to her bitter split with that same periodical over its debate on egoism versus natural rights (August 1887), Gertrude Kelly was one of Tucker's most dynamic writers ... Her departure from Liberty robbed that periodical of an able defender of natural-rights theory and of its most forceful voice for women.

During [Liberty]'s first years, Tucker published Spooner's classic but lengthy work on natural rights, "A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False, Absurd, Self-contradictory, and Ridiculous Inaugural Address," in 19 installments. [It] also ran original pieces by Spooner, sometimes under a pseudonym, sometimes under his own name, for example, his short essay entitled "A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard: Challenging His Right—And That of All the Other So-Called Senators and Representatives in Congress—To Exercise Any Legislative Power Whatever over the People of the United States."

Through his periodical Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order, published from 1881 to 1908, Tucker made the case for a stateless society in clear and uncompromising prose. In addition to Tucker's writings, Liberty published articles by such notable libertarians as Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe. It also featured pieces by Irish literary critic George Bernard Shaw and Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, as well as early translations of the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.