
From Kierkegaardian Reflections by Anarchierkegaard
Skulking with Laurance Labadie, a vile moralist to his Schopenhauerian gloom
The anarchist Americans of the 19th and early 20th century remain, especially on a global scale, minor figures in the history of political thought. With the barrel-chested combination of “natural rights” liberalism, frontier-style “rugged individualism”, a concern for the plight of the common man, and a suspicion of socialism in all its contemporary senses, both pre- and post-Soviet implementation. The likes of Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, and, later, Benjamin R. Tucker were “men against the state” by way of promoting a “can do” attitude, which was interestingly inclusive of the capabilities and potentiality of the common man—regardless of how abstracted that notional man was—whilst also resisting the urge to appeal for a kind of paternalistic, pleading slavishness that they saw complicit with appeals for socialist struggle. In many ways, they were predecessors to a particular vein of “left-facing” anarchist, anarchist-capitalism, and libertarianisms of various flavours, all at once. Their ideas, for all their failings and possible irrelevance today, were elegant, brimming with practical implication, and loaded with that “right amount” of sentimental Romanticism and glassy-eyed utopianism that leads something to become more than a collection of propositions. Many of these thinkers were also noted for the challenge they presented to the status quo, most notably in Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company1 and Warren’s Cincinnati Time Store and utopian communities2, in a way which wasn’t merely a directionless appeal for “resistance” or self-deification in an attempt to capture the mythologised crown of power through stateful action.
There is much to admire in these men, even if only from an aesthetic perspective. But, we can’t find ourselves becoming too weighed down with the weight of hagiography—after all, these men ultimately failed to reinvent America into something compatible with their utopian idealising. Indeed, their unembarrassed belief in the goodness of humanity and the possibility for progress from under the oppressive iron fist of the state would seem almost childishly naive to those who had followed in their footsteps and had to both witness the horrors of secular society in the early 20th century and also then assert that there was this as yet untapped potential for human flourishing merely by way of removing all stateful functions—for some, it was too much.
Laurance Labadie—iconoclast against hope
Anarchists, as a breed of creature, have tended to be filled with this glassy-eyed optimism that believes in the universal goodness of the human race, this ability to implement a particular system or structure which would allow for this goodness to appear and thrive, this wherewithal to resist the reaction into “pre-anarchist” society, and other similar highfalutin ideas that sit just on the inside of our own current epistemological horizon—seemingly beyond the realm of believability, but not quite so due to a heavy dose of liberalism, shorn off it's woolly half-promises and grim realism and spun into a yarn of many colours, severed from its tenuous connections to the material. While we might read that as a distinct criticism of anarchist thought—and, indeed, many have throughout the history of radical thought, including liberals, Marxists, their reactionary counterparts, and other anarchists that differ by a trick of the light—there is also something admirable in the willingness to step out over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”3 with the “hope against hope”4: an earnest belief that a life better than this is possible.
However, not all anarchists have been quite so optimistic: by way of contact with Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and H. L. Mencken, a young Laurance Labadie (wayward son of notable “individualist” anarchist and labour organizer, Joseph Labadie) found that his anarchist instincts were better suited towards a pessimistic, if not nihilistic, view of the world as necessarily antagonistic to the human condition, a world filled with cruelty, suffering, and idiocy, as well as beyond the scope of salvation through some messianic inversion of the hopelessness, whether that be dressed in the robes of a Palestinian carpenter or in the quasi-bourgeois musings of a German radical5. He was, in all senses, a thorough-going pessimist who was unimpressed with the moralising, pearl-clutching retorts of “elitist” and “misanthrope”.
This work bears a great deal of similarity to the communist-anarchists he opposed, holding close to a line that the likes of his father and Benjamin R. Tucker had, was deeply concerned with the anarchist frailty in “self-subjection (the psychology of subservience) and the essential brittleness of collectivist (particularly, communist) organisational conceptions”6. Until anarchists could learn to deal with these problems, they would flounder in obscurity and moralising nothingness—and, of course, they always will due to the fatal combination of liberal optimism and “herdlike idiocy” that haunts the halls of the liberatory left. Without necessarily condoning this critical perspective, it is one worth picking up—especially in the context of S. K.’s own critique of communism and communist-like thought7—in order to explore how pessimistic overtones could collapse liberatory movements when the yoke to the eternal, as mediated in the life of Christ, is broken. Likewise, we mustn’t merely flout our holiness over the ungodly venom that Labadie spewed forth—especially in the context of S. K.’s own critique of a lack of humility around religious claims8—but, rather, engage with these perspectives in order to steel ourselves against the critique of the world, to temper our words against a world which aims to miscontrue them, and to guide our actions in a way which holds tightly to the eternal as the solution to Labadie’s nihilistic despair.
The point of this initial engagement, which by no means is meant to serve in any way as comprehensive, is to set the stage for a novel conversation which has, to the best of my knowledge, never occurred: bringing Laurance Labadie, the pessimist anarchist, into conversation with Søren Kierkegaard, the pessimist Christian who I repeatedly see as flirting with a socio-political perspective that borders on something that can be intelligibly referred to as anarchic. This engagement is not one intended to show a set of “kindred spirits”, separated by time, space, and faith to pass one another like ships in the night. Nor, of course, am I intending to wield one against the other, as a cudgel which flatters those who want to arm themselves before scoffing at anarchism, Christianity, or pessimism—with there being few things more embarrassing than to make oneself a source of ammunition for the debate, a prostitute to the quasi-academically minded.
No, the goal is to take Labadie as a shell to begin a conversation about the kind of anarchism a pessimist might advocate and then to offer this sketch a “corrective” in the Dane’s politics of indifference9 and passionate pursuit of the pre-constituted and de-constituted dynamic of the self as it emerges in repetition10. While I don’t intend to hide my biases, my reader, this engagement is made with the intention of pulling the golden thread from Labadie’s Schopenhauerian elitism, the seemingly earnest call for those “above the crowd”, that could inform the contours of this political theology. We are, in a way, exercising our dialectical skill in exploring the delicate unity of opposites: Kierkegaardian-Ellulian hopefulness against Schopenhauerian-Labadian grimness.
And yet, my reader, there is no other possibility for us unless we want to merely erect a new politics that takes up the mantle that these two men had attempted to smash on the cold floor of modernity. To say anything stronger—or, possibly, to even conclude anything stronger in the free-floating nothingness of imagination that doesn’t find a way to these pages—would be to proudly show to the whole world that we have engaged with two potent thinkers and, smug grin agape, learned nothing whatsoever.
“In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”11
See Men Against the State, ch. VII, J. J. Martin
Ibid., ch. I
Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard
“States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering” in Christian Discourses, p. 109, S. Kierkegaard
“Why Fascism?” from Anarcho-Pessimism: the collected writings of Laurance Labadie, p. 30, L. Labadie, ed. “Chord”
Anarcho-Pessimism: the collected writings of Laurance Labadie, p. 8, L. Labadie, ed. “Chord”
G. Malantschuk believed that the vast majority of S. K.’s commentary on “communist” thought was aimed, rather indirectly, at Proudhon—now better remembered for his valuable contributions to anarchist and mutualist thought (if we should choose to divorce those ideas). Regardless, we shall attempt to tease out a more concrete political critique from the scattered notes and overall “thrust” of S. K.’s reflections on political economy. See The Controversial Kierkegaard, p. 11, G. Malantschuk
“The Tax Collector” in “Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays”, from Without Authority, p. 127, S. Kierkegaard
“Love, Hate, and Kierkegaard's Christian Politics of Indifference”, R. A. Davis, from Religious Anarchism, ed. A. Christoyannopoulos
“The Sublime in Kierkegaard”, J. Milbank, from The Heythrop Journal, Vol 37, p. 300; Sickness Unto Death, p. 13-14, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard
“Diapsalmata” from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 30, [V. Eremita]
Comments
Anarchists are Not Glassy-Eyed Optimists
Wayne Price@ (not verified) Thu, 08/07/2025 - 13:38
"Anarchists, as a breed of creature, have tended to be filled with this glassy-eyed optimism that believes in the universal goodness of the human race,"
This is a common misconception about anarchists. But anarchists see the goodness of people as making anarchy possible--and the bad in people as making anarchy necessary. Simply put we don't trust anyone (or any group) to rule over people. No one is good enough, not even us. Power corrupts, etc. Therefore we are against states but for pluralism, decentralism, checks-and-balances, federalism, rotation-in-office, and so on. Anarchy.
Hi Wayne, That piece, a…
Anarchierkegaard (not verified) Mon, 08/11/2025 - 01:34
In reply to Anarchists are Not Glassy-Eyed Optimists by Wayne Price@ (not verified)
Hi Wayne,
That piece, a little prolegomenon aiming towards a fuller engagement with Labadie the Younger's work, is about setting the stage from a particularly Kierkegaardian perspective. As a part of that, that involves the pessimism or scepticism about the kind of epistemological confidence we can have in political claims, objective theories of freedom, and the like due to the "existential" nature of the thing they are concerned with. In other articles, you will find a fuller account of the political scepticism and theological "existential" thought.
You can find my illustrate of "concrete thought" here: https://anarchierkegaard.substack.com/p/the-case-for-christian-anarchism This is the initial piece in a seven-part series which, thankfully, I am currently discussing bringing to the page with a few publishers!
Thank you for feedback, however.
Talk about two bubble men…
anon (not verified) Mon, 08/11/2025 - 09:54
In reply to Hi Wayne, That piece, a… by Anarchierkegaard (not verified)
Talk about two bubble men sending each other love letters from their ivory towers suspended out of time and socio-political context. Like imagine some "anarchist" writer seeking to publish stuff under a Nazi Germany about how Kierkegaard theory can be applied to a fusion of Christianity and anarchism. Perhaps not inconvenient under a current Christofascist regime?
Imagine an anarchist having…
anon (not verified) Mon, 08/11/2025 - 10:11
In reply to Talk about two bubble men… by anon (not verified)
Imagine an anarchist having interests that persist through different socio-political contexts! The absurdity! Anarchists should follow the trends and only the trends bruh. Anarchists have one job: to focus solely on the current rulers and fight them. Nothing else! Got it, comrade?
Yes! Sorry if this sounds…
A.N. (not verified) Mon, 08/11/2025 - 18:30
In reply to Imagine an anarchist having… by anon (not verified)
Yes! Sorry if this sounds like harping (eagle), but we benign amoral nihilists cannot help but fight authority. We don't go BAM! BAM! POW! we go BAN! BAN! NOW!,,,,,,,because we live in the Now ;)
boycotts are not in the now…
anon (not verified) Mon, 08/11/2025 - 19:16
In reply to Yes! Sorry if this sounds… by A.N. (not verified)
boycotts are not in the now. they're in the future and the past. no puns from you please
Is acknowledging a…
anon (not verified) Tue, 08/12/2025 - 08:32
In reply to Imagine an anarchist having… by anon (not verified)
Is acknowledging a deteriorating political situation a "trend"? It's like you're accusing criticism of the regime of being a "trend" then I suppose being oblivious or careless about it is the more clever, trend-free way? I look at other countries stuck with authoritarian regimes and anarchists are all at least acknowledging the tyrannical regime they're dealing with... while also talking about other stuff.
To keep doing this disconnected philosophy practice like a brain-in-a-vat obviously creates what it does... a plethora of irrelevant theories only serving the purpose of selling books and gaining a level of academic recognition in the process. That feels like running some toothless, hippie insular cult under Franco's Spain.
The critique here is not against intellectualism (like you'll quickly jump onto) but an approach of intellectualism that it uprooted and acquiescent, that promotes more quiescence and impassivity among its impressionable college readers. Which isn't saying more performative Belle Époque LARPing is any better, but.
Brain-dripping-out-of-your…
anon (not verified) Sat, 08/16/2025 - 13:50
In reply to Talk about two bubble men… by anon (not verified)
Brain-dripping-out-of-your-skull type commentary.
Living in the Now there can…
A.N. (not verified) Mon, 08/11/2025 - 07:23
Living in the Now there can be no pessimism. I rest my case.
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