Stephen Pearl Andrews, 200 yrs ahead of his time

1812 Stephen Pearl Andrews (d. May 21, 1886), anarchist abolitionist, Modern Times community founder (with Josiah Warren; 1799 - 1874); born at Templeton, Massachusetts, USA.

He was a lawyer, author (The Sovereignty of the Individual) and free-love advocate; it is said that he knew 32 languages.

He started with a brilliant career at the American bar and sacrificed it by his zealous work for the abolition of slavery. Andrews also contributed frequently to the Truth Seeker, a journal of rational thought that is still in publication (other eminent contributors included Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow, Mark Twain, Robert G Ingersoll, HL Mencken, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Sanger). By the 1860s he was propounding an ideal society called Pantarchy, and from this he moved on to a philosophy he called "universology", which stressed the unity of all knowledge and activities.

Andrews was cited in the article on Anarchism by none other than Prince Peter Kropotkin in the famed 1910 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Others who Kropotkin cites include Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, August Spies, Albert Parsons. Kropotkin adds: "anarchism is connected with all the intellectual movement of our own times. JS Mill's Liberty, [Herbert] Spencer's Individual versus the State, Marc Guyau's Morality without Obligation or Sanction, and Fouillée's La Morale, I'art et la religion, the works of Multatuli (E Douwes Dekker), Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, the works of Nietzsche, Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen, Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction, the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Zola's Paris and Le Travail".

Early progressives in the Book of Days

Tagged: anarchism, progressive