Summary Of Emma Goldman's Anarchism

In Anarchism: What it Really Stands For, Emma Goldman writes, “With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?” (21). Here, Goldman hints at the inherent problem in characterizing human nature through empirical observation: human behavior is skewed by the influence of society and authority. Therefore, conceptions of human nature must be made through reason alone. Though the task is fraught with difficulties, assumptions of human nature in the absence of societal influence underlie all political thought. Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jaques Rousseau approach the task of discerning human nature is very different ways. In Hobbes, we see a conception of human nature that is distorted by Hobbes’s own socially based presumptions. In Rousseau, we have a much more careful abstraction of human nature, and a more clear delineation of where human nature ends and society begins. In this sense, Rousseau preempts Emma Goldman’s criticism that proclamations about human nature are contaminated by the effects of socialization, but closer analysis of their positions will reveal important, albeit
First, Hobbes imagines the state of nature as what would result if humans were free from laws and societal expectations, a conception which has latent problems. Conceiving of the state of nature in this way predisposes Hobbes to imagine simply taking already-socialized human beings and freeing them of the constraints of civil society and the force of authority. In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau argues that Hobbes, and other political theorists, have not removed the effects of society from their conceptions of natural man. Rousseau writes that his objective involves “separating what he [man] derives from his own wherewithal from what circumstances and his progress have added to or changed in his primitive state”