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This article is from the Anarchy FAQ, by Bryan Caplan with numerous contributions by others.

"X is not 'true anarchism''

One of the least fruitful of these sub-debates is the frequent attempt of one side to define the other out of existence ("You are not truly an anarchist, for anarchists must favor [abolition of private property, atheism, Christianity, etc.]") In addition to being a trivial issue, the factual supporting arguments are often incorrect. For example, despite a popular claim that socialism and anarchism have been inextricably linked since the inception of the anarchist movement, many 19th-century anarchists, not only Americans such as Tucker and Spooner, but even Europeans like Proudhon, were ardently in favor of private property (merely believing that some existing sorts of property were illegitimate, without opposing private property as such).


As Benjamin Tucker wrote in 1887, "It will probably surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that 'property is robbery' to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet. But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the laborer of his products."


Nor did an ardent anarcho-communist like Kropotkin deny Proudhon or even Tucker the title of "anarchist." In his Modern Science and Anarchism, Kropotkin discusses not only Proudhon but "the American anarchist individualists who were represented in the fifties by S.P. Andrews and W. Greene, later on by Lysander Spooner, and now are represented by Benjamin Tucker, the well-known editor of the New York Liberty." Similarly in his article on anarchism for the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Kropotkin again freely mentions the American individualist anarchists, including "Benjamin Tucker, whose journal Liberty was started in 1881 and whose conceptions are a combination of those of Proudhon with those of Herbert Spencer."