a tendency to subordinate reason to feeling, will, and instinct. The anarchists have advanced as philosophy has progressed, and have turned away from rationalism towards voluntarism.
To authority, the anarchists counterpose a demand for liberty, upon which they lay more stress than upon equality or even fraternity.
As against the state and authority, anarchists proclaim individualism, and anarchism is often defined as individualism. The term is extremely ambiguous, and it is above all necessary to distinguish between individualism and subjectivism, for these two words are often encountered in association. Individualism is mainly an ethical and socio-political concept, whereas subjectivism belongs chiefly to the spheres of psychology and epistemology. Individualism concerns the relationship of the individual to the social whole or to the entire universe, and deals therefore with an ethical, socio-political, and metaphysical relationship; but when we think a subjectivism we are thinking of the subject as contrasted with the object, and our attention centres upon what we mean by the subject psychologically and epistemologicall (and, of course, metaphysically as well).
We must distinguish, further, different degrees and kinds of individualism and of subjectivism. These terms are ordinarily used in their extremer sense.
Extreme individualism (unless the term be employed to denote nothing more than a well-developed and vigorous personality) often signifies a neglect of the social whole. Otherwise expressed, the individual is set in opposition to the social whole and is considered superior to that whole. Individualism then manifests itself as aristocracy.
Extreme subjectivism or solipsism is at the same time extreme individualism; but the converse of this is not true, for extreme individualism need not necessarily be subjectivism. Solipsism is necessarily aristocratic.
If individualism be opposed on principle to the state and to its organisation of society, the question arises how anarchism conceives of the organisation of society, whether it recognises organisation of any kind, and if so how that organisation is to be carried on. Since as an actual fact a number of individuals exist side by side (for the absurdity of solipsism is self-evident) the anarchist cannot ignore the fact. Logically, the relationship of the individual to the organised social whole
