system, the socialist system not excepted. In this sense we accept individualism and its aspiration for liberty.
With sovereign pride and contempt many individualists enunciate the "odi profanum." The publicity, the community, which socialism demands, do not touch the innermost recesses, the holy of holies, of the individual soul; all that democracy requires is that everyone should work in, with, and for the community; it puts no hindrance in the way of this work being purely individual. Democracy does not hamper men of genius, does not restrict the activities of poets, writers, and artists.
Society and socialisation endure in space and time, so that it is impossible for the individual to enter into a brief and experimental union with society. Nolens volens the individual is permanently associated with the social whole, and an ephemeral treaty such as some individualists desire is impossible in practice. The solitude, the isolation of the intellectual forces, essential to every individual, is something utterly different from the forcible isolation of the solipsist, which necessarily culminates in metaphysical disaster.
Whatever definition socialism may offer of the concept of "the mass," the point of practical importance to socialism is its definition of the concept "organisation."
Socialistic organisation is usually conceived as comparatively centralised. Doubtless equality and fraternity are demanded as well as liberty; but socialists insist upon the need for discipline, and centralisation is hardly possible without a certain amount of coercion, or in the absence of a unified authority. The anarchists, on the other hand, lay special stress upon liberty, and upon various forms of federation.
Socialism, and above all Marxism, wishes to train its adherents to order, order and liberty being conceived as existing simultaneously; the anarchists, on the other hand, ask for liberty first, contending that order will be the spontaneous outcome of liberty.
Marxist socialism is by hypothesis working-class socialism, is proletarian. Anarchism has been proletarian only as voiced by certain representatives of the doctrine, and not until quite recently has anarchism proclaimed itself proletarian. Now, indeed, as against Marxism and social democracy, it claims to be the genuinely democratic representative of the proletariat, whereas the Marxists stigmatise anarchism as the doctrine of the mob.
