And he claims to have recited all the important arguments
that sustain Anarchism: where has he mentioned the argument from the
evil that the State does in interfering with social and economic
experimentation? or the argument from the fact that reforms in the State
are necessarily in a democracy, and ordinarily in a monarchy, very slow
in coming to pass, and when they do come to pass they necessarily come
with all-disturbing suddenness? or the argument from the evil of
separating people by the boundary lines which the State involves? or the
fact that war would be almost inconceivable if the States were replaced
by voluntary and non-monopolistic organizations, since such
organizations could have no "jurisdiction" or control of territory to
fight for, and war for any other cause has long been unknown among
civilized nations? By these and other such unwarranted claims of
absolute completeness, and by the conclusions based on these pasteboard
premises, Eltzbacher makes it necessary to read his final chapters with
all possible independence of judgment.
It remains for me to say something of my own work on this book. I have
consulted the originals of some of the works cited--such as
circumstances have permitted--and given the quotations not by
translation from Eltzbacher's German but direct from the originals. The
particulars are as follows:
Of Godwin's "Political Justice" I used an American reprint of the second
British edition. This second edition is greatly revised and altered from
the first, which Eltzbacher used. Godwin calls our attention to this,
and especially informs us that the first edition did not in some
important respects represent the views which he held at the time of its
publication, since the earlier pages were printed before the later were
written, and during the writing of the book he changed his mind about
some of the principles he had asserted in the earlier chapters. In the
second edition, he says, the views presented in the first part of the
book have been made consistent with those in the last part, and all
parts have been thoroughly revised. It will astonish nobody, therefore,
that I found it now and then impossible to identify in my copy the
passages translated by Eltzbacher from the first edition. In particular,
I got the impression that what Eltzbacher quotes about promises, from
the first part of the book, is one of those sections which Godwin says
he retracts and no longer believed in even at the time he wrote the
later chapters of the first edition. If so, a bit of the foundation for
Eltzbacher's ultimate classification disappears. Besides giving the
pages of the first edition as in Eltzbacher, I have added in brackets
the page numbers of the copy I used, wherever I could identify them.
Throughout the book brackets distinguish footnotes added by me from
Eltzbacher's own, and in a few places I have used them in the text to
indicate Eltzbacher's deviations from the wording of his original, of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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