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Adrian Riskin · @AdrianRiskin

76 followers · 410 posts · Server kolektiva.social

I'm reading Benjamin Tucker's Individual Liberty, not for enlightenment but because it came up in a conversation and I had never heard of Tucker. It's an awful book, and I'll have any number of cogently reasoned criticisms when the time comes, but that being said it's pretty hard to take people seriously as thinkers when they can't (or won't) spot a converse fallacy even as their whole argument relies on it. Thus spake Tucker:

"Mr. Robinson says that the essence of government is compulsion by violence. If it is, then of course Anarchists, always opposing government, must always oppose violence."

No, Tucker, clearly not. If the essence of government is compulsion by violence then compulsion by violence is necessary for government. That is to say that if you have government then you must have violence. However, and freaking obviously, just because you have violence doesn't mean you have government. The rest of the section is no more idiotic than is characteristic, but there's no point in reading it, relying as it does from the first sentence on a well-known fallacy.

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Notes
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1. Here's a link to a copy of the book: https://archive.org/details/al_Benjamin_Tucker_Individual_Liberty_a4 . Search in the full text for violence to find the quote.

2. Here's Tucker on the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Tucker

3. Wiki's article on the fallacy of the converse is good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

#BenjaminTucker #IndividualAnarchism #IndividualistAnarchism #Violence #Coercion #Anarchism #LogicalFallacies #FallacyOfTheConverse #ConverseFallacy #Converse