Egoism by John Beverly Robinson

Autonomous Voice

John Beverly Robinson was one of a small band who pioneered conscious egoism at the turn of the 19th century and an important figure in American individualist anarchism, one who continued in an active role in the United States after Benjamin Tucker ceased publication of Liberty in 1908. John Beverly Robinson started out as an early associate of Louis F. Post, the noted single-taxer, and helped publish The Free Soiler in the early 1880's. He later evolved from this fairly liberal position to a Tolstoyan and eventually to an individualist anarchist. Along with Tucker, John Henry Mackay and others, he rejected natural rights as fictitious and embraced the egoism of Max Stirner and the mutualism of Proudhon, whose General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century he translated into English. Robinson was also the author of Economics of Liberty, inspired by Proudhon's ideas and Rebuilding the World : An Outline of the Principles of Anarchism.