His focus for several decades became the state's economic control of how trade could take place, and what currency counted as legitimate. He saw interest and profit as a form of exploitation. Though not directly examples of coercion (or "invasion" as Tucker preferred to say), they were nevertheless made possible by the state-sponsored banking monopoly, which was in turn maintained through coercion and invasion. Any such state-sponsored interest and profit, Tucker called "usury" and he saw it as the basis for the oppression of the workers. He asserted that anarchism is meaningless "unless it includes the liberty of the single to control his product or even whatever his product has brought him across exchange within a loose market—that is, personalty."

He was the first to translate into English Proudhon's What is Property? and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own — which Tucker claimed was his proudest accomplishment.

Liberty published the original work of Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Victor Yarros, and Lillian Harman, daughter of the free love anarchist, Moses Harman.

Liberty also published such items as George Bernard Shaw's first original article to appear in the United States and the first American translated excerpts of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Tucker's periodical also served as the main conduit of Stirnerite Egoism, of which Tucker became a proponent. This led to a split in American Individualism -- between the growing number of Egoists and the old guard of Spoonerian "Natural Lawyers". Both Egoists and Natural Law theorists rejected coercive authority, involuntary legislation, and the notion of a "social contract." However, they differed over the philosophical basis for their individualism: Natural Law theory derived it from a conception of a natural individual right to be free from coercion, whereas Egoism defended anarchism as a pragmatic compromise in a system where each individual sought only self-interest. As a result of Tucker's egoist foundation, his opposition to initiation of coercion was no longer absolute. He believed that it was justifed in some utilitarian scenarios. He says:

"a ultimate prevent of human being endeavor is the minimum of irritation. You aim to decrease invasion just because, as a rule, invasion increases a aggregate of hurt (meaning, course, anguish suffered per ego, whether directly or even across sympathy by using others). However these are precisely a contention that this rule, despite a huge importance which We place upon it, is non absolute; that, to the contrary, there are exceptional suits in which invasion -that is, coercion of the non-invasive decreases the aggre- gate painful sensation. So coercion of the non-invasive, while justifiable the least bit, is to exist as justified on the ground that it secures, non the minimum of ' invasion, however the minimum of trouble. . . . [T]o maine [it is] axiomatic -that a ultimate prevent is the minimum of anguish."

Dates, Places and Events

Born April 17, 1854 in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

1872 — While a student at M.I.T., Tucker attended a convention of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston, chaired by William Greene, author of Mutual Banking (1850). At the convention, Tucker purchased Mutual Banking, True Civilization, and a set of Ezra Heywood's pamphlets. Furthermore, Free-love anarchist, Ezra Heywood introduced Tucker to William Greene and Josiah Warren, author of True Civilization (1869).

1876 — Tucker's debut into radical circles: Heywood published Tucker's English translation of Proudhon's classic work What is Property?.

1877-1878 — Published his original journal, Radical Review, which lasted four issues.

August 1881 to April 1908 — published the periodical, Liberty, "widely considered to exist as a finest individualist-anarchist periodical ever issued in the English language."

1892 — moved Liberty from Boston to New York

1906 — Opened '''Tucker's Unique Book Shop''' in New York City — promoting "Egoism witharound Philosophy, Anarchism inside Politics, Iconoclasm in Art".

1908 — A fire destroyed Tucker's uninsured printing equipment and his 30-year stock of books and pamphlets. Tucker's lover, Pearl Johnson — 25 years his junior — was pregnant with their daughter, Oriole Tucker. Six weeks after Oriole's birth, Tucker closed both Liberty and the book shop and moved his family to France.

1913 — Tucker comes out of retirement for two years to contribute articles and letters to The New Freewoman which he called "a first publication around existence"

1939 — Tucker died in Monaco, in the company of his lover Pearl Johnson and their daughter, Oriole, who reported, "Father's attitude towards communism never changed a single smidge, nor astir religion.... Inside his endure months he known as in the French housekeeper. 'I personally need her,' he said, 'to exist as the witness that in the dying bed I personally'm non recanting. We don't guess within God!" J. William Lloyd [http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=697&fs=memories+of+benjamin+tucker wrote that] "There was nothing he despised to a higher degree communism, & a Communist-Anarchists utilized to call for him "the Pope"."