Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert (18 June 1838 – 5 November 1906) was an English writer, theorist, individualist philosopher, and politician. A son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, he was a Liberal Member of Parliament for the two-member constituency of Nottingham from 1870 to 1874. He promoted a classical liberal philosophy and took the ideas of Herbert Spencer a stage further by advocating voluntary-funded government that uses force only in defence of individual liberty and private property. He is known as the originator of voluntaryism.
A Radical in his parliamentary years, Herbert declared himself a republican in the House of Commons, voted for women's suffrage, co-sponsored the 1872 Proportional Representation Bill, championed the agricultural labourers' union movement of Joseph Arch, and took a leading part in the passing of the Wild Birds Protection Act 1872. He was the founder of the Savile Club and belonged to the Radical Club of Henry Fawcett.
Early life and education Herbert was born at Highclere Castle on 18 June 1838. He was the third son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, and brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl. Herbert was educated at Eton College, entering the school in 1850. He left school early, having been elected to a founder's kin fellowship at St John's College, Oxford in 1855. He gained a second class in Classical Moderations in 1857.The Oxford University Calendar 1895. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895, p. 296.
In May 1858 he joined the 7th Queen's Own Hussars at Canterbury with the rank of cornet by purchase, and in June 1859 became a lieutenant, also by purchase. In the autumn of 1860 he joined the service troops at Umballa, India. In 1861 he returned to England and sold his commission in 1862. He then resumed his career at Oxford, where he was President of the Union in Hilary Term 1862; he graduated BCL in 1862 and DCL in 1865. He lectured in history and jurisprudence at St John's College, and resigned his fellowship in 1869.
In March 1864 he visited the scene of the Prusso-Danish war, and distinguished himself at Dybbøl by sallies from the Danish redoubts for the purpose of rescuing the wounded. As a recognition of his bravery he was made a knight of the Order of the Dannebrog. His impressions of the campaign were recorded in his letters to his mother published under the title The Danes in Camp (1864). He went to the United States during the American Civil War, and witnessed the Siege of Richmond (1864–65). During the Franco-Prussian War he went to France, and was present at the Battle of Sedan. He was outside Paris during the Siege of Paris, and was one of the first to enter the city after the capitulation, being nearly shot as a spy on his way in. He remained there during the Paris Commune in the company of his second brother, Alan Herbert, who practised medicine in Paris. In later life he received the Austrian Order of the Iron Crown, third class, for helping to rescue the crew of the Pare, an Austrian vessel wrecked off Westward Ho!
Early political career Herbert stood as a Conservative candidate for Newport in the 1865 general election but was defeated. He held the post of private secretary to Stafford Northcote, the President of the Board of Trade, from 1866 to 1868. His politics moving rapidly leftward, he stood as a Liberal candidate for Berkshire in the 1868 election but lost. He served as President of the fourth day of the first ever Co-operative Congress in 1869.
Member of Parliament Herbert was elected as a Liberal at a by-election for Nottingham on 24 February 1870. In the debates on the Elementary Education Act 1870 he supported the principle that all provided schools should be secular or strictly unsectarian — a position in contrast to his later opposition to state provision — and he criticised the religious provisions of the Scotch Education Bill of 1872 on similar grounds.
Republicanism On 19 March 1872 he seconded Sir Charles Dilke's motion for an inquiry into the expenses of the civil list and, following Dilke's example, declared himself a republican. The declaration provoked a scene of great disorder, and the latter part of his speech was inaudible. Herbert acted as teller with Dilke in the ensuing division, in which the motion was defeated by 276 votes to two.
Parliamentary and franchise reform Herbert supported the parliamentary campaign for women's suffrage, voting for the second reading of Jacob Bright's Women's Disabilities Bill on 3 May 1871 and appearing in the ayes for the Women's Disabilities Removal Bill on 1 May 1872, both of which were defeated.Herbert appears in the "Ayes" for the second readings of 3 May 1871 and 1 May 1872: ; .
On 28 February 1872 he was one of the sponsors, with Walter Morrison, Thomas Hughes and Henry Fawcett, of a Proportional Representation Bill embodying the scheme of personal representation advocated by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hare; the bill made no progress.
Bird protection Herbert took a leading part in the passing of the Wild Birds Protection Act 1872, which extended the close-season protection introduced for seabirds by the Sea Birds Preservation Act 1869 to some forty inland species. The following session, on 29 April 1873, he moved for and obtained a select committee to consider extending the close season to species omitted from the 1872 Act, and was himself named to the committee; opposing the motion, Clare Sewell Read remarked that the Member for Nottingham "ought to be satisfied with the victory he achieved in this direction last year".
Labour and other causes He was an ardent supporter of Joseph Arch and spoke at the mass meeting at Leamington on Good Friday 1872, when the National Agricultural Labourers' Union was formed. In 1873, criticising the army estimates, he questioned the organisation and efficiency of the standing army, arguing that a territorial citizen force on the volunteer model would be both more effective and less costly. In April 1873 he sought leave to bring in a bill to limit the compensation payable on the abolition of college fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge, anticipating the university reforms then under consideration.
On account of his objection to taking life he became a vegetarian. Herbert retired from parliamentary life at the 1874 general election.
Clubs In 1868 Herbert was among the founding-year members of the club that became the Savile Club, established that year as the Eclectic Club (renamed the New Club in 1869 and the Savile Club in 1871), whose earliest membership was drawn heavily from Liberals and Radicals of his stamp.The Savile Club 1868–1923. Edinburgh: privately printed for the Committee of the Savile Club, 1923.
He also belonged to the Radical Club, the dining and discussion club founded by Henry Fawcett in 1870 as a support network for the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, in which John Stuart Mill was the dominant early figure, Sir Charles Dilke served as secretary and Millicent Fawcett as treasurer. Its forty members were divided equally between parliamentarians and sympathetic writers and academics, and Herbert's republican declaration of 1872, made in seconding Dilke, carried the club's instincts onto the floor of the Commons.
Later public life and voluntaryism After leaving Parliament, Herbert took an active part in the agitation caused by the Bulgarian atrocities; organised in 1878 the great "anti-Jingo" demonstration in Hyde Park against the expected war with Russia; and in 1880 championed the cause of Charles Bradlaugh, speaking at some of the stormy Hyde Park meetings. His anti-imperialism extended to opposing British intervention in Egypt in the early 1880s, supporting Irish self-determination, and opposing the Second Boer War.
He was an ardent but independent supporter of Herbert Spencer. His creed developed a variant of Spencerian individualism which he described as "voluntaryism". In 1884 Herbert published his best-known book, A Politician in Trouble about his Soul, a reprint with alterations and additions from The Fortnightly Review. In the first chapters the objections to the party system are discussed, and in the last chapter Spencerian principles are expounded and the doctrine of laissez-faire is pushed to the extreme point of advocating "voluntary taxation". In 1890 Herbert started a small weekly paper, Free Life, which soon became a small separate monthly paper, the Organ of Voluntary Taxation and the Voluntary State, which ran until 1901.
Herbert's interests extended well beyond political theory: alongside poetry and travel writing, his non-political essays took in religion, clean air and forest conservation — concerns of a piece with his parliamentary work on bird protection and reflected in Bad Air and Bad Health (1894) and in the open-air simplicity of his later life in the New Forest.
Anarchism In an announcement of Herbert's death, Benjamin Tucker said, "Auberon Herbert is dead. He was a true anarchist in everything but name. How much better (and how much rarer) to be an anarchist in everything but name than to be an anarchist in name only!"Tucker, Benjamin. Liberty, vol. 15, no. 6, p. 16. Tucker praised Herbert's work as "a magnificent assault on the majority idea, a searching exposure of the inherent evil of State systems, and a glorious assertion of the inestimable benefits of voluntary action and free competition..." while admonishing him for his support of profit in trade (but believed, unlike Herbert himself, that Herbert's system would result in an economy without profit).Tucker, Benjamin. "Auberon Herbert and His Work", Liberty, Vol. 3, No. 10, 23 May 1885, Whole No. 62. According to Eric Mack, Herbert felt that people who "like Tucker, favored the free establishment of defensive associations and juridical institutions were simply making a verbal error in calling themselves 'anarchists'."Mack, Eric. Voluntaryism: The Political Thought of Auberon Herbert.
Herbert explicitly rejected the label "anarchist" for his ideas. He argued that anarchy was a "contradiction", and that the Voluntaryists "reject the anarchist creed". They "believe in a national government, voluntary supported... and only entrusted with force for protection of person and property". He called his system of a national government funded by non-coerced contributions "the Voluntary State"."A Voluntaryist Appeal", Herbert Spencer and the Limits of the State, pp. 228, 239.
According to Chris Tame, "He refused to accept the label of 'anarchist', largely because of a semantic decision whereby he labelled the defensive use of force (which, naturally, he accepted) as 'government.'"Tame, Chris R. "The libertarian tradition No 1: Auberon Herbert", The Journal of the Libertarian Alliance, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1980. Richard Sylvan points out that "a variety of political arrangements and organization, including governments of certain sorts, are entirely compatible with anarchy." Rather, anarchists oppose the state or "coercive government."Sylvan, Richard. "Anarchism". A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, editors Goodin, Robert E. and Pettit, Philip. Blackwell Publishing, 1995, p. 293. Sean Sheehan points out, "A distinction that is relevant to the anarchist ideal is the difference between the government, referring to the state, and government, referring to the administration of a political system. Anarchists, like everyone, tend to use the word government as a synonym for state, but what is rejected by anarchism's a priori opposition to the state is not the concept of government as such but the idea of a sovereign order that claims and demand obedience, and if necessary the lives, of its subjects."Sheehan, Sean. Anarchism. Reaktion Books, 2004, pp. 25–26.