Auberon Herbert

“By what right do men exercise power over each other?”

Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) was an English radical individualist who was influenced by the work of Herbert Spencer. With a group of other late Victorian classical liberals he was active in such organizations as the Personal Rights and Self-Help Association and the Liberty and Property Defense League. He formulated a system of “thorough” individualism that he described as “voluntaryism.”

Among his systematic works on the role of politics in society were A Politician in Trouble about His Soul (1883–1884), The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885), and The Voluntaryist Creed (1908). Herbert also played an important role in public life. He was a Liberal member of the House of Commons from 1870 to 1874 and from the 1880s onward strove to create a host of libertarian political associations. He organized public opinion against British intervention in Russia, Egypt, and southern Africa. Between 1890 and 1901, he published Free Life, a weekly, later monthly, journal subtitled “The Organ of Voluntary Taxation and the Voluntary State.”