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As an example, Warren cites people walking on a sidewalk in a city. Sooner or later someone suggests that everyone might avoid collision by agreeing to walk on the right (or left). Since it is in everyone's interest to avoid collisions, people's interests coincide and thus harmony is achieved. Success, rather than authority, is the regulator. There is no "general will," but rather the interests of individuals that creates such coordination. The problem with political government is that it attempts to create harmony by overriding individual interests by creating unnecessary "combinations." While sometimes expeditious, it is clearly a danger to liberty and individuality.
Disconnecting all interests, and allowing each to be absolute despot or sovereign over his own, at his own cost, is the only solution that is worthy of thought. Good thinkers never committed a more fatal mistake than in expecting harmony from an attempt to overcome individuality, and in trying to make a state or a nation an "Individual!" The individuality of each person is perfectly indestructible! A state or a nation is a multitude of indestructible individualities, and cannot, by any possibility, be converted into any thing else! The horrid consequences of these monstrous and abortive attempts to overcome simple truth and nature, are displayed on every page of the world's melancholy history. - Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce
Sovereignty of the Individual
To Warren, the fact of human individuality implies the necessity for sovereignty of the individual. "The true basis for society ... is freedom to differ in all things, or the sovereignty of every individual." He points out that liberty, rather than forcing us to differ, on the contrary gives us a chance to take advantage when our interests coincide. It also allows experimentation, so that the best and most harmonious means can be discovered. "The sovereignty of the individual will be found on trial to be indispensable to harmony in every step of social reorganization, and when this is violated or infringed, then that harmony will be sure to be disturbed."
The state does not recognize the principle of individuality, with disasterous consequences.
Individuality was not recognized as the absolute right of every person, and was not known as the great principle of order and harmony. Diversity could only beget enmity where conformity was demanded! ...
How evidently the system had risen above the man! The idea of the absolute inviolability of every person must lead and predominate in any movement, or it will proceed in confusion and end in despair. - Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce
As we will see, Pierre Proudhon says basically the same thing with his famous phrase, "Liberty, not the daughter, but the mother of order."
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