Benjamin
Tucker,
the son of a whaling merchant, was born in New Bedford on 17th April,
1854. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and while
an eighteen year old student heard William
Greene speak at an anarchist meeting
in Boston. He was immediately converted
to the cause and the two men became close friends. Tucker went to
Europe and where he was influenced by the work of Pierre
Joseph Proudhon. On his return to the United
States he translated and published Proudhon's What
is Property.
Tucker worked for the radical journals The
Word and the Radical Review
before founding the anarchist journal,
Liberty in 1881. In the first edition Tucker praised Sophie
Perovskaya, the Russian revolutionary who had just been executed for
taking part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Over the next
twenty-seven years Tucker published the writings of the world's leading
anarchists including Peter Kropotkin,
Michael Bakunin, Pierre
Joseph Proudhon and Leo Tolstoy.
He was also the author of State Socialism
and Anarchism (1899). Benjamin Tucker died on 22nd June,
1939.
