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bonding agencies, private investigators, private dispute resolution organizations and private aggressor containment agencies as required. Instead of having to pay for restitution, victims sell restitution rights to the RTR agencies. This arrangement can be compared to the contractual nature of the Goðorð system employed in the Icelandic Commonwealth by competing chieftains. Edward Stringham argues that private adjudication of disputes could enable the market to internalize externalities and provide services that customers desire. Like classical liberalism and unlike anarcho-pacifism, anarcho-capitalism permits the use of force as long as it is in the defense of persons or property. The permissible extent of | Anarcho-capitalism |
this defensive use of force is an arguable point among anarcho-capitalists. Retributive justice, meaning retaliatory force, is often a component of the contracts imagined for an anarcho-capitalist society. Some believe prisons or indentured servitude would be justifiable institutions to deal with those who violate anarcho-capitalist property relations while others believe exile or forced restitution are sufficient. Bruce L. Benson argues that legal codes may impose punitive damages for intentional torts in the interest of deterring crime. For instance, a thief who breaks into a house by picking a lock and is caught before taking anything would still owe the victim | Anarcho-capitalism |
for violating the sanctity of his property rights. Benson opines that despite the lack of objectively measurable losses in such cases, "standardized rules that are generally perceived to be fair by members of the community would, in all likelihood, be established through precedent, allowing judgments to specify payments that are reasonably appropriate for most criminal offenses". The Tannehills raise a similar example, noting that a bank robber who had an attack of conscience and returned the money would still owe reparations for endangering the employees' and customers' lives and safety, in addition to the costs of the defense agency answering | Anarcho-capitalism |
the teller's call for help. However, the robber's loss of reputation would be even more damaging. Specialized companies would list aggressors so that anyone wishing to do business with a man could first check his record. The bank robber would find insurance companies listing him as a very poor risk and other firms would be reluctant to enter into contracts with him. One difficult application of defensive aggression is the act of revolutionary violence (including anarcho-capitalist revolution) against tyrannical regimes. Many anarcho-capitalists admire the American Revolution as the legitimate act of individuals working together to fight against tyrannical restrictions of | Anarcho-capitalism |
their liberties. In fact, according to Rothbard, the American Revolutionary War was the only war involving the United States that could be justified. Some anarcho-capitalists, such as Samuel Edward Konkin III, feel that violent revolution is counter-productive and prefer voluntary forms of economic secession to the extent possible. The two principal moral approaches to anarcho-capitalism differ in regard to whether anarcho-capitalist society is justified on deontological or consequentialist ethics, or both. Natural-law anarcho-capitalism (as advocated by Rothbard) holds that a universal system of rights can be derived from natural law. Some other anarcho-capitalists do not rely upon the idea of | Anarcho-capitalism |
natural rights, but instead present economic justifications for a free-market capitalist society. Such a latter approach has been offered by David D. Friedman in "The Machinery of Freedom". Unlike other anarcho-capitalists, most notably Rothbard, Friedman has never tried to deny the theoretical cogency of the neoclassical literature on "market failure", but openly applies the theory to both market and government institutions (see government failure) to compare the net result, nor has he been inclined to attack economic efficiency as a normative benchmark. Kosanke sees such a debate as irrelevant since in the absence of statutory law the non-aggression principle (NAP) | Anarcho-capitalism |
is naturally enforced because individuals are automatically held accountable for their actions via tort and contract law. Communities of sovereign individuals naturally expel aggressors in the same way that ethical business practices are naturally required among competing businesses that are subject to the discipline of the marketplace. For him, the only thing that needs to be debated is the nature of the contractual mechanism that abolishes the state, or prevents it from coming into existence where new communities form. In both its collectivist and individualist forms, anarchism is usually considered a radical left-wing and anti-capitalist ideology that promotes socialist economic | Anarcho-capitalism |
theories such as communism, syndicalism and mutualism. These anarchists believe capitalism is incompatible with social and economic equality and therefore do not recognize anarcho-capitalism as an anarchist school of thought. In particular, they argue that capitalist transactions are not voluntary and that maintaining the class structure of a capitalist society requires coercion, which is incompatible with an anarchist society. Murray Rothbard argues that the capitalist system of today is indeed not properly anarchistic because it so often colludes with the state. According to Rothbard, "what Marx and later writers have done is to lump together two extremely different and even | Anarcho-capitalism |
contradictory concepts and actions under the same portmanteau term. These two contradictory concepts are what I would call 'free-market capitalism' on the one hand, and 'state capitalism' on the other". "The difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism", writes Rothbard, "is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation". He continues: "State capitalism inevitably creates all sorts of problems which become insoluble". Rothbard maintains that anarcho-capitalism is the only true form of anarchism—the only form of anarchism that could possibly exist in reality as he argues that any other form presupposes | Anarcho-capitalism |
an authoritarian enforcement of political ideology, such as redistribution of private property. According to this argument, the free market is simply the natural situation that would result from people being free from authority and entails the establishment of all voluntary associations in society, such as cooperatives, non-profit organizations, businesses and so on. Moreover, anarcho-capitalists as well as classical liberal minarchists argue that the application of left-wing anarchist ideals would require an authoritarian body of some sort to impose it. In order to forcefully prevent people from accumulating private capital, there would necessarily be a redistributive organization of some sort which | Anarcho-capitalism |
would have the authority to in essence exact a tax and re-allocate the resulting resources to a larger group of people. This body would thus inherently have political power and would be nothing short of a state. The difference between such an arrangement and an anarcho-capitalist system is precisely the voluntary nature of organization within anarcho-capitalism contrasted with a centralized ideology and a paired enforcement mechanism which would be necessary under a coercively egalitarian-anarchist system. However, Rothbard also wrote a piece, published posthumously, entitled "Are Libertarians 'Anarchists'?" in which he traced the etymological roots of Anarchist philosophy, ultimately coming to | Anarcho-capitalism |
the conclusion that "we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. That none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines". Furthermore, he said: "We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central | Anarcho-capitalism |
authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist". Classical liberalism is the primary influence with the longest history on anarcho-capitalist theory. Classical liberals have had two main themes since John Locke first expounded the philosophy: the liberty of man and limitations of state power. The liberty of man was expressed in terms of natural rights while limiting the state was based (for Locke) on a consent theory. In the 19th century, classical liberals led the attack against statism. One notable was Frédéric Bastiat ("The Law"), who | Anarcho-capitalism |
wrote: "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else". Henry David Thoreau wrote: "I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have". The early liberals believed that the state should confine its role to protecting | Anarcho-capitalism |
individual liberty and property and opposed all but the most minimal economic regulations. The "normative core" of classical liberalism is the idea that in an environment of "laissez-faire", a spontaneous order of cooperation in exchanging goods and services emerges that satisfies human wants. Some individualists came to realize that the liberal state itself takes property forcefully through taxation in order to fund its protection services and therefore it seemed logically inconsistent to oppose theft while also supporting a tax-funded protector. So they advocated what may be seen as classical liberalism taken to the extreme by only supporting voluntarily funded defense | Anarcho-capitalism |
by competing private providers. One of the first liberals to discuss the possibility of privatizing protection of individual liberty and property was France's Jakob Mauvillon in the 18th century. In the 1840s, Julius Faucher and Gustave de Molinari advocated the same. In his essay "The Production of Security", Molinari argued: "No government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity". Molinari and this new type of anti-state liberal grounded their reasoning on liberal ideals and classical economics. Historian and libertarian | Anarcho-capitalism |
Ralph Raico argues that what these liberal philosophers "had come up with was a form of individualist anarchism, or, as it would be called today, anarcho-capitalism or market anarchism". Unlike the liberalism of Locke, which saw the state as evolving from society, the anti-state liberals saw a fundamental conflict between the voluntary interactions of people, i.e. society; and the institutions of force, i.e. the state. This society vs. state idea was expressed in various ways: natural society vs. artificial society, liberty vs. authority, society of contract vs. society of authority and industrial society vs. militant society, just to name a | Anarcho-capitalism |
few. The anti-state liberal tradition in Europe and the United States continued after Molinari in the early writings of Herbert Spencer as well as in thinkers such as Paul Émile de Puydt and Auberon Herbert. In the early 20th century, the mantle of anti-state liberalism was taken by the Old Right. These were minarchists, anti-war, anti-imperialists and (later) anti-New Dealers. Some of the most notable members of the Old Right were Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett and H. L. Mencken. In the 1950s, the new "fusion conservatism", also called "Cold War conservatism", took | Anarcho-capitalism |
hold of the right-wing in the United States, stressing anti-communism. This induced the libertarian Old Right to split off from the right and seek alliances with the (now left-wing) antiwar movement, and to start specifically libertarian organizations such as the Libertarian Party. Rothbard was influenced by the work of the 19th-century American individualist anarchists (who were also influenced by classical liberalism). In the winter of 1949, influenced by several 19th century individualists anarchists, Rothbard decided to reject minimal state "laissez-faire" and embrace individualist anarchism. In 1965, he said: "Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker were unsurpassed as political philosophers and | Anarcho-capitalism |
nothing is more needed today than a revival and development of the largely forgotten legacy they left to political philosophy". He thought they had a faulty understanding of economics as the 19th century individualists had a labor theory of value as influenced by the classical economists and Rothbard was a student of Austrian economics which does not agree with the labor theory of value. He sought to meld 19th-century American individualists' advocacy of free markets and private defense with the principles of Austrian economics: "There is, in the body of thought known as 'Austrian economics', a scientific explanation of the | Anarcho-capitalism |
workings of the free market (and of the consequences of government intervention in that market) which individualist anarchists could easily incorporate into their political and social Weltanschauung". He held that the economic consequences of the political system they advocate would not result in an economy with people being paid in proportion to labor amounts, nor would profit and interest disappear as they expected. Tucker thought that unregulated banking and money issuance would cause increases in the money supply so that interest rates would drop to zero or near to it. Rothbard disagreed with this as he explains in "The Spooner-Tucker | Anarcho-capitalism |
Doctrine: An Economist's View". He says that first of all Tucker was wrong to think that that would cause the money supply to increase because he says that the money supply in a free market would be self-regulating. If it were not, then inflation would occur so it is not necessarily desirable to increase the money supply in the first place. Secondly, he says that Tucker is wrong to think that interest would disappear regardless because people in general do not wish to lend their money to others without compensation so there is no reason why this would change just | Anarcho-capitalism |
because banking was unregulated. Tucker held a labor theory of value and as a result he thought that in a free market people would be paid in proportion to how much labor they exerted and that if they were not then exploitation or "usury" was taking place. As he explains in "State Socialism and Anarchism", his theory was that unregulated banking would cause more money to be available and that this would allow proliferation of new businesses, which would in turn raise demand for labor. This led him to believe that the labor theory of value would be vindicated and | Anarcho-capitalism |
equal amounts of labor would receive equal pay. As an Austrian economist, Rothbard did not agree with the labor theory and believed that prices of goods and services are proportional to marginal utility rather than to labor amounts in the free market. He did not think that there was anything exploitative about people receiving an income according to how much buyers of their services value their labor or what that labor produces. Of particular importance to anarcho-capitalists and Tucker and Spooner are the ideas of "sovereignty of the individual", a market economy and the opposition to collectivism. A defining point | Anarcho-capitalism |
upon which they agree is that defense of liberty and property should be provided in the free market rather than by the state. Tucker said: "[D]efense is a service like any other service; that it is labor both useful and desired, and therefore an economic commodity subject to the law of supply and demand; that in a free market this commodity would be furnished at the cost of production; that, competition prevailing, patronage would go to those who furnished the best article at the lowest price; that the production and sale of this commodity are now monopolized by the State; | Anarcho-capitalism |
and that the State, like almost all monopolists, charges exorbitant prices". After studying the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians and some of their Northern California neighbors, Walter Goldsmidt reported "a culture which reflects in surprising degree certain structural and ethical characteristics of emergent capitalistic Europe". Commenting on this, Bruce Benson writes: Benson also notes that there was a well-developed system of private arbitration: Legal scholar Bruce Benson notes: The basic political unit was the family, which had a leader, but not in the sense of a political ruler as Hoebel notes: "Although he leads the family in legal and economic | Anarcho-capitalism |
enterprise, its members think of him more as an integrating core than as a head who in any way dominates". The kinfolk had a mutual duty to support each other in disputes with members of other families. They did not settle these disputes through warfare, but through arbitration by a voluntarily contracted "monkalun". Benson notes: The Kapauku Papuans were a primitive linguistic group of about 45,000 living by means of horticulture in the western part of the central highlands of West New Guinea until well past the middle of the 20th century. Their culture emphasized individual freedom and there was | Anarcho-capitalism |
no common property; and almost all property was individually owned as Pospisil remarks: Benson observes: Those who were rich and considered to be honest and generous became leaders called "tonowi". However, they held no coercive authority over others. Legal disputes were handled through contractual arbitration, which was enforced ultimately by the threat of being outlawed and ostracized by all members of one's confederation. Economist and libertarian scholar Bryan Caplan cites the free cities of medieval Europe as important examples of anarchist or nearly anarchistic societies: According to the libertarian theorist David D. Friedman: "Medieval Icelandic institutions have several peculiar and | Anarcho-capitalism |
interesting characteristics; they might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions". While not directly labeling it anarcho-capitalist, he argues that the legal system of the Icelandic Commonwealth comes close to being a real-world anarcho-capitalist legal system because while there was a single legal system, enforcement of law was entirely private and highly capitalist; and so it provides some evidence of how such a society would function. "Even where the Icelandic legal system recognized an essentially 'public' offense, it dealt with it by giving | Anarcho-capitalism |
some individual (in some cases chosen by lot from those affected) the right to pursue the case and collect the resulting fine, thus fitting it into an essentially private system". Commenting on its political structure, libertarian scholar Roderick Long remarks: Long observes how the system of free contract between farmers and chieftains was threatened when harassment from Norwegian kings that began around AD 1000 forced the people of Iceland to accept Christianity as the national religion, which paved the way for the introduction of a compulsory tax in AD 1096 which was to be paid to the local chieftain who | Anarcho-capitalism |
owned a churchstead. This gave an unfair advantage to some chieftains who at least in part did not need to rely upon the voluntary support of their clients in order to receive some income. This gradually lead to the concentration of power in the hands of a few big chieftains, enabling them to restrict competition and eventually establish effective monopolies. Although the Commonwealth was politically stable for over three centuries, longer than any democracy has lasted, its eventual down fall was brought about according to Long "not through having too much privatization, but through having too little". He notes: According | Anarcho-capitalism |
to the research of Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill, the Old West in the United States in the period of 1830 to 1900 was similar to anarcho-capitalism in that "private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved" and that the common popular perception that the Old West was chaotic with little respect for property rights is incorrect. Since squatters had no claim to western lands under federal law, extra-legal organizations formed to fill the void. Benson explains: According to Anderson, "[d]efining anarcho-capitalist to mean minimal government with | Anarcho-capitalism |
property rights developed from the bottom up, the western frontier was anarcho-capitalistic. People on the frontier invented institutions that fit the resource constraints they faced". In his work "For a New Liberty", Murray Rothbard has claimed ancient Gaelic Ireland as an example of nearly anarcho-capitalist society. In his depiction, citing the work of Professor Joseph Peden, the basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath, which is portrayed as "a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes" with its territorial claim being limited to "the sum total of the landed properties of its members". Civil disputes were | Anarcho-capitalism |
settled by private arbiters called "brehons" and the compensation to be paid to the wronged party was insured through voluntary surety relationships. Commenting on the "kings" of tuaths, Rothbard states: Many libertarian historians have cited law merchant, admiralty law and early common law as examples of anarcho-capitalism. In his work "Power and Market", Rothbard states: Commenting on law merchant, the "Britannica Encyclopedia" states: Regarding common law, David D. Friedman notes: Commenting on the evolution of British common law, the classical liberal economist Adam Smith noted in his treatise "The Wealth of Nations": From 1991 to 2006, Somalia is cited as | Anarcho-capitalism |
a real-world example of a stateless society and legal system. Since the fall of Siad Barre's government in January 1991, there had been no central government in Somalia until the establishment of the Transitional National Government and its successor the Transitional Federal Government. While some urban areas such as Mogadishu had private police forces, many Somalis simply returned to the traditional clan-based legal structures for local governance and dispute resolution. Anthropologist Spencer MacCallum has identified the rule of law during the period as that of the Xeer, a customary law indigenous to Somalia. The law permits practices such as safe | Anarcho-capitalism |
travel, trade and marriage, which survives "to a significant degree" throughout Somalia, particularly in rural Somalia where it is "virtually unaffected". MacCallum credits the Xeer with "Somalia's success without a central government, since it provides an authentic rule of law to support trade and economic development". In the Xeer, law and crime are defined in terms of property rights and consequently the criminal justice system is compensatory rather than the punitive system of the majority of states as the Xeer is "unequivocal in its opposition" to any form of taxation. Powell et al. (2006) find that the existence of the | Anarcho-capitalism |
common law dispute resolution system in Somalia makes possible basic economic order. MacCallum compares the Xeer to the common law in 6th century Scotland, and notes that there is no monopoly of either police nor judicial services, a condition of polycentric law. Nonetheless, many anarcho-capitalists argue that Somalia was not an anarchist society. Benjamin Powell argued that statelessness led to more order and less chaos than had the previous state under central government and economist Alex Tabarrok claimed that Somalia in its stateless period provided a "unique test of the theory of anarchy", in some aspects near of that espoused | Anarcho-capitalism |
by anarcho-capitalists David D. Friedman and Murray Rothbard. Some critics argue that anarcho-capitalism turns justice into a commodity; private defense and court firms would favour those who pay more for their services. Randall G. Holcombe argues that defense agencies could form cartels and oppress people without fear of competition. Philosopher Albert Meltzer argued that since anarcho-capitalism promotes the idea of private armies, it actually supports a "limited State". He contends that it "is only possible to conceive of Anarchism which is free, communistic and offering no economic necessity for repression of countering it". In "Anarchy, State, and Utopia", Robert Nozick | Anarcho-capitalism |
argues that an anarcho-capitalist society would inevitably transform into a minarchist state through the eventual emergence of a monopolistic private defense and judicial agency that no longer faces competition. He argues that anarcho-capitalism results in an unstable system that would not endure in the real world. Paul Birch argues that legal disputes involving several jurisdictions and different legal systems will be too complex and costly, therefore the largest private protection business in a territory will develop into a natural monopoly. Anarcho-capitalists counter that this argument is circular because monopolies are artificial constructs that can only be maintained by political immunity | Anarcho-capitalism |
to natural market processes, or by perpetual provision of superior quality products and services. Unless competitors are prevented from entering a market, the profit incentive, which is fueled by constant demand for improvement, proportionately draws them into it. Furthermore, as demonstrated by the medieval systems in Ireland and Iceland, treating the right to justice as a property means that it is sold (not purchased) by victims. Some libertarians propose a restitution system of justice in which the right to restitution created by the violation of the victims' property could be homesteaded by bounty hunters that would bring criminals to justice, | Anarcho-capitalism |
thus creating the incentive for people to work defending the rights of victims that otherwise would not be able to pay for the service. Many anarcho-capitalists believe that negative rights should be recognized as legitimate, but positive rights should be rejected. Some critics, including Noam Chomsky, reject the distinction between positive and negative rights: Most anarchists argue that certain capitalist transactions are not voluntary and that maintaining the class structure of a capitalist society requires coercion, which violates anarchist principles. David Graeber noted his skepticism about anarcho-capitalism along the same lines: Some critics argue that the anarcho-capitalist concept of voluntary | Anarcho-capitalism |
choice ignores constraints due to both human and non-human factors, such as the need for food and shelter; and active restriction of both used and unused resources by those enforcing property claims. For instance, if a person requires employment in order to feed and house himself, the employer–employee relationship could be considered involuntary. Another criticism is that employment is involuntary because the economic system that makes it necessary for some individuals to serve others is supported by the enforcement of coercive private property relations. Some philosophies view any ownership claims on land and natural resources as immoral and illegitimate. Some | Anarcho-capitalism |
libertarian critics of anarcho-capitalism who support the full privatization of capital, such as geolibertarians, argue that land and the raw materials of nature remain a distinct factor of production and cannot be justly converted to private property because they are not products of human labor. Some socialists, including other market anarchists such as mutualists, adamantly oppose absentee ownership. Anarcho-capitalists have strong abandonment criteria—one maintains ownership (more or less) until one agrees to trade or gift it. Anti-state critics of this view tend to have comparatively weak abandonment criteria; for example, one loses ownership (more or less) when one stops personally | Anarcho-capitalism |
occupying and using it. Furthermore, the idea of perpetually binding original appropriation is anathema to socialism and traditional schools of anarchism as well as to any moral or economic philosophy that takes equal natural rights to land and the Earth's resources as a premise. Anarcho-capitalists counter that property is not only natural, but unavoidable, citing the Soviet Union as an inevitable result of its prohibition and collectivization, which they claim eliminates the incentives and accountability of ownership and blackens markets. Kosanke further challenges what he perceives as egalitarian dogma by attempting to demonstrate that all costs of living are naturally | Anarcho-capitalism |
determined, subject to a variety of factors and can not be politically manipulated without net negative consequences. The following is a partial list of notable nonfiction works discussing anarcho-capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism has been examined in certain works of literature, particularly science fiction. An early example is Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" in which he explores what he terms "rational anarchism". Cyberpunk and postcyberpunk authors have been particularly fascinated by the idea of the breakdown of the nation-state. Several stories of Vernor Vinge, including "Marooned in Realtime" and "Conquest by Default", feature anarcho-capitalist societies, sometimes portrayed | Anarcho-capitalism |
in a favorable light and sometimes not. Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age", Max Barry's "Jennifer Government" and L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach" all explore anarcho-capitalist ideas. The cyberpunk portrayal of anarchy varies from the downright grim to the cheerfully optimistic and it need not imply anything specific about the writer's political views. In particular, Neal Stephenson refrains from sweeping political statements when deliberately provoked. In Matt Stone's (Richard D. Fuerle) novelette "On the Steppes of Central Asia", an American grad student is invited to work for a newspaper in Mongolia and discovers that the Mongolian society | Anarcho-capitalism |
is indeed stateless in a semi-anarcho-capitalist way. The novelette was originally written to advertise Fuerle's 1986 economics treatise "The Pure Logic of Choice". "Sharper Security: A Sovereign Security Company Novel", part of a series by Thomas Sewell, is "set a couple of decades into the near-future with a liberty view of society based on individual choice and free market economics" and features a society where individuals hire a security company to protect and insure them from crime. The security companies are sovereign, but customers are free to switch between them. They behave as a combination of insurance/underwriting and para-military police | Anarcho-capitalism |
forces. Anarcho-capitalist themes abound, including an exploration of not honoring sovereign immunity, privately owned road systems, a "laissez-faire" market and competing currencies. Sandy Sandfort's, Scott Bieser's and Lee Oaks's Webcomic "Escape from Terra" examines a market anarchy based on Ceres and its interaction with the aggressive statist society Terra. Anarcho-capitalism Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy and school of anarchist thought that advocates the elimination of centralized state dictum in favor of self-ownership, private property and free markets. Anarcho-capitalists hold that in the absence of statute (law by arbitrary autocratic decrees, or bureaucratic legislation swayed by transitory political special interest groups), | Anarcho-capitalism |
Aristophanes Aristophanes (; , ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion (), was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it. Also known as "the Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy", Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were | Aristophanes |
feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play "The Clouds" as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates, although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. Aristophanes' second play, "The Babylonians" (now lost), was denounced by Cleon as a slander against the Athenian "polis". It is possible that the case was argued in court, but details of the trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially "The Knights", the first of many plays that he directed himself. "In my opinion," he says through that | Aristophanes |
play's Chorus, "the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all." () Less is known about Aristophanes than about his plays. In fact, his plays are the main source of information about him and his life. It was conventional in Old Comedy for the Chorus to speak on behalf of the author during an address called the 'parabasis' and thus some biographical facts can be found there. However, these facts relate almost entirely to his career as a dramatist and the plays contain few clear and unambiguous clues about his personal beliefs or his private life. He was a | Aristophanes |
comic "poet" in an age when it was conventional for a poet to assume the role of 'teacher' (didaskalos), and though this specifically referred to his training of the Chorus in rehearsal, it also covered his relationship with the audience as a commentator on significant issues. Aristophanes claimed to be writing for a clever and discerning audience, yet he also declared that 'other times' would judge the audience according to its reception of his plays. He sometimes boasts of his originality as a dramatist yet his plays consistently espouse opposition to radical new influences in Athenian society. He caricatured leading | Aristophanes |
figures in the arts (notably Euripides, whose influence on his own work however he once grudgingly acknowledged), in politics (especially the populist Cleon), and in philosophy/religion (where Socrates was the most obvious target). Such caricatures seem to imply that Aristophanes was an old-fashioned conservative, yet that view of him leads to contradictions. It has been argued that Aristophanes produced plays mainly to entertain the audience and to win prestigious competitions. His plays were written for production at the great dramatic festivals of Athens, the Lenaia and City Dionysia, where they were judged and awarded prizes in competition with the works | Aristophanes |
of other comic dramatists. An elaborate series of lotteries, designed to prevent prejudice and corruption, reduced the voting judges at the City Dionysia to just five. These judges probably reflected the mood of the audiences yet there is much uncertainty about the composition of those audiences. The theatres were certainly huge, with seating for at least 10,000 at the Theatre of Dionysus. The day's program at the City Dionysia for example was crowded, with three tragedies and a 'satyr' play ahead of a comedy, but it is possible that many of the poorer citizens (typically the main supporters of demagogues | Aristophanes |
like Cleon) occupied the festival holiday with other pursuits. The conservative views expressed in the plays might therefore reflect the attitudes of the dominant group in an unrepresentative audience. The production process might also have influenced the views expressed in the plays. Throughout most of Aristophanes' career, the Chorus was essential to a play's success and it was recruited and funded by a "choregus", a wealthy citizen appointed to the task by one of the archons. A choregus could regard his personal expenditure on the Chorus as a civic duty and a public honour, but Aristophanes showed in "The Knights" | Aristophanes |
that wealthy citizens might regard civic responsibilities as punishment imposed on them by demagogues and populists like Cleon. Thus the political conservatism of the plays may reflect the views of the wealthiest section of Athenian society, on whose generosity all dramatists depended for putting on their plays. When Aristophanes' first play "The Banqueters" was produced, Athens was an ambitious, imperial power and the Peloponnesian War was only in its fourth year. His plays often express pride in the achievement of the older generation (the victors at Marathon) yet they are not jingoistic, and they are staunchly opposed to the war | Aristophanes |
with Sparta. The plays are particularly scathing in criticism of war profiteers, among whom populists such as Cleon figure prominently. By the time his last play was produced (around 386 BC) Athens had been defeated in war, its empire had been dismantled and it had undergone a transformation from being the political to the intellectual centre of Greece. Aristophanes was part of this transformation and he shared in the intellectual fashions of the period—the structure of his plays evolves from Old Comedy until, in his last surviving play, "Wealth II", it more closely resembles New Comedy. However it is uncertain | Aristophanes |
whether he led or merely responded to changes in audience expectations. Aristophanes won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC with his first play "The Banqueters" (now lost). He won first prize there with his next play, "The Babylonians" (also now lost). It was usual for foreign dignitaries to attend the City Dionysia, and "The Babylonians" caused some embarrassment for the Athenian authorities since it depicted the cities of the Delian League as slaves grinding at a mill. Some influential citizens, notably Cleon, reviled the play as slander against the "polis" and possibly took legal action against the | Aristophanes |
author. The details of the trial are unrecorded but, speaking through the hero of his third play "The Acharnians" (staged at the Lenaia, where there were few or no foreign dignitaries), the poet carefully distinguishes between the "polis" and the real targets of his acerbic wit: Aristophanes repeatedly savages Cleon in his later plays. But these satirical diatribes appear to have had no effect on Cleon's political career—a few weeks after the performance of "The Knights"—a play full of anti-Cleon jokes—Cleon was elected to the prestigious board of ten generals. Cleon also seems to have had no real power to | Aristophanes |
limit or control Aristophanes: the caricatures of him continued up to and even beyond his death. In the absence of clear biographical facts about Aristophanes, scholars make educated guesses based on interpretation of the language in the plays. Inscriptions and summaries or comments by Hellenistic and Byzantine scholars can also provide useful clues. We know however from a combination of these sources, and especially from comments in "The Knights" and "The Clouds", that Aristophanes' first three plays were not directed by him—they were instead directed by Callistratus and Philoneides, an arrangement that seemed to suit Aristophanes since he appears to | Aristophanes |
have used these same directors in many later plays as well (Philoneides for example later directed "The Frogs" and he was also credited, perhaps wrongly, with directing "The Wasps".) Aristophanes's use of directors complicates our reliance on the plays as sources of biographical information because apparent self-references might have been made with reference to his directors instead. Thus for example a statement by the chorus in "The Acharnians" seems to indicate that the 'poet' had a close, personal association with the island of Aegina, yet the terms 'poet' ("poietes") and 'director' ("didaskalos") are often interchangeable as dramatic poets usually directed | Aristophanes |
their own plays and therefore the reference in the play could be either to Aristophanes or Callistratus. Similarly, the hero in "The Acharnians" complains about Cleon "dragging me into court" over "last year's play" but here again it is not clear if this was said in reference to Aristophanes or Callistratus, either of whom might have been prosecuted by Cleon. Comments made by the Chorus referring to Aristophanes in "The Clouds" have been interpreted as evidence that he can hardly have been more than 18 years old when his first play "The Banqueters" was produced. The second parabasis in "Wasps" | Aristophanes |
appears to indicate that he reached some kind of temporary accommodation with Cleon following either the controversy over "The Babylonians" or a subsequent controversy over "The Knights". It has been inferred from statements in "The Clouds" and "Peace" that Aristophanes was prematurely bald. We know that Aristophanes was probably victorious at least once at the City Dionysia (with "Babylonians" in 427) and at least three times at the Lenaia, with "The Acharnians" in 425, "Knights" in 424, and "Frogs" in 405. "Frogs" in fact won the unique distinction of a repeat performance at a subsequent festival. We know that a | Aristophanes |
son of Aristophanes, Araros, was also a comic poet and he could have been heavily involved in the production of his father's play "Wealth II" in 388. Araros is also thought to have been responsible for the posthumous performances of the now lost plays "Aeolosicon II" and "Cocalus", and it is possible that the last of these won the prize at the City Dionysia in 387. It appears that a second son, Philippus, was twice victorious at the Lenaia and he could have directed some of Eubulus’ comedies. A third son was called either Nicostratus or Philetaerus, and a man | Aristophanes |
by the latter name appears in the catalogue of Lenaia victors with two victories, the first probably in the late 370s. Plato's "The Symposium" appears to be a useful source of biographical information about Aristophanes, but its reliability is open to doubt. It purports to be a record of conversations at a dinner party at which both Aristophanes and Socrates are guests, held some seven years after the performance of "The Clouds", the play in which Socrates was cruelly caricatured. One of the guests, Alcibiades, even quotes from the play when teasing Socrates over his appearance and yet there is | Aristophanes |
no indication of any ill-feeling between Socrates and Aristophanes. Plato's Aristophanes is in fact a genial character and this has been interpreted as evidence of Plato's own friendship with him (their friendship appears to be corroborated by an epitaph for Aristophanes, "reputedly" written by Plato, in which the playwright's soul is compared to an eternal shrine for the Graces). Plato was only a boy when the events in "The Symposium" are supposed to have occurred and it is possible that his Aristophanes is in fact based on a reading of the plays. For example, conversation among the guests turns to | Aristophanes |
the subject of Love and Aristophanes explains his notion of it in terms of an amusing allegory, a device he often uses in his plays. He is represented as suffering an attack of hiccoughs and this might be a humorous reference to the crude physical jokes in his plays. He tells the other guests that he is quite happy to be thought amusing but he is wary of appearing ridiculous. This fear of being ridiculed is consistent with his declaration in "The Knights" that he embarked on the career of comic playwright warily after witnessing the public contempt and ridicule | Aristophanes |
that other dramatists had incurred. Aristophanes survived The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchic revolutions and two democratic restorations; this has been interpreted as evidence that he was not actively involved in politics despite his highly political plays. He was probably appointed to the Council of Five Hundred for a year at the beginning of the fourth century but such appointments were very common in democratic Athens. Socrates, in the trial leading up to his own death, put the issue of a personal conscience in those troubled times quite succinctly: The language of Aristophanes' plays, and in Old Comedy generally, was valued | Aristophanes |
by ancient commentators as a model of the Attic dialect. The orator Quintilian believed that the charm and grandeur of the Attic dialect made Old Comedy an example for orators to study and follow, and he considered it inferior in these respects only to the works of Homer. A revival of interest in the Attic dialect may have been responsible for the recovery and circulation of Aristophanes' plays during the 4th and 5th centuries AD, resulting in their survival today. In Aristophanes' plays, the Attic dialect is couched in verse and his plays can be appreciated for their poetic qualities. | Aristophanes |
For Aristophanes' contemporaries the works of Homer and Hesiod formed the cornerstones of Hellenic history and culture. Thus poetry had a moral and social significance that made it an inevitable topic of comic satire. Aristophanes was very conscious of literary fashions and traditions and his plays feature numerous references to other poets. These include not only rival comic dramatists such as Eupolis and Hermippus and predecessors such as Magnes, Crates and Cratinus, but also tragedians, notably Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all three of whom are mentioned in e.g. "The Frogs". Aristophanes was the equal of these great tragedians in his | Aristophanes |
subtle use of lyrics. He appears to have modelled his approach to language on that of Euripides in particular, so much so that the comic dramatist Cratinus labelled him a 'Euripidaristophanist' addicted to hair-splitting niceties. A full appreciation of Aristophanes' plays requires an understanding of the poetic forms he employed with virtuoso skill, and of their different rhythms and associations. There were three broad poetic forms: iambic dialogue, tetrameter verses and lyrics: The rhythm begins at a typical anapestic gallop, slows down to consider the revered poets Hesiod and Homer, then gallops off again to its comic conclusion at the | Aristophanes |
expense of the unfortunate Pantocles. Such subtle variations in rhythm are common in the plays, allowing for serious points to be made while still whetting the audience's appetite for the next joke. <poem style="margin-left:2em"> Though to myself I often seem None comes close to Amynias, Clan, a man I once saw Now as poor as Antiphon, Yet he got himself appointed Way up there in Thessaly, Happy to be where everyone It can be argued that the most important feature of the language of the plays is imagery, particularly the use of similes, metaphors and pictorial expressions. In 'The Knights', | Aristophanes |
for example, the ears of a character with selective hearing are represented as parasols that open and close. In "The Frogs", Aeschylus is said to compose verses in the manner of a horse rolling in a sandpit. Some plays feature revelations of human perfectibility that are poetic rather than religious in character, such as the marriage of the hero Pisthetairos to Zeus's paramour in "The Birds" and the 'recreation' of old Athens, crowned with roses, at the end of "The Knights". It is widely believed that Aristophanes condemned rhetoric on both moral and political grounds. He states, “a speaker trained | Aristophanes |
in the new rhetoric may use his talents to deceive the jury and bewilder his opponents so thoroughly that the trial loses all semblance of fairness” He is speaking to the “art” of flattery, and evidence points towards the fact that many of Aristophanes’ plays were actually created with the intent to attack the view of rhetoric. The most noticeable attack can be seen in his play Banqueters, in which two brothers from different educational backgrounds argue over which education is better. One brother comes from a background of “old-fashioned” education while the other brother appears to be a product | Aristophanes |
of the sophistic education The chorus was mainly used by Aristophanes as a defense against rhetoric and would often talk about topics such as the civic duty of those who were educated in classical teachings. In Aristophanes’ opinion it was the job of those educated adults to protect the public from the deception and to stand as a beacon of light for those who were more gullible than others. One of the main reasons why Aristophanes was so against the sophists came into existence from the requirements listed by the leaders of the organization. Money was essential, which meant that | Aristophanes |
roughly all of the pupils studying with the sophists came from upper-class backgrounds and excluded the rest of the polis. Aristophanes believed that education and knowledge was a public service and that anything that excluded willing minds was nothing but an abomination. He concludes that all politicians that study rhetoric must have "doubtful citizenships, unspeakable morals, and too much arrogance” The Greek word for comedy ("kōmōidía") derives from the words for 'revel' and 'song' ("kōmos" and "ōdē") and according to Aristotle comic drama actually developed from song. The first official comedy at the City Dionysia was not staged until 487/6 | Aristophanes |
BC, by which time tragedy had already been long established there. The first comedy at the Lenaia was staged later still, only about 20 years before the performance there of "The Acharnians", the first of Aristophanes' surviving plays. According to Aristotle, comedy was slow to gain official acceptance because nobody took it seriously, yet only 60 years after comedy first appeared at the City Dionysia, Aristophanes observed that producing comedies was the most difficult work of all. Competition at the Dionysian festivals needed dramatic conventions for plays to be judged, but it also fuelled innovations. Developments were quite rapid and | Aristophanes |
Aristotle could distinguish between 'old' and 'new' comedy by 330 BC. The trend from Old Comedy to New Comedy saw a move away from highly topical concerns with real individuals and local issues towards generalized situations and stock characters. This was partly due to the internationalization of cultural perspectives during and after the Peloponnesian War. For ancient commentators such as Plutarch, New Comedy was a more sophisticated form of drama than Old Comedy. However, Old Comedy was in fact a complex and sophisticated dramatic form incorporating many approaches to humour and entertainment. In Aristophanes' early plays, the genre appears to | Aristophanes |
have developed around a complex set of dramatic conventions, and these were only gradually simplified and abandoned. The City Dionysia and the Lenaia were celebrated in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. (Euripides' play "The Bacchae" offers the best insight into 5th century ideas about this god.) Old Comedy can be understood as a celebration of the exuberant sense of release inherent in his worship It was more interested in finding targets for satire than in any kind of advocacy. During the City Dionysia, a statue of the god was brought to the theatre from a temple | Aristophanes |
outside the city, and it remained in the theatre throughout the festival, overseeing the plays like a privileged member of the audience. In "The Frogs", the god appears also as a dramatic character, and he enters the theatre ludicrously disguised as Hercules. He observes to the audience that every time he is on hand to hear a joke from a comic dramatist like Phrynichus (one of Aristophanes' rivals) he ages by more than a year. This scene opens the play, and it is a reminder to the audience that nobody is above mockery in Old Comedy—not even its patron god | Aristophanes |
and its practitioners. Gods, artists, politicians and ordinary citizens were legitimate targets, comedy was a kind of licensed buffoonery, and there was no legal redress for anyone who was slandered in a play. There were certain limits to the scope of the satire, but they are not easily defined. Impiety could be punished in 5th century Athens, but the absurdities implicit in the traditional religion were open to ridicule. The polis was not allowed to be slandered, but as stated in the biography section of this article, that could depend on who was in the audience and which festival was | Aristophanes |
involved. For convenience, Old Comedy, as represented by Aristophanes' early plays, is analysed below in terms of three broad characteristics— topicality, festivity and complexity. Dramatic structure contributes to the complexity of Aristophanes' plays. However, it is associated with poetic rhythms and meters that have little relevance to English translations and it is therefore treated in a separate section. Old Comedy's emphasis on real personalities and local issues makes the plays difficult to appreciate today without the aid of scholarly commentaries—see for example articles on "The Knights", "The Wasps" and "Peace" for lists of topical references. The topicality of the plays | Aristophanes |
had unique consequences for both the writing and the production of the plays in ancient Athens. The Lenaia and City Dionysia were religious festivals, but they resembled a gala rather than a church service. The development of New Comedy involved a trend towards more realistic plots, a simpler dramatic structure and a softer tone. Old Comedy was the comedy of a vigorously democratic polis at the height of its power and it gave Aristophanes the freedom to explore the limits of humour, even to the point of undermining the humour itself. The structural elements of a typical Aristophanic plot can | Aristophanes |
be summarized as follows: The rules of competition did not prevent a playwright arranging and adjusting these elements to suit his particular needs. In "The Acharnians" and "Peace", for example, there is no formal agon whereas in "The Clouds" there are two agons. The parabasis is an address to the audience by the chorus or chorus leader while the actors leave or have left the stage. In this role, the chorus is sometimes out of character, as the author's voice, and sometimes in character, although these capacities are often difficult to distinguish. Generally the parabasis occurs somewhere in the middle | Aristophanes |
of a play and often there is a second parabasis towards the end. The elements of a parabasis have been defined and named by scholars but it is probable that Aristophanes' own understanding was less formal. The selection of elements can vary from play to play and it varies considerably within plays between first and second parabasis. The early plays ("The Acharnians" to "The Birds") are fairly uniform in their approach however and the following elements of a parabasis can be found within them. "The Wasps" is thought to offer the best example of a conventional approach and the elements | Aristophanes |
of a parabasis can be identified and located in that play as follows. Textual corruption is probably the reason for the absence of the antistrophe in the second parabasis. However, there are several variations from the ideal even within the early plays. For example, the parabasis proper in "The Clouds" (lines 518–62) is composed in eupolidean meter rather than in anapests and the second parabasis includes a kommation but it lacks strophe, antistrophe and antepirrhema ("The Clouds" lines 1113–30). The second parabasis in "The Acharnians" lines 971–99 can be considered a hybrid parabasis/song (i.e. the declaimed sections are merely continuations | Aristophanes |
of the strophe and antistrophe) and, unlike the typical parabasis, it seems to comment on actions that occur on stage during the address. An understanding of Old Comedy conventions such as the parabasis is necessary for a proper understanding of Aristophanes' plays; on the other hand, a sensitive appreciation of the plays is necessary for a proper understanding of the conventions. The tragic dramatists, Sophocles and Euripides, died near the end of the Peloponnesian War and the art of tragedy thereafter ceased to develop, yet comedy did continue to evolve after the defeat of Athens and it is possible that | Aristophanes |
it did so because, in Aristophanes, it had a master craftsman who lived long enough to help usher it into a new age. Indeed, according to one ancient source (Platonius, c.9th Century AD), one of Aristophanes's last plays, "Aioliskon", had neither a parabasis nor any choral lyrics (making it a type of Middle Comedy), while "Kolakos" anticipated all the elements of New Comedy, including a rape and a recognition scene. Aristophanes seems to have had some appreciation of his formative role in the development of comedy, as indicated by his comment in "Clouds" that his audience would be judged by | Aristophanes |
other times according to its reception of his plays. "Clouds" was awarded third (i.e. last) place after its original performance and the text that has come down to the modern age was a subsequent draft that Aristophanes intended to be read rather than acted. The circulation of his plays in manuscript extended their influence beyond the original audience, over whom in fact they seem to have had little or no practical influence: they did not affect the career of Cleon, they failed to persuade the Athenians to pursue an honourable peace with Sparta and it is not clear that they | Aristophanes |
were instrumental in the trial and execution of Socrates, whose death probably resulted from public animosity towards the philosopher's disgraced associates (such as Alcibiades), exacerbated of course by his own intransigence during the trial. The plays, in manuscript form, have been put to some surprising uses—as indicated earlier, they were used in the study of rhetoric on the recommendation of Quintilian and by students of the Attic dialect in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries AD. It is possible that Plato sent copies of the plays to Dionysius of Syracuse so that he might learn about Athenian life and government. Latin | Aristophanes |
translations of the plays by Andreas Divus (Venice 1528) were circulated widely throughout Europe in the Renaissance and these were soon followed by translations and adaptations in modern languages. Racine, for example, drew "Les Plaideurs" (1668) from "The Wasps". Goethe (who turned to Aristophanes for a warmer and more vivid form of comedy than he could derive from readings of Terence and Plautus) adapted a short play "Die Vögel" from "The Birds" for performance in Weimar. Aristophanes has appealed to both conservatives and radicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Anatoly Lunacharsky, first Commissar of Enlightenment for the USSR in 1917, | Aristophanes |
declared that the ancient dramatist would have a permanent place in proletarian theatre and yet conservative, Prussian intellectuals interpreted Aristophanes as a satirical opponent of social reform. The avant-gardist stage-director Karolos Koun directed a version of "The Birds" under the Acropolis in 1959 that established a trend in modern Greek history of breaking taboos through the voice of Aristophanes. The plays have a significance that goes beyond their artistic function, as historical documents that open the window on life and politics in classical Athens, in which respect they are perhaps as important as the writings of Thucydides. The artistic influence | Aristophanes |
of the plays is immeasurable. They have contributed to the history of European theatre and that history in turn shapes our understanding of the plays. Thus for example the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan can give us insights into Aristophanes' plays and similarly the plays can give us insights into the operettas. The plays are a source of famous sayings, such as "By words the mind is winged." Listed below is a random and very tiny sample of works influenced (more or less) by Aristophanes. Most of these are traditionally referred to by abbreviations of their "Latin" titles; Latin remains | Aristophanes |
a customary language of scholarship in classical studies. The standard modern edition of the fragments is Kassel-Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci III.2. Aristophanes Aristophanes (; , ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion (), was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it. Also known as "the Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy", Aristophanes | Aristophanes |
Albert Schweitzer Albert Schweitzer, OM (14 January 18754 September 1965) was an Alsatian theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of Justification by Faith as secondary. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", becoming the eighth Frenchman to be awarded that prize. His | Albert Schweitzer |
philosophy was expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, in the part of French Equatorial Africa which is now Gabon. As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and influenced the Organ Reform Movement ("Orgelbewegung"). Schweitzer was born in the province of Alsace, which had been a French province since 1639 and became Prussian after France lost it to Prussia in 1871. It became French again in 1919, after Germany's defeat during the First World War. Schweitzer considered himself French, and wrote | Albert Schweitzer |
mostly in German. His mother-tongue was Alsatian, a Germanic dialect, although he was also fluent in French and German. Schweitzer was born in Kaysersberg, Haute Alsace, the son of Louis Schweitzer and Adèle Schillinger. He spent his childhood in the Alsatian village of Gunsbach, where his father, the local Lutheran-Evangelical pastor of the EPCAAL, taught him how to play music. The tiny village became home to the Association Internationale Albert Schweitzer (AIAS). The medieval parish church of Gunsbach was shared by the Protestant and Catholic congregations, which held their prayers in different areas at different times on Sundays. This compromise | Albert Schweitzer |
arose after the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. Schweitzer, the pastor's son, grew up in this exceptional environment of religious tolerance, and developed the belief that true Christianity should always work towards a unity of faith and purpose. Schweitzer's first language was the Alsatian dialect of German language. At the Mulhouse gymnasium he received his "Abitur" (the certificate at the end of secondary education) in 1893. He studied organ in Mulhouse from 1885 to 1893 with Eugène Munch, organist at the Protestant cathedral, who inspired Schweitzer with his profound enthusiasm for the music of German composer Richard Wagner. | Albert Schweitzer |
In 1893 he played for the French organist Charles-Marie Widor (at Saint-Sulpice, Paris), for whom Johann Sebastian Bach's organ music contained a mystic sense of the eternal. Widor, deeply impressed, agreed to teach Schweitzer without fee, and a great and influential friendship thus began. From 1893 Schweitzer studied Protestant theology at the Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strasbourg. There he also received instruction in piano and counterpoint from professor Gustav Jacobsthal, and associated closely with Ernest Munch, the brother of his former teacher, organist of St William church, who was also a passionate admirer of J.S. Bach's music. Schweitzer served his | Albert Schweitzer |
one-year compulsory military service in 1894. Schweitzer saw many operas of Richard Wagner in Strasbourg (under Otto Lohse) and in 1896 he managed to afford a visit to the Bayreuth Festival to see Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" and "Parsifal", which deeply impressed him. In 1898 he went back to Paris to write a PhD dissertation on "The Religious Philosophy of Kant" at the Sorbonne, and to study in earnest with Widor. Here he often met with the elderly Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. He also studied piano at that time with Marie Jaëll. In 1899, Schweitzer spent the summer semester at the | Albert Schweitzer |