A beautiful facsimile made from high resolution scans of an original copy of the 1975 booklet.
17th issue of the egoist journal “Stand Alone”.
What is Man’s Destiny?
by Laurance Labadie
introduction by Mark A. Sullivan
5.5″ x 8.5″, Saddle-stitched
Limited to 66 copies.
Order: Underworld Amusements
“All through history invasion, conquest, subjugation, enslavement and exploitation has been the name of the game, and is the most salient factor in human relations even up to the present day.”
Laurance Labadie begins with the thesis that the State was born under conditions of scarcity, and survived at the expense of other states and its own subjects. Labadie applied egoist Benjamin R. Tucker’s critique of monopoly to a world Tucker declared doomed. Going beyond the “plumb line” of his mentor, Labadie’s portrayal of “civilization” before close of the Twentieth Century is a rival to any nightmare of Orwell.
Laurance was the son of anarchist labor advocate and publisher Joseph A. Labadie, and the last true connection to Benjamin Tucker and the group of individualists known as the “Boston Anarchists.”
“What Is Man’s Destiny?” was first published in the fourth quarter, 1970 issue of The Journal of Human Relations. The current form is a facsimile of Mark A. Sullivan’s pamphlet edition released in 1975, which included his typed and mimeographed introduction stapled to actual offset prints of the original essay.
At the end of the essay is an excerpt from economist Hugo Bilgram’s book The Cause of Business Depressions, and then an editorial statement on that excerpt to place it within the context of Labadie’s essay. The latter was probably written by Don Werkheiser, who was editor of the journal from 1968 to 1971.
Mark A. Sullivan published the egoist/gay/anarchist journal The Storm from 1976 to 1988. He was also heavily involved in the Mackay Society, which was dedicated to publish and distribute the work of German anarchist John Henry Mackay.
His introduction to “What is Man’s Destiny?,” dated November 1975, was completed only four months after Laurance died. Sullivan would later expand this introduction, with the help of Mildred J. Loomis of the School of Living, into the essay “Laurance Labadie: Keeper Of The Flame.” It was included in a 1986 collection of essays titled Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty. Sullivan co-edited the book with Mike Coughlin and Charles H. Hamilton. The original version of the biographical essay was published in Anarcho-Pessimism: The Collected Writings of Laurance Labadie (Ardent Press, 2014).
