M. E. Lazarus

Who was M. E. Lazarus?

Dr. Marx Edgeworth Lazarus was an American individualist anarchist from Guntersville, AL where he owned a small farm. Lazarus wrote under the pseudonym "Edgeworth." He is the author of several essays and anarchist pamphlettes including Land Tenure: Anarchist View. He was the first-born son of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, who had an extensive correspondence with the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth.

A famous quote from Lazarus is "Every vote for a governing office is an instrument for enslaving me."

Lazarus was also an intellectual contributor to Fourierism and the Free Love movement of the 1850s, a social reform group that called for, in its extreme form, the abolition of institutionalized marriage. Members of this movement, which included in its ranks the Oneida Society and its founder John Humphrey Noyes, Mary Gove Nichols, Victoria Woodhull, and Emma Goldman, called not for promiscuity or multiple partners, but for the right of people to marry in accordance with romantic desires and be free from state interference. In Lazarus' 1852 essay, Love vs Marriage, he argued that marriage as an institution was akin to "legalized prostitution," oppressing women and men by allowing loveless marriages contracted for economic or utilitarian reasons to take precedence over true love.