Month: September 2006

I’ve now worked through six of the first eight volumes of the free religionist paper, The Index, and it strikes me that we’re going to have to revise somewhat our sense of what the important periodicals of the late 19th century were, for individualist anarchists. At the very least, we’re going to have to add one to the list. A few surprises: Tucker’s translations of Proudhon’s “The State” and “The Malthusians” both appeared in The Index in 1877, prior to their appearance in Liberty (which began publication in ). Following the end of the Tucker-Andrews debate on Proudhon in 1876, […]

Monday morning, as I was getting ready to head out the door to campus, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story about Wikipedia–mostly positive. The next day, the Wall Street Journal hosted one of their mini-debates, pitting the Wikipedia model against the traditional model of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is all over the news right now, and getting pretty good press. That doesn’t change the nature of that very strange beast. You should always, with any research source, be prepared to double-check what you find there. That one of the basic, hard truths of research. It’s why instructors demand multiple sources. […]

It’s a good week for currency cranks. I was working through some microfiched pamphlets from John Zube’s Libertarian Microfiche Project, trying to work my way through this “roll call” phase of my researches on mutual banking. I consider John a kindred libertarian-packrat, and I’m always finding little gems, usually with his notes attached, on fiche I picked up for some other text. How To Escape the Coin Monopoly (1895), published anonymously by the Equity Publishing Company of Oakland, California, is just such a gem. I won’t speculate right now on the authorship, but the sources are obvious and explicit. The […]

I know a few folks are following this who don’t have access to the syllabus, so here are the relevant readings for the last two weeks: A Model of Christian Charity (1630) The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647) Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) Green-Libertarian Platform (2006) Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637) (biography)Roger Williams, from The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644)Samuel Rutherford, from Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649)Massachusetts anti-Quaker law (1658)Letters of Quaker martyrs Ann Dyer and William Leddra prior to their executions (read pages 187-188, 377-387)

At its limits, tolerance can be explosive, deadly. In our readings about religious conflicts in colonial New England, we’ve seen that the stakes of differences of opinion could be raised to the point where those outside the envelope of acceptable beliefs could be banished or even killed. Remember that one of the primary sparks for the American Revolution was the passage of the “Intolerable Acts” in 1774. We generally think of tolerance as sort of a warm, fuzzy affair, but its flipside, intolerance, suddenly takes us into an entirely different terrain. There comes a point when we simply can’t or […]

This is the third in a series of explorations of the mutualist tradition—or, perhaps more appropriately, traditions. The particular perspective they present is, as I’ve said, somewhat revisionist. It has been some time since I’ve posted in this series. My decision to tackle some of Proudhon in the original French has created productive delays. In the meantime, allow me to present… THE MUTUALIST,Or, Practical Remarks on the Social System of Mutual Cooperation. 1826. In the first entry in this series, I mentioned this series of five letters to the New Harmony Gazette, which Bestor notes as the first published use […]

The materials we are looking at this week all revolve around questions of religious tolerance, and the more extreme consequences of stepping “outside the envelope” of what could be tolerated in Puritan Massachusetts. The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647) is the classic statement in defense of intolerance. Roger Williams’ writings are generally taken as the model for a more tolerant approach. (See The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution; Williams timeline) The Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations – July 15, 1663, which grew out of the Rhode Island settler’s conflicts with Massachusetts, incorporates the principle of religious tolerance: noe person […]

As it turns out, physician and temperance reformer Diocletian (“Dio”) Lewis (1823-1886) was a friend of Lysander Spooner, and Spooner features in Lewis’ book, Talks about People’s Stomachs (1870). I was unfamiliar with Lewis until yesterday when, as fate would have it, I dug up both his account of Spooner’s eating habits and a biography of Rev. Jesse Henry Jones (who debated William B. Greene in the pages of The Word) which also mentions him. Anyway, without further ado, here is the first of two sections related to Spooner: One Meal a Day. The Greek and Roman armies ate but […]

I’ve resumed my work extracting significant debates from The Index with an 1876 exchange between Ezra H. Heywood and Elizur Wright on the “Family Bank.” Heywood takes the standard anti-usury line, while Wright, who was an important reformer in the insurance business, takes what he believes is a more practical tack. There is plenty of work to be done in fleshing out the context of this debate. I would also be unsurprised to find a continuation in the volume for 1877. Stay tuned. . . Other collected Index debates: 1873: Tucker, Abbott, et al, on Usury 1876: Tucker vs. Andrews […]

After a long, complicated set of negotiations and near-misses, I’ve scheduled a first seminar at the local progressive campus ministry. Initially, we had talked about something focusing on William B. Greene in his role as Christian minister, but the pastor has asked me if I would do something with a broad, ecumenical appeal—while still drawing largely from my work on religion and liberty. In the end, we came up with “Models of Christian Charity,” a seminar starting with Winthrop’s “Modell” and working forward. I’ll post details as I get them worked out, but this is a potentially very interesting line […]