Year: 2006

Here are two more chapter froms Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), dealing with the struggles of Toledo against the natural-gas and oil trusts. I’ll post the last two chapters from this section tomorrow. Wealth Against Commonwealth Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903) CHAPTER XXIIITHE FREEDOM OF THE CITY Towns, like men, stamp themselves with marked traits. Toledo had an individuality which showed itself from the start. Its leading men clubbed together and borrowed money as early as 1832 to build one of the first railroads constructed west of the Alleghenies—the Erie and Kalamazoo, to connect Toledo and Adrian. When, in […]

Three Fables from Things as They Are (1899), by Bolton Hall Philosopher Dog. I SUPPOSE I must have been half asleep when I heard Snap whine, “Yeow arn yow ell.” It sounded like, “You aren’t very well. ” Strange! I listened again. However, I am fond of Snap, and sometimes talk to him. So I said: “No, I’m not well. Monopole is after the rent of the farm, and I haven’t got the money.”“Rent?” said Snap, quite distinctly. “What’s rent?”“Why,” said I, “it’s what we pay to be allowed to live on any part of the earth that’s good for […]

It’s been almost a year since I put together the bibliography of Bolton Hall’s book-length works, and now I’m finally getting the first of them online. Hall was a libertarian single-taxer and Tolstoyan, founder of Free Acres, and a prime mover in the “enclave” movement within Georgeism. (Just in case you missed it the first time, don’t miss: Bolton Hall, single tax anarchist – the song!) I’ll be posting a couple of teasers from Things as They Are (1st ed., 1899), the volume I’m currently editing for the Labyrinth. Like a number of Hall’s works, the volume is split between […]

Stephen Pearl Andrews published one essay in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The July, 1874 issue contained his “Revisal of Kant’s Categories,” one of the most conventional philosophical essays we have from Andrews. Andrews, whose interest in linguistics eventually led him to work on Alwato, a “universal language,” approaches Kant’s categories through grammar. Though it is, in itself, a fairly straightforward essay, its broader context includes Andrews’ Discoveries in Chinese (available from Elibron), the works on Universology (text scanning in progress), and, generally, the work by Charles Kraitsir, Alexander Bryan Johnson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and others to discover a scientific, […]

William Batchelder Greene‘s theological works are almost unknown today, but they form the immediate context for his better-known works on mutual banking, which were written while he was the minister of a Unitarian church in South Brookfield, MA. Like my predecessors, I’ve been a bit remiss in concentrating on these works, at least where the archive is concerned, but I’ve started to address that problem with a pdf edition of The Doctrine of the Trinity :Briefly and Impartially Examined in the Light of History and Philosophy (1847). A look at the chronological bibliography of Greene’s work places this pamphlet, between […]

In 1877, Lewis Masquerier, aged and going blind, collected such of his newspaper articles and short essays as he felt represented, however partially, his social thought. The result was Sociology: or, The reconstruction of society, government, and property, upon the principles of the equality, the perpetuity, and the individuality of the private ownership of life, person, government, homestead, and the whole product of labor, by organizing all nations into townships of self-governed homestead democracies–self-employed in farming and mechanism, giving all the liberty and happiness to be found on earth, another of those “books by a man too busy to write […]

I’ve been too darn busy to post much about what I’m reading these days, but I spent a delightful half-hour this afternoon drinking some good Grounds for Thought coffee and reading print-outs of a couple of blogs. Not surprisingly, a lot of what I had to catch up on was from the Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left crowd. Here’s some highlights: Freeman, libertarian critter, who has given his blog a nice remodeling, reads from the Agorist Quarterly on land enclosures, and comments on Reisman‘s review of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. The decentralized dust-up continues! Sheldon Richman is somebody I’ve […]

Some men—not all men—see always before them an ideal, a mental picture if you will, of what they ought to be, and are not. Whoso seeks to follow this ideal revealed to the mental vision, whoso seeks to attain to conformity with it will find it enlarge itself, and remove from him. He that follows it will improve his own moral character; but the ideal will remain always above him and before him, prompting him to new exertions. What is the natural conscience if it be not a condemnation of ourselves as we are, mean, pitiful, weak, and a comparison […]