Year: 2006

The Very Idea

Reading “A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance” II: The Eleventh-Hour Concept Review

April 22, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m going to go ahead and use the Green-Libertarian platform I discussed in the last post as an occasion for one last serious review of the critical tools we have been assembling for talking about “great ideas.” The most difficult thing about maintaining discussion in the class (aside from some infelicities of the interface) has been finding means of defining “greatness” that helped keep us all talking in the same terms, or at least at the same rung on the ladder of abstraction. We’ve taken as out working definition that “great ideas” are those which we (collectively) can’t seem to […]
Uncategorized

Debs Pamphlet Collection online

April 21, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
Indiana State University’s Cunningham Memorial Library has among its holding the Debs Collection of radical pamphlets. This collection, heavy on left and labor publications, is indexed online and many of the pamphlets have been scanned to pdf format. Anarchist titles are few and far between, but there are lots of items from organizations like the ACLU and the IWW, and from publishers such as Charles H. Kerr. I’ve been collecting Kerr pamphlets for years now, and have been able to scoop up pdfs of items I have never seen for sale. I’ll write up some of the more specifically interesting […]
anarchist mutualism

What Mutualism Was – II: The Kernel(?) of the Problem(?)

April 20, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] This is the second 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 is also a work in progress, so if anyone out there thinks they can set me straight, I would welcome the attempt. To continue… Wikipedia is my current touchstone for contemplating everything that can go wrong (and, to be fair, a handful of things that can go right) on the way to a definition, or a history. I got started doing some editing there when I […]
The Very Idea

Reading “A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance”

April 20, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
[I’ve asked the students in my Great Ideas Honors class to respond to Kevin Carson’s recent post, A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance. What follows is an attempt to put that proposal in a context for the students. I trust my other readers will help clarify what’s at stake in all of this.] Kevin Carson, in the Mutualist Blog, has posted a possible 10-point “statement of shared principles” for “a strategic alliance of DFC Democrats, Libertarians and Greens.” View his entire post here. Some background: back in July, 2005, he had posted some thoughts about a “green tax shift” which would involve […]
communism

from the “Fragments:” Communism vs. Mutualism

April 18, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
This chapter from the Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments (1875), originally appeared in The Word. Greene’s correspondent is apparently Jesse Henry Jones (1836-1904), a frequent contributor to The Word and a number of other reform-oriented or religious magazines, and author of several books. He prompted debates in a couple of the Oneida-related periodicals, and composed a song in support of the 8-hour movement. (I’ll try to find some time to treat Jones separately, and dig up the immediate context for this exchange.) Greene is in his combatative mode here, happy to damn “communism,” specifically in the sense of community […]
Uncategorized

William B. Greene in “The Word:” Woman’s Suffrage

April 17, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
The origin of William B. Greene’s essay on “The Right of Suffrage” has been a bit of a puzzle, as it appears without previous publication information and does not appear to have have been separately published prior to its appearance in the Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments. (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875.) Part of the mystery is solved by this column from The Word, where Ezra H. Heywood quotes from a “private letter” that obviously contained at least some of the ideas for the essay. Heywood’s closing paragraph mentions Greene’s sponsorship of “the Working Women’s Convention, held in Boston, […]
Uncategorized

William B. Greene in “The Word:” Free Love (1)

April 17, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
Readers familiar with the more accessible of Greene’s works will probably know his exchange with Francis Barry, reprinted from The Word, on the subject of “free love.” Barry’s letter begins with reference to an earlier statement by Greene, in the August 1874 issue. It turns out that the earlier piece is very interesting, a “legal opinion” on the subject from Greene. The first paragraph contains my favorite characterization of Greene’s work: [H]e can produce to order, almost any revolution out of the Mass’tts Bill of Rights… Enjoy! More material from The Word is on the way. FREE LOVE IN MASSACHUSETTS.—Its […]
Uncategorized

Science of Society online / scanning goals

April 13, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
Great news! Kenneth R. Gregg of the CLASSical Liberal blog has just posted an online edition of Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Science of Society. This was Andrews’ attempt to present the ideas of Josiah Warren in a more systematic manner. Ken has promised some more biographical work on Andrews, which ought to be worth waiting for. Somehow I missed the announcement of the edition of Andrews’ Love, Marriage and Divorce at the Molinari Institute “Heritage of Dissent” online library. The same update included Edwin C. Walker’s 1904 Communism and Conscience. Thanks to Roderick Long & Co. for their contributions of libertarian […]
anarchist mutualism

1850: The Hotbed of Mutual Banking Agitation

April 11, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
In the years 1849 and 1850, William B. Greene published Equality and Mutual Banking, describing his Christian Mutualism and setting out the details of the real estate based mutual bank. He was at that time, the minister of the Unitarian church in Brookfield, Massachusetts. In 1850 and 1851, he lead a rural agitation-by-petition, by means of which the General Court of Massachusetts was repeatly asked to legalize this updated form of land bank. We know from copies of the petitions in the 1857 The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium that the petitioners included “the Towns of Brookfield, Warren, […]
Uncategorized

Col. Greene defends Washington / Civil War incidents

April 10, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur
Among the new items in the Libertarian Labyrinth is a short piece on military discipline in the 14th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the Civil War regiment William Batchelder Greene commanded during 1861-62. It consists of two reports of VIPs stopped by Greene or his officers among the forts on the Virginia side of the Potomac, where the 14th was stationed. Taken alone, it is an entertaining account. Taken in the context of other accounts of life around the Long Bridge (coming soon to the Layrinth), it looks like general officers didn’t take sentries very seriously, with results that were frequently as […]