2006 - Page 15 of 18 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

How I Spent My Spring Vacation

March 13, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

I celebrated a birthday, had my main email account compromised (so if you’ve tried to contact me, I’m not ignoring you, but it may be another day or so before I see you mail), reread What Is Mutualism? and a lot of Proudhon, edited a Wikipedia entry or three, tried to organize my mounting collection of land bank references, started a William B. Greene timeline and miscellany (coming soon), did a lot of class prep, met another of Greene’s great-great-grandchildren online, and started the web-site redesign I need to finish before the Libertarian Labyrinth is really up and available at […]

The Founding Fathers

February 21, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Some days I’m content to treat the “founding fathers” as Real American Heroes, guys who did a pretty amazing job of forging a country out of the colonies, despite active opposition from England and internal divisions at home. You have to admire Jefferson as a writer and observer. Franklin the practical rationalist and experimental scientists is charming, if kind of weird, with his charts and his rationales for everything. Federalists and Jeffersonians alike clearly took the business of forming an American government seriously. And there are few writers in the canon who can touch Tom Paine for flair, or for […]

The Declaration as an Argument

February 21, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

So, what does the Declaration of Independence do? What kind of writing is it, and what does it seek to accomplish? The documents begins: When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another We start with the occasion for the Declaration. “When. . . .” The language is strangely universal—as if this sort of thing happens all the time—but we’re going to find that the Declaration is part manifesto. That is, it wants to make real and proper something which is a bit unprecedented and […]

Colonial America: The First Half of our History

February 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s surprising when you notice that the colonial period is nearly one half of American history, over 150 years. If you start the history of the national period after the ratification of the Constitution, rather than at 1776, the halves even a little more. But “nationhood” at that time still only meant the 13 original colonies. It’s worth looking at the dates states entered the union, just to remind ourselves how recent a thing our United States really is. [The fact that this isn’t obvious to us can be attributed to 1) boring history classes in high school; and/or 2) […]

Great Ideas: Working Definitions and Clarifications

February 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s obvious, once the question is asked, that people value “great ideas” for a variety of reasons. But perhaps a general definition may still be possible. Great Ideas are those which will not let us (collectively) go—or which we can’t seem to let go—and which shape our sense of collective identity. It’s all too obvious that this only takes us so far. But that may be far enough to clarify things a bit more. Certain Great Ideas are of the “I know ’em when I see ’em” variety: liberty, democracy, monotheism, rationalism, science, community—these are our course keywords—love, progress, (indoor […]

Land-Banks as a substitute for Alchemy?!

February 13, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Carl Wennerlind has a great article online, tracing connections between the alchemical tradition and the rise of credit-money, including land-banking. “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England” starts with the “paper-money scene” from Goethe’s Faust, traces the uses of alchemical metaphors in the early days of credit-money, and then goes on to show how various individuals who had searched for currency solutions through the transmutation of other substances into gold eventually came around to the plan of transmuting real property into credit-currency. The cast of characters is fascinating. Samuel Hartlib and his circle are […]

Susan Dimock and Bessie Greene

February 13, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Ednah Dow Cheney’s Memoir of Susan Dimock : resident physician of the New England Hospital for Women and Children is now online. There’s some very nice material here, including accounts of the funeral for the two young women, after their deaths in the wreck of the Schiller in 1875. There’s also a nice tribute to Bessie Greene. You can see Susan Dimock’s gravesite online as well. Presumably, this is very close to the graves of Bessie and William B. Greene in Forest Hills Cemetary, Boston. Harvard’s Women Working archive has some very nice items relating to Susan and Bessie, including […]

Puritan New England 2: Key Categories

February 12, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

We’ve set as a goal some attention to the development of “great ideas” as they relate to politics (specifically democracy), religion (monotheism), philosophy (rationalism), and science. So it make sense to do an occasional round-up along these lines. I. Politics: I’ve covered much of this already. Obviously, the state of government in the New England colonies was a far cry from modern notions of democracy, and very few of the basic rights we tend to take for granted were yet recognized. With a notion of liberty based on obedience to God and rightly-constituted authority, and a “model of charity” that […]

William B. Green and the LTV

February 11, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Among the interesting questions that rise out of Greene’s early mutual bank writings is this one: did Greene really believe in a “labor theory of value” in the same way as other socialists of his era? In the 1850 Mutual Banking he writes: It is affirmed by some, that labor is the only true measure of value, that every thing is worth precisely what it costs in labor to produce it, and that the price of every thing ought always to be determined by the relative amount of labor expended in its production. We would remark, in answer to these […]

Puritan America: Round-up of primary source archives