Month: November 2007

anarchist mutualism

Mutualism, the Anarchism of Approximations, I

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
What is Mutualism? It is a question that even self-proclaimed mutualists may hesitate to answer. Since 1826, when the term mutualist first appeared in print, there have, in fact, been only a handful of attempts to present mutualism in systematic form. The most important of these, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865), has yet to be translated into English. The most accessible, Clarence L. Swartz’ What Is Mutualism? (1927), dates from a period when mutualism had, by most accounts, waned almost to insignificance as a political force.

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Masonic Tribute to William B. Greene

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 10px 0 10px”]   COL. WILLIAM B. GREENE, 33°. This Supreme Council and the Council of Deliberation for the Order in Massachusetts are called upon to deplore the death of their Ill. Bro. WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE, Sov. Gr. Inspector-General Honorary of the Thirty-third Degree of the Scottish Rite of this Jurisdiction. Col. Greene was made a Mason in Paris when a resident there, and after resuming his citizenship in this State, was advanced through the various Bodies of the Scottish Rite, taking his Thirty-second Degree in the Massachusetts Consistory Nov. 17, 1871; and […]
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Too much anarchism at Google Books?

November 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Curiouser and curiouser. While doing some research on early appearances of the word “anarchism,” prior to 1870, I ran across numerous hits on Google Books for very early texts, many of them in French. Now, given the proof-reading and quality control issues I’ve blogged about before, it wasn’t out of the question that perhaps I was seeing some early use of the French word anarchisme, together with some sloppy OCR work, in, for example, Charles Fourier’s Traité de l’association domestique-agricole. But the search engine at Google Books informed me that the word anarchism appeared on thirty different pages in that […]
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An Early Libertarian Communist

November 7, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Paul Brown, whose Twelve Months in New Harmony I posted some time ago, was, from various indications, a friend of Josiah Warren. He was also the most articulate voice in favor of property-in-common that we have from the New Harmony community. He was the author of a number of books, on a range of subjects, as well as some uncollected writings, under the title “Gray Light,” which appeared in the New Harmony Gazette. I’m working on transcribing Gray Light, which is probably one of the five or six most interesting uncollected works I’ve run across in the last few years. […]
Anarchism

Onward and upward!

November 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m obviously disappointed about the early cancellation of the “Roots of American Anarchism” course, but I’ve also already done much of the work to make the course possible. I had already started breaking the graduate-level course down into undergrad/continuing education-sized bites. What I am currently trying to make happen is a 12-week course covering European philosophical roots, Fourier, some early Proudhon, the 1826 Mutualist, John Gray, Paul Brown, Thomas Skidmore and a lot of Josiah Warren. This would be an expansion of the early phases of the announced course and, if successful, would probably be followed by a similar course […]