Year: 2007

Anarchism

Proudhon, The Coming Era of Mutualism

March 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
This is a translation of one of Proudhon’s earliest discussions of mutualism—”une théorie de MUTUALITÉ,” in the original—from the System of Economic Contradictions [V. II, 527-9]. It appeared in The Spirit of the Age I no. 7 (August 18, 1849), 107-8. I have appended the original French text as well. THE COMING ERA OF MUTUALISM. From the “System of Contradictions in Political Economy,” BY P. J. PROUDHON. If I am not deceived, my readers must be convinced at least of one thing, that Social Truth is not to be looked for either in Utopia or in the Old Routine; that […]
Anarchism

J. K Ingalls’ Reminiscences, etc

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
With someplace friendly to put it, I’m starting to clean out my backlog of material. The second dump to From the Libertarian Library consists of material from the Boston Investigator by Lewis Masquerier and material from Joshua King Ingalls, including the first five chapter of his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform, with some of the annotations that I’ll be including in the in-progress print edition. UPDATE: All of Ingalls’ Reminiscences, except for the Appendix, which consists of a few later writings, is now available online. I think students of mutualism, and of radical […]
Anarchism

A little rearranging

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve decided, in the interest of going easy on my readers here, and on various feeds and aggregators where this blog is now available (such as the new leftlibertarian.org site), to limit the number of full texts I post. I feel like there is sufficient “market” for the texts in the blogosphere to keep posting them somewhere where they can easily be accessed via an RSS feed, and through Technorati and other search services. But I would like to make this blog and Travelling in Liberty leaner and more readable than they have been. In order to make that happen, […]
Uncategorized

Samuel Leavitt, Anti-Malthus I (1880)

March 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
This is the first of two parts, originally published in The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, Aug 1880. Vol. 71, Iss. 2, p. 72-76. The author, Samuel Leavitt, was an associate of Joshua King Ingalls and George Jacob Holyoake. His work appeared in various of the Onieda colony publications, and in The Arena. In his Reminiscences, Joshua King Ingalls wrote: I should apologize perhaps to Mr. Samuel Leavitt, for not mentioning his name before. But he has been met on so many different platforms, I scarce know where to place him, particularly. We were in accord on the land […]
Utopian and Scientific

J. William Lloyd, “The World’s Future—A Prophecy” (1882)

March 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE WORLD’S FUTURE—A PROPHECY. I BELIEVE that a time is approaching when terrestrial nature, at least, will be in almost complete subjection to mankind. Man will then indeed be “the lord of creation.” The deserts will be turned into inland seas, or converted by irrigation into fertile and fruitful plains. The swamps will be ditched and drained until they become the very gardens of the earth, and the planting of malaria-destroying vegetation and other sanitary precautions will render them as healthful as the most salubrious locations. A similar plan to that […]
Anarchism

J. K. Ingalls – Relations, Existing and Natural

March 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Progress! I’ve been working on my scanning process, and have managed to nearly double my speed with a new approach to the OCR work. This should mean, in the long run, much better progress over on Travelling in Liberty, which constantly suffers from my desire to have the texts available when I comment on them. In the short run, it means something of a backlog of texts from The Twentieth Century, including a dozen or so by J. K. Ingalls. Check the Ingalls bibliography for updates and links. On the hand-transcription front, progress as well. Here is the fourth and […]
Uncategorized

Mini-Canon Assignment: How-To posts

March 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Here’s an archive of the “how-to” posts for the Mini-Canon assignment, from a previous semester:] We want to keep focused on the realm of “great ideas,” even while we research stuff that more specifically interesting to us. The common oppositions help us start pretty high up on the ladder of abstraction: Us / ThemMine / YoursKnown / UnknownHeaven / Earth All of these oppositions involve drawing pretty basic distinctions. If we tried to get much more abstract than this, we would be looking at ideas like “unity” and “difference,” “the one” and “the other,” etc. When we’re talking about our […]
Uncategorized

possible scanning breakthough

March 16, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
This project is always slowed down by my desire to make much of the pertinent original material available as I comment on it. Working from microfiche originals makes this process somewhat cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming. Or, it has done so in the past. I’ve just changed my scanning process somewhat, while working with material from The Twentieth Century, and have been able to at least double my scanning speed in many cases. I hope to get a chance, perhaps even yet this evening, to attempt the same process with some issues of Liberty. Think good thoughts…
mutualism

Pierre Leroux, The Nature of Man

March 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
William B. Greene’s two early works on mutualism are very similar, to the point of repeating some sections, but the differences are also telling. Greene was attempting to combine elements of the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Pierre Leroux in both volumes, but it probably fair to say that Equality (1849) is philosophically dominated by Leroux’s influence, as Mutual Banking (1850) is dominated by Proudhon’s. I have lamented at various times the lack of knowledge of Proudhon’s work, even among anarchists. Leroux is virtually unknown, although interest in his work appears to have been a common denominator among an early […]
Anarchism

Fragments of Proudhon on Property and Liberty

March 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Some Proudhonian fragments, recently translated:The phrase “la propriété, c’est la liberté” appears in the Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1867, Lacroix, p.128) and in the posthumous Théorie de la propriété, (1867, Lacroix, p. 183) where Proudhon writes as if he had said that in 1846, in the System of Economic Contradictions. What he says in the 1846 is actually this, as far as I can tell: “Property, with regard to facts and to rights, is essentially contradictory, and it is for this reason that it is anything at all. Indeed, Property is the right of occupation, and at the same time […]