Month: May 2008

mutualism

A book, approximately

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m roughly two weeks away from my cross-country relocation, which explains my relative quiet online lately. I’ve been whittling away at 18 years worth of accumulated stuff and making as much use of the research resources here as I can before heading west, reading Proudhon and Leroux, working on texts for LeftLiberty, etc. I’ve also been doing a lot of talking with friends here about mutualism, following up on this Spring’s informal seminar and a presentation I gave on mutualist institutions. The result has been a significant crystalization of my thoughts about mutualism, and the outline, finally, for a collection […]
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And then I stumbled upon…

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
There are a certain number of volumes in almost every major library collection, with titles like “Philosophical Pamphlets,” or something equally vague, which contain collections of materials bound together, with more or less rhyme or reason. The digital collections, of course, have them too, though frequently with even less in the way of contextual material or metadata to identify them and their contents. Once in a while those volumes turn out to be gold mines. This weekend, while searching at the Internet Archive site (one of those before-I-log-out searches, a stab in the dark, because I hadn’t done it in […]
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Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas weblog

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
On the Research on Anarchism list, Robert Graham writes: I’ve recently set up a weblog to provide additional commentary and selections to complement the published edition(s) of my anthology of anarchist writings, Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Recent posts include the first English translation of anything by Ernest Coeurderoy, an excerpt from his Jours d’exil (Days of Exile), and a CNT-FAI pamphlet from December 1936, encouraging Spanish peasants to embrace libertarian communism and assuring them that such a thing could never be imposed upon them. I’ve also posted the Prefaceand Table of Contents to Volume 1, From Anarchy […]
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A new rogue for the gallery

May 2, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
The search for material for LeftLiberty has taken me in some interesting directions. Every time I think I have a pretty good idea of the range of “socialist” positions out there, I run across some new figure who turns out to be significant, even if largely forgotten. In the mid-19th century, of course, there are a lot fewer socialists out there than there were at the end of that century, and it has been in the course of exploring the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I have found some of the greatest surprises, along with some difficult problems […]