Month: March 2020

Our Lost Continent

Our Lost Continent: Preliminaries (2015-2018)

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings: Notes for an Introduction Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism.   “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) The “lost continent” of anarchist history has been there all along, not so much lost but rather willfully ignored or dismissed, a blank spot on our map marked, not […]
Our Lost Continent

Mappings: Notes for an Introduction

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism.   Extrications: History, Tradition, Theory (August 7, 2017) The initial task in these Extrications is analytic: we want to pull things apart a bit, enough to see if we can’t isolate some terms and make some useful distinctions. I want […]
Working Translations

Charles-Auguste Bontemps, “The Sustainability of Anarchism” (1967)

March 25, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
I am reminded that some libertarian communists or socialists, who claim to be revolutionaries in the politico-social sense of the term, have renounced or demand that those of their tendency renounce what they call the anarchist label. That anarchist label, from their perspective,  conceals a very questionable sort of anarchism. They are disturbed by it and disturb still more the propagation of a specifically anarchist philosophy.

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Featured articles

In Search of the Great Divide

March 19, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve decided to devote a section of the project, In Search of the Great Divide, to the pre-1840 period—and specifically to the question of how and when to start a general history of anarchism, addressing some of the alternatives in the beginning and taking the opportunity to look at how various other general histories have tackled the problem.

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Lewis Masquerier

Lewis Masquerier, “Politicology”

March 14, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
What is assembled here is two different sets of texts related to “a forthcoming work, entitled “Politicology;” a new development of Rights and Wrongs, &c., &c.,” announced in the land reform paper Young America in 1845 and then published as a 24-page separately numbered section in Sociology in 1877.

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Lewis Masquerier

Lewis Masquerier in “Working Man’s Advocate” and “Young America” (1844-1848)

March 12, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Links: Lewis Masquerier [main page] Sociology [Reconstructed] Bibliography: Lewis Masquerier, “Declaration of Independence, of the Producing from the Non-Producing Class,” Working Man’s Advocate 1 no. 27 (September 28, 1844): 4. L. Masquerier, “To Reformers, Tenants, Anti-Renters, Squatters, And Slaves,” Young America 2 no. 16, New Series (July 12, 1845): 1. L. Masquerier, “Monopoly Of Land The Great Evil,” Young America 2 no. 17, New Series (July 19, 1845): 2. L. Masquerier, “Eras of Civilization,” Young America 2 no. 24, New Series (September 6, 1845): 1. L. L. Masquerier, “Hired Labor Maintains All Society,” Young America 2 no. 27, New Series […]
Saint Ravachol

Georges Etiévant, “The Hare and the Hunter” (1897)

March 8, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
When one is found, among the little phalanx of those who carry themselves bravely, among those whom the idea of liberty has touched with its wing, who, thanks to individual circumstances, feels, at some moment, the sentiments of human dignity stir powerfully within them, rebelling against the cowardice imposed by society on the individual; when, rid of age-old prejudices arising from a contemptible education, which teach men to idolize strength and success, one of them rises up to threaten power and wealth; when, finally weary of being a tacit accomplice in injustices, he strikes at the head or at the belly of the social body; and when, separating from those who perform or support these iniquities, he haughtily hurls himself, like a bloody challenge, head-first at society, then the careless, spineless crowd, forced to think, bays stupidly.

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author miscellanies

Warren Edwin Brokaw

March 6, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Warren Edwin Brokaw, “The Only Unpardonable Sin,” The Pacific Monthly 15, no. 6 (June 1906): 763-767. Warren Edwin Brokaw, “Who Should Possess the Wealth of the World?,” The North American Review 214, no. 3 (September 1921): 431-432. “Write, Let Children Starve,” New York Times (December 22, 1908): 1. The Only Unpardonable Sin By Warren Edwin Brokaw LUTHER BURBANK is reported by W. S. Harwood, in “New Creations in Plant Life,” as saying that “ignorance is the only unpardonable sin.” The statement, as it stands, is too sweeping in its scope. Ignorance is that condition which results from ignoring, and there […]
art-liberty

Calvin Blanchard, “Religion Made Intelligible” (1866)

March 5, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Mr. Editor:—I was once, as you know, a mere sceptic, or unbeliever. But for many years past I have been a Positivist, certainly foreknowing, or claiming to foreknow, that, by means of Nature, including her cunning method, Art, the world will be populated from pole to pole by human beings, all of whom will be as far better developed than any that now exist, as the best of the present ones are superior to the ourang outang. Here is my Creed, if that which is positively known can properly be called a mere creed:—

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equitable commerce

Josiah Warren, “On Education and Re-Education” (1865)

March 4, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
The grand secret of Education is to make the learner feel an interest in the thing to be learned. The founders of the prevailing systems not knowing any other way of interesting children in their studies, have sought to create an interest by the hope of factitious rewards and the fear of punishments; the one intending to stimulate a blind self-conceit, and the other destroying all self-respect, both of which may be equally fatal in after life.

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