I had a happy coincidence of time and ambition today, with the result that the four issues of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Radical Review have joined Liberty in the archive. Once again, these are scans from microfilm, with all the defects you would expect, but I’ll be working to complete the OCR work on these in the near future. I have broken the 826 pages down by article (with an occasional pdf covering two or three book reviews.) Everything is linked from the oddly arranged contents page published in the bound volume. Use that one to browse, or go straight to Wendy McElroy’s much more complete index. There is a lot in these pages, including work by John Weiss, Sidney H. Morse, Lysander Spooner, Ezra H. Heywood, Henry Edger, Joshua King Ingalls, Dyer D. Lum, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Christopher P. Cranch, and other familiar names from anarchist and free religionist circles.
Contr'un
Archive upgrades, II
A thousand is a lot, when it is a thousand articles that have to be checked for complete citations, typos, and formatting, and assigned to enough categories and index pages to be findable. The work on cleaning up and standardizing the Libertarian Labyrinth archive has already been both a lot of work and a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned before, much of my accumulation of texts has been done at times when there was little leisure, or too much distraction, to take as much time with them as I would have liked. So while I’ve been doing a lot […]
Contr'un
Benjamin Tucker enters the fray
[ezcol_2third] On January 5, 1873, 18-year-old Benjamin R. Tucker sent a letter to Francis Abbot, the editor of The Index, the journal of the Free Religious Association. In it, he took Abbot to task for the following remarks: “Usury laws, in especial, which sometimes work great detriment to the business interests of whole communities, are in fact based upon the Bible conception that it is a crime to take interest for money loaned; although the common sense of mankind reject the notion in fact.” The free religionists were engaged in one of a series of attempts to reconstruct religion on […]
Anarchism
New Anarchist Platformist archive
Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches represented here, there are important issues being wrestled with in all of this stuff, and the more practical issues are not unlike those that any anarchist society will face as it attempts to give itself a working shape. I’m ultimately unsympathetic to the solutions offered by platformism, but value the […]