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
Transcribing Liberty
There is a new initiative to systematically transcribe the contents of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty, a project near and dear to my heart, but one I’ve never found enough support for to pursue seriously and consistently. Put Transcribing Liberty in your blogroll and show some love for this sort of difficult, and all too frequently thankless, sort of work.
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 […]
mutualism
John Gray (1799-1883)
John Gray, best known for his Lecture on Human Happiness, is frequently listed among the earliest of mutualists. Certainly, he was an important figure among the more-or-less-Owenite socialists of the mid-1820s. His Lecture was cited by the “Mutualist” of 1826. But we know that at least some of the accounts of this “first mutualist moment” are at least a bit garbled, particularly where Gray is involved. I’m still deciding how to classify Gray’s contribution to the history of mutualism, but the work has recently become easier, thanks to the appearance of a number of digital editions of Gray’s works. The […]