It has been well over a decade since I started piecing together the pieces of mutualist history. At the time, the work had a curious urgency, as the handful of us who had gravitated to the “mutualist” label had a lot of ground to cover in order to really understand just what we had implicated ourselves in. The specific project of sketching all that early history is one in which I have invested less energy as the years went on, but I’ve never stopped documenting the bits of history that I have found. The links here will form an evolving and definitely incomplete history of the various tendencies that have been called “mutualist,” but I think even this fragmentary documentary history is quite useful for those now facing the same questions we did a decade ago.
I’m now in the midst of updating and consolidating this material, as I start to work on a book-length history of mutualism.
PROJECT PAGE: What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with Our Anarchist Past
AUTHOR PAGES:
- William Batchelder Greene (1819–1878)
 - Joshua King Ingalls (1816–1898)
 - Eliphalet Kimball (1800–1890)
 - Dyer D. Lum (1839–1893)
 - Lewis Masquerier (1802–1888)
 
What Mutualism Was:
An Incomplete History of Mutualist Tendencies
- Mapping Mutualism
 - Prehistories
- Notes on the origins of the term “mutualism” (1822-1850)
 
 - The Kernel(?) of the Problem(?)
 - “The Mutualist” (1826)
 - A Documentary History of the Movement for Equitable Commerce (1827–1905)
 - Early uses of the term “capitalisme” in French
 - “Protest of the Mutuellistes” (Lyon, 1834)
 - Lewis Masquerier in “The Free Enquirer” (1834)
 - Lewis Masquerier in “The Crisis” (1834)
 - Lewis Masquerier in “The New Moral World” (1836–1841)
 - Stephen Pearl Andrews in the Journal of the American Temperance Union (1837–1838)
 - Jules Leroux declares that “property is theft” (1838)
 - Edward Kellogg, 1790-1858
- Edward Kellogg in “The Word”
 - Godek Gardwell (Edward Kellogg) to the Merchants’ Magazine
 - Edward Kellogg, “Remarks upon Usury”
 
 - Joshua King Ingalls among the Universalists (1840–1847)
 - William B. Greene in the Second Seminole War (1840)
 - William B. Greene at 22: “First Principles” (1842)
 - Pierre Leroux in “The Present” and “The Spirit of the Age” (1843–1849)
 - Declaration of Independence, of the Producing from the Non-Producing Class (1844)
 - William B. Greene’s Articles on Transcendentalism (1845-1872)
 - Thomas and Maria L. Varney—The other “Equitable Commerce” of 1846
 - Joshua King Ingalls in “The Univercœlum” (1847–1849)
 - Maria L. Varney in “The Herald of Truth” (1847–1848)
 - William B. Greene in “The Worcester Palladium” (1848–1868)
 - “A Transcendentalist in Political Economy” (1849)
 - 1850: The Hotbed of Mutual Banking Agitation
 - Mutualist Townships: Albert Brisbane and J. K. Ingalls (1849–1850)
 - Burke + Warren, 1850
 - 1853: William B. Greene at 34
 - John Adams, mutual bank advocate
- “Social Reform” (1854)
 
 - William Pare on equitable commerce (1854)
 - A glimpse of William B. Greene in 1854
 - Practical application of the cost principle in Massachusetts (1863)
 - French mutualism beyond Proudhon
 - Mutualists in the First International
 - Lewis Masquerier’s “Sociology” Reconstructed (1869–1877)
 - “I hope to do some work for the Labor Cause…” (Benj. R. Tucker, 1872)
 - Angela T. Heywood in “The Word” (1873–1881)
 - “Josiah Warren” (poem) (1874)
 - Sidney H. Morse, “Liberty and Wealth” (1882)
 - James L. Walker (“Tak Kak”) in “Liberty” (1885–1903)
 - William Bailie in “Liberty” (1891–1906)
 - J. K. Ingalls, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (1897)