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September 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I am gradually bringing some long-term bibliographic projects up to the point where it will make sense to publish them. While I’m still a long way from having tracked down all the work by Josiah Warren, or Joshua King Ingalls—or even William Batchelder Greene—I have reached the point where I feel like the major works are located, and I can give some useful indications of what remains to be unearthed. The goal is a series of annotated reader’s guides, ranging in scale from extremely modest to quite extensive, and one important step towards the goal is to transform the Libertarian […]

“Jacques Bonhomme’s Vision,” a short story by Dyer D. Lum

September 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Through one of the narrowstreets of old Paris late one evening a man was carefully picking his way. Pavements, sidewalks, gutters, street-lamps were then unknown, save to the fewwho had penetrated into MoslemSpain. Save fromthe dimlight-shadows which occasionally flickered in the darkness before some open wine shop, there was no visible guide for a stranger, which evidently he was not, for he moved swiftly, passing the noisy mirth which came with the sound of clinking glasses, and only pausing to hug the wall when some carriage or cavalcade came rushing past, and then resuming his way in the street as if to avoid open cellarways near the houses.

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E. Armand on Sensual Pleasure

September 19, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

VARIATIONS SUR LA VOLUPTÉ Je sais que la volupté est un sujet dont vous n’aimez pas qu’on parle ou qu’on écrive. En traiter vous choque. Ou provoque chez vous la plaisanterie de mauvais aloi. Vous avez des livres dans votre bibliothèque qui embrassent presque toutes les branches de l’activité humaine. Vous possédez des dictionnaires et des encyclopédies. Vous comptez peut-être cent volumes sur une spécialité de la production manuelle. Et je ne parle pas des bouquins politiques ou sociologiques. Mais il n’y a pas sur vos rayons un seul ouvrage consacré à la volupté. Il y a des journaux qui […]

E. Armand, “On Sexual Liberty” (1916) (FR/EN)

September 19, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

In the past, I’ve translated a number of short essays by E. Armand, and thoroughly enjoyed reading several more, without entirely convincing myself that Armand is an important anarchist figure. The brand of Nietzschean individualism featured in the “Mini-Manual of the Individualist Anarchist” is interesting and sometimes suggestive. His writings on naturism and “amorous camaraderie” really do illuminate aspects of European individualist anarchism that are largely unknown to American anarchists. When I ran across his “De la liberté sexuelle” (published in 1916 in the corrected 2nd edition I worked from), it struck me as a useful bit of anarchist theory, […]

Dyer D. Lum, “The Fiction of Natural Rights”

September 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Fiction of Natural Rights. [Dyer D. Lum in Pittsburg Truth.] The very corner-stone of Anarchistic philosophy is often supposed to be a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer’s “First Principle” of equal freedom, that: “Every person has a natural right to do what he wills, provided that in the doing thereof he infringes not the equal rights of any other person.” Yet there lurks in the expression a fallacy that correct thought must repudiate, or we must carry with us a diagram explaining the meaning of the words we use. What are “natural rights?” In the middle ages school-men believed that […]

Claude Pelletier — “A Clear-Headed Socialist” — (1816-1880)

September 4, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Readers of this blog and The Mutualist should already know the name Claude Pelletier from my in-progress translation of The Socialist Soirées of New York (1873) and some mentions of his Socialist Dictionary. (I’ve also started a translation of his 1848 Solution of the Problem of Poverty.) Pelletier was one of that small, but important group of French anarchists who published much of their work while in America, and, like Joseph Dejacque, he was a member of the International Association of 1855-59. He was essentially a mutualist anarchist in his politics, though he preferred a series of terms of his […]

Hugh O. Pentecost’s “Twentieth Century”

August 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I suppose there are a lot of reasons why important radical publications get neglected. Some of those are a matter of scarcity, or difficulty and cost of access. For instance, The Boston Investigator is largely digitized online, provided you are willing to pay for access through one of the genealogy sites and are up to wrestling information from the rotten interfaces involved. The Twentieth Century, which was originally edited by Hugh O. Pentecost, was mostly microfilmed by the Library of Congress, but it suffers from a different sort of inaccessibility. There have been a lot of periodicals with very similar […]

Contr'un

Special “LeftLiberty+” Issue of “The Mutualist”

July 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m both streamlining the Corvus Editions catalog a bit for upcoming bookfairs and trying to assemble a more focused body of materials to serve as a background for the next couple of issues of The Mutualist. With those goals in mind, I’ve combined the most useful bits of my own writing from the two issues of LeftLiberty with the blog posts I reference, or expect to reference, most often, as a special issue of The Mutualist. The contents are: Mutualism: The Anarchism of Approximations Mutualist Musings on Property (including “The Gift Economy of Property, etc.) Note A (by Charles Fourier) […]

Early uses of the term “capitalisme” in French

July 19, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

The accounts of the early uses of the term “capitalism” have not kept up at all with the sources now available for research. For example, on Wikipedia we find: According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term capitalism was first used by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1854 in The Newcomes, where he meant “having ownership of capital.” Also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the term private capitalism in 1863. The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 and Pierre-Joseph […]

L. S. Bevington, “The Last Gasp of Propertyism”

July 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] It’s not much fun to be in a debate where the participants consistently talk past one another, but it can be fairly instructive to observe them. The debate in Tochatti’s Liberty is potentially instructive, while it certainly is not anything like a model for real meetings of minds. To recap: the communists of Liberty published the final section of Proudhon’s Theory of Property, together with a provocative argument that Proudhon’s stated personal preference for “Slavonic or Communal possession of land” somehow put “so-called Proudhonians” at odds with […]