Blog - Page 239 of 286 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Sidney H. Morse’s alternate history of equitable commerce

September 5, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Tucked away in the pages of Liberty, Sidney H. Morse, Josiah Warren’s literary executor, contributed an odd item, a kind of “what-if” history of Robert Owen’s New Harmony, as if, at the critical moment, Josiah Warren’s equitable commerce had been the model for continuing on after the failure of the original project. The story, Liberty and Wealth, may be the very best introduction I know of to Warren’s thought as filtered through another individuality. There is a difficulty in dealing with Warren’s writings, since he insisted that, in practice, equitable commerce must be based in a complete individualization of interests […]

The Ethics of the Homestead Strike

August 30, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

In his Liberty review of William Bailie’s The First American Anarchist, Clarence L. Swartz noted that, “Sidney H. Morse, the sculptor, was, during the last two years of Warren’s life, his most active propagandist. Furthermore, Morse’s efforts were so great that they did not fail of appreciation by Warren, and the latter showed his full recognition of their value by making Morse his literary executor.” Morse is one of those major figures who never seems to get quite the attention he deserves. He was the editor of The Radical, a contributor to The Radical Review, as well as to Liberty, […]

Constitutions and Organic Bases

August 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Tomorrow night’s discussion at Laughing Horse Books will be on “Panarchy and Pantarchy, with a brief look at Proudhon’s theory of the state.” As I told the collective yesterday, “It will be breezier than it sounds.” I had initially meant to pair Paul Émile de Puydt’s 1860 “Panarchy,” which proposes a free market in governments, just with some documents relating to Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Pantarchy, which was an anarchistic outlier, from roughly the same year, strongly influenced by August Comte and heavy on voluntary hierarchy, with Andrews expecting to find himself, voluntarily, pretty much at the top of the heap. […]

Missing pieces

August 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been working on a collection of short biographies of radical figures, sort of an introductory miscellany, and had been translating Elisée Reclus’ “John Brown” to include there. Gallica has a rough, but readable scan of what appears to be a pamphlet version of the text. Now that I’ve translated it, it also appears to be an incomplete version. Some text, probably at least a few lines, is pretty clearly missing. Brown’s capture, trial and death seem to have disappeared between one line and the next. This looks like an “original” error, rather than a recent scanning error. It’s still […]

Radical History night at Laughing Horse

August 9, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

A new weekly event, at Laughing Horse Books! R@dical History SeriesMAJOR MOMENTS, MINOR MOVEMENTS, LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS, CONTROVERSIES, AND CHARACTERS. EACH WEEK: A SHORT, INFORMAL PRESENTATION, FOLLOWED BY COFFEE-DRINKING AND DISCUSSION. AUGUST TOPICS: 8/12: P.-J. Proudhon and “Property is theft!” (Theme and Variations) A survey of the uses to which Proudhon put his famous phrase. 8/19: Panarchy and Pantarchy: Hierarchy in a free society P. E. Depuydt and Stephen Pearl Andrews push the envelope of anarchy. 8/26: Anarchists as Inventors: From desk-top publishing 1830-style to the Lysander Spooner’s “elastic bottom.” With Shawn P. Wilbur (Laughing Horse Collective, Alliance of the Libertarian […]

August 6, 1945

August 6, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

A repost, but one appropriate for the day: Guinea-Pig Fleet: Hiroshima Tattoo

I need a technical assist

July 28, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been pushing ahead with plans to equip one of my wikis for a group transcription/translation of Proudhon’s collected works. The tools developed at Wikisource are in many ways pretty slick, and it looks like they will be adaptable to all the needs of the project. My only problem is that they use the djvu format, and I am living in an all-Macintosh house at the moment. If there’s anyone out there who has the capability to do some pdf-to-djvu conversion for me, I can do the rest of the work to get the OCR work done and the raw […]

What Is Property? Chapter 2, part 3 notes

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Just a bit more on Destutt-Tracy: on page 61-2, there is one of the clearest expressions of Proudhon’s argument that a significant amount of property theory rests on a semantic slide, and it comes in the context of one of Proudhon’s few direct encounters with the concept of self-ownership. Here’s Proudhon: “Shameful equivocation, not justified by the necessity for generalization! The word property has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say the properties […]

The unfinished business of Liberty, III

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Just a note on the last post: the addition of the tools for translation will also mean the possibility of more efficient transcription of the pdf files of Liberty. If you can’t translate, but can read and type, there might be some of this unfinished business you could help finish.

The unfinished business of Liberty, II

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s do something big! A side thread, during a rather distracted week on the Proudhon seminar list, has involved the possibility of tackling the untranslated portions of Proudhon’s writings in a collaborative setting. I’ve bounced this notion off of a few friends and allies, without a lot of response, but having someone else suggest it reminds me how much I really want to get the job done. There are tools for Mediawiki that should make the two-step process of transcribing and then translating the works. The structure of a wiki ought to make it easy for the participants to also […]