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Liberty archive: phase 1 complete!

July 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]

Liberty Site update

July 21, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

401 issues of Liberty and Libertas are now available in the archive. That leaves only 10 issues of Liberty to go! I should be able to complete this phase tomorrow. Next up: A more complete proposal for The Liberty Site—a rather ambitious scheme to answer, hopefully in the positive, the question: Can Liberty be the mother of order?

And you thought “Lucifer” was an unfortunate name…

July 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Yes, Virginia, there are worse names for your radical journal than Lucifer the Light-Bearer, although that may not be immediately clear. When Lucifer changed its name and format, becoming the American Journal of Eugenics, it was considered by many a step in the right direction, towards a more staid, respectable image that would appeal to more Americans. Bolton Hall, for example, wrote in to express his approval of the changes. The masthead of the new journal was, like that of Lucifer, quite striking. What do think, shall I have some t-shirts made? I’m afraid, however, that the American Journal of […]

Proudhon’s 1848 “Toast to the Revolution”

July 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

It is with more than a bit of fear and trepidation that I embark on a new phase of my mutualist researches, with a working translation of Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution.” I neglected my French studies for a good couple of decades, before returning a year or so back to tackle the untranslated portions of Proudhon and the writings of a few of his contemporaries. It has been an interesting year, bringing myself back up to speed, and learning to read at a level I had never really attempted as a student. There are undoubtedly some mistakes in the […]

Proudhon at Google Books

July 16, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

As I mentioned in the last post, Google Books’ search engines do miraculous things sometimes, the sort of miraculous things that make finding anything an iffy proposition. I make no claims for the completeness of the list that follows. Finding what I did find was something of an adventure. However, I can happily announce that most of Proudhon’s major work is available, if not obviously so, on Google Books. Volumes undoubtedly lack pages, have text obscured by the fingers of workers, are blurred or bleed of the edge of the screen, but these are just the things we are learning […]

Google Books is hiding things again

July 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

More stupid search engine tricks. Back in May, I noted some peculiarities of Google Books’ search engines. If you follow the links from that original post, you will notice some new peculiarities, including the disappearance of the 1849 Amos E. senter edition of Equitable Commerce from the results for: inauthor:josiah inauthor:warren. That important edition is still available from Google Books; you can follow the link above to see what Equitable Commerce looked like before Stephen Pearl Andrews edited it. But it, and one other listing, no longer show up in a general search for Warren’s work. There are still five […]

Bits of Liberty’s History

July 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Labors of love are notoriously bad at paying the rent, and other work has been a little slow, so I’m digging into my personal archive a bit to keep a roof over my head while I work on the Josiah Warren book and Liberty archive. I was fortunate enough, some years ago, to pick up a lot of original issues of Liberty, along with a few related items: letterhead stationary from the Liberty offices and the portrait of Michael Bakunin which Tucker claimed was the first faithful likeness published in the United States. I have put one each of the […]

Burke + Warren, 1850

July 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

In an article on “Anarchism in England Fifty Years Ago,” reprinted in the February 1906 issue of Liberty, Max Nettlau discussed two very early anarchist publications printed in England. One of these was an edition of Edmund Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society, published By Holyoake and Co., in 1850, under the title The Inherent Evils of all State Governments Demonstrated. The particular interest in this edition of Burke’s work comes from the Appendix which followed it, probably the work of Ambrose C. Cuddon, in which Josiah Warren’s “system” (he hated the word but…) of equitable commerce is presented as an […]

Reading around / Dyer D. Lum’s Alarm

July 9, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been reading pretty broadly lately, pulling together articles related to the Liberty archive project and Utopia, OH, the Josiah Warren anthology. That’s taken me into the pages of The Egoist, where Benjamin Tucker, Bolton Hall, and Stephen Byington shared pages with the likes of Ezra Pound, and fairly familiar debates about the nature of egoism and anarchism appeared alongside early reviews of Italian Futurism. It’s also taken me into the pages of Max Nettlau’s 1897 Bibliographie de l’Anarchie, which I had never tackled before, and which has been full of pleasant surprises. A steady regimen of Proudhon translation has […]

Cohn and Wilbur, What’s Wrong with Postanarchism

July 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

What’s Wrong With Postanarchism? http://www.anarchist-studies.org/article/articleview/26/1/1/ by Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur What is now being called “postanarchism” by some thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word, thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the post- prefix applies to its new object as well—implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete. Together, these two senses of the word form a narrative: […]