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From the Boston Investigator, 1848-49, Pt. 1

April 10, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I was contacted this afternoon by a reader of this blog who is working on a biography of Josiah Warren. Taking that together with Crispin Sartwell’s work on a Warren Anthology, Crispin’s Josiah Warren Project archive, and the work that I’ve been doing digging through the archives, it appears that Warren’s star is once again on the rise. Good news! I’ve been promising Crispin the results of my own work for awhile, so here’s a start. XVII, 49 (April 12, 1848) 3. THE “ANGLO SACSUN,”—The publishers of the Phonographic paper, by this name, printed in New York, have issued a […]

An early mutual banking proposal

April 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m wrapping up my first exploration of The Spirit of the Age (a little more rapidly than I had hoped, thanks to an Interlibrary Loan mix-up), and am already planning a road trip to scan more of this really important mutualist paper. My lengthy side-trip, from the William B. Greene research through the work of Joshua King Ingalls and ultimately to The Spirit of the Age, has paid an unexpected dividend (if, in this context, I can safely speak about the paying of dividends)—a discussion of Mutual Banking in the 1850 volume which casts Greene’s work in a somewhat different […]

J. K. Ingalls, “Address to Commonwealers”

April 2, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Joshua King Ingalls, “Address to Commonwealers,” The Twentieth Century, XIII, 2 (July 12, 1894), 11. ADDRESS TO COMMONWEALERS BY J. K. INGALLS. Hirelings who for gold have bled!Voters to polls by bosses led!Toilers, begging “work or bread,” Strike for Liberty!Now’s the day and now’s the hour!Cease to court the oppressors’ power!Who threaten, bribe, while they devour Your fruits of industry. Decline their deal the ballot boxTheir “leaden diet” cartridge box!Detective trick and brutal knocks! Brave thought against them try!In no “god of battles trust!”Give nor take what is not just!And only die, when die you must, As man for man […]

William Henry Van Ornum, “Co-operation” (1894)

April 1, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] There are whole books tucked away in the pages of the periodical literature, which have never seen separate publication. One of the pleasures of my current treasure hunt is finding some of those hidden books. William Henry Van Ornum, author of Why Government at All?, published his 19-part Co-operation in The Twentieth Century. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Co-Operation William Henry Van Ornum from the pages of The Twentieth Century, May 10–September 20, 1894 Introduction In England Its Ideal Ancient Co-operation Some Experiments Various Schemes Various Schemes European Credit Banks European Credit Banks European Credit […]

Mutualist Townships: Albert Brisbane and J. K. Ingalls (1849–1850)

March 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

In early 1850, The Spirit of the Age featured two proposals for a “mutualist township.” One, by Joshua King Ingalls, was a practical follow-up to his “Method of Transition.” The other was by Albert Brisbane, the well-known popularizer of Charles Fourier. Brisbane was also an acquaintance of Proudhon, having visited him in prison in France. In this sense, Brisbane had the most direct connection to the French mutualist tradition of any of the American writers in 1850. Greene would eventually meet Proudhon, later in the 1850s. What follows is, in a sense, Brisbane’s mutualist resumé, including his account of his […]

Proudhon, The Coming Era of Mutualism

March 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is a translation of one of Proudhon’s earliest discussions of mutualism—”une théorie de MUTUALITÉ,” in the original—from the System of Economic Contradictions [V. II, 527-9]. It appeared in The Spirit of the Age I no. 7 (August 18, 1849), 107-8. I have appended the original French text as well. THE COMING ERA OF MUTUALISM. From the “System of Contradictions in Political Economy,” BY P. J. PROUDHON. If I am not deceived, my readers must be convinced at least of one thing, that Social Truth is not to be looked for either in Utopia or in the Old Routine; that […]

J. K Ingalls’ Reminiscences, etc

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

With someplace friendly to put it, I’m starting to clean out my backlog of material. The second dump to From the Libertarian Library consists of material from the Boston Investigator by Lewis Masquerier and material from Joshua King Ingalls, including the first five chapter of his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform, with some of the annotations that I’ll be including in the in-progress print edition. UPDATE: All of Ingalls’ Reminiscences, except for the Appendix, which consists of a few later writings, is now available online. I think students of mutualism, and of radical […]

A little rearranging

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve decided, in the interest of going easy on my readers here, and on various feeds and aggregators where this blog is now available (such as the new leftlibertarian.org site), to limit the number of full texts I post. I feel like there is sufficient “market” for the texts in the blogosphere to keep posting them somewhere where they can easily be accessed via an RSS feed, and through Technorati and other search services. But I would like to make this blog and Travelling in Liberty leaner and more readable than they have been. In order to make that happen, […]

Samuel Leavitt, Anti-Malthus I (1880)

March 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is the first of two parts, originally published in The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, Aug 1880. Vol. 71, Iss. 2, p. 72-76. The author, Samuel Leavitt, was an associate of Joshua King Ingalls and George Jacob Holyoake. His work appeared in various of the Onieda colony publications, and in The Arena. In his Reminiscences, Joshua King Ingalls wrote: I should apologize perhaps to Mr. Samuel Leavitt, for not mentioning his name before. But he has been met on so many different platforms, I scarce know where to place him, particularly. We were in accord on the land […]

J. William Lloyd, “The World’s Future—A Prophecy” (1882)

March 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE WORLD’S FUTURE—A PROPHECY. I BELIEVE that a time is approaching when terrestrial nature, at least, will be in almost complete subjection to mankind. Man will then indeed be “the lord of creation.” The deserts will be turned into inland seas, or converted by irrigation into fertile and fruitful plains. The swamps will be ditched and drained until they become the very gardens of the earth, and the planting of malaria-destroying vegetation and other sanitary precautions will render them as healthful as the most salubrious locations. A similar plan to that […]