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Since class members will be wrapping up their work for the semester with a response to Kevin Carson’s “A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance,” we need to spend a little time dealing with the two keywords: libertarian and green. Both terms are contested, and are claimed by significantly diverse political movements. Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for the term Libertarianism is useful, essentially dividing those who have claimed the term between libertarian socialist and libertarian capitalist traditions, while acknowledging that the two currents are united by a preoccupation with individual liberty. All libertarians are likely to be definable, positively, in terms of a commitment […]

Anyone who has used Google Books much is used to the odd scans of binding, covers, fingers, etc. Occasionally, we get something really special from their rather odd scanning methods. Check out this nice bit of Benjamin R. Tucker memorabilia, from the online edition of Proudhon’s Contradictions Politiques.

More proof that “full text” translates to something like randomly indexed. While searching for something else, I came across this letter from A MEMBER OF A COMMUNITY, the name used in the first few “Mutualist” letters, in the New Harmony Gazette, a week before the first of those appeared. The letter asks most of the questions answered in THE MUTUALIST, Or, Practical Remarks on the Social System of Mutual Cooperation [see pdf, intro], so it seems quite likely that the author is indeed the same. The question of which community the Mutualist was a member of has occupied some of […]

Teddy Bears, and squatting and police violence, oh my! Maybe you’re wondering what this particular title is doing here. Once upon a time, when I was pamphleting more than blogging, I very slightly detourned an old teddy bear title which was already pretty anarchist-friendly. Since teddy bears were initially prone to stirring up mischief, it didn’t take more than some very slight changes to make the bunch in The Teddy Bears’ House Underground into the cuddliest squat collective you’re likely to see. In full color. Enjoy!

The land bank tradition was aimed at providing a currency adequate to ordinary trade and improvement, generally alongside some form of government currency. The largely rural population suffered from shortages of currency, thanks to fluctuations in the supply of specie and various sorts of controls on the number of bills circulating which kept economic power in the hands of those with political clout. What the partisans of the land banks proposed was another form of “monetized credit.”

I’m currently working a lot on the years 1825-27 in America, the high-water mark period for Robert Owen’s influence in the U.S., as well as the period out of which the “Mutualist” of 1826 emerges. My search for clues to the identity and location of that early critic of Owen and contemporary of Josiah Warren was one of the things that convinced me to pursue the Distributive Passions project. Expect a sort of miscellany of period pieces here over the next week or so. MR. R. OWEN’S LETTER At Sea—New York Packet, October, 1825. Americans—I am again hastening to your […]

My notebooks are full of leading, if perhaps unanswerable, questions and what-if‘s regarding radical history. At one time, when my focus was on the tag-end of antebellum utopian socialism movements in the postbellum era, I began to work out some of my ideas in the form of speculative fiction: The Old Dispensation is a story of socialism in decay and disrepute, following a rag-tag caravan of old school radicals, who probably should have found new tricks, off to Oregon, where they ride their hobby-horses into an obscure and unexpected glory. I’ll be dusting off my accounts of Lanquist’s Exodus, Solly’s […]

God and Government: John Cotton, Letter to Lord Say and Sele (1636). John Winthrop, Essay Against the Power of the Church To Sit in Judgement on the Civil Magistracy (1637) Samuel Willard, The Character of a Good Ruler (1694) [edited; note potential source biases]; biography Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1740) Science and Theology: An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star (1665) [intro] Increase Mather, Heaven’s Alarm to the World (1692) [facsimile, skip intro]from Cotton Mather’s The Christian Philosopher: “On Comets” (1721) Mather Bayles, The Comet (1744) Jeremiah Newland’s […]

We have become accustomed to thinking that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. Debates over school science curricula—to pick one recent example—play out in the mass media as if only two polar positions were possible. Without question, there are people—believers in the absolutely literal truth of the whole Bible on one end, and militantly atheistic rationalists on the other—for whom there can be no middle ground, but the vast majority of Americans do not seem to fall into either of these extreme camps. The statistics frequently quoted by both extreme camps suggest that a majority of Americans find some […]