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At its limits, tolerance can be explosive, deadly. In our readings about religious conflicts in colonial New England, we’ve seen that the stakes of differences of opinion could be raised to the point where those outside the envelope of acceptable beliefs could be banished or even killed. Remember that one of the primary sparks for the American Revolution was the passage of the “Intolerable Acts” in 1774. We generally think of tolerance as sort of a warm, fuzzy affair, but its flipside, intolerance, suddenly takes us into an entirely different terrain. There comes a point when we simply can’t or […]

This is the third in a series of explorations of the mutualist tradition—or, perhaps more appropriately, traditions. The particular perspective they present is, as I’ve said, somewhat revisionist. It has been some time since I’ve posted in this series. My decision to tackle some of Proudhon in the original French has created productive delays. In the meantime, allow me to present… THE MUTUALIST,Or, Practical Remarks on the Social System of Mutual Cooperation. 1826. In the first entry in this series, I mentioned this series of five letters to the New Harmony Gazette, which Bestor notes as the first published use […]

The materials we are looking at this week all revolve around questions of religious tolerance, and the more extreme consequences of stepping “outside the envelope” of what could be tolerated in Puritan Massachusetts. The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647) is the classic statement in defense of intolerance. Roger Williams’ writings are generally taken as the model for a more tolerant approach. (See The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution; Williams timeline) The Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations – July 15, 1663, which grew out of the Rhode Island settler’s conflicts with Massachusetts, incorporates the principle of religious tolerance: noe person […]

As it turns out, physician and temperance reformer Diocletian (“Dio”) Lewis (1823-1886) was a friend of Lysander Spooner, and Spooner features in Lewis’ book, Talks about People’s Stomachs (1870). I was unfamiliar with Lewis until yesterday when, as fate would have it, I dug up both his account of Spooner’s eating habits and a biography of Rev. Jesse Henry Jones (who debated William B. Greene in the pages of The Word) which also mentions him. Anyway, without further ado, here is the first of two sections related to Spooner: One Meal a Day. The Greek and Roman armies ate but […]

I’ve resumed my work extracting significant debates from The Index with an 1876 exchange between Ezra H. Heywood and Elizur Wright on the “Family Bank.” Heywood takes the standard anti-usury line, while Wright, who was an important reformer in the insurance business, takes what he believes is a more practical tack. There is plenty of work to be done in fleshing out the context of this debate. I would also be unsurprised to find a continuation in the volume for 1877. Stay tuned. . . Other collected Index debates: 1873: Tucker, Abbott, et al, on Usury 1876: Tucker vs. Andrews […]

After a long, complicated set of negotiations and near-misses, I’ve scheduled a first seminar at the local progressive campus ministry. Initially, we had talked about something focusing on William B. Greene in his role as Christian minister, but the pastor has asked me if I would do something with a broad, ecumenical appeal—while still drawing largely from my work on religion and liberty. In the end, we came up with “Models of Christian Charity,” a seminar starting with Winthrop’s “Modell” and working forward. I’ll post details as I get them worked out, but this is a potentially very interesting line […]

If you’ve been putting off taking a look at some of the goodies on Google Books because of the inconvenience of paging through volumes, there is some good news. Many of the “full view” titles are now downloadable as pdf files. That doesn’t mean the scans themselves are any better, alas, but it is much easier to deal with what’s available. I’ll be compiling some “user’s guides” to the anarchist material available, as I get time to check over the pdfs and see what is and isn’t usable.

Now we tackle the most difficult of our preliminary questions: What is a Great Idea? We’ve already talked a bit about “greatness,” but the other half of the term threatens to get at least as complicated. My big old 1919 Webster’s has the following definitions: 1. An archetype or pattern; a conception of any perfection; an ideal; hence, in a less exalted sense, a preliminary or imperfect conception or construction; a plan, outline, sketch, or draft;—now usually restricted to a plan or purpose of action; an intention or design.2. The embodying form or exemplar of a conception, person, or thing; […]

I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on a fragile inter-library loan copy of Alfred Westrup’s The Abolition of Interest, and will be transcribing it over the next couple of days. The bibliography is even a little more convoluted than I had guessed. This earliest pamphlet contains about half of The Financial Problem, so it is indeed the “first edition” of that work, but it also contains an important section that would be developed in Citizen’s Money, making it, by the same logic, something like the first edition of that work. This is the reverse of the bibliographic problem […]

As part of the process of tackling “great ideas,” we’ll be doing a certain amount of meta-talking—talking about what we’re talking about, and why we’re talking about it in the first place, or why we’re talking about it in a particular way, when we could be talking about it in so many other ways. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most inescapable one is this: “Greatness” is a “great idea.” Those of you with a little background in critical thinking should have red flags appearing in that part of your brain that marks logical flaws […]