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William B. Greene, Equality (1849)

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve finally got Equality, the first of Greene’s mutual banking books online. This is the 1849 work largely based on those still-elusive Worcester Palladium articles. Here’s the index: EQUALITY, NO. 1. The Banking System The Usury Laws Equal Laws and Equality Before The Laws The Currency The Currency—Its Evils—And Their Remedy EQUALITY, NO. II. To the Philosophers and Politicians. Solidarity The Formula of Labor Communism—Capitalism—Socialism Socialism in Massachusetts Liberty Readers of any of the later editions of Mutual Banking should recognize the 2nd, 4th and 5th sections of No. I, and readers of this blog will recognize the 3rd section […]

A first go at Google Books

November 22, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

After reading all sorts of newspaper coverage about the conflict between publishers and Google over the intellectual property rights issues involved with the Google Books scanning project, I decided to see what the project amounted to so far. I had been getting the “invitation” to try my searches on the new service for awhile, but hadn’t waded in. Having done so now, I have to say I’m underwhelmed. You’ve probably heard about the plan. Google will scan all the books in a number of libraries, setting things up so that the full text is searchable, but only a fraction within […]

Greene, Whittier, Brownson

November 15, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve posted two new biographical tidbits in the Libertarian Labyrinth. The first is from Annie Fields Author’s and Friends (1896), a collection of reminiscences. It tells the story of “the Bachiler eyes:” Old New England people were quick to recognize “the Bachiler eyes,” not only in the Whittiers, but in Daniel Webster, Caleb Cushing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Bachiler Greene, a man less widely known than these distinguished compatriots. Mr. Greene was, however, a man of mark in his own time, a daring thinker, and one who was possessed of much brave originality, whose own deep thoughtfulness was always planting […]

Taking Proudhon (and controversy) out of “Mutual Banking”

November 14, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

A funny thing happened on the way to the modern edition of William B. Greene’s Mutual Banking. We know that with Mutual Banking, as was so often the case with Greene’s work, the editorial refinement process over the years consisted largely of whittling away at his early works, Equality (1849) and Mutual Banking (1850), cutting down towards the kernel of occasionally sprawling explorations. The editors of Proudhon’s Solution to the Social Problem, who gave us the modern edition of Mutual Banking, only continued that trend. The result is a bit peculiar. While modern critics have at times taken pains to […]

Lord Acton on William Batchelder Greene

November 9, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I just read through Acton In America (Shepherdston: Patmos Press, 1979; S. W. Jackman, ed.). It’s a delightful, predictably opinionated read. It describes Lord Acton’s visit to the US in 1853, with entries covering New York, Boston and Emmitsburg, Maryland. Naturally, he met many of the prominent citizens of the cities. He seems to have liked Orestes Brownson as well as anyone he met. Richard Henry Dana took him to see the workings of the Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention, where he met William B. Greene. He apparently did not see Greene give the speech on the qualification of voters which […]

Edward Kellogg in “The Word”

November 4, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I was printing out a couple of issues of Ezra Heywood’s The Word, and ran across a listing of books available from the Heywoods’ Co-Operative Publishing Co. in 1873. William B. Greene’s then-newly-published The Blazing Star tops the list, followed by Mutual Banking. Then come two by Heywood: Yours and Mine and Uncivil Liberty. Josiah Warren’s True Civilization (the 1869 title; see Ronald Creagh’s great Warren bibliography for that convoluted publishing history), Lysander Spooner’s No Treason, and Joshua King Ingalls Land and Labor round out the list-along with one other, Edward Kellogg’s A New Monetary System. Kellogg’s work is an […]

“A Transcendentalist in Political Economy”

October 27, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Reading through William B. Greene’s various essays on New England Transcendentalism, perhaps the most puzzling question is: “Why does he care? What’s the Big Deal?” Greene clearly looked up to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and just as clearly tried to make that respect clear, even as he ripped into transcendentalism. He was not intellectually slavish in his admirations. By 1845, when he published the first of the works on transcendentalism, Greene had already made at least one attempt to rectify what he saw as errors in Orestes Brownson’s formulation of the “doctrine of life” and its consequences. Later, his use of […]

Edward Kellogg, 1790-1858

October 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Edward Kellogg’s Labor and Other Capital (1849) was one of the major sources, along with the works of Proudhon and William Beck’s Money and Banking (1839), from which William Batchelder Greene drew portions of his mutual bank theory. He differed from all of his sources in the measures he proposed, but, as was the case with his theological writings and the influence of Orestes Brownson, sometimes he appropriated large sections of the works he was reading, if only to turn them aside from their author’s trajectories. This was certainly the case with Kellogg, whose ideas about banking and interest were […]

William B. Greene’s Articles on Transcendentalism

October 25, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Bibliography: “Mr. Emerson and Transcendentalism.” American Whig Review (March 1845). “The Bhagvat Gheeta and the Doctrine of Immortality.” American Whig Review (September 1845). “Human Pantheism.” Spirit of the Age, I, 349. The first two essay were condensed into the 1849 pamphlet Transcendentalism, which was further condensed into “Human Pantheism,” and then revised into the 1871 Transcendentalism, which was reprinted in 1872 in The Blazing Star (probably from the same plates) with one additional, final paragraph added. A full bibliographic essay and content analysis is in preparation. MR. EMERSON AND TRANSCENDENTALISM. I. PERHAPS some of our readers are still ignorant of […]

Navigating the new library

October 22, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been pretty quiet here for awhile, mostly because the William B. Greene research has taken on a life of its own, not just because A Special Answer to a Special Prayer threatens to be about twice as long as I expected, or because the editing and republication of Greene’s works is at a particularly demanding stage (expect all of the versions of the work on transcendentalism, as well as a new bibliographical essay soon), but also because–to my great surprise–word of the nature of the work has prompted some new and very practical kinds of collaboration. Mutualism seems to […]