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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 […]

1842: William B. Greene at 22 (“First Principles”)

October 5, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] William Batchelder Greene’s first major work was an essay titled “First Principles,” which appeared in the transcendentalist periodical The Dial, in January 1842. Greene was, at the time, just starting his exploration of theology. His martial poem, “Song of Espousal,” had been written only two years before, while he was serving in Florida during the Second Seminole War. Still only 22, Greene was going through some rapid changes in his life. His religious conversion was little more than a year before, and his introduction into transcendentalist circles, in part through the […]

1853: William B. Greene at 34

October 4, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

In 1853, William B. Greene had resigned from his position as pastor of a West Brookfield church, but had not yet settled himself in Paris, where he would stay until his return in 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War. Greene was 34 years old, was married to “the belle of Boston,” and had two children, one of them only a couple of years old. He was financially comfortable, but politically unsettled by the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (to which some attribute his resignation and emigration). He was on the tail end of one of the […]

Homeland Security: now we see what we’re paying for

September 15, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] Perhaps the hardest thing to take about the botched federal response to Katrina is that it was largely perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security. Since 9/11, we’ve been encouraged to believe that the erosion of privacy rights and civil liberties was part of a trade-off, and in return we would get greater security at home. Yet we see what appears to be a weakened FEMA and a national economy already strained by the “war on terror” abroad. We see no signs of an intelligent response to oil dependency, global warming or Gulf Coast wetlands degredation and land loss. […]