Blog - Page 285 of 286 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

On Why You Can’t Beat a (Real) Book for Research

August 10, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Something wasn’t looking right. It certainly seemed unlikely to me that the scholars of transcendentalism, who, after all, have been mining a very small body of texts for a very long time now, could have missed a signed article by a noted, if not central figure, in the transcendentalist journal. And they didn’t. A little time in the archives this morning proved what I had begun to suspect from a close look at the electronic texts – there is only one article by William B. Greene in the Dial, but there are two listed in APS Online, separately indexed, without […]

Just a bit more on Greene and Transcendentalism

August 8, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

Philip F. Gura has a useful article, “Beyond Transcendentalism: The Radical Individualism of William B. Greene,” in a collection called Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Mass. Historical Soc., 1999), edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. He concentrates on Greene’s philosophical and theological writings from the 1840s, but also speculates a bit on Greene’s reasons for leaving the pulpit in West Brookfield in 1850. Greene’s relationship to Orestes Brownson, who was an important early mentor, is also explored a bit. Dean Grozdin’s American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002) adds a […]

William B. Greene, “Song of Espousal” (1840)

August 7, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

We find in the “TOKEN” for 1841, the following beautiful poem from the pen of Lieut. GREENE, son our our esteemed Postmaster, Nathaniel Greene, Esq. It breathes the very soul of martial poesy, and resembles in spirit the celebrated “Sword Song” of Kerner, which once rung through the German forces, calling them to valiant deeds.–Boston Eve. Gazette

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Mutualist and transcendentalist bits — William B. Greene

August 6, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

William Batchelder Greene (1818-1878), the “American Proudhon,” is a strangely underdocumented character, given his importance to the individualist anarchist tradition. He has yet to find his biographer, though many of his contemporaries considered his life interesting enough to mention in other contexts. This entry from George Willis Cooke’s Historical and Biographical Introduction to the Rowfant Club reprint of The Dial gathers some of those accounts (and I have gathered the relevant text in the Libertarian Labyrinth.) We know that there are articles and letters in periodicals going back into the early 1840s which have, at best, been mentioned as sources […]

Radical Parables

August 2, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] As I’ve been immersing myself in Bolton Hall’s work lately, I’ve been finding that nearly half of the book-length works consist of parables of one sort or another. The parable form is fairly common among radical writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before he wandered off into anti-semitism and eugenic speculation, Morrison Isaac Swift, the anti-imperialist, wrote a collection of entertaining short fictions, nearly all of which amount to radical parables. A number of Mary Marcy’s books published by Charles H. Kerr took the form of socialist parables. Of course, these latter works were a bit […]

Readings at Random: How the Doctors At Last Agreed

August 1, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] How the Doctors At Last Agreed A patient with a rope twisted tight around his fee was brought to the Sociologic Hospital. His skin was chafed and bruised by the cord, and fever burned him so that he was like to perish outright. Said Dr. Divine: “We must first make you and your fellows religious, so that you won’t come to such dreadful straights.” “No,” said Dr. Socialis; “first do away with competition, which makes men enemies, then if the patient needs religion, it may be administered.” Dr. Charitas said: “Good homes would prevent all this. Now here is […]

Post-anarchism: Instead of an Essay

July 28, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] I see that the Postanarchist list has landed back at the old digs at Yahoogroups, since the demise of the Spoon Collective, and that founder/moderator Jason Adams is blogging at Immanent Multiplicity. For those of you unfamiliar with postanarchism, it’s an attempt to bring together elements of poststructuralist philosophy with anarchism. Todd May’s Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism marks one of the origins of postanarchism, although the term was coined by Saul Newman, author of From Bakunin to Lacan. The Institute for Anarchist Studies made space for a debate on the subject in 2003. Saul Newman contributed The Politics […]

Not Our Grandparents’ War, etc

July 24, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] Apparently, i’m not the only one who can’t make sense of the whole war narrative. Tom Shanker has an interesting piece in the New York Times today, called “All Quiet on the Home Front, and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why.” It begins: The Bush administration’s rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war. Overall, it hasn’t been the cheeriest news day, and the Times features stories on […]

More research plan

July 21, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] My library is nearly unpacked, after the move, and i’ve been sifting through material, trying to get a handle on things, so i can proceed in a more or less orderly manner. Because i want this manuscript to be useful as a broad history of mutualism, and as a tool for orienting more specific studies (both my own and others’), i’ve decided to organize it as on a year-by-year basis (or as close to year-by-year as the material requires.) I’ll combine reports of relevant publications, organizations, births, deaths, and career highlights of prominent folks, with historical context and general […]

Government’s “Civil Defense Dilemma”

July 21, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] Just a follow-up to yesterday’s post: it seems there is a kind of basic contradiction at the heart of most government sponsored civil defense efforts. Such programs are necessary because, when push comes to shove, government resources alone are not sufficient to provide security in severe crises, so citizens are prepared to take over important government functions during those crises. Everything depends on making the standing government resources unnecessary, under certain very limited circumstances. Governments are reluctant to delegate authority, of course. To tell people that they can get along more or less by themselves, precisely at the moment […]