Anarchism Archives - Page 3 of 8 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

William Beck’s “Money and Banking”

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Money and Banking, Or Their Nature and Effects Considered (Cincinnati, 1839), published, and presumably written, by William Beck, was one of the major sources of William B. Greene’s mutual bank writings. It has also been the most difficult one to access in its entirety, since the microfilm, which is relatively common, has a number of unreadable pages, thanks to an early era of sloppy reproduction. A quick look suggests that this is one that Google Books got right. One more piece in place for the critical edition of Equality and Mutual Banking (1850), which will be my top priority, once […]

Onward and upward!

November 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m obviously disappointed about the early cancellation of the “Roots of American Anarchism” course, but I’ve also already done much of the work to make the course possible. I had already started breaking the graduate-level course down into undergrad/continuing education-sized bites. What I am currently trying to make happen is a 12-week course covering European philosophical roots, Fourier, some early Proudhon, the 1826 Mutualist, John Gray, Paul Brown, Thomas Skidmore and a lot of Josiah Warren. This would be an expansion of the early phases of the announced course and, if successful, would probably be followed by a similar course […]

Educational counter-institutions, I

October 31, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Thanks to those who have responded, either on the blog or through email, to my post on the “Roots of American Anarchism” course. I suspect that our pilot course online will fall somewhere between self-paced instruction and a basic online seminar, or, more likely, that we’ll end up offering both options. There is no reason not to offer options tailored to a variety of learning styles and schedules. I’m open, and I think a viable educational counter-institution has to be open, to a great deal of user-customization of the process. That means being willing to provide a bare minimum, as […]

“Roots of American Anarchism” course, and Beyond(?)

October 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Well, it looks now like a fairly sure thing that I’ll be teaching a graduate-level course on “The Roots of American Anarchism.” This course is really concerned with the roots of the American anarchist traditions, and with their earliest flowerings. I’ve been half-joking that I would follow the development only up to about the time that the term “anarchism” came into widespread use. In realtity, I’ll go a little further than that, but not a lot. The course is for students of American Culture Studies, but we’ll also spend quite a bit of time looking at European sources.I’m pretty excited […]

Tucker’s “Radical Review”

August 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I had a happy coincidence of time and ambition today, with the result that the four issues of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Radical Review have joined Liberty in the archive. Once again, these are scans from microfilm, with all the defects you would expect, but I’ll be working to complete the OCR work on these in the near future. I have broken the 826 pages down by article (with an occasional pdf covering two or three book reviews.) Everything is linked from the oddly arranged contents page published in the bound volume. Use that one to browse, or go straight to […]

Questions on anarchism and ecology, roughly. . .

June 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Rough notes in response to this week’s Carnival of Anarchy: I had a rare chance to sit and talk with my father face to face a couple of weeks ago. He’s a retired civil servant, who in a career with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service worked on a range of environmental issues from game management to endangered species recovery. We were talking about the weakening of endangered species protection and about the environmental damage likely to be done in the Rio Grande Valley by the immigration “fence,” and he challenged me a bit about how anarchism of the […]

Hippolyte Havel on Voltairine de Cleyre

June 7, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Hippolyte Havel, “Introduction,” in Voltairine de Cleyre; Alexander Berkman, ed., Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, New York: Mother Earth, 1914, 5-14. Introduction “NATURE has the habit of now and then producing a type of human being far in advance of the times; an ideal for us to emulate; a being devoid of sham, uncompromising, and to whom the truth is sacred; a being whose selfishness is so large that it takes in the whole human race and treats self only as one of the great mass; a being keen to sense all forms of wrong, and powerful in denunciation […]

Three by Kropotkin

May 2, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Prince Peter Kropotkin was a regular contributor to The Nineteenth Century, and his essays were widely reprinted. Here are three of his contributions to that journal. Peter Kropotkin, The Coming Anarchy Peter Kropotkin, The Scientific Bases of Anarchy Peter Kropotkin, The Morality of Nature

Tucker on Right and Rights, 1882

May 1, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

There have been a series of discussions / arguments / pointless pissing contests in recent months, revolving around the question of just what sorts of property, and what sorts of actions, are authorized by mutualist theory. Mutualism begins—literally, in Proudhon’s What Is Property?—with a sense that “property” may be a problem without a really satisfactory solution. What, then, does that mean about the mutualist understanding of property relations, particularly in a setting where other property systems may be in place, or in competition. The short answer is probably that mutualism authorizes very little. If the best we can do is […]

William B. Greene, Communism vs. Mutualism

April 28, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[This is a repost, probably the first of several, highlighting some of the more important statements about the philosophy of mutualism. Long-time readers and students of mutualism should note, particularly as I did not note it myself before, Greene’s apparent adoption of the “cost principle,” and the linked principle of deferred and social profit: “so much as the individual laborer will then get over and above what he has earned will come to him as his share in the general prosperity of the community of which he is an individual member.” That does not mean, however, that Greene had jumped […]