Anarchism Archives - Page 4 of 8 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Eliphalet Kimball—”Anarchy is a good word.”

April 27, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

As promised, here’s a bit more from Eliphalet Kimball. One of his early contributions to The Boston Investigator was “Law, Commerce, and Religion” (June 30, 1862). It may, in fact, be his earliest explicitly anarchist essay. And it’s a doozy—a mix of revolutionary and primitivist elements, written in fine ranting style. There’s something to amuse and/or offend pretty much any anarchist or libertarian. But, most importantly, there is the very existence of Kimball, a Yankee doctor calling for a very radical anarchy in the midst of the Civil War, as striking as he is unexpected. Here’s a taste: It is […]

John Adams, mutual bank advocate

April 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

With two other researchers now working on Josiah Warren, I’ve been trying (as regular readers will know) to get notes together and sources archived. It’s rather wonderful, I must say, to be working in a field so wide open that it’s a relief to find that someone else can make use of your research. One less book to write. My notes on The Boston Investigator turned out to be a little less complete than I had hoped, so I’ve been taking another look at those microfilm reels—no hardship since each pass through a literature as rich as this tends to […]

Josiah Warren bloglog

April 11, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Previous entries on Josiah Warren: Letter to Louis Kossuth Josiah Warren’s debt to Robert Owen Practical application of the cost principle in Massachusetts, 1863 Co-operation – Alfred B. Westrup Josiah Warren, The First American Anarchist To The Friends Of The Equal Exchange Of Labor In The West A Poem on Equitable Commerce Benjamin Tucker enters the fray Henry Edger, a Positivist Priest at Modern Times From the Boston Investigator, 1848-49, Pt. 1

An early mutual banking proposal

April 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m wrapping up my first exploration of The Spirit of the Age (a little more rapidly than I had hoped, thanks to an Interlibrary Loan mix-up), and am already planning a road trip to scan more of this really important mutualist paper. My lengthy side-trip, from the William B. Greene research through the work of Joshua King Ingalls and ultimately to The Spirit of the Age, has paid an unexpected dividend (if, in this context, I can safely speak about the paying of dividends)—a discussion of Mutual Banking in the 1850 volume which casts Greene’s work in a somewhat different […]

J. K. Ingalls, “Address to Commonwealers”

April 2, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Joshua King Ingalls, “Address to Commonwealers,” The Twentieth Century, XIII, 2 (July 12, 1894), 11. ADDRESS TO COMMONWEALERS BY J. K. INGALLS. Hirelings who for gold have bled!Voters to polls by bosses led!Toilers, begging “work or bread,” Strike for Liberty!Now’s the day and now’s the hour!Cease to court the oppressors’ power!Who threaten, bribe, while they devour Your fruits of industry. Decline their deal the ballot boxTheir “leaden diet” cartridge box!Detective trick and brutal knocks! Brave thought against them try!In no “god of battles trust!”Give nor take what is not just!And only die, when die you must, As man for man […]

Proudhon, The Coming Era of Mutualism

March 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is a translation of one of Proudhon’s earliest discussions of mutualism—”une théorie de MUTUALITÉ,” in the original—from the System of Economic Contradictions [V. II, 527-9]. It appeared in The Spirit of the Age I no. 7 (August 18, 1849), 107-8. I have appended the original French text as well. THE COMING ERA OF MUTUALISM. From the “System of Contradictions in Political Economy,” BY P. J. PROUDHON. If I am not deceived, my readers must be convinced at least of one thing, that Social Truth is not to be looked for either in Utopia or in the Old Routine; that […]

J. K Ingalls’ Reminiscences, etc

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

With someplace friendly to put it, I’m starting to clean out my backlog of material. The second dump to From the Libertarian Library consists of material from the Boston Investigator by Lewis Masquerier and material from Joshua King Ingalls, including the first five chapter of his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform, with some of the annotations that I’ll be including in the in-progress print edition. UPDATE: All of Ingalls’ Reminiscences, except for the Appendix, which consists of a few later writings, is now available online. I think students of mutualism, and of radical […]

A little rearranging

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve decided, in the interest of going easy on my readers here, and on various feeds and aggregators where this blog is now available (such as the new leftlibertarian.org site), to limit the number of full texts I post. I feel like there is sufficient “market” for the texts in the blogosphere to keep posting them somewhere where they can easily be accessed via an RSS feed, and through Technorati and other search services. But I would like to make this blog and Travelling in Liberty leaner and more readable than they have been. In order to make that happen, […]

J. K. Ingalls – Relations, Existing and Natural

March 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Progress! I’ve been working on my scanning process, and have managed to nearly double my speed with a new approach to the OCR work. This should mean, in the long run, much better progress over on Travelling in Liberty, which constantly suffers from my desire to have the texts available when I comment on them. In the short run, it means something of a backlog of texts from The Twentieth Century, including a dozen or so by J. K. Ingalls. Check the Ingalls bibliography for updates and links. On the hand-transcription front, progress as well. Here is the fourth and […]

Fragments of Proudhon on Property and Liberty

March 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Some Proudhonian fragments, recently translated:The phrase “la propriété, c’est la liberté” appears in the Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1867, Lacroix, p.128) and in the posthumous Théorie de la propriété, (1867, Lacroix, p. 183) where Proudhon writes as if he had said that in 1846, in the System of Economic Contradictions. What he says in the 1846 is actually this, as far as I can tell: “Property, with regard to facts and to rights, is essentially contradictory, and it is for this reason that it is anything at all. Indeed, Property is the right of occupation, and at the same time […]