Contr'un Archives - Page 37 of 56 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Josiah Warren’s Last Letter (from The Index)

October 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

JOSIAH WARREN’S LAST LETTER [As our readers have been already informed, Mr. Josiah Warren, the author of True Civilization and other unpretentious little works on social reform, died In Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the fourteenth of April, at the age of seventy-five years. Although he was confined to his chamber during most of the winter, his mind was as vigorous as ever; and he took great interest in the articles on his “cost principle” which have been published from time to time in The Index. On the eleventh of April, he wrote the first of the following papers; but, not being […]

Lysander Spooner in “Liberty”

September 29, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve added a number of Lysander Spooner’s anonymous or pseudonymous contributions (as “O”) to Liberty to the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. Unsigned articles Lysander Spooner, “Distressing Problems,” Liberty 1, no. 7 (October 29, 1881): 3. Lysander Spooner, “Guiteau’s ‘Malice’,” Liberty 1, no. 10 (December 10, 1881): 2. Lysander Spooner, “Guiteau’s ‘Devilish Depravity’,” Liberty 1, no. 11 (December 24, 1881): 2. Lysander Spooner, “Guiteau’s Wit,” Liberty 1, no. 11 (December 24, 1881): 3. Lysander Spooner, “Justice Gray,” Liberty 1, no. 12 (January 7, 1882): 2. Lysander Spooner, “The Guiteau Experts,” Liberty 1, no. 12 (January 7, 1882): 2-3. Lysander Spooner, “Andover Theological […]

Archive upgrades

September 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I am gradually bringing some long-term bibliographic projects up to the point where it will make sense to publish them. While I’m still a long way from having tracked down all the work by Josiah Warren, or Joshua King Ingalls—or even William Batchelder Greene—I have reached the point where I feel like the major works are located, and I can give some useful indications of what remains to be unearthed. The goal is a series of annotated reader’s guides, ranging in scale from extremely modest to quite extensive, and one important step towards the goal is to transform the Libertarian […]

Dyer D. Lum, “The Fiction of Natural Rights”

September 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Fiction of Natural Rights. [Dyer D. Lum in Pittsburg Truth.] The very corner-stone of Anarchistic philosophy is often supposed to be a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer’s “First Principle” of equal freedom, that: “Every person has a natural right to do what he wills, provided that in the doing thereof he infringes not the equal rights of any other person.” Yet there lurks in the expression a fallacy that correct thought must repudiate, or we must carry with us a diagram explaining the meaning of the words we use. What are “natural rights?” In the middle ages school-men believed that […]

Hugh O. Pentecost’s “Twentieth Century”

August 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I suppose there are a lot of reasons why important radical publications get neglected. Some of those are a matter of scarcity, or difficulty and cost of access. For instance, The Boston Investigator is largely digitized online, provided you are willing to pay for access through one of the genealogy sites and are up to wrestling information from the rotten interfaces involved. The Twentieth Century, which was originally edited by Hugh O. Pentecost, was mostly microfilmed by the Library of Congress, but it suffers from a different sort of inaccessibility. There have been a lot of periodicals with very similar […]

Contr'un

Special “LeftLiberty+” Issue of “The Mutualist”

July 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m both streamlining the Corvus Editions catalog a bit for upcoming bookfairs and trying to assemble a more focused body of materials to serve as a background for the next couple of issues of The Mutualist. With those goals in mind, I’ve combined the most useful bits of my own writing from the two issues of LeftLiberty with the blog posts I reference, or expect to reference, most often, as a special issue of The Mutualist. The contents are: Mutualism: The Anarchism of Approximations Mutualist Musings on Property (including “The Gift Economy of Property, etc.) Note A (by Charles Fourier) […]

Early uses of the term “capitalisme” in French

July 19, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

The accounts of the early uses of the term “capitalism” have not kept up at all with the sources now available for research. For example, on Wikipedia we find: According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term capitalism was first used by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1854 in The Newcomes, where he meant “having ownership of capital.” Also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the term private capitalism in 1863. The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 and Pierre-Joseph […]

“I hope to do some work for the Labor Cause…”

July 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] One of the bits of Liberty‘s prehistory that undoubtedly needs to be better documented is Tucker’s entry into the anarchist movement. I recently purchased microfilm of The Word, Ezra Heywood’s paper, and just ran across this in the Nov. 1872 issue: B. R. Tucker, New Bedford, Mass. ‘I hope to do some work for the Labor Cause but first wish to study the question that I may thoroughly understand it. For this reason I send for your publications. I wish you would hold a Convention in New Bedford. The conservatives here […]

Contr'un

Exploring intellectual history with Benjamin R. Tucker

July 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] There is probably no figure in the history of anarchism about whom I am as, well, “passionately ambivalent” as Benjamin R. Tucker. He was the great popularizer of Proudhon, Greene and Warren, and an important partisan of Stirner, but also, in each case, something of a bowdlerizer. The plumb-line approach was worlds away from Proudhon’s notion of truth-in-relations, and his wholly “negative” understanding of anarchism ultimately at odds, to some degree at least, with the projects of all of his mutualist predecessors. He was the prototype for every left-libertarian who has trouble […]

Bevington and Seymour, “Proudhon and Communism” (1894)

July 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] I’ve long admired the “other” Liberty, the anarchist-communist paper published in England by James Tochatti in the 1890s. (You can admire some of the later issues here.) But I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit down with more than just scattered issues until last week, when I spent several hours going through the microfilm of the run. There are a number of articles that I’ll be reproducing here, or in the Labyrinth archive, but the material that is probably of most immediate interest to the readership of this blog is […]