Contr'un Archives - Page 52 of 56 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

What Mutualism Was – II: The Kernel(?) of the Problem(?)

April 20, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] This is the second in a series of explorations of the mutualist tradition—or, perhaps more appropriately, traditions. The particular perspective they present is, as I’ve said, somewhat revisionist. It is also a work in progress, so if anyone out there thinks they can set me straight, I would welcome the attempt. To continue… Wikipedia is my current touchstone for contemplating everything that can go wrong (and, to be fair, a handful of things that can go right) on the way to a definition, or a history. I got started doing some editing there when I […]

What Mutualism Was – I: Prehistories

March 21, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] [This post seems to have been lost at some point, but there was a draft preserved in my Blogger account.] This is the first of a series of explorations of the mutualist tradition—or, perhaps more appropriately, traditions. The particular perspective they present is, I’m afraid, somewhat revisionist in a variety of ways. It is also a work in progress, so if anyone out there thinks they can set me straight, I would welcome the attempt. Anyway, to begin… As anyone who has explored the matter—or perhaps fought about it on the Wikipedia talk pages—knows, the […]

How I Spent My Spring Vacation

March 13, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

I celebrated a birthday, had my main email account compromised (so if you’ve tried to contact me, I’m not ignoring you, but it may be another day or so before I see you mail), reread What Is Mutualism? and a lot of Proudhon, edited a Wikipedia entry or three, tried to organize my mounting collection of land bank references, started a William B. Greene timeline and miscellany (coming soon), did a lot of class prep, met another of Greene’s great-great-grandchildren online, and started the web-site redesign I need to finish before the Libertarian Labyrinth is really up and available at […]

The Founding Fathers

February 21, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Some days I’m content to treat the “founding fathers” as Real American Heroes, guys who did a pretty amazing job of forging a country out of the colonies, despite active opposition from England and internal divisions at home. You have to admire Jefferson as a writer and observer. Franklin the practical rationalist and experimental scientists is charming, if kind of weird, with his charts and his rationales for everything. Federalists and Jeffersonians alike clearly took the business of forming an American government seriously. And there are few writers in the canon who can touch Tom Paine for flair, or for […]

Calvin Blanchard: A Crisis Chapter on Government

January 26, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s been awhile since this has been up in the Labyrinth. Yesterday, when I was discussing Tom Paine with my Great Ideas students, I passed around a couple of 19th century editions of Paine’s work: the D. M Bennett collection of “major works” (edited by Calvin Blanchard) and an 1839 George Henry Evans edition of The Crisis with a list of Blanchard’s titles pasted inside the front. One of my students tracked down the current incarnation of The Truth Seeker. She wasn’t terribly impressed. So I figured it was time to get the Crisis Chapter back online so we can […]

Oops! Wrong Brookfield? Mass. Historical backroads prove tricky

January 25, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Hehe. Thanks to some help from the very kind folks at the West Brookfield Historical Commission, it looks like we may have to revise one of the generally accepted “facts” about William B. Greene’s career. The West Brookfield firm of Merriam & Chapin printed a number of the pamphlets Greene wrote and published while he was a pastor in the area, but it looks like he was probably serving the First Congregational Church of Brookfield (identified in some contemporary accounts as South Brookfield), rather than the similarly named church in West Brookfield. With 20/20 hindsight, this looks obvious to me. […]

“Song of Espousal” in the Moss Rose for 1847

January 23, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been able to verify that William B. Greene’s first published work, the poem “Song of Espousal,” did in fact appear in the Moss Rose holiday gift annual for 1847. The annual is apparently a renamed reprint of the Atlantic Token for 1841, where the poem initially appeared. The poem is accompanied by an engraving: Most of the engravings in the annual appear to be stock cuts. This probably is as well, but I was immediately struck by the fact that it looks much like the descriptions of Greene in his youth. The R. Woodman credited may well be the […]

The Fund: A Boston Land Bank of 1681

January 23, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

An important episode in the story of the New England land banks is The Fund at Boston, in New England, apparently the earliest practical land bank experiment in the colonies. Much of what we know of it comes from a pamphlet with the delightfully cryptic title Several relating to the FUND, Printed for divers Reasons, as may appear (1681 or 1682). Because all that we have of the Severals is one unbound sheet, probably issued as a prospectus, I’ve simply posted the whole thing up on The Very Idea!.

The Fund: A Boston Land Bank of 1681

January 22, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

One sheet survives of this pamphlet, attributed to Rev. John Woodbridge. It describes an early mutual bank scheme known as The Fund at Boston in N. E. It is quite likely that this sheet was issued as a prospectus, and that the rest of the pamphlet was never published. The Severals is of particular interest because it confirms that path of between William Potter’s Key of Wealth (England, 1650) and the New England land bank experiments. Andrew Mcfarland Davis published an account of the Fund which we hope to have online sometime soon. Severals relating to the FUND Printed for […]

The Incredible Shrinking. . .

January 19, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

William B. GreeneAn observation, based on the collations I’ve been doing of Greene’s borrowings from sources such as William Beck and Edward Kellogg: The mutual bank writings of 1849 and 1850 are full of Greene’s personal ideas, personal analyses, pet projects, etc. In 1857 he cuts a tremendous amount of stuff out, adding some new material from Beck and a commentary on the colonial land bank. What remains is largely derived, or outright lifted, from a few sources. Greene’s personal stamp is much fainter here. The 1870 edition is a little leaner still. There are some new clarifying footnotes in […]