individualism

individualism

Frank Q. Stuart, “Why I Am an Individualist” (1890)

June 11, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] WHY I AM AN INDIVIDUALIST. BY F. Q. STUART. Some months ago the editor requested me to write an article on this subject, but not until now have I found myself so situated that I could conveniently do so. This is a question that may be answered in various ways, but at best it can only be partially answered in a short article. I am an Individualist first, because Individualism is the only philosophy that furnishes a rational, or if you please, scientific, solution of the great social and political questions […]
Anarchism

Max Nettlau, Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
ANARCHISM: COMMUNIST OR INDIVIDUALIST?—BOTH By Max Nettlau. ANARCHISM is no longer young, and it may be time to ask ourselves why, with all the energy devoted to its propaganda, it does not spread more rapidly. For even where local activity is strongest, the results are limited, whilst immense spheres are as yet hardly touched by any propaganda at all. In discussing this question, I will not deal with the problem of Syndicalism, which, by absorbing so much of Anarchist activity and sympathies, cannot by that very fact be considered to advance the cause of Anarchism proper, whatever its other merits […]
Contr'un

E. Armand, “The Gulf”

August 9, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] This short piece by E. Armand appeared in Horace Traubel’s The Conservator in 1910. It’s an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman—and an interesting example of Armand’s thought. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE GULF All the societies of the vanguard—Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists—say that the individual is a “product of his environment.” It would be more exact to say that individuals are products of their environment, adding that the individual person, more especially, is the end of an ancestral line, which […]
individualism

LeftLiberty extra: Individualism vs. Socialism, c. 1900

June 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
The historical material in LeftLiberty #1 will be drawn primarily from the individualism/socialism debate of the mid-19th century, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that, if we take our cues from any much later iteration of the debate, we find ourselves faced with the sort of simple opposition of entrenched positions that I suspect many of us would like to get past. However, in the interest of completeness, I offer what is perhaps the exemplary “exchange” of the Talking Past One Another Era: Ernest Belfort Bax, sometime collaborator of William Morris, vs. Henry Wilson, of the […]
individualism

LeftLiberty: Proudhon on individualism and socialism

April 9, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Bits of progress on LeftLiberty, including tweaks to the logo, the beginnings of a website and some responses to my call for contributions. I’ve been working to get the wiki archive working smoothly, with prettier urls and interwiki linking with the Distributive Passions site. The material for the “classics” section looks like it will include works by Proudhon, Leroux, Bastiat, Molinari, Tucker, and several others. In the early works, there is a lot of belligerent agreement that a simple opposition between “individualism” and “socialism” doesn’t quite get the work done. Here’s a bit of a letter from Proudhon: Paris, January […]
Anarchism

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 […]