mutualism Archives - Page 5 of 8 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

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 […]

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 […]

Mutualist Townships: Albert Brisbane and J. K. Ingalls (1849–1850)

March 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

In early 1850, The Spirit of the Age featured two proposals for a “mutualist township.” One, by Joshua King Ingalls, was a practical follow-up to his “Method of Transition.” The other was by Albert Brisbane, the well-known popularizer of Charles Fourier. Brisbane was also an acquaintance of Proudhon, having visited him in prison in France. In this sense, Brisbane had the most direct connection to the French mutualist tradition of any of the American writers in 1850. Greene would eventually meet Proudhon, later in the 1850s. What follows is, in a sense, Brisbane’s mutualist resumé, including his account of his […]

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 – 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 […]

Pierre Leroux, The Nature of Man

March 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

William B. Greene’s two early works on mutualism are very similar, to the point of repeating some sections, but the differences are also telling. Greene was attempting to combine elements of the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Pierre Leroux in both volumes, but it probably fair to say that Equality (1849) is philosophically dominated by Leroux’s influence, as Mutual Banking (1850) is dominated by Proudhon’s. I have lamented at various times the lack of knowledge of Proudhon’s work, even among anarchists. Leroux is virtually unknown, although interest in his work appears to have been a common denominator among an early […]

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 […]

One mystery of mutualism solved—probably…

March 11, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Originally posted in discussion on Wikipedia.] Swartz’ reference to John Gray in What Is Mutualism? is puzzling. He says mutualism “seems to have been first used by John Gray, an English writer, in 1832,” but does not name the work. The only book or pamphlet from 1832 is Production the cause of demand being a brief analysis of a work entitled “The social system, a treatise on the principle of exchange, by John Gray : with a short illustration of the principles of equitable labour exchange,” which probably isn’t by Gray at all, although it relies on long passages from […]

Joshua King Ingalls, “Property and Its Rights”

March 11, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Here’s the third installment in J. K. Ingalls’ series on property and rights, from The Spirit of the Age. Notice that Ingalls had by this time already encountered Edward Kellogg’s work. He had, in fact, written a two-part review of Labor and Other Capital in the Univercoelum (which I’ll be travelling to track down in the next week or so). In his Reminiscences, Ingalls talks about arguing face to face with Kellogg about the latter’s belief that the power of increase through interest was an essential feature of money. This is obviously germane to the issue here, and Ingalls, like […]

Joshua King Ingalls, “Man and His Rights”

March 10, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is the second installment of J. K. Ingalls’ series on the “natural rights of man.” In it, we find the general plan that unites the majority of Ingalls’ contributions to The Spirit of the Age. “When the subject of property, its rights, and the relation it sustains naturally to man, have been discussed, there may be an outline given of a translatory association, the aim of which shall be to unite the efforts of all friends of the race, who look with hope to the future, all friends of industrial reform, all oppressed producers, who feel the injustice of […]