Uncategorized Archives - Page 14 of 39 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

J. K. Ingalls, “Social Wealth”

February 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

At long last, Joshua King Ingalls’ Social Wealth, is available online, in a (largely) searchable pdf edition. (The text will follow soon.) At 320 pages, the file is a little over 16 megs, but well worth the time to download and read through. Let me know if you have any problems with the file. I’m still experimenting with adding searchable texts to files, while maintaining broad compatibility. I’m slowly, but surely working my way through the Liberty archive, making those files as searchable as the rough image scans will allow. (For now, check out the issues from volumes 12 and […]

My NaNoWriMo

December 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Well, I’ll admit with no regrets that I did not complete the 50,000 words of fiction necessary to “win” during November’s National Novel Writing Month. Some other realities intervened. I wrote a little over 25,000 words on The Distributive Passions, some of which is up on the site. (I may have covered the other half in other writings.) Winner or not, I had a very good time trying, and the pressure of trying to get ready for a month of sustained writing did wonders for my overall sense of where the novel is going. I did manage to write a […]

Godek Gardwell (Edward Kellogg) to the Merchants’ Magazine

November 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Godek Gardwell, “Labor and Other Capital” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 18, 1 (January 1848), 65. Art. VIII.—LABOR AND OTHER CAPITAL:THE RIGHTS OF EACH SECURED, AND THE WRONGS TO BOTH ERADICATED. Freeman Hunt, Esq.—Dear Sir: Although it is universally admitted that nearly all wealth is the product of labor, yet the laboring classes of all civilized nations have been, and are, as a body, poor. If the natural product of labor be wealth, the natural result of toil would be competence or wealth to those who performed the labor, unless something intervened to deprive them of their natural rights. […]

Proudhon and Tucker get psychedelic!

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Wow, man! Tucker’s edition of Proudhon’s The Malthusians, in a very special digital edition. Google Books raises the Art of Screwing Up to the level of, well, ART.

Too much anarchism at Google Books?

November 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Curiouser and curiouser. While doing some research on early appearances of the word “anarchism,” prior to 1870, I ran across numerous hits on Google Books for very early texts, many of them in French. Now, given the proof-reading and quality control issues I’ve blogged about before, it wasn’t out of the question that perhaps I was seeing some early use of the French word anarchisme, together with some sloppy OCR work, in, for example, Charles Fourier’s Traité de l’association domestique-agricole. But the search engine at Google Books informed me that the word anarchism appeared on thirty different pages in that […]

An Early Libertarian Communist

November 7, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Paul Brown, whose Twelve Months in New Harmony I posted some time ago, was, from various indications, a friend of Josiah Warren. He was also the most articulate voice in favor of property-in-common that we have from the New Harmony community. He was the author of a number of books, on a range of subjects, as well as some uncollected writings, under the title “Gray Light,” which appeared in the New Harmony Gazette. I’m working on transcribing Gray Light, which is probably one of the five or six most interesting uncollected works I’ve run across in the last few years. […]

Ah, Well…

November 2, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve just been informed that the Spring course on “The Roots of American Anarchism” will not run.

Calculus, Poetry, the two William Batchelder Greenes, etc

October 29, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

As much as I complain, and will continue to complain, about the quality of Google Books’ digital archive, their access to materials is remarkable. I have very mixed feelings about that access, given the rather cavalier way in which scanning appears to be done. I worry that scarce, fragile volumes are being subjected to the rigors of the duplication process—without any complete and usable edition resulting! But the other side of the coin is that today I finally have access to a copy of William Batchelder Greene’s 1859 An Expository Sketch of a New Theory of the Calculus, the work, […]

Fools rush in

September 25, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

As some of you know, I’ve been playing with an alternate-history project for awhile. The Distributive Passions is “Fourierist speculative fiction, with a mutualist message,” or something like that. I’m treating it as a place to make speculations about the implications and possibilities of the socialist and libertarian histories which occupy so much of my scholarly time, and to make some broader, less scholarly statements about people, how they interact, and what happens when they try to change the world. Having worked on various outlines and character descriptions, and having found it hard to keep it all straight in my […]

A few new William B. Greene citations

September 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Thanks to Brady Campbell, who did a little research legwork at the American Antiquarian Society, we have a better idea about William B. Greene’s contributions the Worcester Palladium. Here are his notes: Equality – – No.1 by OMEGA. – Wednesday 18 July 1849Deals with Moses, and equality among Christian brotherhood Equality – – No.2 by OMEGA. – Wednesday 25 July 1849Deals with the banking system Equality – – No.3 by OMEGA. – Wednesday 1 August 1849Deals the repeal of usury laws Capital and Labor – – No. 1 by OMEGA. Wednesday 12 September 1849Deals with Transcendentalism Capital and Labor – […]