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I’m always interested to find radicals from the NW Ohio area. There are no shortage of interesting connections here: Lysander Spooner was involved in land speculation in what became Grand Rapids, OH, just down the road a few miles. Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones was Toledo’s “anarchist mayor” (and Pingree, the progressive mayor of Detroit during the 1890’s depression, had been a member of William B. Greene’s Civil War regiment.) There have been important free thought, free religionist (The Index, to which Greene and Benjamin Tucker contributed) and socialist (W. F. Ries) publications based in Toledo. Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote about […]

Although the community of Modern Times was organized on Josiah Warren’s principles of “equitable commerce” and “individual sovereignty,” it was not by any means a community of anarchists. The experimental community drew a wide range of participants, some of whom differed significantly from the project’s main propagandists in their ideas about various issues. Among the more interesting and articulate of the dissident participants was Henry Edger, perhaps the first “priest” of Positivism in the US. He published a number of works from Modern Times, and also contributed an essay to Benjamin Tuckers Radical Review. Modern Times, the Labor Question, and […]

In the post Land-Banks as a substitute for Alchemy?! I mentioned a text by Samuel Hartlib, on William Potter’s land bank proposal, The Key of Wealth. The 1653 essay, An essay upon Master W. Potters designe, concerning a bank of lands to be erected throughout this common-wealth: whereby lands may be improved in a new way to become the ground for increase of trading, and of publique and private revenues, and accomodations, represented thus briefly, by a person of singular zeal and integrity to all publike interest, appeared originally as an appendix to: A discoverie for division or setting out […]

Proudhon published Les Malthusiens in Le Représentant du Peuple (August 10, 1848). It was published separately the following year. We know William B. Greene was reading in it Massachusetts in 1849-50; the section on “Usury” in the 1850 Mutual Banking is full of references. Benjamin Tucker translated the essay for the May 31, 1884 issue of Liberty. The Research on Anarchism site lists an 1886 London publication, “reprinted from The Anarchist.” The text here is taken from Libertarian Microfiche Project reprint (PP 957) of the 1938 Ishill Freeman Press edition. The Malthusians P.-J. Proudhon Dr. Malthus, an economist, an Englishman, […]

The difficulties associated with using Google Books haven’t changed much, but the depth of the “full view” library certainly has. I had posted a few titles to the mutualists list recently, but when I looked again, several of Andrews’ phonographic texts had been added. Here’s a partial list of titles that might be of interest to mutualists and students of the radical traditions: Andrews, Stephen Pearl: Basic Outline of Universology (1872) Complete Phonographic Class-Book (1845) Complete Phonographic Class-Book (1846) Complete Phonographic Class-Book (1851) Phonographic Reader (1846) Phonographic Word Book Number One (1849) Phonographic Word Book Number Two (1849) Primary Phonotypic […]

Here are two final chapters from Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against CommonwealthXXII and chapters XXIII-XXIV. A pdf file of all five chapters is available in the Libertarian Labyrinth. For a bit more of Northwest Ohio’s struggle against Standard Oil, see this first post on George H. Phelps and his The New Columbia, or the Re-United States. (1894), dealing with the struggles of Toledo against the natural-gas and oil trusts. Previous posts contains chapter Wealth Against Commonwealth Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903) CHAPTER XXVA SUNDAY IN JUNE IN the midst of the anxious discussion by the citizens of Toledo as to the […]

Here are two more chapter froms Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), dealing with the struggles of Toledo against the natural-gas and oil trusts. I’ll post the last two chapters from this section tomorrow. Wealth Against Commonwealth Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903) CHAPTER XXIIITHE FREEDOM OF THE CITY Towns, like men, stamp themselves with marked traits. Toledo had an individuality which showed itself from the start. Its leading men clubbed together and borrowed money as early as 1832 to build one of the first railroads constructed west of the Alleghenies—the Erie and Kalamazoo, to connect Toledo and Adrian. When, in […]

Three Fables from Things as They Are (1899), by Bolton Hall Philosopher Dog. I SUPPOSE I must have been half asleep when I heard Snap whine, “Yeow arn yow ell.” It sounded like, “You aren’t very well. ” Strange! I listened again. However, I am fond of Snap, and sometimes talk to him. So I said: “No, I’m not well. Monopole is after the rent of the farm, and I haven’t got the money.”“Rent?” said Snap, quite distinctly. “What’s rent?”“Why,” said I, “it’s what we pay to be allowed to live on any part of the earth that’s good for […]

It’s been almost a year since I put together the bibliography of Bolton Hall’s book-length works, and now I’m finally getting the first of them online. Hall was a libertarian single-taxer and Tolstoyan, founder of Free Acres, and a prime mover in the “enclave” movement within Georgeism. (Just in case you missed it the first time, don’t miss: Bolton Hall, single tax anarchist – the song!) I’ll be posting a couple of teasers from Things as They Are (1st ed., 1899), the volume I’m currently editing for the Labyrinth. Like a number of Hall’s works, the volume is split between […]

Stephen Pearl Andrews published one essay in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The July, 1874 issue contained his “Revisal of Kant’s Categories,” one of the most conventional philosophical essays we have from Andrews. Andrews, whose interest in linguistics eventually led him to work on Alwato, a “universal language,” approaches Kant’s categories through grammar. Though it is, in itself, a fairly straightforward essay, its broader context includes Andrews’ Discoveries in Chinese (available from Elibron), the works on Universology (text scanning in progress), and, generally, the work by Charles Kraitsir, Alexander Bryan Johnson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and others to discover a scientific, […]