I’ve finished transcribing Eliphalet Kimball’s 1867 Thoughts on Natural Principles, which is about a defense of anarchism, in articles that originally appeared in The Boston Investigator. The rest is frequently inspired medical and culinary crankery, which should be read carefully for the analogies presented between it and the political thought. Analogy was, after all, all the rage in the 19th century, even, apparently, if you were a radical New England doctor. I’m now working on transcribing a couple of additional essays and some responses, so I can reissue the book in expanded form this spring.
equitable commerce
Sidney H. Morse’s alternate history of equitable commerce
Tucked away in the pages of Liberty, Sidney H. Morse, Josiah Warren’s literary executor, contributed an odd item, a kind of “what-if” history of Robert Owen’s New Harmony, as if, at the critical moment, Josiah Warren’s equitable commerce had been the model for continuing on after the failure of the original project. The story, Liberty and Wealth, may be the very best introduction I know of to Warren’s thought as filtered through another individuality. There is a difficulty in dealing with Warren’s writings, since he insisted that, in practice, equitable commerce must be based in a complete individualization of interests […]
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Josiah Warren: People’s Sunday Meeting (3/7/1849)
“People’s Sunday Meeting,” Boston Investigator, 18, 44 (March 7, 1849), 3. People’s Sunday Meeting:—By reference to the advertisement of this Society, it will be seen that Mr. Warren will deliver next Sunday a lecture on Music and Singing. We understand he has a new and original theory on this very pleasing subject, and being also practically acquainted with it, having for some years past been an occasional teacher, we have no doubt of his ability to five an interesting and instructive lecture. We ask for him a crowded Hall. The position he takes is, that the reason why people do […]
From the Archives
Lewis & Ann Masquerier in the “Boston Investigator” (1834-1888)
INTRODUCTION January 5, 2026. — I have stood on the top of Mount Moosilauke, on the western end of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and looked down over the Connecticut River valley. It’s a spectacular spot, which I wish I had been able to visit more often. These days, that view to the west has gained a surprising significance, as I have gradually come to think of a twenty-mile stretch, between Wells River, Vermont, in the north, and Orford, New Hampshire, in the south, as something of a hotbed, in the years when anarchism was emerging, of the kind of thought […]
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Analogy was, after all, all the rage in the 19th century
Well, sure. After all, we have to establish the Analogical Relationship between NUMBER, as the General Domain of the Abstract Mathematics, and THE UNIVERSE AT LARGE, in respect to those Primary Metaphysical Discriminations which are — within this less definite Domain — equally fundamental, but — apparently — less exact than the corresponding Elemental Distributions of Number itself.