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.
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Mr. Warren’s Lecture
“Mr. Warren’s Lecture,” Boston Investigator, 18, 38 (January 24, 1849), 3. Mr. Warren’s Lecture. PEOPLE’S SUNDAY MEETING—The lecture delivered by Mr. Josiah WARREN on Sunday last, was very interesting, and well attended. We should be pleased to give an extended report of it, but horn the manner in which a great part of the lecture was carried on—namely, by questions from the audience and his answers thereto—we fear we should not be able to do it any thing like justice did we attempt a detailed report, and the whole subject being a new one in this quarter, we should regret […]
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Eliphalet Kimball in 1873
Here’s a bit of follow-up on the Eliphalet Kimball story I recently posted. More searching has not turned up any more direct account of Kimball’s 1852 presidential platform, but while filling some holes in my bibliography I found an 1873 article in the Boston Investigator which I had not see previously. In many ways, this newly unearthed article repeats the concerns and attitudes of Kimballs contributions in the 1860s, but it also seems to echo very strongly the ideas reported in 1852. My developing sense is that Kimball may have adopted his peculiar variety of anarchism quite early and stayed […]
Contr'un
Another side of Eliphalet Kimball
It looks to me like Eliphalet Kimball remained as obscure a figure to most of his peers as he is to us today—right up until the end of his life. And then, curiously, he developed a sort of notoriety, but one entirely unconnected to his writings on anarchy. Kimball seems to have spend most of his adult life in New Hampshire. It appears that he was born in 1799 or 1800 in Orford, NH, and the published works I’ve found all originate from west-central New Hampshire, or over the border in Vermont—except for one which seems to mark a short […]
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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.