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, Equitable Commerce, 4/11/1849
“Equitable Commerce,” Boston Investigator, 18, 49 (April 11, 1849), 3. Equitable Commerce. The following article on this subject by Josiah Warren, its discoverer, will be read with interest by his friends in this city and throughout the country :— To the Editor of the Investigator: Dear Sir:—In accordance with your request, I would gladly make use of your columns as a medium through which the public might get some idea of “Equitable Commerce,” but I do not know that I could re-state the subject in any better form than that in the pamphlet entitled “Equitable Commerce,” from which you are […]
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Equitable Commerce [extract]
“Equitable Commerce,” Boston Investigator, 19, 2 (May 16, 1849), 2. Equitable Commerce. We extract the following paragraphs from a pamphlet with this title, by Josiah Warren, published at Utopia, Ohio:— If a traveller in a hot day, stops at a farm house and asks for a drink of water, he generally gels it without any thought of price. Why?—Because it costs nothing, or its cost is immaterial. If the traveller was so thirsty that he would give a dollar for the water rather than not have it, this would be the value of the water to him; and if the […]
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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.