It’s a very, very good day for those interested in the earliest manifestations of mutualism in the United States. William Henry Channing’s The Spirit of the Age (1849-1850) is now available, in its entirety, with minimal scanning defects, from Google Books. I had previously had the chance to read through an original bound volume, and transcribe some contributions. Now I can finally sit down to read through the entire run. 150 or so pages in, my sense of the importance of this early journal just keeps increasing. Go check it out!
Anarchism
Tucker’s “Radical Review”
I had a happy coincidence of time and ambition today, with the result that the four issues of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Radical Review have joined Liberty in the archive. Once again, these are scans from microfilm, with all the defects you would expect, but I’ll be working to complete the OCR work on these in the near future. I have broken the 826 pages down by article (with an occasional pdf covering two or three book reviews.) Everything is linked from the oddly arranged contents page published in the bound volume. Use that one to browse, or go straight to […]
Contr'un
Exploring intellectual history with Benjamin R. Tucker
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] There is probably no figure in the history of anarchism about whom I am as, well, “passionately ambivalent” as Benjamin R. Tucker. He was the great popularizer of Proudhon, Greene and Warren, and an important partisan of Stirner, but also, in each case, something of a bowdlerizer. The plumb-line approach was worlds away from Proudhon’s notion of truth-in-relations, and his wholly “negative” understanding of anarchism ultimately at odds, to some degree at least, with the projects of all of his mutualist predecessors. He was the prototype for every left-libertarian who has trouble […]
Contr'un
The Impact of the Cost Principle (and Archive Upgrades, VII)
It’s been sort of a hard week to stay on task, with constant new developments in the Occupy movement and multiple live streams to follow. I’ve also been approached, out of the blue, to collaborate on a Charles Fourier translation that sounds like enough fun to shuffle some things to make room for it in my workflow. As it happens, more of a focus on Fourier will undoubtedly help with projects like Dejacque’s Humanisphere and Proudhon’s Creation of Order, so I’m grateful for the distraction. And work on the archive is still moving right along. I’m at about 525 COinS-equipped […]