With the 2006 projects in the wrap-up phase, it’s time to get the next set rolling. Along with the new Libertatia Lab Reports, I’ve launched Travelling in Liberty, a blog to document my attempt to read through all 403 issues of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty in 2007, and get a more complete sense of the development of individualist anarchism through the years 1881-1908. I hope regular readers here will join the fun.
From the Archives
Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”
Benjamin R. Tucker’s rather sudden conversion to Max Stirner’s philosophy of Egoism was a calamitous accident. There is nothing in common between individualist and philosophical Anarchism as Tucker developed it on the foundations laid by Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Warren, Spooner, Spencer, Herbert, Green and Andrews, and Stirner’s German political metaphysics. Some of Tucker’s adherents uncritically swallowed. Egoism and persuaded themselves that it was a corollary, if not a logical deduction from anarchistic premises. This was a gross error. Egoism is half platitudinous, half fallacious.
Contr'un
Dyer D. Lum, “The Fiction of Natural Rights”
The Fiction of Natural Rights. [Dyer D. Lum in Pittsburg Truth.] The very corner-stone of Anarchistic philosophy is often supposed to be a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer’s “First Principle” of equal freedom, that: “Every person has a natural right to do what he wills, provided that in the doing thereof he infringes not the equal rights of any other person.” Yet there lurks in the expression a fallacy that correct thought must repudiate, or we must carry with us a diagram explaining the meaning of the words we use. What are “natural rights?” In the middle ages school-men believed that […]
Anarchism
“Travelling in Liberty” update, etc.
I’ve finally getting things rolling over at Travelling in Liberty, my examination of Benjamin R. Tucker’s thought and journal, and have already drawing a good question on Tucker’s relation to the rest of the anarchist tradition, with regard to wages. (Thanks, Iain!) Joshua King Ingalls’ Reminiscences is taking lots of work to annotate, but it is extremely agreeable work. Ingalls seems to have known everyone, including quite a few folks I was unfamiliar with. When I’m done with the notes on this, libertarians can take up “Three Degrees of Separation from J. K. Ingalls” as our new game. Social Wealth […]
Comments are closed.
Good luck reading through all that. You are a die-hard scholar…