New Project: Travelling in Liberty

It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]

At the center of this pamphlet is a disagreement about the use of the terms anarchy and anarchism—a topic that has grown in interest for me in recent years. W. H. Tillinghast accuses Tucker of “misusing words” when he uses the term anarchism to describe anarchist beliefs. The proper word, he claims, would be anarchy—or, more specifically, an-archy (from Proudhon’s occasional spelling, an-archie.) He would seem, from a modern perspective, to be a bit confused and Tucker’s response would be correct, if perhaps a bit excessive. It is easy to forget that in 1881 anarchism was still a “rare” word, whether in English or French.

The lesson here is to take on projects well-adapted to the conditions under which you expect to labor. Now, if only I could get to a place where I could predict those conditions from month to month, or even semester to semester. I’ve been doing a lot of work on this project, reading, scanning and transcribing material from Liberty and from related sources. I haven’t been doing it in a particularly systematic way—until this last week. Some rethinking has obviously been in order, so here’s a new, delightfully doable plan for the start of a relaunch here. I have begun […]