Hugh O. Pentecost Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Anarchism defined (“Twentieth Century,” 1890)

June 6, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Anarchism does not mean no government. It means no government by physical force. It does not mean each for himself independently of all. It means voluntary cooperation. Anarchism is Socialism without physical compulsion. It does not mean the destruction of our present forms of government by physical violence. It means the harmonizing of society by education in sociologic science. It does not contemplate sudden changes. It recognizes that slowness is a necessary characteristic of evolution. Anarchism is the synonym for sociologic evolution. It means that we should proceed in the direction of less government by […]

Hugh O. Pentecost, “The Anarchistic Method” (1890)

September 28, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL REFORM III. THE ANARCHISTIC METHOD. Those who accept the conclusions of Anarchism believe that it is a science; or, if you please, a philosophy supported by facts scientifically discovered and collated. It is not a religion based upon assumptions, unwarranted or contradicted by facts. It is not a system of metaphysics consisting of undemonstrable speculations. They freely admit that Sociology is not yet an exact science; that, strictly speaking, there is no Science of Society. But they speak of Anarchism as a science because its methods of investigation and accomplishment are scientific. In so far as it […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “Hugh O. Pentecost” (1907)

July 28, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

EIGHTEEN or nineteen years ago, away out in a sleepy little Michigan town, there fell into my hands a tiny bit of a paper “no bigger than a man’s hand”; there were only four sheets of it, but every word was vibrant with life and power. It was written by Hugh O. Pentecost and T. B. McCready, and at this hour I feel my eyes opening wide again as they did that morning with the light and the movement in the swinging lines. They were Single-Taxers then, but with an alarming freedom in their handling of it that must have […]

Hugh O. Pentecost, “Anarchy” (1889)

August 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Delivered on June 30, 1889 to the Unity Congregation at Newark, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. Published in Twentieth Century on July 4, 1889 — The Editor] Good people who hold opinions not commonly understood generally have a bad name. The world is ready to believe almost anything of a man except that he is a genuinely good man. If his life is stainless but unconventional, the world suspects some hidden shame or base motive. So far are most people from understanding or desiring what is true and right that the highest truth is often believed to be the lowest lie, and […]

Hugh O. Pentecost’s “Twentieth Century”

August 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I suppose there are a lot of reasons why important radical publications get neglected. Some of those are a matter of scarcity, or difficulty and cost of access. For instance, The Boston Investigator is largely digitized online, provided you are willing to pay for access through one of the genealogy sites and are up to wrestling information from the rotten interfaces involved. The Twentieth Century, which was originally edited by Hugh O. Pentecost, was mostly microfilmed by the Library of Congress, but it suffers from a different sort of inaccessibility. There have been a lot of periodicals with very similar […]