Josiah Warren Archives - Page 3 of 3 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Josiah Warren, a Most Unlikely Internationalist

June 29, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Josiah Warren was, famously, not a joiner. He habitually quarreled with anyone who suggested that he had followers or had founded a school. By his own account, after his early adventures with Owenite socialism, he only ever joined one organization—but what an organization! It appears that, for roughly a month in the summer of 1873, Josiah Warren was affiliated with Section 26, of Philadelphia, of the International Workingmen’s Association. Warren was certainly not the only individualist anarchist who took an interest in the I. W. A., and participated to some extent […]

Clarence L. Swartz on Warren and Bailie

June 17, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Josiah Warren and His Work. Josiah Warren, as Liberty’s readers know, was the original founder and teacher of Philosophical Anarchism in America. A scion of the Massachusetts puritan house of Warren, which numbers among its many distinguished members the revolutionary hero of Bunker Hill, Gen. Joseph Warren, Josiah, who was born in Boston toward the close of the eighteenth century, became one of the most noted social reformers of his time. As the exponent of the doctrine of Individual Sovereignty and Cost the Limit of Price, he blazed the path which Liberty, for twenty-five years, has followed as its […]

John Pickering on “Equitable Commerce” (1847)

June 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

John Pickering, The working man’s political economy: founded upon the principle of immutable justice and the inalienable rights of man; designed for the promotor of national reform. Cincinnati : Stereotyped in Warren’s new patent method by Thomas Varney, 1847. CHAPTER XIX. “EQUITABLE COMMERCE.” A work bearing the above title, published by Josiah Warren, New Harmony, Indiana, has lately appeared before the public. The work professes to be, “A new development of principles for the harmonious adjustment and regulation of the pecuniary, intellectual and moral intercourse of mankind, proposed as elements of new society.” The author of this work, and myself, […]

William Pare on equitable commerce

May 11, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] William Pare’s “Equitable Villages in America,” a lecture from 1854, is a particularly good short treatment of the system of “equitable commerce” proposed and practiced by Josiah Warren. Pare never forgot that the first principle of Warren’s philosophy was individualization, and this helped him to understand that the “cost principle” is not simply a matter of exchanging labor time, but a system which incorporates into the notion of “cost” a whole range of subjective valuations, which cannot be subordinated to any social or institutional standard of equity without betraying the system completely. I recommend the […]

A Poem on Equitable Commerce

September 25, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

[The New Harmony Gazette published the following in December, 1827.] From the Saturday Evening Chronicle we copy, for the amusement of his friends, the following jeu d’esprit, on the Magazine kept by a late fellow-citizen at the corner of Elm and Fifth streets, Cincinnati, wherein a subscriber may receive, for one day’s labor, a similar amount of the labor of any other subscriber,—or may purchase articles at a wholesale price, adding thereto the value of the time necessarily consumed in the sale of the article. For an equal exchange of Labor, as valued by Time, now in successful operation, at […]