Liberty Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Transcribing Liberty

March 5, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

There is a new initiative to systematically transcribe the contents of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty, a project near and dear to my heart, but one I’ve never found enough support for to pursue seriously and consistently. Put Transcribing Liberty in your blogroll and show some love for this sort of difficult, and all too frequently thankless, sort of work.

Dyer D. Lum, “The Fiction of Natural Rights”

September 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

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 […]

Contr'un

Exploring intellectual history with Benjamin R. Tucker

July 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[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 […]

Bakunin’s “Political Theology of Mazzini”

March 11, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] There are still lots of gems hidden in the pages of Liberty, and some of them are not, perhaps, quite what you would expect to find. For instance, Sarah Holmes translated Bakunin’s lengthy essay, “The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International,” and Tucker serialized it in his paper. I’ve collected the text here in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive and will be releasing a pamphlet version at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair next weekend. It’s a very interesting read. Give it a look. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] The Political Theology of Mazzini And […]

Proudhon, Liberty, Satan, and The Ladies Repository (oh, my!)

September 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Very little of Proudhon’s 6-volume work on Justice in the Revolution and in the Church has been translated, but one in/famous passage has been treated to a number of English renderings. Section XLVII, which ends Chapter 5, “Function of Liberty,” which is itself the final chapter of the Eighth Study, “Conscience and Liberty” (which appears in Justice, Tome III in the Lacroix collected works) contains a passage that begins “Come, Satan, come. . . ,” and which has naturally been handy for those who wanted to demonstrate what an evil dude that French socialist Proudhon was. There is a really […]

Unfinished business of Liberty

April 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Benjamin Tucker, like a lot of us, took on a lot of projects, not all of which came to fruition. His “Proudhon Library” and the pamphlet version of Bellegarrigue’s “Anarchy: Journal of Order” are among those announced, but never completed. In some other cases, what Tucker translated from his wide reading of libertarian literature was just the tip of the iceberg, where fascinating material was concerned. It will take some time before anything like the “Proudhon Library” is possible, but one of the reasons for pursuing the updated Libertarian Labyrinth is precisely to pursue those kinds of projects. And some […]

The Liberty Site and such

August 6, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve set up a somewhat more attractive and informative front-end for The Liberty Site archive. I would encourage folks who are linking to the archive to direct readers there. Thanks to everyone who has publicized the work. That includes Roderick Long (waxing hyperbolic on his own blog and in a more restrained mode at the Mises Institute), Kevin Carson, Presto, Thomas Van Wyck, camelCase, William Gillis, Bernd Haug, and mentions at Positive Liberty and the paxx:blog. I almost missed Brian Doherty’s nod at Reason; he linked to both the Liberty and Lucifer archives, but managed not to mention where they […]

What Iain said!

July 31, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

In response to the news of the Liberty archive’s first-phase completion, my friend Iain commented, “now, if only someone could do that for Freedom between 1886 and 1926!” Amen! And for Mother Earth, and for any number of other important anarchist papers and journals. I’ve started to work up a text archive of the six issues of The Rebel (Boston, 1895-6), an anarchist-communist paper, which had a few Voltairine de Cleyre items in it, in part because it looked like a simple job, and because I wanted to look at something other than issues of Liberty and Woodhull and Claflin’s […]

Benjamin R. Tucker, The Lesson of Homestead

July 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Benjamin R. Tucker, “The Lesson of Homestead,” Liberty, 8, 48 (Jul 23, 1892), 2. The Lesson of Homestead. Regarding method, one of the truths that has been most steadily inculcated by this journal has been that social questions cannot be settled by force. Recent events have only confirmed this view. But when force comes, it sometimes leads incidentally to the teaching of other lessons than that of its own uselessness and becomes thereby to that extent useful. The appeal to force at Homestead affords a signal example of such incidental beneficence, for it has forced the capitalistic papers of the […]

Liberty archive: phase 1 complete!

July 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

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 […]