Stephen Pearl Andrews

Proudhon Library

Benjamin R. Tucker, “Proudhon and His Critic” (1876)

January 20, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Debates in The Index: [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] [For The Index.] PROUDHON AND HIS CRITIC. BY BENJ. R. TUCKER. The student of Proudhon must have laid down The Index of June 22d, containing Stephen Pearl Andrews’ article on “Proudhon and his Translator,” with a feeling of pleasure not unmixed with pain; pleasure at meeting at last with an elaborate and scholarly criticism of this author and his work, dealing in argument rather than ridicule; and pain at finding this same criticism so alloyed with error and careless misstatement as to greatly detract from its […]
Proudhon Library

Stephen Pearl Andrews, “Proudhon and His Translator” (1876)

January 19, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Debates in The Index: [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] [For The Index.] PROUDHON AND HIS TRANSLATOR. BY STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS. Benj. R. Tucker, the business partner and confrère of E. H. Heywood of Princeton, Mass., has translated and published, in an elegant volume of nearly 500 royal octavo pages, the most renowned of the politico-economical works of the justly celebrated P. J. Proudhon. The title of the work in English is: What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government. I am requested to write a review-notice of the work. The […]
equitable commerce

Bibliography of Equitable Commerce

July 19, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Equitable Commerce was the name given to Josiah Warren’s social system, which combined the principles of individual autonomy and “cost the limit of price.” Warren’s approach attracted a fairly substantial following at various times and was influential among anarchists. The works collected here are either writings by Warren and his associates, elaborating the system, or outside accounts of the movement. 1821 Josiah Warren’s 1821 lamp patent — “Weekly Summary,” The Plough Boy, and Journal of the Board of Agriculture, 2, 52 (May 26, 1821), 415. “Patent Lamp,” Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, New Series, 3 no. 221 (April 18, 1921): […]
Contr'un

Statism: It’s not just for dentists anymore…

February 12, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
The story of anarchist anti-statism turns out to have an unexpected wrinkle, in which that tale crosses another story of anarchists and terminology that is rather bizarre. In attempting to clarify Proudhon’s treatment of “government” and “the state,” it has been necessary to follow those terms through a rather large number of texts and context, which add up to a rather dizzying number of uses, in order to draw some general conclusions about the shift in Proudhon’s thought from what we might now think of as an anti-statist position to an analysis in which we find room for an anarchist state, but none for any governmental principle. Part of the difficulty has, of course, been the close association of anarchism with anti-statism in the present, which leads us to believe that Proudhon should have been an anti-statist, and leads us to take his strong critiques of the state, in texts like “Resistance to the Revolution,” as evidence that he was a foe of statism at first, and then changed his mind.

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equitable commerce

Stephen Pearl Andrews on Equitable Commerce, 1850

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Stephen Pearl Andrews was a bizarre, multi-faceted character, whose contributions to anarchism have sometimes been overshadowed by the peculiarity of his contributions in other fields of study. I’ve been slowly-but-surely trying to make sense of my notes on Andrews, and in the course of trying to fill some gaps in the story of his involvement with a sort of perpetual-motion machine scheme (a story in which Josiah Warren also plays at least a bit part), I discovered that the Library of Congress had made large runs of the New York Daily Tribune available online. They […]
Panarchy

Stephen Pearl Andrews’ “New Rendering of Ten Commandments”

May 9, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] New Rendering of Ten Commandments. BY STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS. I. Thou shalt have no other gods than The Most High (that, whatever it is, that embodies, to thy conception, the supremest excellence). II. Thou shalt not make, unto thee, any sham substitute, or inferior likeness of this thy supreme ideal; whether it be in itself relatively high (in heaven above), or mean (in the earth beneath); or base (in the water under the earth). Thou shalt not degrade (bow down) thyself, in respect to any such, nor come under the yoke […]
Pantarchy

I hope this clears things up…

March 7, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Johnson’s (Revised) Universal Cyclopaedia (1886) contained the following explanation, by its creator, of the science of “universology:” Universol´ogy is the name given to a universal science covering the whole ground of philosophy, of the sciences in their general aspects—in which sense it is called “sciento-philosophy”—and of social polity, or the collective life of the human world. As a philosophy, in the more common and general or less precise use of that term, the system is called “integralism,” as that of Comte is called “positivism;” as a new science—in the exact sense […]
equitable commerce

Digital editions of Josiah Warren, etc.

April 9, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I was recently asked to clarify my notes on Warren’s publications: Think of the sequence in this way: First, there were two editions of Equitable Commerce in the 1840s, composed by Warren alone. Second, there is a period in the 1850s when Warren collaborated with Stephen Pearl Andrews. Andrews substantially revised Equitable Commerce and published his Science of Society, based on Warren’s work. Warren also published a new work, Practical Details in Equitable Commerce. Third, in the 1860s, Warren published another new work, True Civilization an Immediate Necessity, and the Last Ground of Hope for Mankind (which become the second […]
Contr'un

Constitutions and Organic Bases

August 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Tomorrow night’s discussion at Laughing Horse Books will be on “Panarchy and Pantarchy, with a brief look at Proudhon’s theory of the state.” As I told the collective yesterday, “It will be breezier than it sounds.” I had initially meant to pair Paul Émile de Puydt’s 1860 “Panarchy,” which proposes a free market in governments, just with some documents relating to Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Pantarchy, which was an anarchistic outlier, from roughly the same year, strongly influenced by August Comte and heavy on voluntary hierarchy, with Andrews expecting to find himself, voluntarily, pretty much at the top of the heap. […]
From the Archives

Debate on Abolition and Disunion (1847)

December 5, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] [Here is a slightly “pre-anarchist” Stephen Pearl Andrews and a Wendell Phillips eager not to be taken as a “no-government man, debating the question of disunion in the context of abolitionism.] ABOLITION REASONS FOR DISUNION. By Wendell Phillips. [A Reply to appear in our next Number.] THE youngest of us can remember the time when it was thought an offence next door to treason, to calculate the value of the Union. Of late years, there are many who not only calculate its value, but openly declare that they would rather part […]