The Index Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Stephen Pearl Andrews, “The Science of Universology” (1877–1879) (I–XII)

November 27, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

For the merely preliminary statement of what universology is, the reader is referred to the last half of my reply to Mr. Tucker (Index August 10). That statement will enable the reader to know about the subject. But to know about a thing is one thing, and to know the thing itself is quite another thing. I am now to undertake to enable one to know universology itself in some measure,—still, however, a very primary, and incipient sense; to give to the reader that insight at least which will enable him to judge whether it is the kind of thing which it would interest him to pursue further, by the study of the more extended expositions contained in books published and to be published on the subject. I must, at the same time, however, occupy a portion of the very limited space which I feel is assigned to me, in simple declaration of the true nature and immense scope and value of the new sciento-philosophy.

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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 […]

Josiah Warren’s Last Letter (from The Index)

October 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

JOSIAH WARREN’S LAST LETTER [As our readers have been already informed, Mr. Josiah Warren, the author of True Civilization and other unpretentious little works on social reform, died In Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the fourteenth of April, at the age of seventy-five years. Although he was confined to his chamber during most of the winter, his mind was as vigorous as ever; and he took great interest in the articles on his “cost principle” which have been published from time to time in The Index. On the eleventh of April, he wrote the first of the following papers; but, not being […]

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 […]

Benjamin Tucker enters the fray

July 10, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] On January 5, 1873, 18-year-old Benjamin R. Tucker sent a letter to Francis Abbot, the editor of The Index, the journal of the Free Religious Association. In it, he took Abbot to task for the following remarks: “Usury laws, in especial, which sometimes work great detriment to the business interests of whole communities, are in fact based upon the Bible conception that it is a crime to take interest for money loaned; although the common sense of mankind reject the notion in fact.” The free religionists were engaged in one of a series of attempts to reconstruct religion on […]