William Henry Channing Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

William Henry Channing, “Letters to Associationists”

May 29, 2012

LETTERS TO ASSOCIATIONISTS. Number One. As Corresponding Secretary of the “American Union of Associationists,” allow me thus publicly to present a view of our duties in the Social Movement. Judge, each reader, of the truth of what is said! Freely challenge and correct errors! Let us commune together! Thus will the latent spirit be prepared for outward manifestation. Your thoughts are invited to consider I. Our Position. 1. In Actual Life, we take the ground of mediating between Revolutionary and Conservative tendencies. We propose a detailed scheme of practical reconciliation, whereby Capital and Labor may combine in a work of […]

William Henry Channing, “Charles Fourier” (1843)

May 29, 2012

CHARLES FOURIER. The zeal and ability with which Albert Brisbane has for several years devoted himself to the propagation of Fourier’s doctrines of association, begin to be appreciated as they deserve. And whatever conclusive judgment his countrymen may pass upon this peculiar system, all must admit, that this earnest advocate of social reorganization has hastened and widened the great reform movement of our day. Few who have paid Fourier the respect he merits, of deep study, will deny that he has cast light, much needed and timely, upon the darkest problems, whether they adopt his social science without modification or […]

William Henry Channing, “Call of the Present” (1843)

October 2, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

William Henry Channing, editor of The Present (1843-44) and The Spirit of the Age (1849-50), was well placed to gather together the radical threads of the early 1840s. The nephew of the prominent Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and a friend or acquaintance of figures like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, William Batchelder Greene, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Lane, Bronson Alcott, etc., he was in touch with much of what was bubbling up in the years prior to the 1848 revolutions. The works of Fourier, Swedenborg, Saint Simon and Proudhon all appeared in his publications, and he translated a number […]

Puzzle pieces: W. H. Channing’s “The Present”

September 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve emphasized before the importance of William Henry Channing’s The Spirit of the Age, as the closest thing we have to a mid-19th century American mutualist paper. Channing is equally important as part of the late-transcendentalist/radical Unitarian/free-religionist current with which American individualist anarchism was in constant dialogue. William B. Greene was himself a part of that current, as was Sidney H. Morse and, at least early on, Joshua King Ingalls. Tucker was influenced by it, and his Radical Review was full of contributors from it. And a great deal of attention was paid in the early issues of Liberty, to […]