Half a hundred Libertys

It’s been sort of a hard week to stay on task, with constant new developments in the Occupy movement and multiple live streams to follow. I’ve also been approached, out of the blue, to collaborate on a Charles Fourier translation that sounds like enough fun to shuffle some things to make room for it in my workflow. As it happens, more of a focus on Fourier will undoubtedly help with projects like Dejacque’s Humanisphere and Proudhon’s Creation of Order, so I’m grateful for the distraction. And work on the archive is still moving right along. I’m at about 525 COinS-equipped […]

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 […]

The Libertarian Labyrinth clean-up advances, step by step: I’ve made it through the “A”s in a roughly linear fashion—with lots of side trips to deal with all the old problems, new listings and such that naturally appear. And I’ve been simultaneously digging out and organizing my paper files, which can be a little daunting, since my print-outs of Bolton Hall articles (mostly one-page parables) amount to a 5” stack all by themselves. Since I’m taking the time to verify citations with the original sources where I can, it’s been an opportunity to rapidly refresh my memory about a lot of […]