Might Makes Right (a bad book is good to find…)

A thousand is a lot, when it is a thousand articles that have to be checked for complete citations, typos, and formatting, and assigned to enough categories and index pages to be findable. The work on cleaning up and standardizing the Libertarian Labyrinth archive has already been both a lot of work and a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned before, much of my accumulation of texts has been done at times when there was little leisure, or too much distraction, to take as much time with them as I would have liked. So while I’ve been doing a lot […]

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 […]

John Gray, best known for his Lecture on Human Happiness, is frequently listed among the earliest of mutualists. Certainly, he was an important figure among the more-or-less-Owenite socialists of the mid-1820s. His Lecture was cited by the “Mutualist” of 1826. But we know that at least some of the accounts of this “first mutualist moment” are at least a bit garbled, particularly where Gray is involved. I’m still deciding how to classify Gray’s contribution to the history of mutualism, but the work has recently become easier, thanks to the appearance of a number of digital editions of Gray’s works. The […]