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 what Tucker felt was its decline. Channing’s earlier paper, The Present, has also turned up at Google Books, along with a number of volumes of the Western Messenger, which he co-edited. There’s some very interesting stuff in The Present, including some discussion of William B. Greene’s philosophical and theological work.
Proudhon Library
P.-J. Proudhon, “Confessions of a Revolutionist” (Spirit of the Age, 1850)
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] These “translations” are often more like summaries, but they show that readers in the United States were at least getting some exposure to Proudhon’s work by 1850. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] From the London Weekly Tribune. P. J. PROUDHON. Proudhon was born in 1809, of parents in humble circumstances, at Besançon, the birthplace, by the way of Fourier; and where Proudhon began life as a compositor in a printing-office. This printing-office he afterwards occupied on his own account; but some years since, he quited Besançon for an engagement in a mercantile house at Lyons. […]
Utopian and Scientific
William Henry Channing, “Call of the Present” (1843)
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 […]
Pierre Leroux
Pierre Leroux in “The Present” and “The Spirit of the Age”
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] From Humanity Pierre Leroux, “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” The Present 1 no. 2 (October 15, 1843): 65-68. Pierre Leroux, “The Education of the Human Race,” The Present 1 no. 3 (November 15, 1843): 105-110. Pierre Leroux, “Charity, As the Remedy of Evil,” The Present 1 no. 5-6 (December 15, 1843): 203-205. From Equality Pierre Leroux, “Equality,” The Spirit of the Age 1 no. 10 (September 8, 1849): 156. Pierre Leroux, “Humanity,” The Spirit of the Age 1 no. 17 (October 27, 1849): 261-262. Pierre Leroux, “Necessity of Evil,” The Spirit of the Age […]