From the Archives

From the Archives

Victor Yarros, “Benjamin R. Tucker—The Man”

August 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Of Benjamin R. Tucker, the founder and leading exponent of individualist. philosophical Anarchism, I have written elsewhere. Of Tucker the man, little has been written by anyone, and I propose to record here impressions and recollections of him based on many years close association with him, personal as well as intellectual and ideological. […]

From the Archives

Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”

August 11, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Benjamin R. Tucker’s rather sudden conversion to Max Stirner’s philosophy of Egoism was a calamitous accident. There is nothing in common between individualist and philosophical Anarchism as Tucker developed it on the foundations laid by Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Warren, Spooner, Spencer, Herbert, Green and Andrews, and Stirner’s German political metaphysics. Some of Tucker’s adherents uncritically swallowed. Egoism and persuaded themselves that it was a corollary, if not a logical deduction from anarchistic premises. This was a gross error. Egoism is half platitudinous, half fallacious. […]

From the Archives

Dyer D. Lum, “The Science of Social Relations” (1890)

February 25, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

By the law of the Three Stages, so elaborately set forth by Auguste Comte, we are told that every science, each branch of knowledge, passes through three different theoretical conditions; the theological, or mythical; the metaphysical, or speculative; and the positive or scientific. “Hence,” said Comte, “arises three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the other. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed, or definite, state; the second is merely a state of transition.” […]

French texts

Jacques-Antoine Vila, “Les Mémoires d’un Forçat” (1898)

July 17, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

A Cayenne, quelques-uns de mes camarades de chaîne et moi, ceux dont l’énergie n’était pas atteinte et éteinte par le genre de vie cruelle du terrible pénitencier nous nous étions souvent jurés, si nous parvenions une bonne fois à nous évader, de faire connaître au monde civilisé, à l’univers entier, les horreurs épouvantables, les perpétuelles tortures subies par des êtres humains dans cet autre dit de justice. […]