William B. Greene, Equality (1849)

I’ve finally got Equality, the first of Greene’s mutual banking books online. This is the 1849 work largely based on those still-elusive Worcester Palladium articles. Here’s the index:

EQUALITY, NO. 1.

• The Banking System
• The Usury Laws
• Equal Laws and Equality Before The Laws
• The Currency
• The Currency—Its Evils—And Their Remedy

EQUALITY, NO. II. To the Philosophers and Politicians.

• Solidarity
• The Formula of Labor
• Communism—Capitalism—Socialism
• Socialism in Massachusetts
• Liberty

Readers of any of the later editions of Mutual Banking should recognize the 2nd, 4th and 5th sections of No. I, and readers of this blog will recognize the 3rd section of No. II, which I discussed recently in the context of the works on transcendentalism. The 4th section of contains the (in)famous indictment of Socialism as “the only political system which presents no good points,” but Greene is not consistent in his use of the terminology, and ultimately always returns to some balance between opposing philosophies. To Brownson, he said, for example, “my conscience suggested to me, when I was reading your description of socialism as the ne plus ultra of heresy, that I belonged to the most abandoned wing of the socialist faction.”

I’m about half way through the final proofing and XHTMLizing of the 1850 Mutual Banking, and might have that online tomorrow. The 1857 and 1870 works will follow shortly after.