A book, approximately

I’m roughly two weeks away from my cross-country relocation, which explains my relative quiet online lately. I’ve been whittling away at 18 years worth of accumulated stuff and making as much use of the research resources here as I can before heading west, reading Proudhon and Leroux, working on texts for LeftLiberty, etc. I’ve also been doing a lot of talking with friends here about mutualism, following up on this Spring’s informal seminar and a presentation I gave on mutualist institutions. The result has been a significant crystalization of my thoughts about mutualism, and the outline, finally, for a collection of writings on the subject.

1. The Anarchism of Approximations: the synthesis/manifesto, parts of which have been posted here;
2. Towards a History of Mutualism: a discussion of the issues to be resolved before any sort of definitive history of mutualism could be written, including an introduction to major figures and texts;
3. A Mutual Theory of Property: a look at property in Locke, Proudhon, Leroux and Ingalls, and a discussion of self-ownership, occupancy and use, possession vs. property, intellectual property, ecological concerns, etc., all in the context of the principle of mutuality;
4. Mutuality and Mystery: a discussion of the religious elements in William B. Greene’s original Christian Mutualism, with some thoughts on how mutuality and religious mystery may be connected there, and how they both might connect with contemporary treatments of community in the works of writers like Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben;
5. Mutualist Institutions for the Here and Now; a very nuts-and-bolts discussion of what institutions (and it’s probably not the mutual bank) mutualists could attempt to institute right now, with the actual resources at hand, and some discussion of existing left-libertarian projects (my own and others’) in that context;
6. A review (overdue, no doubt) of Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, and some discussion of how I see Kevin’s vision of mutualism and my own connecting.

This is the stuff that goes to the top of the to-do list, as soon as the cats and my bulkier possessions start on their way west. Much of it is already written, or outlined, so it may start to appear fairly quickly. Nothing, of course, is certain, given the rather complete upheaval of my life just around the corner, but I hope to have the majority of this circulating in some form by the end of 2008.