As a lot of my day-to-day focus shifts back to the digital archiving projects, it makes sense to put some old tools back into use. By the beginning of the new year, I should have Travelling in Liberty, or a reboot thereof, back in action, and today I’m relaunching From the Libertarian Library as a spot to highlight the archival projects, display long texts, etc., freeing this blog up as a more focused space for writing about mutualism. Between now and the end of December, I’ll be gradually making the shift back to using multiple blogs for various tasks.
The first new text at the Libertarian Library site is a long essay by Steven T. Byington, from the pages of Dora Marsden’s journals, The New Freewoman and The Egoist. (Anyone interested in these journals should check out the Modernist Journals Project, which I, for better or worse, discovered the day after I dedicated a day in the library to them.) In it, his thesis is this:
If one person injures another by making the material environment unfit for that other’s use, the injury should be regarded as on the same level with a direct assault on another’s person or on the products of his labour.
And the treatment is both interesting and presented in an entertaining manner. The questions raised are, I think, more or less the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring this sort of injury, which means, of course, that the difficulties encountered are probably just the most obvious. I think there’s considerable food for thought in the piece.
