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Title: Mutualism
Author: Shawn P. Wilbur
Date: 2018
Language: en
Topics: mutualism, history, anarchist movement
Source: Retrieved on August 26, 2022, from https://www.academia.edu/41820311/Mutualism
Notes: "Mutualism," in The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, Eds. M. Adams and C. Levy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018) ISBN 978-3319756196

Shawn P. Wilbur

Mutualism

Within the anarchist tradition, mutualism has a long, complex and

contentious history. That history has been written by divers hands, with

opponents often contributing as significantly as proponents. As a

result, we face a range of interpretive choices, no one of which

provides a complete picture. Approached as a single tendency, mutualism

seems to defy definition. When we identify the common threads that unite

the tradition, we find they are often not the elements that have defined

the various mutualisms individually. Between each stage in the history

we find nearly as much discontinuity as continuity.

Considered in all its richness, taking into account the elements

abandoned or added along the way, the history of mutualism sheds light

on much more than just the portions of the anarchist tradition generally

designated as mutualist. The price of those insights, however, is a

willingness to exercise considerable interpretive care and caution,

together with a willingness to allow the history its twists and turns.

The language of mutualism, which emerged in the 1820s, predates

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s appropriation of anarchy and anarchist in 1840,

just as those terms predate anarchism, which did not come into

widespread use until the late 1870s. Originally defined in terms of

mutual aid, reciprocity and fair play, the term has designated both the

general notion of mutuality and a series of more specific social

programmes and ideologies. Once appropriated by Proudhon for his

anarchistic project, it would remain associated with his thought,

sometimes functioning as a designation for his entire project. That

association would shape the understanding of mutualism within the

anarchist milieus, which was repeatedly remade according to the fortunes

of Proudhon’s thought in the emerging movement. Once rivals emerged to

claim the anarchist label and anarchism became widely used, mutualist

and mutualism could not simply function as synonyms for these terms and

a more radical shift in meaning took place.

It was at the end of the nineteenth century that the conception of

anarchist mutualism was most significantly transformed, becoming largely

a conceptual foil for anarchist communism, which emerged as a dominant

tendency after the split in the International and the death of Mikhail

Bakunin.[1] Redefined as non-communist anarchism, it retained nominal

connections to Proudhon’s thought, but in fact only reflected those

aspects of his project not easily assimilated by rival tendencies. The

emphasis on social and economic reciprocity remained, although it now

became more likely that individuals would distinguish between mutual

aid—and its associations with the anarchist communist Peter

Kropotkin—and mutuality—now specifically associated with exchange and

market reciprocity. Other defining characteristics were a penchant for

practical, legal reform—in distinction to more overtly revolutionary

means—and a rhetoric drawing on the language of commerce and contract.

For a time, the dominant narrative was that there were two distinct and

opposing forms of anarchism: anarchist communism and a mutualism most

closely associated with individualist, philosophical or commercialist

tendencies.[2]

While the starkest, most divisive aspects of this narrative could not

survive, challenged as they were by a variety of tendencies, all

subsequent definitions of mutualism undoubtedly owe something to this

particular formulation. At present, the existence of multiple mutualist

currents, each drawing very different conclusions from the available

histories, only underlines the extent to which mutualism, in the

broadest sense, has come to be defined at least as much in terms of what

it is not as it is by the ideas dearest to its various proponents.

What follows, then, is a survey of representative episodes drawn from

the history of mutualism, highlighting key moments in the evolution of

the idea. In each episode considerable emphasis will be placed on those

elements, beyond the shared thread, that differentiated the various

individual mutualisms. This is a history rich in possibilities and rife

with conflict, which cannot be understood without acknowledging these

elements.

Much of the modern political lexicon emerged early in the nineteenth

century, often arising in multiple locations and languages before being

clarified and standardised in the international movements of

mid-century.[3] The language of mutualism (mutualist, mutuality, etc.)

dates to the 1820s. In his Traité de l’association domestique-agricole

(1822), Charles Fourier used the phrase ‘mutualisme composé convergent’

to describe the process of mutual education in his proposed system, a

radical variation on the monitorial system, by which the education of

children would be largely in the hands their slightly older peers.[4] In

1826, a series of articles were published in the New Harmony Gazette

under the title ‘The Mutualist, or, Practical Remarks on the Social

System of Mutual Cooperation’, in which a decentralised, more

libertarian adaptation of the Owenite experiment at New Harmony was

proposed. The author signed the articles as ‘a member of a community’,

and the community was probably the Friendly Association for Mutual

Interests, located either at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania or Kendal,

Ohio.[5] In 1828, the canuts, French silk-workers in Lyon, established

the Société du Devoir mutual (Society of Mutual Duty), which played a

militant role in the labour revolts of the 1830s. Its motto was ‘Vivre

libre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!’ ( ‘Live free working, or

die fighting!’)[6]

In each of these cases we find individuals who would be associated with

anarchist mutualism in tantalisingly close proximity. In 1827, Josiah

Warren, who had visited the Kendal community in 1825, would leave New

Harmony to pursue his own libertarian project, the proto-anarchist

‘equitable commerce’. In 1829, Proudhon encountered Fourier during the

printing of the latter’s Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire and

in 1843 he was living in Lyon, where mutuellistes were still an active,

if largely clandestine presence. But while there is no shortage of

suggestive echoes and possible connections, we would probably be hasty

to read too much into either the popularity or the persistence of the

language of mutualism in an era when even the most familiar terms could

be subject to repeated appropriation and reuse.

We know that Proudhon practiced this sort of appropriation. His famous

declaration, ‘Je suis anarchiste’, is an obvious example. And we know

that he performed similar transformations of the language of property,

Fourier’s serial analysis and the phrase laissez faire, to cite just a

few examples. The most obvious provocations were, in fact, grounded in a

point of principle. In 1853, in The Philosophy of Progress, he declared

that ‘it is not my place to create new words for new things and I am

forced to speak the same language as everyone’. Moreover, ‘there is no

progress without tradition, and the new order having as its immediate

antecedents religion, government and property, it is convenient, in

order to guarantee that evolution, to preserve for the new institutions

their patronymic names, in the phases of civilization, because there are

never well-defined lines, and to want to accomplish the revolution by a

leap would be beyond our means’.[7] Sometimes, of course, speaking ‘the

same language as everyone’ means allowing even important words to assume

multiple meanings or approaching a single topic with multiple

vocabularies—and this is what we find in Proudhon’s work.

While mutualism has at times become a shorthand designation for

Proudhon’s thought as a whole, we know that for him it was one tool in a

very extensive kit. In much of Proudhon’s work, mutualism and mutuality

simply designate reciprocal social relations. ‘Credit’, Proudhon tells

us in the Confessions of a Revolutionary, ‘is, from the point of view of

social relations, a mutualism, an exchange’.[8] There are, however, more

programmatic uses. At the end of The System of Economic Contradictions,

having explored the various unresolved contradictions that he believed

dominated modern society, he claimed that ‘in order to arrive at the

definitive organization that appears to be the destiny of our species on

the globe, nothing remains but to make a general equation of all our

contradictions’ and that the ‘formula’ of that equation must be ‘a law

of exchange, a theory of MUTUALITY, a system of guarantees’.[9]

The practical application of this ‘formula’ was to be the subject of a

sequel and Proudhon’s notebooks for 1846 are filled with notes for a

‘Program of the Progressive Association, or Theory of Mutuality’, which

was his attempt to sketch a model of anti-capitalist self-organisation

for the working classes. However, this work, which was probably the most

comprehensive attempt to sketch a mutualist program in the 19th century,

is only now due to be published.[10]

After the French Revolution of 1848, Proudhon prepared a new mutualist

program, based this time around the notion of free credit. In 1849, a

long series of articles appeared in Le Peuple, under the general title

‘Demonstration of Socialism, Theoretical and Practical, or Revolution by

Credit’. In these, Proudhon addressed many of the details regarding his

Bank of the People, which aimed to provide a secure and inexpensive

currency to workers who were otherwise excluded from most commerce. In

the sixth article in the series, ‘Deduction of the Revolutionary

Idea.—Gratuity and Mutuality of Credit’, he discusses the ‘right to

credit’ and the duty to extend it, concluding that if they exist they

must be equal. ‘Now’, he says, ‘if the right to credit and the duty to

extend it are equal; if obligation is born from guarantee, and vice

versa, then we arrive at this formula: RECIPROCITY OF CREDIT,

MUTUALISM’.[11] The full exposition is striking, drawing as it does on a

variety of arguments pertaining to different spheres of knowledge, but

it was the basic practical proposal that was imitated so faithfully for

so long, particularly in the United States.

Proudhon’s influence on the emerging international workers’ movement can

be traced to a third attempt at a mutualist program. The Political

Capacity of the Working Classes, the final work completed before his

death, was in many ways a return to the project of ‘progressive

association’. Framed as a response to a group of Parisian workers

questioning the advisability of supporting worker candidates in upcoming

elections, Proudhon’s response was a lengthy sketch of the ‘Mutualist

System’ by which the workers could achieve liberty through

self-management.[12]

These same Parisian workers were then instrumental in the establishment

of the First International, although their influence was not to last.

According to E. E. Fribourg, ‘the history of the International divides

into two parts: the first period, which I will call Parisian,

corresponds to the founding and the first two congresses, at Geneva in

1866, and Lausanne in 1867. During this time the association was

mutualist, demanding of the collectivity only the guarantee of the

execution of contracts that have been freely discussed, and freely

consented to’. In the second part, ‘the moral direction inevitably

escaped the hands of the French workers, passed to Belgium, and in that

second period, which we will call Russo-German, the International became

communist, which is to say authoritarian’.[13] But what Fribourg,

himself part of the Paris contingent, describes as a change of tendency

was described by César de Paepe, one of the most influential of the

Belgian workers, as a dispute among mutualists.

During the 1867 Congress, in the midst of a debate on the social

ownership of the soil, de Paepe stated:

Like the citizens Tolain and Chemalé, I am an adherent of the mutualist

socialism, which wants to realise the principle of reciprocity in all

the transactions of men; but I do not consider the idea of the inclusion

of the soil in social property as incompatible with mutualism—quite the

contrary. What, indeed, does mutualism demand? It demands that the

product of labour belongs, in its entirety, to the producer and that

this product only exchanges in society for an equivalent product, one

costing the same amount of labour and expense; but the soil is not the

product of anyone’s labor, and the reciprocity of exchange is not

applicable to it […] It is because I am a mutualist that I want, on the

one hand, the cultivator to have some guarantees that assure them, with

regard to society, the full product of their labour and, on the other

hand, some guarantees for society with regard to the cultivator: and

this is why the soil can only be the property of the social

collectivity, and the cultivator can only have simple possession, the

right to use without abuse. Mutualism is not only the reciprocity of

exchange; it is also the reciprocity of guarantees. [14]

In this, de Paepe was largely correct and represented that faction among

the collectivists who saw in their own ideas, as Bakunin put it,

‘Proudhonism, greatly developed and taken to its ultimate

conclusion’.[15] We see here the possibility of a different evolution of

mutualism, perhaps one in which his analysis of collective force and

progressive association might have found development. But pressures

within the International tended to heighten tensions and deepen the

gulfs between factions. Ultimately, de Paepe would defect from both the

mutualist and anti-authoritarian collectivist camps, siding with Marx

and others to whom Bakunin would not hesitate apply the ‘authoritarian’

label.

As for Bakunin himself, while his work shows numerous indications of

Proudhon’s influence, he chose, even in the heat of his battles with

Marx, to praise Proudhon for his instincts, rather than his social

science. In 1872, he wrote that ‘Marx, as a thinker, is on the right

track’, while Proudhon ‘had the true instinct of the revolutionary—he

adored Satan and he proclaimed an-archy’. About mutualism he had little

or nothing to say.[16]

It is clear that by the 1870s mutualism was a waning force within the

anarchist milieus. Some isolated Proudhonian thinkers continued to

develop his ideas, often in a collectivist direction. Some of the best

of this work, however, did not appear under the mutualist banner. Claude

Pelletier, an exile in New York, published a number of striking

Proudhonian works under the general title Atercracy, which he considered

equivalent in meaning to anarchy, but perhaps less threatening to the

uninitiated.[17]

As mutualism waned in significance as an anarchist label and as Proudhon

waned as a reference among anti-authoritarians increasingly drawn toward

collectivism, if not communism, anarchism, which had seen some use by

anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque after 1859, arose as a label around

which an anarchist movement might form in the wake of the splits in the

International. At first, very few of the anti-authoritarians outside

mutualist or ‘Proudhonian’ circles adopted the anarchist label. In his

1881 essay ‘On Order’, Peter Kropotkin described the process by which

the label was reluctantly accepted. Having noted that rebels had often

had their names imposed on them, he observed that:

[It was] the same for the anarchists. When a party arose in the heart of

the International that denied the authority in the Association and

rebelled against authority in all its forms, that party first gave

itself the name federalist party, then that of anti-statist or

anti-authoritarian. In that era, it avoided even giving itself the name

of anarchist. The word an-archy (that is how it was written then) seemed

to link the party too much with the Proudhonians, whose ideas regarding

economic reform the International combated at that moment. But it was

precisely because of that, in order to spread confusion, that the

adversaries to delight in using that name; besides, it allowed them to

say that the very name of the anarchists proves that their sole ambition

is to create disorder and chaos, without thinking of the results.[18]

This is the account of a succession, by which one group of anarchists,

the Proudhonians, have been replaced by another, proponents of a ‘modern

anarchism’ that Kropotkin identified with anarchist communism. Five

years later, Hazell’s Annual Encyclopaedia for 1886 would report that

‘Anarchists are divided into mutualists, who hope to bring about their

economic results by Banks of Exchange and a free currency; and

communists, whose motto is: ‘From every man according to his capacity,

to every man according to his needs’’.[19] By that time, as well, a new

mutualist faction had emerged to take its place opposite the anarchist

communists.

The individualists who would claim the mutualist title at the end of the

nineteenth century were largely the product of a development in the

United States, parallel and often independent of the European movements.

Proudhon’s mutualism had arrived there by 1849 and for a brief period

the term had a wide currency in the radical press, even if its meanings

did not always conform to Proudhon’s thought. Among the translations in

The Spirit of the Age (1849-1850), a short-lived reform paper, appeared

a long passage from The System of Economic Contradictions, under the

title ‘The Coming Era of Mutualism'.[20] In this translation of the

passage already cited, the ‘theory of MUTUALITY’ became a ‘theory of

MUTUALISM’ and the accompanying discussion makes it clear that

Proudhon’s ideas were being treated as compatible with the Fourierism

and Christian socialism already present in the milieu. In a somewhat

distorted echo of the System of Economic Contradictions—where Proudhon

gave the notion of Providence his own anti-theist twist—editor William

Henry Channing framed the mission of paper in mutualist terms:

“What transformation does Providence now intend?”

We can but denote some of the impending changes which Humanity plainly

commands and Heaven sanctions—thus presenting germs to be hereafter

unfolded; and we invite the aid of practical persons in marking out the

stages of this next era of Guarantees, as it was denominated by Fourier,

or Mutualism, as Proudhon calls it.[21]

While the approach was eclectic, it was the sort of well-read

eclecticism that could make the connection between Proudhon’s mutualism

and Fourier’s guarantism long before Proudhon made it explicit in his

own work. Mutualism was also the subject of articles by Charles A. Dana,

Joshua King Ingalls, Francis George Shaw and Albert Brisbane. Translated

excerpts from Proudhon’s Confessions of a Revolutionary also appeared,

as well as unsigned articles on mutual banking clearly drawn from the

work of William Batchelder Greene.

Greene was himself another eclectic, eccentric character, a

soldier-turned-minister with ties to New England transcendentalism and

the Massachusetts abolitionists, who left for France after the passage

of the Fugitive Slave Law, encountering Proudhon during his stay, and

then returned to lead a Union artillery regiment during the Civil War.

In 1849-1850, he was adapting Proudhon’s mutual credit schemes to

conditions in rural New England, attempting to reconcile the work of

Proudhon with that of his rival Pierre Leroux, and seasoning the mix

with his own brand of esoteric Christianity.

The first edition of Greene’s work on mutual banking was a two-volume

compilation of articles written in 1849 under the name ‘Omega’ for the

Palladium of Worcester, Massachusetts. Equality was published in 1849

and Mutual Banking was published the following year. In those early

volumes we find not just Greene’s adaptation of Proudhon’s bank

proposal, but also legal and religious meditations on usury, together

with an explanation of mutualism that presents it as the successor to

Christianity.

[D]ispensation fellows dispensation; each dispensation being adapted to

its peculiar stage of human progress. New light will soon break forth

from the Gospel, and the NEW CHRISTIANITY will establish itself in the

world—a Christianity as much transcending the one now known in the

Churches, as this last transcends the religion of types and shadows

revealed through Moses.

This is the order of the dispensations:—the Covenant with Noah; the

Covenant with Abraham; THE MOSAIC DISPENSATION; CHRISTIANITY; CHRISTIAN

MUTUALISM.

Christian Mutualism is the RELIGION of the coming age: —Sanscrit, yuga;

Heb. yom, or ivom; Gr. aion; Lat. aevum; Light's manifestation,

revolving age, dispensation, world, day.[22]

Later editions, including two published by Greene himself and several

published after his death, would dispense with the religious framing,

but the original volumes are essential for understanding just how the

milieu surrounding papers like The Spirit of the Age differed from the

later individualist anarchist milieu associated with Benjamin R. Tucker

and Liberty.

Absent from the pages of The Spirit of the Age, but present in the

Boston freethought forums during precisely the same period, was Josiah

Warren, theorist of equitable commerce—a system of cost-price exchange

employing a unique variety of labour notes. Warren, despite his own

avoidance of labels, would become known as a mutualist retrospectively,

thanks to his influence on Tucker and his circle, but the movement for

equitable commerce that developed around him was a force in Boston’s

reform circles at the time.[23]

Twenty years later, the same eclectic mix of reformers and interests

that had filled the pages of The Spirit of the Age would find an

organisational expression in the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL)

and various associated organisations. Founded in 1869, the NELRL was

largely the brainchild of Ezra H. Heywood, who had long been active in

abolitionist circles and had come to embrace both anarchistic mutualism

and free love. With his wife, Angela Heywood, he published The Word, a

paper of generally anarchistic tendencies, from 1872 through 1893.[24]

The Heywoods were instrumental in publishing and distributing the works

of Greene, Warren and others in their general circle. The last edition

of Mutual Banking published during Greene’s lifetime was published under

the auspices of the NELRL.

Greene, Warren and Heywood were all present at the 1872 conference of

the NELRL. Also in attendance was a young Benjamin R. Tucker, who had

been attending meetings of the Boston Eight-Hour League, but without

feeling that he had found the economic answers he was looking for. His

encounter with the leading lights of the NELRL was transformative and

set Tucker on the road to becoming the most prominent individualist

anarchist in the United States, with few peers anywhere in the world.

Almost immediately on meeting the older radicals, Tucker threw himself

into the milieu, working on The Word and then moving on to publications

of his own, launching first the short-lived Radical Review and then

Liberty, which appeared from 1881 to 1907. Initially, his circle

included a wide range of reformers, but Tucker’s consistent response to

his indisputably broad range of influences was a steady narrowing and

distillation of his own thought, often accompanied by noisy schisms in

the pages of various periodicals. Tucker was proud of adhering to a

‘plumb-line’ politics and he developed an analysis of society according

to which it was various forms of monopoly that stood between people and

a free society based on voluntary association. He then proceeded to

adapt insights drawn from Proudhon, Greene, Warren and a host of other

thinkers to this worldview, which was in many ways entirely alien to the

original works of those thinkers.

Perhaps the clearest single expression of Tucker’s philosophy is the

1888 essay ‘State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and

Wherein They Differ’.”[25] Here, Tucker divides the modern socialist

movement according to socialists’ adherence to either the principle of

authority or that of liberty. Faced with the choice between these

principles, he says, in a partisan retelling of the history, ‘Marx went

one way; Warren and Proudhon the other. Thus were born State Socialism

and Anarchism’. Kropotkin and the martyred Haymarket anarchists, he

continues, seem headed down the wrong road as well. And the essay ends

with the republication of a long ‘Socialistic Letter’ by Ernest Lesigne,

outlining the distinctions between ‘The Two Socialisms’. It begins:

There are two Socialisms.

One is communistic, the other solidaritarian.

One is dictatorial, the other libertarian.

And it continues for another 600 words, drawing the distinctions in no

uncertain terms, ending with the prediction:

One is the infancy of Socialism; the other is its manhood.

One is already the past; the other is the future.

One will give place to the other.

Today each of us must choose for the one or the other of these two

Socialisms, or else confess that he is not a Socialist.[26]

Although this is clearly a reflection of the division noted by Hazell’s

Annual Encyclopaedia, Tucker did not himself make the distinction one of

mutualists vs. communists. However, in 1894, Henry Seymour, in what was

essentially a rewriting of Lesigne’s letter, presents the struggle

between ‘The Two Anarchisms’ in precisely those terms:

There are two Anarchisms. That is to say, there are two schools of

Anarchism.

One is communistic, the other mutualistic.[27]

And, in the decades to follow, the identification of mutualism with

individualism would increasingly go unchallenged. In 1927, for example,

Clarence Lee Swartz’ What is Mutualism? would address socialism in a

chapter on ‘Proposed But Inadequate Remedies’.

Tucker’s plumb-line individualism is, of course, well worth study on its

own merits, in the context of the larger tradition of anarchist

individualism, and the contributors to Liberty included a wide range of

interesting and able anarchist thinkers. However, as mutualism came to

mean simply non-communist, the content that seems specifically vital to

a history of mutualism dwindled. Among Tucker’s associates, the one

agitation that stands out as particularly mutualist was the long

propaganda in favor of the mutual bank.

Indeed, in that one regard, the individualists of the Tucker school

proved themselves tirelessly faithful to the projects of Proudhon and

Greene. Alfred B. Westrup produced a series of tracts on the subject,

culminating in the book The New Philosophy of Money, and organised the

Mutual Bank Propaganda to spread the mutual credit gospel. Anarchist

insurance broker Herman Kuehn produced The Problem of Worry, a variation

on the familiar model organised according to principles derived from the

insurance industry. And a substantial portion of Swartz’s What is

Mutualism? was dedicated to the question of mutual credit.

For much of the twentieth century, mutualism remained essentially

moribund. With the arrival of the twenty-first, however, and perhaps

particularly with the improved access to historical documents that has

come with the advent of the internet, interest in mutualism revived

considerably. At the centre of this largely grassroots revival has been

Kevin Carson, an independent writer and scholar who over the past decade

has produced four self-published volumes and a large number of essays

exploring mutualism.[28]

His first major work, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, attempted

to show that elements of Marxian and Austrian economics could be

understood as compatible, particularly in the context of a Benjamin R.

Tucker-inspired mutualism or ‘free market anti-capitalism’.[29]

Subsequent works have expanded the project, extending the initial

synthesis to include material from a wide range of scholarly

disciplines, literary genres and reform movements. While the fundamental

vision of a market-centred individualist anarchism is perhaps not

substantially removed from that of Tucker, the eclectic range of

materials and the ambitious, experimental approach to constructing ‘low

overhead’ transitional institutions recalls various nineteenth century

mutualists.

The internet era has also provided new stimulus to the study of

Proudhon’s work. Property is Theft, the first significant collection of

full texts and lengthy excerpts in English, was a product of the same

culture of online debate that produced An Anarchist FAQ. Some of the

texts included there originated in the Proudhon Library project, a

proposed continuation of Tucker’s original Proudhon Library. A number of

book-length works have been translated and work has begun to bring at

least a partial edition to print.[30]

Perhaps the only thing more difficult than summarising mutualism’s past

is speculating about its future. While the continued expansion of

Carson’s project and the continued recovery of Proudhon’s seem likely to

offer new resources to the anarchist movement, it is less clear to what

extent mutualism is an adequate framework for the development of the

anarchist project and to what extent it remains too closely tied to

partisan conflicts that are now well over a century old. Only time will

tell how long mutualism remains viable through cycles of appropriation

and revision, but, as I hope this narrative suggests, the existing

tradition contains enough unexplored material to occupy students for

some time to come.

[1] See, for example, Dyer D. Lum, “Communal Anarchy,” The Alarm 2 no.

15 (March 6, 1886): 2. “A distinction has been sought between what has

been termed “Mutualistic Anarchy” and communistic anarchy….”

[2] Regarding these distinctions, see Steven T. Byington, “Anarchist

Labels,” The Demonstrator 1 no. 2 (March 18, 1903): 2.

[3] an overview of this creative period, see Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., "The

Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary," Journal of the History of Ideas

9 no. 3 (Jun., 1948): 259–302.

[4] Charles Fourier, Traité de l'association domestique-agricole, tome

II (Paris: Bossange, 1922): 349.

[5] “The Mutualist,” New Harmony Gazette 1 no. 37 (June 7, 1826): 294.

[6] David Barry, Women and Political Insurgency (New York: Springer,

1996): 140.

[7] P.-J. Proudhon, The Philosophy of Progress (Gresham. OR: Corvus

Editions, 2012): 29.

[8] P.-J. Proudhon, Les confessions d'un révolutionnaire (Brussels:

Delevinge & Callewaert, 1849): 141.

[9] P.-J. Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques, tome II

(Paris: Guillaumin, 1846): 527.

[10] Edward Castleton has prepared an edition under the title La

propriété vaincue. Théorie de l'Association universelle, slated for

publication in 2018. See his essay “Association, Mutualism and the

Corporate Form in the Published and Unpublished Writings of

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,” History of Economic Ideas 25 no. 1 (2017):

143-172, for a discussion of this work and a useful overview of

Proudhon’s work on mutualism.

[11] P.-J. Proudhon, Mélanges, tome II (Brussels: Lacroix, Verboekhoven

& Co.): 39.

[12] P.-J. Proudhon, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières

(Paris: Dentu, 1865.)

[13]

E. E. Fribourg, L'Association internationale des travailleurs (Paris:

Armand Le Chevalier, 1871): 2.

[14] Procès-verbaux: Congrès de l'association Internationale des

travailleurs (Chaux-de-fonds: La voix de l’avenir, 1867): 80-81.

[15] Mikhail Bakunin, Oeuvres, tome III (Paris: Stock, 1908): 252.

[16] Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain” (1872)

https://blog.bakuninlibrary.org/

bakunin-to-the-brothers-of-the-alliance-in-spain-1872/.

[17] See, for example, Edualc Reitellep, Les Soirées socialistes de New

York (New York: np, 1873.)

[18] Pierre Kropotkine, Paroles d’un révolté (Paris: C. Marpon et E.

Flammarion, 1885): 99.

[19] Hazell’s Annual Encyclopaedia (London: Hazell, Watson & Viney,

1886): 17.

[20] P.-J Proudhon, “The Coming Era of Mutualism” The Spirit of the Age,

1 no. 7 (August 18, 1849): 107-8.

[21] William Henry Channing, “Topics and Their Treatment” The Spirit of

the Age, 1 no. 7 (August 21 18, 1849): 105.

[22] William B. Greene, Mutual Banking (West Brookfield, MA: O. S. Cooke

& Company, 1850): 94

[23] The best source on the equitable commerce movement in Boston,

between 1846 and 1855, is the Boston Investigator, which followed its

progress closely.

[24] See William B. Greene, “Communism versus Mutualism,” The Word 3 no.

7 (Nov. 1874).

[25] Benjamin R. Tucker, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They

Agree and Wherein They Differ (London: A. C. Fifield, 1911.)

[26] Ibid

[27] Henry Seymour, The Two Anarchisms (London, Proudhon Press, 1894.)

[28] Carson’s works, which are all self-published, include Studies in

Mutualist Political Economy (2007), Organization Theory: A Libertarian

Perspective (2008), The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010) and The

Desktop Regulatory State (2016).

[29] Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Charleston:

BookSurge Publishing, 2007.) For more on “free market anti-capitalism,"

see Carson’s website at www.mutualist.org.

[30] Translations can be found at proudhonlibrary.org.