Utopia, Ohio: Writings of Josiah Warren, Practical Anarchist

Introduction

by Crispin Sartwell

The early nineteenth century in America produced a bewildering variety of individualists, both in the sense of people who advocated the primacy of the human individual politically and metaphysically, and in the sense of seriously idiosyncratic persons who followed their own genius and ended up changing the world or leaving it entirely indifferent. It was, in many ways, a religious revival, but it soon sacrificed God on the altar of originality and non-conformity. It produced undoubted geniuses of the caliber of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne; social reformers as pure and intense as any that the world has known - such as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Captain John Brown; and it produced utopians who thought they could found a new order, people like Adin Ballou and Josiah Warren.

Like most of these astonishing and exasperating people, Josiah Warren originated in Massachusetts. Like Garrison (and Ben Franklin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Albert Spears) he was printer. Like Brown he was a revolutionist, though Brown was violent, Warren by his own declaration peaceful. Like Emerson and Whitman, he sang or in his case lectured about the freedom of individuality and connected it to an understanding of the nature of the universe. Like Thoreau he loved simplicity and skill, and displayed them prodigiously as qualities of character and thought throughout his life. And like Ballou - and all these people at one time or another - he loathed the state and took steps to try to work out a life without it.

You could think of Warren as an Emersonian avatar, someone who lived what "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," "Nature," and even "Fate" taught, even as those fundamental statements of the American character were written. He practiced wilderness self-sufficiency, anti-capitalist economy, radical democracy that entailed extreme decentralization of decision-making, and a metaphysics of particulars and their unity. In short, his philosophy is what is called in American literary history "transcendentalism," and it as early as Emerson.

Josiah Warren was both a genius and a crank of nearly the first order. Warren has often been called the first American anarchist, though he called himself a "Democrat." And though I'm sure he wasn't the first American anarchist (since every state breeds skeptics, and since Anne Hutchinson and Samuell Gorton lived in the seventeenth century), it is not an entirely inapt characterization. In the usual histories of anarchist thinking only William Godwin is earlier, and Warren's self-printed Peaceful Revolutionist (of 1833) has plausibly been called the first anarchist periodical. Through Stephen Pearl Andrews and Benjamin Tucker - also extremely idiosyncratic thinkers - Warren became known as the founder of "individualist" anarchism. He was probably the first non-religious American anarchist to publish his views.

He was also - until now, I believe - well-nigh unreadable. He himself never regarded his written work (but rather his practical experiments in living) as his most important work, and his prose is undoubtedly the prose of a man who developed a new and less expensive and time-consuming process for manufacturing his own type. Warren's is some of the most typographically perverse writing produced before surrealist poetry. He will, for example, use several sizes of small caps for different degrees of emphasis, tossing in a half dozen exclamation marks for effect. I informally calculate that among his works about a third of the sentences end in at least one exclamation point; while in his notebooks the percentage is far higher. He introduced marginal indexing systems and tables of reference so that one could follow a single theme through a book, or read the book in different thematic orders, a kind of hyperlink typesetting that yields perverse organizations worthy of a Spinoza. In his handwritten journals he used a system of underlinings meant to add absurd shades and degrees and intensities of emphasis, building to a bathetic crescendo of hyperbole. Bracing and fundamentally original ideas are studded with mere enthusing, as in this from Equitable Commerce: "Thus does simple EQUITY outstrip the sagacity and genius of man, and work out for him the great problem of SOCIETY, WITHOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF LIBERTY!" Even as American anarchists appealed to him as their founder and to his ideas as their solution, he was something of an embarrassment.

One thing we could say about all the American literary and political figures mentioned above. They may or may not have been smarter, cooler, or better human beings than Josiah Warren. They may or may not prove to be greater benefactors of mankind. But they were undoubtedly better prose stylists.

Why, then, revive the sage of . . . Utopia, Ohio? My own primary interest in Warren is not as an historical phenomenon but as someone who developed and tried to put into concrete operation practical plans to realize a complex society in which unity does not rest on coercion. That is, I think of Warren as our most practical anarchist. Furthermore, however, I believe his political philosophy derives from a set of profound insights which were astonishing and perverse when they were articulated and which are perhaps even more astonishing and perverse today. They run against the stream of modernity and post-modernity in physical science and social science and ethics, in short in every area of human thought and endeavor, but they are simultaneously entailed by these developments, are their other.

I. Life in Brief

For someone who dedicated much of his life to writing and to publishing what he wrote, Josiah Warren revealed surprisingly little about himself. He was born in 1798 in Boston and by his early twenties had moved to Cincinnati, married (he and his wife Caroline eventually had a son, George), and set up shop as a performer and teacher of music. An inveterate tinkerer, he invented a lamp that burned lard, as opposed to the more expensive tallow, and in the mid-1820s began to manufacture his invention. Inspired by hearing a lecture by Robert Owen - the great Scottish industrialist and utopian projector - he and his family removed to the socialist community of New Harmony, where he served as the band leader. Returning to Cincinnati after the failure of the initial New Harmony experiment in 1827, Warren established the first of his Time Stores, which served to establish a small cooperative economy, to illustrate the labor theory of value, and to put into the circulation the first version of Warren's currency: the labor note. In 1835, he established the first of his "trial villages" in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, which was followed by experiments at Utopia, Ohio, commencing in 1841, and Modern Times, on Long Island, in 1851. The priority in all cases was to make it possible for people with no means to have homes. In 1833, he published what is often termed the first anarchist periodical, The Peaceful Revolutionist, and throughout his life, small-scale publishing ventures were conjoined with dramatic innovations in type production, typesetting, and printing, including what was perhaps the world's first continuous-feed press, which he perfected in the 1830s and 40s. In 1844 he published the first version of his new "mathematical" system of musical notation. He moved to Modern Times in the 1850s, then to the Boston area by the 1860s, where he lived for the remainder of his life, which concluded in 1874.

The main biographical source is William Bailie's Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist, published in 1906. For more details, see the timeline that concludes this introduction.

II. Leading Ideas

Warren throughout his adult life thought of his philosophy as easily captured in a few simple principles. He listed them in various enumerations: here I give them in four: individualism; self-sovereignty; the cost limit of price; and the labor note as a circulating medium.

(1) Individualism, as an ontology and as a science: as a statement of what there is and of the principle for finding out what there is, namely by ever-finer appreciation of the specificities of every event, thing, or person.

Science, in its initial bloom at the hands of Bacon for example, and certainly through the "scientistic" late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is sometimes thought of as a refinement of everyday induction: one makes a series of observations and draws generalizations from them. Science in this sense, we might say, is the art of generalization, the art of battening on to the shared qualities of varied phenomena, and capturing these shared qualities in principles or laws. Newtonian physics is a good example, of course, but perhaps an even clearer one - and one closer to Warren's spirit and moment - is Darwin's theory of natural selection. Devising and refining and defending the theory required countless observations of particular organisms in relation to the particularities of their environments. But its value became manifest at the moment that from these particularities a generalization emerged which encompassed and accounted for them. The particular phenomena, we might say, were instrumental in the process of generalization, and were expunged into it, comprehended by it, grasped and turned to useful work within it.

Warren formulates the exquisite opposite principle, which he himself called the first principle or the subject-matter of all his work: "The Study of Individuality, or the practice of mentally discriminating, dividing, separating, or disconnecting persons, things , and events, according to their individual peculiarities" (Equitable Commerce). This is, in one way, the most perverse discipline ever founded. The study of anything, as understood since the earliest Greeks is the process of generalizing from particulars. That's the origin of the pre-Socratic cosmologies of Thales or Democritus; it's the essence of Platonism, where generalities are the only truths, to say nothing of Augustine or Plotinus. Aristotle qualified but did not abandon this approach to disciplinary taxonomies and also, hence, to the actual nature of things, in his physics, logic, metaphysics, ethics, poetics, politics. Islamic and scholastic philosophy displays the Aristotelian negotiation between the purity of ideas and the particularities of phenomena. In Kant and Hegel the purity of ideas are working themselves out in history: threatened by particularities now, we rise eventually to generality, or become noumenal.

In the rhetoric of modern science and in the atmosphere of British empiricism in which even a provincial cousin like Warren was steeped, the world was being de-mystified, principles yielding to observations. This tradition emerged from the revival of republicanism and skepticism and a rapidly improving technology. Nevertheless, the goal of the project was always to create an adequate taxonomy of nature (the primary project of 18th century science, as in Linnaeus). To range it under categories was to comprehend its laws, which opened the globe to navigation using ships and lenses, and created prosperity: Adam Smith's economics is a manifesto of this idea.

The idea that science proceeds by generalization or by the abstraction of individuals into categories, is itself an impoverished characterization, because science thus conceived in a Linnaeus way fundamentally involves - or we may redescribe the same process by saying that it involves -unprecedented attention to the individual object and an attempt to account for the bewildering array of experience through a multiplication of specific categories, by an increased attentiveness to specificities. In Equitable Commerce, Warren argues that if you want to organize your correspondence or a box of tools, you individualize and separate them. But of course you also conflate them into categories; indeed the two processes are complementary or inseparable. It is Warren's task to emphasize what we might call the subaltern moment in this dialectic. In this he was fundamentally influenced by Alexander Bryan Johnson, of whom see below.

In application to human beings, this takes the form of an affirmation of the irreducibility of subjectivity and a critique of language, in particular written language. For Warren, the problem at the heart of a political order is that it necessarily de-individualizes its subjects, treating them en masse or in classes. And the worst imaginable approach would be to subject human beings to laws or constitutions, which are inevitably interpreted differently by each person, and by the same person at different times. To freeze a dynamic social order into a document is mere folly: you simply now launch into the interminable and in principle insoluble process of interpretation. Words are the tools of persons, that is, rather than persons the tools of words, and that cannot be changed until human subjectivity can be eradicated. The eradication of subjectivity - the dream or nightmare of a Rousseau, a Hegel, and a Marx - would be the eradication of persons and the world they experience. Or: subjectivity is a dimension of the massed specificities of each person, a human aspect of the pluralism and dynamism of the universe, its existence as an array of irreducible particulars. Indeed the political movement of modernity, which depends in almost any of its formulas on some system of combining interests and identities, is simply a fantasy and a formula for interminable conflict: people clash when their interests are the same, not when they are carefully distinguished, and conflict can be minimized by extricating people from one another, not by rolling them up in ever-larger human bales.

For Warren, a last move remains in the history of science considered as a program: total emigration into specificity, in which the value and character of each incomparable object, event, and person becomes manifest. It is a hyper-nominalist fantasy, and potentially also re-mystifies experience. In the Western tradition it has antecedents in Heraclitean flux, Cynicism, Scottish common-sense philosophy. And surely this is also an idea scouted in Emerson, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In each case it can look either like anti-scientism or the triumph of scientism over the western tradition that returns us to the brute truth of reality, as the tradition rips itself apart or shows, by its own epistemic standards, its own untruth. The truth lodges in particulars, not in principles. Every abstraction from the world is...an abstraction from the world, a digression or diversion from it, and a devaluation of it. For millennia, we have been bundling things together to try to comprehend them; now the point is to appreciate their strangenesses, their excesses to categorization. Individualism is an attempt to re-make the world by affirming it.

Indeed Warren, a la Saussure, treats symbol systems, including his own musical notation, as systems of differences, and points out that signs only mean insofar as they are syntactically distinct and separated from one another spatially or temporally. The world is an indefinitely large plethora of particulars, and so are the representational systems by which we show it forth or grasp it.

The critique itself, of course, is self-refuting. As soon as Warren starts going around founding disciplines and capturing in a term ("individuality") the essence of the universe, or ("self-sovereignty") the basis of all justice and social arrangements, he is doing what the discipline he invented demands he not do. But his discipline demands that he do it. At any rate, Warren is located at the heart of this conceptual tornado, under the tsunami's curl we might say. No one has flatly stated the truth more comprehensively in a few sentences and no one has inveighed more extremely against drawing any generalizations from experience. For precisely these reasons, he both an extreme and emblematic figure, as far into a certain dilemma as the Western tradition has ever gone.

Two broad strands of individualism emerged from the Protestant reformation. Both of them took with some literalness Luther's call for a "priesthood of all believers," a basic statement of religious individualism most emblematically expressed in America in Quakerism. Each person was placed by Luther in charge of his or even her own relationship with God; there were to be no intercessors, none of Catholicism's layers of beings between the peasant and the Lord. As Reformation Europe tried to throw off clerical institutions and remake political institutions, it focused on the individual believer, and assigned to her the task of becoming apparent before God, as the Lutheran lay preacher and contemporary of Warren's, Kierkegaard, put it. And it is worth mentioning that the Reformation's aesthetic was minimalist and utilitarian: each more radical sect simplifying further the principles of design. The design of Warren's system is extremely clear and simple and consistent from the 1820s to the 1870s: a Shaker chair of a philosophy, and thus opposed temperamentally to, let us say, Hegel, or even Emerson.

One form of individualism that emerged from these developments arose among the educated classes, especially in England, where it is called "the liberal tradition." We see it in Hobbes's notion that people can only be put out of a state of nature by their own consent. This becomes, with an admixture of academic Thomism, the notion of natural rights, and of government instituted by contractors or independent agents in something appearing similar to a business transaction. The tradition is of course associated with democracy (as we would now put it) as a political system, above all with the names of Locke and Madison. And it is associated with capitalism as an economic system, the classic statements being in Smith and Ricardo. It eventuates in British utilitarianism, in Bentham and Mill. It is (after Locke) empirical, this-worldly. It emphasizes inalienable individual political and (above all) economic rights. By the time of its maturity in Hume or Gibbon, it has lost even the veneer of theology (in Locke God is still close at hand), and it leads as well to what are called social sciences, in Comte, Spencer, or Mead. It seeks limitations on government power without an actual descent into anarchy. Its real center is an elitist but civic-minded republicanism of a sort compatible with a Protestant monarchy or a representative republic.

The other strand was an individualism not of scholars and gentlemen but of half-cracked enthusiasts or fanatics. Consider, at the dawn of the Reformation, the radical peasant movements of the German Reformation, for example the spread of radical Anabaptism, fairly quickly extended into North America. These movements recognized no authority over the individual, either religious or temporal, because they (the movements) asserted the unconditional obligation each person was under to obey the commands of God, as God was manifest in the life and mind of that person. We might mention radical Protestant dissenters in England, including religious anarchists such as the Diggers and of course Quakers and their ilk. The earliest expression of this attitude of "antinomianism" on the American continent is the movement of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to secede from Plymouth colony and establish communities of conscience. These folks did not conceive their activities as the effusion of reason and science, but as the direct inspiration of God, His intervention into every aspect of life. It was an individualism among persons for the sake of the union with God: individualism as the abandonment of individuality. Its mood was not genteel or scholarly or commercial, but ecstatic.

This is the idea that swept the United States in a half-beautiful and half-farcical mood or movement in the early nineteenth century and it led from an enthusiasm for God to an enthusiasm for...enthusiasm, a hyper-provincial romanticism. Water cures and spirit visitations, all the motley of apocalyptic cults, celibate saints, community-of-wives trigamists, primitive Christian communists, violent abolitionists, absolute non-resistants, temperance fanatics etc, each with a vision from on high and plan to redeem the world or abandon it completely: Adin Ballou and John Humphrey Noyes, Shakers and Mormons, mentally ill or divinely instructed. Emerson and Thoreau stand in a fascinating relation to these developments. For Americans, they were the most cosmopolitan of Harvard men, casually dropping into ancient Greek. Yet they emerge in this culture of enthusiasm and in many ways crystallize it, even as they maintain, from it, a wry distance, seen with lovely absurd clarity in Emerson's essay "New England Reformers." The radical history of America becomes, in them, an American literature and an American character. After the Civil War, many of the enthusiasts lost their idealism and descended into decadence, rolling from fad to fad like Warren acquaintances Victoria Woodhull and Mary Gove Nichols. One might find oneself believing or at least trying to believe anything; the compelling quality of any idea became its implausibility.

At any rate, these two strands of individualism conflict at times; they are as much temperaments as opinions, and though in some ways the opinions dovetail, the temperaments are fiercely incompatible. But we might think, for example, of the American Revolution as in part patrician liberal individualists leading ecstatic Protestant individualists. Certainly the average person in western Pennsylvania or Virginia was not reading Locke. But he was going to church. A good example of an authorship poised on this borderline is Lysander Spooner's. Never have liberal principles (natural rights) been given a clearer exposition, or a more extreme statement. Meanwhile, Spooner was founding an alternative postal service or plotting to liberate John Brown with a raid into Virginia. But as an auto-didact of English legal theory or anything else, Warren is no match for Spooner. He is a pure product of the American utopian vision, drifting West to make the lands bloom.

American ecstatic individualism states its own essence in Warren's work. Warren has none of Emerson and Thoreau's distance or erudition, none of Spooner's polemical mastery. But he delivers a central formulation of the very central motif of American reform, circa 1840, a political theory to match his pre-Thoreauvian ontology of particulars. And he states an extreme response to Western metaphysics even as he insists on a utopian vision.

One of the most interesting aspects of Warren's authorship is that he is an individualist and an advocate of liberty with no sophisticated notion of natural rights. What he says is simply this: the individuality of each person is ineradicable and hence in the strictest sense literally inalienable. Then the question is: how are we to deal politically with this reality?

(2) The Sovereignty of the Individual. Each person is to have absolute control over his own body and actions, at his own cost or responsibility.

The ideal of self-sovereignty is central to the reform movements of early nineteenth century America, and it is a direct, if you like secularist development out of religious conviction of the sovereignty of God. True commitment to the authority of God, according to the radical Reformation, entailed that one could not come under any lesser authority. One must always be free to obey God's command in the face of any lesser command, whether of ruler, priest, or master. You don't find Locke talking about self-sovereignty, or even Jefferson: at their hearts these are republicans who are sensitive to the construction of civic identities, identifying oneself with the interests of the polis. But the radical Reformation tore even at this fairly mild bundling together of identities.

What crystallizes the idea of self-sovereignty as the pure expression of American individualism is the abolitionist movement. This emerged, in perfect simultaneity to the life of Josiah Warren, from an extreme ecstatic Protestantism to a fairly secular vision of universal freedom. The problem of slavery appeared to Garrison and Henry Wright and Lucy Stone as the overarching sin of their own nation and people. And the problem with slavery was not merely its cruelty, but the source of its cruelty: its claim to ownership in persons. This claim appeared to all these figures to be poised in precise opposition to the teachings of Jesus, above all the Sermon on the Mount. Ownership of other people was conceived not merely as an evil, but the essence and acme of all evil: the justification of every violation. To say that this has anarchist implications is overly mild: government, with its authority that rests on coercion and a policy of expropriation of property, its conscription and use of people as cannon fodder, its pretensions to oversee the values of its citizens, is in its essence and in its every act, incompatible with each person's ownership of herself.

The abolitionist movement was dominated by people who simply asserted (a typical statement in some ways is Thoreau's) that government cannot possibly impose actual duties on its citizens that they do not already possess, government or no. For one thing, the government of the United States, including as embodied in the Constitution, recognized the institution of slavery, as did various Christian denominations. Since dominant institutions plainly can permit or encourage the greatest of human evils short of soul-murder, it was obvious that governments could actually be satanic; Garrison famously called the Constitution a "pact with the devil."

The ancients characterized forms of government by forms of sovereignty. Aristotle sorts regimes according to whether one person, or a few persons, or all the persons, rule. Once you have the insight that what freedom means is individual self-sovereignty (the rule, we may say, of each), it is evident that you cannot countenance human government. One might, as well, simply reach this conclusion directly from Christian pacifism of the kind best embodied by Ballou, later taken up by Tolstoy and King: if physical violence is wrong, human government is illegitimate. One way to capture the pacifist intuition is that to physically attack someone is to tear away their self-ownership, literally to violate their humanity and hence one's own. Indeed, initially the American anarchist movement (as it was constituted by such as Ezra Heywood, Warren, and a young Ben Tucker and Voltairine de Cleyre) was explicitly pacifist.

Eventually, the idea of self-sovereignty became something of a euphemism for license, and the residents of Modern Times were referred to with a bit of derision as "sovereigns." Under the tender ministrations of Stephen Pearl Andrews and Ezra Heywood, self-sovereignty came to be associated with extreme eccentricity and free love. But for Warren, self-sovereignty was precisely as much about responsibility as liberty. One problem with social combination is that it tends to obscure the lines of responsibility, and surely we should say that this foreswearing of responsibility and hence personhood has been brought to a peak of perfection by government. Warren himself denounced free love at Modern Times, though he may have been at the same time co-habiting with a woman other than his wife (whom he had left behind in New Harmony). And he was nothing if not industrious, and was particularly concerned to emphasize individual productivity and responsibility early in his career, as in the Peaceful Revolutionist of 1833.

(3) Cost the Limit of Price. The price of something is to be fixed by (can only be fixed by) the cost of producing it, measured by the labor expended in producing it, rather than by what a given person is prepared to pay for it.

Of the figures usually described as "utopian," only Warren actually founded a place called "Utopia," a town in Ohio that still exists by the same name. It had some success, because Warren's vision of how social living might be arranged was realistic, grounded in the basic skills and trades it took to keep people alive, interested in the circulation of commerce and the improvement of standards of living and technological development and pride in individual ownership. And yet there was to be no accumulation of capital or profit because business would be conducted according to Warren's doctrine of equitable commerce. This taught that the price of goods was to be fixed not by what they would bring, but what they cost to produce.

Obviously, this is radical conclusion in the face of Smith-style capitalist economics: it is boldly perverse. And it is, as well, strikingly simple as an economic law. According to Warren, the alternative - that demand fixes price - is, first of all, simply morally and politically repellant: it explicitly authorizes blackmail and coercion. He always returns to the same reductio ad absurdum of the law of supply and demand: what is the value of a glass of water to a man dying of thirst? Everything he has. It would be contrary to self-interest not to take it all. People at times do take everything that someone has, justifying themselves by the supposed law that price is fixed by demand. Ought they to, and must they? At the macro-scale, one works on fleecing one or another segment of the economy, alternately underselling to destroy competitors and inflating prices to exploit local monopolies; prices are entirely capricious, speculation rests on price fluctuations and exacerbates them; economic crises result, etc. This of course recalls Marx's analysis of capitalism, the common strand between Warren and Marx being provided by Owen's socialism.

It is not entirely clear whether, for Warren, cost as what fixes price is a mere utopian ideal or an economic law. But it is not completely out of place as a description of, let us say, mature small-scale capitalist economies, even as a conclusion of the usual laissez-faire arguments. Warren actually proved time and time again by practical experiment that businesses conducted on this principle would in the long run and for the most part under-sell businesses that operated on the motive of maximum profit. This seems obviously true in the sense that in the long run prices cannot fall short of costs or eventually everyone starves. It seems in a certain way likely that in a situation of free competition, prices must approach costs, eliminating profits.

The idea that price must be fixed by cost shows us why Warren cannot be annexed to the greed-is-groovy crowd of libertarian egoists such as Ayn Rand or Smithian rational utility maximizers. When John Humphrey Noyes wrote his history of American utopian movements, he called them "American Socialisms." The word is of course impossibly vague (actually, both words are), but it is meant to encompass Christian anarcho-communism of the sort that Noyes taught at Oneida, and Warren's equitable communities. Possibly it was coined by Owen in his projects. Eventually 'socialism' just indicated plans for social improvement. But Warren is one of the few thinkers ever to propose ownership, even of capital, without greed: a modified capitalism that could if necessary be based on a sober assessment of one's actual interests but could also be an inspiring ideal of a decent life of moderate ownership and doing good work.

Warren was an adherent of the labor theory of value, which was already something of a commonplace before he wrote. Vernon Parrington, discussing the labor theory of value as propounded in the mid-eighteenth century by Benjamin Franklin, gives the notion the following pedigree. "In his Treatise on Taxes, written in 1662, Sir William Petty . . . clearly elaborated the principle of labor-value; it was restated by Vauban in 1707, . . . by Hume in 1752, and later by the Physiocrats; and when Adam Smith wrote it was pretty widely known."[1] One might remark that it is implied in Locke's account of property. Obviously it was an article of faith for Marx and later communism as well. Indeed, one supposes that it is an ancient insight, a kind of inevitable conclusion. Why, for example, are a hundred pots more valuable than one? As an exclusive account of why things actually have the value they do, it has its limitations. In Warren's version, however, the labor theory of value is, as it were, an ideal: he asserts that expenditure of time and of pain, is the only rational and stable means of fixing price, that all other systems, in particular specie money, entail arbitrary fluctuation of price, speculation, usury, and poverty.

His account was refined over the decades of his authorship. Initially he argued that all labor was of equal worth: that one hour of washerwomaning was worth one hour of lawyering. As he went on, he came to think that cost was equal to pain, and hence, for example, that the work of a washerwoman was worth substantially more than that of a lawyer, and far, far more than that of a musician (such as himself), whose labor was for the most part an actual pleasure.

(4) The Labor Note as Circulating Medium. The only rational medium of exchange is a representation of a certain definite quantity of labor of a certain type, which is equivalent to a certain quantity of a commodity.

This idea follows from Warren's version of the labor theory of value, and was the basis of Warren's "Time Stores" in Cincinnati, Utopia, Modern Times, and other locations. He admitted the desirability, for commerce, of a circulating medium. However, Warren's account of monetary economics is radical in its attack on money, and beautifully clear as a theory of economic representation and circulation. He argues that money, in the current capitalist economy, is a commodity like anything else: its price is fixed by its value, or what it will bring. For precisely this reason, money - whether or not, for example, it is backed by gold - is unsuited to be a circulating medium: one can never fix the price of money from one moment to the next, and currency, like corn in an irrational capitalist economy, is subject to sudden inflation because of speculation or limits on the supply and sudden deflation because of overproduction or people dumping hoarded supplies. A circulating medium must be nothing but a representation of a certain amount of goods or labor: a sheer placeholder. Goods are, in turn, resolvable into labor; the two are interchangeable.

Various collections preserve labor notes from different eras of Warren's career, and most of them are proposed to be negotiable for a certain amount of labor of a certain type (seamstressing, for example), or good of a certain quantity (bushels of corn, for example). Warren had from his earliest experiments a strategy for weaning people from currency to labor notes. At the Time Stores he established, one would pay for goods usually in legal tender, repaying the store-keeper for his time in purchasing, stocking, weighing, selling etc with a labor note. Eventually, if the cooperative became large enough, the labor notes of a variety of people would be desirable; goods could then be purchased with labor notes, or labor notes could be exchanged as people made their needs known to one another, posting them on a notice-board at the Time Store. Thus the Time Store would eventually mutate into a labor bank that would be the basis of a local co-operative economy. This would be of inestimable help to the poor and homeless, who have wealth in this context insofar as they dispose of their own labor, and indeed at Utopia and Modern Times people were able to build homes with almost no outlay of money, by exchanging their labor with one another. In other words, Warren regarded this approach as a solution to homelessness and poverty.

In addition, this approach solves the problem that Warren came more and more to conceive as central to the nineteenth century: securing for labor, which produces all wealth, its just reward. For each person to be self-sovereign entails that each person controls her own labor. If labor is equitably exchanged along the lines explored at the Time Stores, each will receive the equivalent of her actual production. This is Warren's "socialism," his way of addressing emerging polarizations of class along the lines of ownership and labor, which many American radicals of the era regarded as a mode of ownership in persons, or a development of slavery.

There are many possible objections to a labor note economy. For one thing, nothing apparently stops people from issuing an indefinite number of labor notes, then absconding or failing to make good when the labor is (or goods are) demanded. Furthermore, there could be speculation in labor notes: one might seek to monopolize an industry by buying up the notes of those who work in that industry, etc. But Warren (especially as elaborated by Heywood in the essay "Hard Cash"[2]) saw that a credit system would evolve along with the labor-note economy, that people whose notes were not good would soon find themselves unable to have their notes accepted. Potential speculators, not having anything to begin with but their own notes, would be unable to amass wealth in that form. The economy could in essence be self-regulating, the only coordination being provided by a central clearinghouse of needs and abilities.

Another objection might be that such a system is appropriate only to a small-scale economy: it is a craft or artisanal model of production and could not work on an industrial scale. On the contrary, the model is more plausible the larger the economy and the more specialized the tasks which people perform, because each such increase increases the likelihood that one will find in a labor exchange a person able to perform the exact task one requires. Warren was an advocate of division of labor, but also hoped that each person could learn several trades, and thus be able to gravitate toward the productive sectors of the economy. He evidently thought that cutting down labor costs as well as sheer irrepressible human ingenuity, would continue to produce technological innovations. All of this he tried to demonstrate in his own course of life as well as in his experimental communities.

Again, in the beginning, and under the influence of Owen, Warren believed that all labor should be valued at the same rate. As he went on, he came to believe that the value of labor varied not only with time expended but with the onerousness of the task, so that the tasks people were least happy to perform should be paid at the highest rate. That is, ultimately the labor note was a calculation of pain. This too could be left as it were to the free market in notes, as the notes of those able to perform the most painful tasks would be the least common, and no one would be able to perform such tasks for many hours at a clip. Thus, if anything, the class order would be inverted, and those engaged in purely artistic or intellectual tasks would pay a (small and reasonable) price for the pleasantness or absorbingness of their professions.

If Warren believed he had shown nothing else in the course of his "experiments," he certainly believed he had demonstrated the practicality of labor notes as a circulating medium, and their effectiveness at pulling people out of poverty and pulling class interests into coordination.

III. Warren and Anarchism

As politics, the principle of individuality is a flat attack on the whole of modern political thought: the Hobbes Leviathan, the Lockean contract, Rousseau's general will, Hegel's state. And then it runs roughly against the entire stream of political reality since Warren wrote: Marxist communism squaring off against welfare-state, bureaucratic capitalism. Understand that Warren's thought gravitates no more toward modern capitalism than it does toward Marxism, nor more the other way round: it is outside and prior to these categories, having been written in the middle of nowhere (somewhere outside Cincinnati, to be precise) in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It's worth saying that Warren rarely quotes anything except the Declaration of Independence: there is no evidence of his reading Hegel or Hume, Smith or (later in his life) Marx or Proudhon, or, for that matter, Emerson and Thoreau. In fact, between spasms of journal writing, he was developing new processes for manufacturing wagon-wheels or printing up new varieties of currency.

Warren is also precisely prior to and outside of the split between what I'm going to call left-wing and right-wing anarchism. Tracing the left: it proceeds from Proudhon - who like Warren precedes and remains outside it - and then develops as a movement against Marx in the late nineteenth-century battles for leadership of the political radicals of the industrial labor movement. Mikhail Bakunin follows Proudhon as Marx's opponent, and Peter Kropotkin is easily the best 19th-century theoretician of this view. This strand came to be called "communist anarchism." It was marked by an attack on private ownership and called for a true union of human beings: a spontaneous unanimity and cooperation enshrined in Kropotkin's concept of "mutual aid" as a factor in evolution, forever the refutation of social Darwinism. Communist anarchism reaches its American height under the aegis of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Russian Kropotkinians importing their ideas to Greenwich Village. This strand came to be despised between the time of the Haymarket riot and the assassination of William McKinley. Its image: the bomb-throwing immigrant nihilist terrorist scourge of modernity.

The alternative history uses Warren as Bakunin and friends use Proudhon. The nineteenth-century militant individualist movement emerges out of New England reform, abolitionism, radical Protestantism, and the progressive social movements of nineteenth century America. Lysander Spooner moves straight from Locke and Jefferson to a militant defense of deism and individual rights. If anarchism could have a legal theory, Spooner in his capacities as a self-taught lawyer and freakish polemical talent would have been its advocate. Benjamin Tucker - another provincial New England printer - used Warren and Spooner as twin supports without fully exploring the tension between them. But Tucker, as time goes on, adds an admixture of the egoism of Max Stirner, of whom he was the first American publisher. Stirner's work, though striking in its diagnosis of modernity as the cult of the state and its continual paradoxes, would be an absurd guide for social reform, and is actually sort of pathetic: the assertion by a tiny man of his unbelievable giganticness, the fact that his ego is or accomplishes or commands the world. At any rate, I will be frank or annoying enough to say that American anarchism was debased from both the European left and right and artificially driven into schism.

Because they precede and transcend the schism between stateless communism and Stirner-style egoism, between left and right anarchism as it has played out ever since, I propose that it is a particularly urgent matter to recover Warren and Proudhon's thought. Of course the communist anarchists rejected Marx's statist solution, but they accepted to a large extent his analysis of history as class struggle. Indeed, Bakunin's thought is little more than a pastiche of Marxism and Proudhon. The communist anarchists held property to be at the root of capitalist exploitation, and hence proposed its elimination. This analysis was to some extent discredited by the development of capitalism into a modified socialism with a huge state sector and regulation of the economy and redistributive schemes, as well as by the success of the labor movement in increasing wages and benefits and decreasing hours. In addition, the communists organized internationally as opposed to trying to achieve local transformations, emphasized world proletariat revolution rather than local community formation.

The egoists, on the other hand, came to celebrate exploitation itself as the result of voluntary contract, and to celebrate self-seeking. It tried to manufacture the overman: the independent ego who needs no assistance and brooks no interference: who dares to do injustice: the blonde beast or little chairman of the Federal Reserve. The egoists refuse organization of attempts at societal transformation and think of activism or community construction or even charity as little more than an expression of social slavishness, and dismiss justice and morality as a plot of the little people. Warren fits this picture no better - or perhaps considerably worse - than he does the communist ideal, despite his own brand of extreme individualism. The question for Warren is how decent folk can achieve a non-exploitative economy in which they contribute not only to themselves but to social well-being, which he thinks of as one of our natural impulses. It is one of the greatest errors in superficial readings of Warren to connect him to the thought of later Benjamin Tucker, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and so on, though the term "individualist" is used to describe them all.

A division in anarchist theory persists throughout its history between those who wish to proceed by community-formation or by carving out, within existing society, a zone of autonomy, and those who propose a global social revolution. To some extent this tracks the American/European and individualist/communist splits within anarchism. The Americans emerge from dissenting Protestant prophets and abolitionist saints. The Europeans emerge from the 1789 French revolution and the works of Rousseau. Each despises the other, and thinks the other impractical and defeatist. But each has also done great (well, medium-sized) prodigies. The pre-immigrant American tradition takes the course of practical experiment (Lysander Spooner's postal service and challenges to licensing procedures are another example), along with an accompanying polemical publicity that serves as a record of experiments and a recruiting brochure. Warren, at any rate, belongs squarely in what is called by its opponents "lifestyle anarchism," concerned with inhabiting the temporary autonomous zone. On the other hand, of course, the revolution is going to suck: plenty of death and destruction without any predictable result. At any rate, the opposition is tendentious; the approaches ought to be complementary. Build a world, then take it public.

On, as it were, the third hand, Warren was no primitivist, though his own preference for small-scale, local economies might lend some comfort to anarchists of this bent. But his own continuous activity as inventor shows his warmth for technology. An article about Warren in the journal Print History is aptly titled "Every Man His Own Printer," and Warren would no doubt at this point be a blogger. He conceived his own economics as practical, as encouraging industry and trade. He is neither a technological optimist in the mode of so many thinkers of his time and afterwards (such as the pragmatists) nor a pessimist of the backtotheland movements of the sixties and the millennium. For Warren, technology cannot redeem us, but it can contribute to a decent human life in many ways.

At any rate it is crucial for understanding Warren to understand the political spectrum of early nineteenth century American politics, in particular radical politics. The very most radical, progressive elements were by and large religious fanatics. What we might think of as the far left - the feminist movement, abolitionism, the peace movement - attacked the very idea of state power; individualism was the political currency of the American reform movement. The division of the left and right understood as statist socialism or communism and the right as libertarian laissez faire capitalism just wasn't in play.

There is evidence that Warren sympathized with most of the major reform movements of the nineteenth century: abolitionism, pacifism, religious skepticism, and, in particular feminism. He is among the few nineteenth-century authors you will find using gender-neutral locutions such "he or she": these are not as a result of my editing. Warren explicitly and at length decries the limitation of women to a certain set of professions, and frankly proposes equality of the sexes, along with practical measures to make this possible (including day care).

The real "first American anarchist" was more likely Anne Hutchinson, to whom we might add a variety of religious individualists and political radicals of the seventeenth century, such as Samuell Gorton and William Harris.[3] Extreme religious forces in early nineteenth century America were on the far left. What we would call "conservatives" were leftover Federalists or slavery enthusiasts. They were big-government Hamiltonians or bold pseudo-Cavaliers. Reform still meant freedom from "tyranny," control by a foreign power. But the term "tyranny" soon came to mean simply any interruption of self-sovereignty: in short, slavery. That is why we need to return precisely to the moment of Warren: because this split between left and right as it developed under the aegis of Marxism is invidious and extraneous, arbitrary with regard to the subject matter. The Hegelian solution, the ever-growing state, has in fact been adopted by both the extreme right and the extreme left, and the moderate right and the moderate left. In a way, the history of American reform movements in particular was co-opted by international statist socialism, which prevented the emergence of an indigenous radical understanding. It would be worthwhile to revert to this moment for ideas. After Warren, the apocalypse: the Civil and World wars, the genocides of colonialism and state terrorism. So now we inhabit the dark ages, looking for a little-bitty renaissance.

Put simply, Warren was neither a communist nor a capitalist. He was not a communist: the economy he imagined was regulated by the invisible hand of competition and the inexorable laws of supply and demand. He emphasized private property and free transactions. He never tried to outnice his capitalist competitors, but to underprice them. He was not a capitalist: his entire program depended on the elimination of profit in all transactions; and he always proposed his "experiments" as a way to help the laboring classes as well as the destitute.

IV. Pragmatism and Eschatology

On one level, Josiah Warren is about as level-headed and practical a man as it is possible even for a backwoods philosopher to be. At heart, he's a pragmatist in the early sense and professes no interest in theory even as he spouts it. On another, he's a pure second revival millenarian, over the moon for ecstasy at the end of history, just around the corner. In this, Warren was massively in keeping with the mood of both secular and religious society, with scholars and the fanatics, geniuses and dolts: it hovers over the era like a fog or a sun, depending on your view. The divergent Protestant sects of Europe awaited the apocalypse, and brought that expectation to North America. The Shakers anticipated the millennium, and John Humphrey Noyes said that it had already occurred. The Mormons taught a version of the rapture, and Godwin and Owen showed the way to a social paradise. Marx and Hegel predicted the inevitable, paradisiacal end of history. The abolitionists, the transcendentalists, nor the spiritualists: none was immune from the mood.

I'm not sure that such an atmosphere can be explained; certainly it cannot be explained in a neat sentence or two. We might think of the radical displacements or rapid economic and environmental changes of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, but one might say the same of practically any era. The typical millennial vision was at least provisionally optimistic, and participated in the optimistic implications of an apparently open continent or world: a penchant for starting over in a direction that would lead to perfection, or salvation, a renewal of or return to the garden that would bring this sorry tale to a close. Whatever.

Warren is as close to the radical protestant sects in this matter of mood as he is to Owen, and the overflow of his typography is his ecstatic testimony, his shaking and quaking and speaking in tongues. Even late in his life he retains an optimism that arises from faith rather than reason, though his own mood is tempered, as is, by then, the mood of all the apocalyptic cults aside from those of Marx and Hegel.

What is remarkable about several of these figures - certainly about Noyes, for example, and the Shakers (under the leadership of Frederick Evans, Warren's fellow veteran of New Harmony) - is their combination of extreme, unjustified faith with Yankee ingenuity and know-how. These were people with the ability to perform the practical tasks before them in an extremely effective manner. Indeed, Warren's paradise was above all a place where skills were inculcated and practiced and valued to their fullest. They were people liable to clear the land, survey it, build structures on it and furnish those structures, and then building institutions or anti-institutions (such as the Time Store) of remarkable practical value.

V. Freedom and Determinism

A remarkable feature of Warren's individualism is that he takes it to follow from an environmental determinism (which he in turns inherits from Godwin via Owen). Even more radically and, one might think, oddly for an extreme individualist, Warren takes a deflationary attitude to the human self; it has no core, but is an ever-changing bundle of experiences. That is precisely, in fact, wherein individuality consists: in the incomparability of the experiences of each of us, and the pressure on each of us of a unique set of uncontrollable circumstances.

One correlate of this is that punishment for crime is wrong and ineffective. If one does not want people to commit some class of act, the environment which gives rise to it must be altered. Controlling people under threat, trying to erase their individuality according to some text or model, is worse than hopeless. Furthermore, enforcement or construction of uniformity is counter-productive: the only way to find out how circumstances affect persons is to allow them to experiment: the greatest possible flourishing of human variety and eccentricity is the only approach that respects the circumstances and hence the character of each individual and it is the approach best suited to finding, by practical experiment, how best to live. In all these positions, Warren strikingly connects to his contemporary John Stuart Mill, who explicitly credits Warren with lending Mill the idea of self-sovereignty.

Warren is notably reticent on matters of religion. It may be that, under the influence of Alexander Bryan Johnson, he believed that religious claims were literally senseless, or referred only to the emotional states of the speaker. Or it may be that he took religious matters to be so strictly a matter of individual conscience that he should not speak about them at all. Nevertheless, I think it's fairly certain from a few stray remarks - notably very early, in The Peaceful Revolutionist - that Warren was an atheist or at most a deist. In True Civilization he defines "the Divine" as whatever is not human, or as the natural, a fascinating and extraordinarily problematic assertion. At any rate, he never believed in the human soul, the kernel of inexplicable individual essence. Rather, he believed in the self as an ever-changing kaleidescope of experiences, fragments of glass through which the world shone.

VI. Influences

The only intellectual influences Warren explicitly acknowledges are Thomas Jefferson, Robert Owen, and an extraordinary American philosopher named Alexander Bryan Johnson. Lamartine's History of the French Revolution was sitting on Warren's desk or in his commonplace book when he and Andrews assembled Equitable Commerce. Most of the lengthy and tangential quotations from Lamartine have been excised in my redaction of EC. (Lord Bolingbroke shows up, quoted in Warren's Notebook D.)

There is no evidence, I believe, that Warren was influenced by Andrews, Heywood, William B. Greene, or Tucker, and he never fooled in his authorship with spiritualism (though he expresses some credulity about it in a letter), free love, or eugenics, to say nothing of Stirner-type egoism, Greene's mystic reading of the Kabbala, or Andrews's universology, the reduction of all knowledge and language to a single system or perhaps alphabet. Nor is there any evidence of which I am aware of any influence back or forth with Proudhon, with whose views Warren's bear a remarkable affinity in some respects, though Greene - who developed a Warrenian/Proudhonian system of banking - is a possible intellectual connection. At any rate, Proudhon's and Warren's ideas developed entirely independently, as shown decisively from the Warren side by the fact that his basic economic theories had been expressed by 1827.

Owen is central throughout Warren's thought, both as the origin of the secular utopian impulse and as the imaginary opponent - which Warren usually calls "communism" (referring specifically to Owen's assertion that property should be held in common) - toward which much of Warren's critique is directed. Owen was in turn a follower of William Godwin, who is often asserted to be the first anarchist philosopher, and who was certainly a pioneering feminist (husband of ur-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) and egalitarian. In particular, Owen absorbed Godwin's assertion (certainly already a classic of British empiricism) that people are the products of the regular causal operation of their environments. This Godwin, Owen, and Warren unfolded into a vision of human perfectibility: if environments could be created where decency, justice, and autonomy could be inculcated in every aspect of experience, people would become decent and just. (Sadly, it has proven impossible for unjust and indecent persons such as ourselves to create an environment that inculcates decency and justice, leaving us in rather a sad little insoluble future.) This perfectionism is easily read as a secular version of the Christian doctrine put forward by John Humphrey Noyes: every man a potential saint.

In words that strikingly encapsulate Warren's (and John Stuart Mill's) philosophy with regard to law, Godwin wrote as follows.

In defiance of the great principle of natural philosophy, that there are not so much as two atoms of matter of the same form through the whole universe, [law] endeavours to reduce the actions of men, which are composed of a thousand evanescent elements, to one standard. . . . If, on the contrary, justice be a result flowing from the contemplation of all the circumstances in each individual case, if the only the criterion of justice be general utility, the inevitable consequence is that the more we have of justice, the more we shall have of truth, virtue, and happiness.[4]

The elements of classical liberalism and British utilitarianism in Warren's philosophy derive from Godwin via Owen and Frances Wright. Indeed, probably Owen is also the source of Warren's knowledge of classical British economics, for Warren has evidently learned the rudiments of Smith and Ricardo, and indeed expanded their insights or simplified them into an unbearably coherent economics, made them into Shaker artifacts. Warren often refers to the "natural liberty" of persons, which has an element of Jeffersonian liberalism and Smith's free markets but is primarily a matter of his own theory of human individuality. The beauty of Warren's economics is its simplicity, which is also the source of its shortcomings. But he certainly taught the importance of property, division of labor, and trade in Smithian terms, even as he rejected completely a Smith vision of persons or nations as naturally seeking wealth, and a capitalist vision of money issued by a government as a circulating medium. For Warren, what people in their natural state pursued was adequate resources and satisfying work. This is far more in keeping with Godwin than with Ricardo.

Warren's associates and influences - Godwin, Owen, Fanny Wright, Pearl Andrews, William B. Greene, Ezra and Angela Heywood - form quite a cast of characters, not to say loons. Among the least barmy of the thinkers surrounding Warren, and the most interesting, is Alexander Bryan Johnson, Warren's close contemporary, who emigrated from England as a teenager and set up shop in Utica, New York. Johnson was a successful banker who wrote numerous works in philosophy, political commentary, and fiction, none of which seems to have made much of an impression on anyone at the time, or indeed since then. The one exception to the absence of reception, for reasons that remain a trifle obscure, occurred in Cincinnati in the late 1820s, where Johnson's Treatise on Language was reviewed ecstatically by Frances Wright and others.

Johnson's philosophy of language would have been a contribution to human thought had it been more widely read. It looks back to and elaborates the classical empiricists and common sense philosophers in one direction and strikingly anticipates logical positivism and pragmatism on the other. For Johnson, the meaning of a statement or theory is the means that would be used to prove or give evidence for it; a statement means the difference it would practically mean in experience. He attacked language on grounds that might be termed radically nominalistic. Nature, he said, appeared only in particulars, whereas the words applied to these particulars were always general. That is, in every instance of a different thing to which a word refers, the same word is applied, but in each case the particular phenomenon is different. This leads philosophers and even the rest of us into a massively fallacious interpretation of nature, in which it is viewed as a series of instantiations of universals. Rather, language should be adapted to the ever-more precise delineation of particulars. "Individuality is characteristic of nature. [L]anguage unites under one name, as identities, what is only partially identical. Individuality is no anomaly of nature. It is nature's regular production, and boundless riches. No two parcels of calomel possess the perfect identity which the sameness of their name implies. No two men possess the perfect identity which the sameness of their manhood implies; nor possesses any one man, at all times, and under all circumstances, the complete identity with which language invests his individuality."[5]

Johnson was a phenomenalist: he believed that the fundamental data of experience were what Hume termed "sense impressions" (Johnson calls them sights, sounds, feels, smells, and tastes) and that what we termed individual objects were composed of or identical with such impressions. Any term that could not be referred to a specific impression - someone's experience at some time - was asserted by Johnson to be without meaning: it was returned to nature as a pristine, blank sound. However, he did not follow this into a Berkeleyan idealism, but to a radical realism (which, to be fair, is one reading of Berkeley).

My hand is red, hair is often red, the moon is sometimes red, fire is red, and Indians are red. These objects possess a congruity of appearance that entitles them to the appellation of red; but the precise meaning of the word in each application is the sight itself which the object exhibits. Whether an object shall or not be called red is a question which relates to the propriety of phraseology, and with which nature has no concern; but the meaning of the word red in each application, is a question which relates solely to nature, and with which language has no concern:- at least, language possesses over it no control. (115)

This is a remarkable doctrine, taken by Johnson to be a direct result of his nominalism: it returns us to nature and, explicitly, to language as a mirror of nature, albeit a dark mirror. Language is serviceable and sensible insofar as it reflects nature in its massed specificities. A perfect language would have a different name for each phenomenon of nature, but such a thing is beyond our power to wield. We must keep speaking in generalities, but we must open ourselves to the specificities of reality: real knowledge would consist of a degeneralization or an ever-closer approximation to nature. Warren sought a politics that could thus respond to particularity, a nominalism of persons. And Johnson's dismissal of entities that could not be sensed would have armed Warren against the Christian fanaticism common among community builders early in his life; the semi-coherent speculations of Fourier, the dominant utopian figure of Warren's mid-life; and to some extent the spiritualist fad that swamped his later acquaintances.

Warren throughout his career evinced an interest in notational systems and what we might call practical semantics, and his philosophy at its best is expressed in a notably precise style. He gave new systems of musical notation and stereotyping, and was followed along these lines by Andrews, whose first works were by way of introducing Pitman's phonic shorthand to American audiences. The problem of reference and a critique of language is never far from Warren's mind.

Johnson is unusual, or rather, unique, among the provincial philosophes of 19th century America in that the cogency, erudition, prescience, and coherence of his views are astonishing. Warren absorbed his proto-pragmatism, his critique of language and his nominalism, and his celebration of individual things and moments as the reality underlying experience and underlying the description of experience. Indeed, Warren's life can in some ways be read as the attempt to live Johnson's anti-metaphysics, to make it into a social philosophy as well as a philosophy of language.

VII. Influence

Warren's influence was sadly expended with the fervor of the native-born reform movement after the Civil War. When another progressive movement began, it began in an entirely different context (the very height of industrial capitalism), the union movement, and the immigration of radical persons and ideas into American mines, factories, and sweat shops. By the turn of the century, Warren was a beloved memory among a few American individualists - such as Stephen Bywater and Benjamin Tucker. He was remembered, as well, by a small group of eclectic Americans, who sought to blend American and European anarchist traditions: figures such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Dyer Lum. And he was mentioned by others, including Emma Goldman, but this was more a gesture in the direction of the native tradition than a serious turn toward Warren's thought.

A certain perhaps at times right-wing individualist tradition shows affinities to Warren's thought, though perhaps no direct influence. One might, however, consider such figures as John Jay Chapman, Alfred Nock, Randolph Bourne, and even H.L. Mencken as displaying a version of anarchism closely related to sheer Yankee cussedness of the sort manifested by Warren even on the frontier. Later individualists such as Rand and her followers as well as economists of the Rothbard/Friedman stripe also display some connection through classic American individualism to Warren. Any connection to left-wing cooperative enterprises or living arrangements seems speculative, yet such developments are more in keeping with Warren's economics than are Rothbard's for instance.

John Stuart Mill credits Warren with the idea of "the sovereignty of the individual" in the Autobiography: Describing the influences on On Liberty, he says "a remarkable American, Mr. Warren, has framed a System of Society, on the foundation of 'the Sovereignty of the Individual,' had obtained a number of followers [at Modern Times] (whether it now exists I know not) which, though bearing a superficial resemblance to some of the projects of the Socialists, is diametrically opposite to them in principle, since it recognises no authority whatever over the individual, except to enforce equal freedom of development for all individualities. As the book which bears my name claimed no originality for any of its doctrines, and was not intended to write their history, the only author who had preceded me in their assertion of whom I thought it appropriate to say anything, was Humboldt, who furnished the motto for the work; although in one passage I borrowed from the Warrenites their phrase, the sovereignty of the individual."[6]

Benjamin Tucker dedicated his collection of essays Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One to "The memory of my old friend and master Josiah Warren, whose teachings were my first source of light."

Peter Kropotkin mentions Warren in his famous Encyclopedia Brittanica article on "Anarchism" as a precursor of (influence on?) Proudhon.

It [mutualism] had also its precursor in America. Josiah Warren, who was born in 1798 . . . , and belonged to Owen's "New Harmony," considered that the failure of this enterprise was chiefly due to the suppression of individuality and the lack of initiative and responsibility. These defects, he taught, were inherent to every scheme based upon authority and community of goods. He advocated, therefore, complete individual liberty. In 1827 he opened in Cincinnati a little country store which was the first "equity Store," and which people called "Time Store," because it was based on labor being exchanged hour for hour in all sorts of produce. 'Cost - the limit of price,' and consequently 'no interest,' was the motto of his store, and later on of his 'Equity Village' near New York, which was still in existence in 1865. Mr. Keith's 'House of Equity' at Boston, founded in 1855, is also worthy of notice.[7]

Voltairine de Cleyre declared: "Josiah Warren, though a poor man, lived in an Individualist way and made his free-life social experiment in small country settlements."[8]

In 1952, Joseph Ishill wrote as follows:

Josiah Warren was undoubtedly the first American anarchist; as such he devoted most of his life towards the betterment of mankind. In spite of his individualistic tendencies which are so characteristic of the spirit of our old American pioneers, he was heart & soul for ALL, and for a society where peace and tranquility would be the dominant factors. It is also true that Josiah Warren was by nature and tradition a born rebel against all injustices & human hardships. His writings have shown the way toward liberation & annihilation of all archaic forms of slavery, and above all, he stood fast on his conviction of the SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL. The entire world is today, as never before, under a total eclipse of confusion and disillusionment, due mostly to the manifestation of a perverted "ism", which has darkened almost the entire horizon of the universe and which seeks to destroy ruthlessly all democratic principles based on truth & justice. This too, we hope, shall pass into oblivion. As to Josiah Warren's own publications I like to quote here from another great scholar and bibliophile, Dr. Max Nettlau. The following is extracted from an unpublished letter addressed by him to Ewing C. Baskette, dated May 26, 1936, in which he mentions one of Warren's early publications: 'The Peaceful Revolutionist' (1833): "I should like to know who has ever seen it? If there is a copy anywhere, it should be treasured and removed to one of the most important libraries in New York or Washington."[9]

VIII.

At any rate, Warren's life might be described as merely odd and quixotic, but it was also beautiful in its earnestness, in the consistency and overflowing love, the strange combining of rationality and ecstasy, with which it tried to be the truth it spoke.

IX. Timelines

Compiled from: "Notebook D" in the Working Men's Library at New Harmony (from Ann Caldwell Butler's MA Thesis at Ball State. (Butler says that these entries "did not appear to be in Warren's writing")); from Bailie's biography; various bibliographies; Martin's great book; Warren's writings; and so on.

1. Warren's Life

George Santayana in Persons and Places describes the "Brighton Warrens" as "a dissentient family." His first American ancestor, John Warren, is said in The History of Watertown to have been arrested for non-attendance at church and harboring Quakers.

1793: [William Godwin: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice]

1798: Born, Boston, Mass.

1805: [Birth of Emerson], [Birth of Garrison]

1809: [Birth of Proudhon]

1818, Jan. 3 - April 7: Musical engagements in places in and around Boston; marries Caroline Cutter.

1821(?): Invents lard (as opposed to tallow) burning lamp. "The patent documents for the lard lamp were signed by President John Quincy Adams. The patents on the printing presses invented by my father were issued under the signature of Andrew Jackson, and B. F. Butler, in 1835" (George Warren). That is, he humorously falsified the patent data.

1825-27: New Harmony, IN, as music director etc. New Harmony was established in Indiana by the British industrialist and utopian thinker Robert Owen. Owen may have coined the term "socialism," and he prescribed community of property, possibly under the influence of the Rappites and Shakers. New Harmony was probably the first secular ideal community in America. Warren lived there from almost start to almost finish, supervising its music program. The failure of the community has been blamed on the fact that some residents were essentially spongers on Owen's wealth, and that agreement on uses of community property could not be arrived at by the extremely various and eccentric inhabitants. These failures gave rise to Warren's doctrines of individual sovereignty and defense of property. Robert Dale Owen (the founder's son) in the Atlantic described his delight in the musical performances, with "an excellent band leader, Josiah Warren. This was a performance of music, instrumental and vocal, much beyond what I expected in the backwoods."

1827-May 18 1829: Time Store, Cincinnati. In downtown Cincinnati, later at Utopia, back at New Harmony (1840s) and at Modern Times (1850s), Warren established Time Stores, which were employed labor notes as the circulating medium. Each Time Store would become the center of a cooperative, equitable economy. In every case, particularly the first, the experiment was a dramatic success.

Son George Warren born. "At four years old the boy was taught to use carpenter's tools. At seven he learned type-setting and composed a tiny book with pages one inch square. . . . He was a musician, and at seventeen began to teach for a living. At eighteen he built an organ, fashioning it from the raw material. It was sold at the current price of such instruments. Being a practical wood-worker, he made the best paling fence in the town. He was also skilled in the use of pencil and brush, and, as one of his sources of income, painted some of the most artistic signs in that part of the country. . . . When he was twenty-one he was noted as a composer of band music, and was an expert performer on the Clarinet, French Horn, Cornet, Violin, and 'Cello" (Bailie).

1828: Visited at home in Cincinnati by Frances Wright. [Alexander Bryant Johnson's The Philosophy of Human Knowledge published; read by both Warren and Wright. Later revised and re-published as A Treatise on Language.]

1831: Visits New York; establishes village in Tuscawaras County, OH. [William Lloyd Garrison publishes the first number of the Liberator.]

Early 1830s: Warren perfects the continuous-feed printing press.

1832: Cholera epidemic in Cincinnati. Warren was able to provide extremely cheap and fast printing of health information, at cost, through use of his type-casting techniques and continuous-feed press.

1833: The Peaceful Revolutionist published, the plates cast on the family stove at the Equity community. Death of Camilla Wright (Frances Wright's daughter), on which Warren writes the following poem.

Written on Hearing Unwelcome News

They say tis best to be deceived

When sad realities would break the heart:

O would I could be thus relieved

When moral meteors like thee depart.

Ah! vain the thought - We seldom find

A friend like thee in all mankind

And when thou'rt gone can we caress thee

And think thee here when most we miss thee?

Ah no - Then let the poor, the weak,

The injured, talented and meek

Prepare to hear what I most dread

To tell - Their friend Camilla's dead.

O would that death could be controled

By tears, by reason or by gold

These in excess thy friends would give-

E'en die for thee, couldst thou but live.

Thy doating sister too, when oft reclined

Fatigued and worn, will call to mind

Thy gentle, soothing, watchful care -

Will call "Camilla" but thou wilt not hear.

She has thee not; but now alone

Feels every moment, thou art gone!

Kind friends around us strive in vain

To place her as she was, again.

She lives now but to haste the day

(and knows her aid can speed its coming)

When, if sweet flowers too soon decay

They'll leave as sweet, around us blooming.

1834-37: Tuscawaras County, Ohio. The first "equitable village," encompassing four hundred acres and a half-dozen families, and commencing with a cooperative sawmill. The atmosphere was malarial: deaths and sickness caused Warren and friends to return to Cincinnati or New Harmony; Warren established a Time Store in New Harmony by 1842.

1840: [Proudhon: What is Property?]

1841: [Emerson's Essays: First Series.]

1842: New Harmony Time Store.

1844: New, "mathematical" musical notation published; Peaceful Revolutionist (vol 2. no 1) published as pamphlet. Publicly exhibits a new printing press in New York; prototype of the later high-speed presses. The principle was so simple that "there was no equitable ground for a patent, and it was given to the public" (Bailie quoting Warren, 84). Invents "universal typography," apparently a cheap way of casting type.

1846: First edition of Equitable Commerce (?), New Harmony.

1847: Establishment of Utopia, Ohio (Claremont County) With some resources derived from printing, Warren bought a village that had previously been a small Fourierist phalanx on the Ohio River. Houses were built - again with perhaps 6 families, who began destitute. Utopia was a small-scale success. This village apparently persisted long after Warren had gone east, and eventually removed to Minnesota, displaced by land speculation. A village called Utopia still exists at this location.

1848: [Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience."]

1849: [Emerson: Nature. Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.]

1850: Visits New York and Boston.

1851: Foundation of Modern Times on Long Island. Equitable commerce/self-sovereign community established by Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews (who never lived there). Again, destitute families were able to build homes. Eventually, it started attracting anyone whose lifestyle was not conventional, including people living with partners other than their spouses, as well as advocates of free love - Victoria Woodhull was about, for example - and a variety of fads, such as spiritualism, nudism, the all-bean diet, the water cure, and the amazing philosophy of Pearl Andrews. Warren writes: "Whoever tries what is vulgarly known as 'free love' . . . will find it more troublesome than a crown of thorns: and there is not much danger of its becoming contagious where the results of the experiment are made known" (Periodical Letter quoted by Wunderlich 78). It was eventually torn apart under the weight of Horace Greeley's publicity in the New York Tribune. Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols made it notorious by mailing sex education guides and advocating promiscuity. Then they moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and tried celibacy. First they were spiritualists, then conservative Catholics. In short (like (I hate to say it) Victoria and her sister Tennessee), they were not serious people, rather post-apocalyptic faddists. But within reason Modern Times was a success, despite the occasional nudist or visitation by malevolent spirits, for some ten years for a hundred people or more. Community more or less seamlessly becomes the town of Brentwood during the 1860s. Caroline Warren stays behind in New Harmony, and perhaps Josiah is co-resident with another woman (Wunderlich).

1851: Stephen Pearl Andrews publishes The Science of Society, expounding Warren's ideas with eclectic bits of Comte and Fourier thrown in.

1852: 2nd (canonical) edition of Equitable Commerce. Debate commences in the New York Tribune among Horace Greeley, Henry James Sr., and Pearl Andrews on marriage and free love, focusing prurient attention on Modern Times. [Lysander Spooner: An Essay on Trial By Jury.]

1854-58: Periodical Letter published at Modern Times.

1855, &c.: House of Equity (Boston) Established by Warren follower [?] Keith, who conceived it as an urban community center, with equitable stores, lectures, recreational areas, printing facilities etc. Warren helped conceive and execute the plan, which eventually collapsed when Keith's finances did.

1858: seems likely that Warren was resident in the Boston area by this date. The Dual Commerce Association formed on Warren principles (though the extent of Warren's involvement is imperfectly clear; the proprietor is listed as T.J. Lewis). It was essentially an equitable food store. The wage of the "distributors or merchants" was set at two dollars a day, based on a labor calculation. The project, which was described in a proposal dated July 1, 1858 and then reported on in a tract dated January 1, 1859, is striking for its size, and should make us re-think the scale of Warrenian equitable experiments. The Jan 1 tract is not Warren's writing, but quotes an earlier advertisement that certainly is. The central store was located in the basement of the Pelham Hotel, with other "stations" in different poor neighborhoods in the city, six in all, each staffed by a man and a woman, 20 employees altogether. The basic system was consignment: farmers still owned their produce until sold, and price did not vary by quantity. The Jan 1 report says that "several thousands of individuals have already begun to experience the benefits growing out of the movement." Milk was priced at "five cents per quart in winter, four in summer." The distribution is described as 500 quarts of milk per day; 50 barrels of flour per week (at 50 cents); 6000 pounds of soap per month; 5000 bushels of Nova Scotia potatoes per month (five cents a bushel "if taken from the boat, or ten cents when delivered at the homes of consumers"), and so on. From the earlier advertisement by Warren: "Dual commerce" expresses those commercial relations which result and develope between producer and consumer, instead of being the absorbent of both." Unknown how or when the DCA was dissolved.

1863: Boston area; association with Ezra Heywood and the nascent labor movement. True Civilization published. An equitable commerce store established (contact "Nath'l G. Simonds,

No. 189 Main St., Charlestown"), apparently on a pretty small scale. (This project identified by Shawn Wilbur in the form of an advertisement, in the Boston Investigator, Vol. XXXII, No. 50, April 15, 1863, p. 393.

1866: Resident at Cliftondale, Mass.

1872: Princeton, Mass. At the Spring meeting of the New England Labor Reform League, Warren, Ezra Heywood, William B. Greene, and a young and impressionable Benjamin Tucker are all present: possibly the greatest summit meeting of American anarchists. Publication of Warren's last book(let): Practical Applications.

1874: Death claims Josiah Warren, individually.

2. American Utopias

Compiled from Noyes, American Socialisms; Holloway, Utopian Communities in America; Hinds, American Communities. The division into religious and secular communities is to some extent arbitrary, but convenient as an ordering principle. Noyes's argument throughout American Socialisms is that communities are more successful when based on common religious commitments. This appears consonant with the data. Obviously, the enumeration is not anything like complete.

Religious

Rhode Island. Founded by dissenters Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, 1635, as outpost of female preaching, free speech, and Protestant dissent. Rhode Island has, of course, failed miserably, and is now a desolate wasteland.

The Woman in the Wilderness. Christian communist community founded near Philadelphia in 1692. Pietistic Christians from Germany.

Ephrata. Founded in 1735 in what is now Lancaster County, PA, by Johann Beissel; German pietists. Extreme austerity, local educational work.

Shakers: Mother Ann Lee, an English woman of peasant stock from Manchester, took a group of schismatic Quakers (various Quaker groups could fit in throughout, at any rate) to New York in 1776, and established a compound at Watervliet. The most successful of the religious utopians, unless you count the Mormons, the Shakers spread to a number of compounds throughout the US. Ecstatic dancing and economical, integral design. Up to 5,000 members by mid-early-19th c. Led for much of the 19th c. by Frederick Evans, who had been at New Harmony, and knew Warren. Celibacy, though it has a feminist reading, sadly did not turn out to be the wave of the twentieth century, which displayed an inexplicable preference for pornography and promiscuity. It has been asserted that their communism influenced Robert Owen.

Rappites: George Rapp, a German prophet, came to Baltimore in 1803 with 300 families and settled in Western PA, calling the community Harmony. Adopted communism for practical reasons on the frontier. Very prosperous, they sold out at a profit and removed to Indiana, where they also called their community Harmony. Eventually, they sold to Owen, who established New Harmony on the site. Rappites returned to Western PA and founded "Economy."

Zoar: similar German protestant sect, settled in wilderness of Ohio in 1819 with 225 people.

Mormons: radical protestant sect founded with a new scripture by Joseph Smith in 1830. Numbered at least 15,000 when they settled the town of Nauvoo. Experimented with plural marriage and various communistic schemes.

Oneida: founded by John Humphrey Noyes in upstate New York in 1848 on a doctrine of "Christian perfectionism" (he had already founded a small community in Putney, VT). Practiced a form of communism and "plural marriage." Eventually mutated into a successful co-operative silverware manufacturer, thus merging (conceptually) with capitalist utopias such as Hershey and Amana. Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau stayed there awhile, and couldn't get laid even under the auspices of plural marriage; Guiteau was referred to affectionately by the women of Oneida as "Charles Gitout."

Hopedale; founded by Adin Ballou in 1841, formerly a Universalist minister; like Noyes a charismatic and schismatic Christian. Ballo