Rad Geek People's Daily

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New from the Scriptorium: Part I of Instead of a Book and Part I of the Principles of Mathematics

Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 17 years ago, in 2007, on the World Wide Web.

One of the things I’ve been working on while I’ve been away from blogging is transcribing public domain texts for the Fair Use Repository. I have a few different projects on tap there; right now, what’s worth mentioning are the following two online editions:

  1. Benjamin R. Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One is a classic of individualist anarchism. It’s also a classic of miscellaneous writing; the title (as well as the subtitle, A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism) refers to the fact that it’s composed of fragments from Tucker’s writing, mainly from Liberty. Bloggers may, thus, feel an odd sense of familiarity in the reading; but for its being arranged topically instead of in reverse chronological order, the way in which Instead of a Book reads — heavily based on dialog and critical engagement, focused on short points, sometimes organizing itself into extended discussion threads between Tucker and other writers — will seem almost indistinguishable from the way that blogs are written today. In any case, Fair Use now has the introductory essays and the entirety of Part I (on The Individual, Society, and the State) available online, including Tucker’s masterful essay on State Socialism and Anarchism, an extended discussion with John Beverly Robinson over non-resistance (i.e., the permissibility of defensive violence) (1, 2, 3, 4), and an excellent long essay by Clara Dixon Davidson on Relations Between Parents and Children. Now it’s on to Part II, on Money and Interest. Stay tuned!

  2. Readers may remember that I mentioned quite a while ago that I’d started on a transcription of Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics (1903). Well, after working on it off and on (mostly off) for the last year and a half, the online edition now includes the entirety Part I of Russell’s book (on The Indefinables of Mathematics, which, along with the two appendices, contains most of the work’s sustained discussion of philosophical logic). Notably, it concludes with Russell’s first sustained discussion of Russell’s paradox. From here it’s on to Part II, on the theory of Number.

There’s more to come soon, both for these works and in some other projects I’ve got coming down the pipeline. Read, cite, and enjoy!

2 replies to New from the Scriptorium: Part I of Instead of a Book and Part I of the Principles of Mathematics Use a feed to Follow replies to this article · TrackBack URI

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2007-09-19 – Part II of Instead of a Book is now online:

    […] A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I was working on an online transcription of Benjamin Tucker’s [Instead of a Book][IOB], and had completed the introductory essays and Part I: The Individual, Society, and the State. I’m pleased to announce that Part II: Money and Interest — containing Tucker’s defense of free competition and radical laissez-faire in banking, his proposals for mutual banking, and several exchanges with Greenbackers, gold-bugs, defenders of interest, et cetera — is now also available in full online. For summaries of some of the essays, see Fair Use Blog 2007-09-07, 2007-09-15, and 2007-09-19. […]

· October 2007 ·

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2007-10-26 – Part IV (Socialism) of Instead of a Book is now available online:

    […] I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on an online edition of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man […]

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