Josiah Warren

Josiah Warren (1798 – April 14, 1874) was an individualist anarchist, inventor, musician, and author in the United States.

Josiah Warren

Quotes

Equitable Commerce (1848)

• Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
  • pg 21

• It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.
  • pg 105

Quotes about Josiah Warren

• Anarchism had been connected to communitarianism in the United States since the days of Josiah Warren...Warren's failures were the failures of a generation. Communitarianism as a movement was moribund by the 1860s. An urbanizing, industrializing society that was coming to depend on large-scale organization had little space left, physically or psychologically, within which men and women could secede from the larger community and at the same time believe that they were creating a new social order that would eventually dominate the entire society. Nevertheless, despite the disintegration of communitarianism in practice, the idea of communalism retained a powerful hold on the minds of many Americans. This was particularly true in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century.
  • Margaret S Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (1981)