Josiah Warren (; 1798 – April 14, 1874)
was an individualist anarchist, inventor,
musician, printer and author in the United
States.
He is regarded by some as the first American
anarchist (though he never used the term himself)
and the four-page weekly paper he edited during
1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, the first
anarchist periodical published, an enterprise
for which he built his own printing press,
cast his own type, and made his own printing
plates.
== Life ==
=== Early life ===
Warren was born in Boston, Massachusetts,
in 1798, a descendant of John Warren (1555–1613),
the brother of Mayflower passenger Richard
Warren.
He showed an early talent for music and was
a member of the "Old Boston Brigade Band"
at an early age.
In 1819 he married Caroline Cowing (1795–1872)
and then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where
he worked as a music teacher and orchestra
leader.
They had two children, Caroline (1820–1850)
and George (1826–1902), and George wrote
a remembrance of his father that can be found
in the Labadie Library at th University of
Michigan.
He invented a tallow-burning lamp in 1821
and manufactured his invention for a number
of years in Cincinnati.
=== Owenism and New Harmony ===
In 1825, Warren became aware of the "social
system" of Robert Owen and began to talk with
others in Cincinnati about founding a communist
colony.
When this group failed to come to agreement
about the form and goals of their proposed
community, Warren "sold his factory after
only two years of operation, packed up his
young family, and took his place as one of
900 or so Owenites who had decided to become
part of the founding population of New Harmony,
Indiana."
The Cincinnati colony was attempted without
Warren's involvement, but failed.
Warren traveled by flat-boat from Cincinnati,
arriving in New Harmony in early May, 1825.
By 1827, he had returned to Cincinnati, convinced
that the complete individualization of interests
was necessary to cooperation.
He considered Owen's experiment "communism,"
which he rejected in no uncertain terms, but
he developed a warm and lasting respect for
Robert Owen and his sons.
One of his earliest writings, published in
The March of Mind in 1827, attests to this,
as do later writings.
=== Cincinnati and Utopia ===
He put his theories to the test by establishing
an experimental "labor for labor store" called
the Cincinnati Time Store in downtown Cincinnati,
which facilitated trade by notes backed by
a promise to perform labor.
This was the first store to use a labor-for-labor
note.
"All the goods offered for sale in Warren's
store were offered at the same price the merchant
himself had paid for them, plus a small surcharge,
in the neighborhood of 4 to 7 percent, to
cover store overhead."
Between 1827 and 1830, the store proved successful.
Warren closed the store to pursue establishing
colonies based on economic mutualism, including
"Utopia" and "Modern Times."
=== Modern Times ===
Modern Times, which was located in what is
now Brentwood, New York, lasted from approximately
1851 to 1864.
It was Josiah Warren's last attempt to put
his ideas of Equitable Commerce and sovereignty
of the individual, which he had developed
over a lifetime of study and experimentation,
into action.
In 1850, Warren came back to Boston from the
Midwest and began searching for an area near
a major city, with low land prices, to establish
a utopian community.
The inexpensive land enabled Warren to be
able to implement his plan to provide homes
for families that had never owned one before.
The Pine Barrens of long Island where Modern
Times was located had an undeserved reputation
as having poor soil so he was able to purchase
400 acres at $2.75 an acre with a very small
down payment.
Modern Times was a town with neither government
nor money nor laws and can accurately be described
as anarchistic, yet there was no crime and
very little commotion.
The citizens of Modern Times although eschewing
the profit motive, were not socialistic in
their attitude toward ownership of property
or the means of production.
According to author Roger Wunderlich, "On
7 September 1864 the name of the village was
changed to Brentwood."
=== 
Later life and death ===
Warren later returned to the Boston area.
From 1864 to 1869, he resided in Cliftondale,
Massachusetts, where he twice attempted to
establish a mutual town.
He then moved back to Boston, where he remained
until his death.Warren died on April 14, 1874,
in Charlestown at the home of a friend after
developing edema.
== Philosophy ==
Warren, like Proudhon, chose the path of anarchism
and individualism.
Benjamin Tucker dedicated his collection of
essays, Instead of a Book, to the memory of
Warren, "my friend and master ... whose teachings
were my first source of light".
Tucker credits Warren with being "the first
man to expound and formulate the doctrine
now known as Anarchism."
John Stuart Mill said Warren's philosophy,
"though being a superficial resemblance to
some of the project of the Socialists, is
diametrically opposed to them in principle,
since it recognizes no authority whatever
in Society, over the individual, except to
enforce equal freedom of development for all
individuals."
Warren's principle of the "sovereignty of
the individual" was later taken up by Mill
and Herbert Spencer.Warren's individualistic
philosophy arose out of his rejection of Robert
Owen's cooperative movement, of which he was
an early participant, witnessing in person
the failure of Owen's New Harmony commune.
Of it, he wrote: "It seemed that the difference
of opinion, tastes, and purposes increased
just in proportion to the demand for conformity
... It appeared that it was nature's own inherent
law of diversity that had conquered us ... our
'united interests' were directly at war with
the individualities of persons and circumstances
and the instinct of self-preservation".
According to Warren, there should be absolutely
no community of property; all property should
be individualized, and "those who advocated
any type of communism with connected property,
interests, and responsibilities were doomed
to failure because of the individuality of
the persons involved in such an experiment."
Warren is notable for expounding the idea
of "sovereignty of the individual".
In his Manifesto Josiah Warren writes:
[T]he forming of societies or any other artificial
combinations IS the first, greatest, and most
fatal mistake ever committed by legislators
and by reformers.
That all these combinations require the surrender
of the natural sovereignty of the INDIVIDUAL
over her or his person, time, property and
responsibilities, to the government of the
combination.
That this tends to prostrate the individual—To
reduce him to a mere piece of a machine; involving
others in responsibility for his acts, and
being involved in responsibilities for the
acts and sentiments of his associates; he
lives & acts, without proper control over
his own affairs, without certainty as to the
results of his actions, and almost without
brains that he dares to use on his own account;
and consequently never realizes the great
objects for which society is professedly formed.
Warren said that Stephen Pearl Andrews' The
Science of Society, published in 1852, was
the most lucid and complete exposition of
Warren's own theories including Warren's belief
that employers should pay their employees
the full value of their labor according to
the cost principle.
== Ethics of pricing ==
Josiah Warren termed the phrase "cost the
limit of price," with "cost" here referring
not to monetary price paid but the labor one
exerted to produce an item.
This understanding of cost is congruent with
that of the classical economist Adam Smith
who said "The real price of every thing, what
every thing really costs to the man who wants
to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of
acquiring it," though Warren reached different
conclusions.
He believed that goods and services should
trade according to how much labor was exerted
to produce them and bring them to market,
instead of according to how individuals believed
them to be subjectively worth.
Therefore, he "proposed a system to pay people
with certificates indicating how many hours
of work they did.
They could exchange the notes at local time
stores for goods that took the same amount
of time to produce."
To charge more labor for something that entailed
less labor was "cannibalism," according to
him.
Moreover, he believed that trading according
to "cost the limit of price" would promote
increasing efficiency in an economy, as he
explains in Equitable Commerce:
If cost is made the limit of price, every
one becomes interested in reducing COST, by
bringing in all the economies, all the facilities
to their aid.
But, on the contrary, if cost does not govern
the price, but every thing is priced at what
it will bring, there are no such co-operating
interests.
If I am to have my supply of flour at cost,
then, any facility I can afford to the wheat
grower, reduces the cost to me, and it does
the same for all who have any portion of the
wheat, I am promoting all their interests
while pursuing my own ... Now if the wheat
were NOT TO BE SOLD TO us AT COST, but at
"whatever it would bring" according to our
necessities, then none of us would have any
interest in affording facilities, repairing
breaches, nor in any other way co-operating
with the producer of it.
The same motive would act in the production,
preservation, and use of every thing.
== Influence ==
Catalan historian Xavier Diez reports that
the intentional communal experiments pioneered
by Warren were influential in European individualist
anarchists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries such as Émile Armand
and the intentional communities started by
them.
== See also ==
Anarchist economics
== Notes
