GREENE, William B

Equality.

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O.S. Cooke & Co., West Brookfield, 1849. Octavo, a wonderful copy in original printed wrappers. Rare first edition of a radical American utopian tract.

Greene (1818-1878) was a prominent American theorist and Unitarian minister, who published prolifically on the question of government and banking, as well as producing more esoteric works on the kabbala, transcendentalism and suffrage. His long-held beliefs regarding the importance of the individual and ownership of labour, led to his postulation of the urgent necessity for a community of equals providing non-competitive support for each other. This reinstatement of private property is an explicit rejection of Socialism, which he labels in this work 'the only political system which presents no good points.'

Instead, he calls for a profoundly American apotheosis of the republican ideal: 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: this is the mystical triangle which ought to be inscribed on the colors of every republic.' Only the presence of all three of these ideals, each tempering and moderating the others, can allow for the creation of the ideal Constitutional Democratic Republic. The tract concludes with an axiomatic statement about Greene's political theory, and its foundational positioning of the explicit rejection of Socialism: 'An organisation of Society which renders a man dependent upon his neighbours, upon public opinion - which, in a word, renders him subservient to his accidents, instead of supreme over them - is destructive to individualism, and is, therefore, profoundly immoral.'.

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