The purpose of ReadLiberty.org is to transcribe, preserve and spread all 403 issues of Liberty, Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order, an individualist anarchist periodical originally edited and published by Benjamin Tucker from 1881 to 1908.

As part of our activities we have decided to publish the whole Volume I of Liberty in the form of an eBook in ePub, Mobi and PDF formats. In the phase one an eBook containing issues 1-13 of the original Volume I will be made available. Once they are all transcribed, the eBook will be updated to contain all 26 issues of the original Volume I. And you can be a part of the book!

C4SS is very excited by this project. Benjamin Tucker’s periodical, Liberty, is not only a major influence on market anarchist thought, but it is greatly responsible for setting the style of market anarchist discourse. As Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson detail in their introduction to Markets Not Capitalism:

The history of the individualist and mutualist tradition is largely a history of ephemeral publications, short-lived presses, self-published pamphlets, and small radical papers. The most famous is certainly Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (1881-1908) … The independent, dialogue-based small press has provided a natural habitat for market anarchist writing to flourish – whereas liberal and Marxist writing found their most distinctive habitats in declarations, manifestos, and intricate, comprehensive treatises. …

Market anarchism aims to draw out social truths not by dogmatizing or laying down the law, but rather by allowing as far as possible for the free interplay of ideas and social forces, by looking for the unintended consequences of accepted ideas, by engagement in an open-ended process of experimentation and discovery that permits the constant testing of both ideas and institutions against competitors and bottom-line reality.

In other words, Tucker’s Liberty is not only an invaluable anarchist resource, but a glimpse into what a possible market anarchist culture would look like in all of its iterative glory, weirdness and experimentation.

Another reason we are excited by this project is that ReadLiberty is devoted to making Tucker’s Liberty available to anyone. As they clarify on their page’s Q&A:

Q: What license will be the book subject to?
A: As we don’t believe in the concept of IP it’ll be a subject to the CC0 “license”. Although you don’t have to we’ll be thankful if you choose to mark us as the authors of the transcription and let others to use the work in the same way. Happy reading, sharing, editing and selling!

Every little bit helps. Please donate $5 today and help bring Tucker’s Liberty to more and more people. (Link to their indiegogo page)