GREENE, William Batchelder.

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Equality. First edition of this proto-utopian tract. A fusion of Christianity and radical economics, it expounds the Unitarian minister's mutualist theories of value, property, and credit to form a distinctly American anti-capitalist theory of political economy. Rooted in Christian ethics and the belief that all are equal under natural law, Greene (1819-1878) contended that mutualism was the social manifestation of Christianity. Central to the pamphlet's argument are the claims that wage labour violates equality and that all market exchange under monopoly conditions is exploitative. He proposes free access to land, voluntary co-operation, and mutual credit associations, the latter of which was expounded the following year in Mutual Banking (1850). Equality is expanded from an article of the same name published in the Worcester Palladium.

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