Year: 2008

Contr'un

Colins’ painful punctuation

December 31, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Warning: Off-topic chatter about the process of translation. Jean Guillaume Cesar Alexandre Hippolyte, baron de Colins was the chief theorist of Rational Socialism, and a frequent critic and intellectual rival of Proudhon. Indeed, Colins’ crew were pitting the two figures against each other long after both had died. I’m planning on finishing up a translation of Adolphe Hugentobler’s Dialogue of Dead Men sometime in 2009. Colins wrote a three-volume work, Justice in Science, apart from the Revolution and the Church, which begins with a 600-page attempted refutation of most of Proudhon’s main theses in Justice in the Revolution and the […]
Contr'un

War: What’s it good for?

December 30, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
It turns out that Proudhon’s answer to the musical question is rather interesting, and challenging. His two-volume War and Peace represents an further exploration of some of the ideas he had developed in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. The turning point in Proudhon’s philosophy came in the 1850s, between the Philosophy of Progress and Justice, when he realized that, as he later put it, “the antinomy does not resolve itself.” The immediate consequence of this realization was a move from the emphasis on synthesis, which had dominated his work from the last sections of What is Property? […]
Uncategorized

Proudhon’s “Kronos”

December 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In the biographical introduction to Tucker’s edition of What is Property? is a brief mention that around 1851 Proudhon’s “entertained the idea of writing a universal history entitled “Chronos.” This project was never fulfilled.” There was probably no shortage of “universal history” in France by 1850, although an entry by Proudhon would no doubt have been novel and interesting. The Saint-Simonians and their allies, including P. J. B. Buchez, Auguste Ott, Pierre Leroux, had written volume after volume on the subject. In 1849, William B. Greene published his Remarks On The History Of Science; Followed By An Apriori Autobiography, which […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon’s projects

December 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”]   [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] During his lifetime Proudhon was frequently accused of being primarily a critic, a destroyer, and within anarchist circles it is largely his destructive critique of property rights that we remember. In some ways, this is a curious turn of events, since so much of his work was devoted to constructing his People’s Bank, his theory of Progress, his evolving theory of property, etc. When his Œuvres Complètes was assembled in the late 1860s, apparently the editors felt the need to combat that perception, and their advertisement for the series […]
translations

Second things first

December 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
The “Second Letter” of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Progress is now available in English translation in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. For those interested in the elements of Proudhon’s philosophy involving collective persons, or those relating to the combination of conservative and progressive elements in “the Revolution,” there will be some additional material here. There’s also a great deal more. In the two letters that make up The Philosophy of Progress, Proudhon attempted to make his general “profession of faith,” with “faith” being just one of the terms he was in the midst of transforming in his works. The result was […]
Contr'un

…or is there?

December 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Well, it appears that the class action suit against Google Books is being resolved, and Google feels free to make some texts available that it has been sitting on for years. Among those newly available files are an incomplete run of The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher (1848-49), one of the periodicals that merged to form The Spirit of the Age, an important part of the literature of mutualism. Joshua King Ingalls was among the contributors to The Univercoelum, and the available issues contain a number of previously hard-to-access articles, and information about several more. It’s certainly not every day that […]
Contr'un

“there’s nothing wrong with competition”

December 14, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
When Roderick Long made mention of my recent post on bookselling, a bit of back-and-forth ensued in the comments on his post. The point was raised that, if the big box bookstores benefit from state intervention, so do their customers, who get cheap books. The problem is that I’m not sure that the big box stores actually deliver there. I asked: What evidence is there that a bookselling monoculture with lots of coupons and discount stickers prominently displayed actually represents lots of cheap choices for consumers? Mass-market bookselling is notoriously wasteful of resources (to the point of destroying gazillions of […]
Contr'un

Sounds like nonsense

December 12, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is, it turns out, more than one “conflation conflict” that we need to deal with. Before we can even begin to wrestle with the relation of the current economic situation to various understandings of “capitalism” and/or a “free (or freed) market,” we apparently have to pick our way through a rhetorical minefield of widely used terms and phrases which “sound like” something no real anarchist or libertarian would (presumably) ever say. For right libertarians, the primary concern seems to be contamination by “Marxism,” which embodies, apparently, pretty much everything that is or could be wrong with the world. Now, […]
Contr'un

Happy 150th, “libertaire”

December 11, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Over at the Anarchist FAQ blog, Iain has a post recognizing the sesquicentennial of the term libertaire, used in 1858 by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his journal, La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social. Déjacque is generally credited with the first use of the term “libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist.” We’ve learned, as the digital archives grow, to be skeptical of first-use claims, but I’m happy to take a moment to recognize the importance of Déjacque’s contribution. His fascinating mix of anarchism, communism, egoism, and feminism, drawing on the thought of Fourier, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux and others, is […]
Contr'un

Who benefits most economically from state centralization?

December 10, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] The conversation surrounding Roderick Long’s recent article at Cato Unbound, “Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now,” has been pretty remarkable, starting with the fact that it began at Cato. There’s been some sloppy, even, shabby stuff along the way, including some weird speculative stuff about Kevin Carson’s work, and its ability to stand academic criticism. As a recovering academic, I would just like to remind folks that loose talk about whose father’s theory can whip whose theory is the stuff of Wikipedia talk pages and chat rooms: scholars have to bring it […]