Month: September 2008

Contr'un

The Gift Economy of Property

September 26, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Contr’un Revisited: This may well be the best known of my anarchist writings, thanks to its inclusion in Markets Not Capitalism, where, I’m afraid, it is a bit of an anomaly. It is, I suppose, a fine enough example of the content here, rich in suggestive bits, if a little short on elaboration. At the same time, however, it is probably not a surprise that almost ten years after I first came up with the notion, the gift economy of property remains little more than a phrase. We’ve made some headway over the years in bringing various discourses into some […]
Uncategorized

from better mousetraps to lemonade seas (Blog recycling, part 2)

September 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In my post “Time to free ALL the political prisoners” I announced my intention to transform The Very Idea into a group blog for counter-institutional speculation and invention. I’ve got some redesigning to do to finish the “recycling,” but the new incarnation, retitled “from better mousetraps to lemonade seas” (the very idea, indeed!) is open for collaborative business, and I have established a discussion list as well. I’m hoping for practical results, but more than anything I am hoping to open a space for those, like me, who have more ideas than they can practically pursue, to document those things, […]
Uncategorized

Reinvent and Relaunch!

September 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
For a number of years, this blog has hosted my work on intellectual history outside the “libertarian labyinth,” work posted for my students and posts on material that is simply interesting, without being particularly relevant to current issues and struggles. The long silence here suggests how little I have focused on those concerns lately. In part that is because I have been very focused on recovering material from the anarchist and libertarian traditions, but it has also been in part a result of my broadened sense of how for that “labyrinth” really extends. The next time I treat the struggles […]
Corvus Editions

Blog recycling, Part 1

September 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
The old sister-site of this blog, From the Libertarian Library, has been pretty much forlorn and abandoned since I set up the wiki site for the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. But it has a new reason to be, as an announcement site for the new series of pamphlets that I am compiling from the Labyrinth. The series will consist of material relating to the Radical History Series at Laughing Horse Books, to the mutual school courses that will begin in 2009, and to various other projects. Pamphlets will be available in downloadable pdf format. There is some overlap of material with […]
Uncategorized

“The current unintelligent tampering…with the moral order of business”

September 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In 1873, William Batchelder Greene was asked by Ezra Heywood to explain Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas on property. Greene sent along translations of the first three, and last three pages of What is Property? and a short, fascinating account of Proudhon and his ideas, based on Greene’s acquaintance with Proudhon during his years in Paris, roughly 1853-1861. It is clear from the account that Greene was most familiar with Proudhon’s earlier works. Some of Greene’s explanation is not consistent with the works from the 1860s, and some of it is consistent, as when Greene likens property to Satan, but in ways […]
Corvus Editions

Basic writings by Voltairine de Cleyre

September 20, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
While there is no shortage of editions of Voltairine de Cleyre’s writings, I’ve put together a collection which includes those I use most often, or recommend most often to others. The “basic writings” pamphlet includes “Anarchism and American Traditions,” “The Economic Tendency of Freethought,” and the two essays relating to individualism and communism. Invisible Molotov also has much of this material, in more confrontational packaging. Pick the package that fits your audience.
Corvus Editions

Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution” as a bilingual pamphlet

September 20, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
A new purpose for an old blog, the raison d’être of which had been largely eliminated by my migration of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive to the wiki site: a new series of downloadable pdf pamphlets from the archive. First up: Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution,” in an English-French bilingual edition. Please let me know if you have any trouble with these pamphlets. I’m also printing actual hard-copy pamphlets for local distribution, and will probably be issuing a few more elaborately produced items as fund-raisers for research materials.
Contr'un

Proudhon, Liberty, Satan, and The Ladies Repository (oh, my!)

September 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Very little of Proudhon’s 6-volume work on Justice in the Revolution and in the Church has been translated, but one in/famous passage has been treated to a number of English renderings. Section XLVII, which ends Chapter 5, “Function of Liberty,” which is itself the final chapter of the Eighth Study, “Conscience and Liberty” (which appears in Justice, Tome III in the Lacroix collected works) contains a passage that begins “Come, Satan, come. . . ,” and which has naturally been handy for those who wanted to demonstrate what an evil dude that French socialist Proudhon was. There is a really […]
Uncategorized

Puzzle pieces: W. H. Channing’s “The Present”

September 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve emphasized before the importance of William Henry Channing’s The Spirit of the Age, as the closest thing we have to a mid-19th century American mutualist paper. Channing is equally important as part of the late-transcendentalist/radical Unitarian/free-religionist current with which American individualist anarchism was in constant dialogue. William B. Greene was himself a part of that current, as was Sidney H. Morse and, at least early on, Joshua King Ingalls. Tucker was influenced by it, and his Radical Review was full of contributors from it. And a great deal of attention was paid in the early issues of Liberty, to […]
Uncategorized

Proudhon on freedom and free will

September 12, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I’m working away at the translation of Proudhon’s chapter (in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church) on “The Nature and Function of Liberty.” It’s a key piece in his overall work, and includes an explanation of the nature and function of “free will,” along with some suggestions about how that explanation would scale up to the realm of social or political liberty. Remember that Proudhon was, from the earliest of his works, concerned with the “collective force” which arises from associated production and exceeds the productive power of the […]