Month: March 2010

Proudhon Library

Proudhon on Force and Rights (War and Peace)

March 31, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
These extracts from Proudhon’s War and Peace will appear in The Mutualist #1 (which will itself appear in the next couple of days.) It’s useful to recall that Proudhon treated “justice” almost entirely as a matter of the balance of forces, and acknowledged that there would be “degrees” of justice, just as there are of liberty, or of the strength and present expression of all human faculties. As early as What is Property?, Proudhon gave a historical account of the development of justice in its earliest stages: balance of strength, followed by balance of strength and guile. His scattered treatments […]
Contr'un

A Note on “Another note on the term ‘private property’”

March 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I posted this reply to Brad Spangler’s “Another note on the term ‘private property.’” I think it’s worth posting here, since it sums up my own present approach to the question of what makes a useful and theoretically “elegant” theory of property: I’m constantly uncertain why modern Lockeans support Locke’s analysis. It seems to me that the strength of the model is that it gives us a clear mechanism for appropriation (labor mixing), a rationale for that appropriation (extension of the self), and a rule for avoiding the monopolization of property (the provisos.) That’s pretty elegant. Add an active, “unmixing” […]
Contr'un

Anselme Bellegarrigue on “The Revolution”

March 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Bellegarrigue’s Anarchy: A Journal of Order only lasted for two issues, although he had projected several more. The first issue contained his “Manifesto”  — translated and published in part by Benjamin Tucker in Liberty, and in full by the Kate Sharpley Library — and the second was dedicated to “The Revolution.” Like Proudhon, Bellegarrigue was a strong critic of the direction that the 1848 revolution had taken: “In theory, the Revolution is the development of well-being. In practice, it has only been the extension of malaise.” And, like Proudhon, he pointed to certain essential contradictions which prevented that “development of […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin’s “Political Theology of Mazzini”

March 11, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] There are still lots of gems hidden in the pages of Liberty, and some of them are not, perhaps, quite what you would expect to find. For instance, Sarah Holmes translated Bakunin’s lengthy essay, “The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International,” and Tucker serialized it in his paper. I’ve collected the text here in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive and will be releasing a pamphlet version at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair next weekend. It’s a very interesting read. Give it a look. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] The Political Theology of Mazzini And […]
Contr'un

Down with the Bosses!

March 8, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Here’s a translation of an article from Le Libertaire, originally published as “L’autorité. — La Dictature,” April, 1859. I’ve also recently translated his poem, “To the Ci-Devant Dynastics.” I think the difficulties, and the resulting rough spots, in both translations will be fairly obvious. [Translation revised, and introductory quote added: January, 2012] Authority.—Dictatorship. aka “Down with the Bosses!” Le Libertaire, no. 12 (April 7, 1859) [revised translation] What assurance have I gained? What conclusion can I draw? … The knowledge that I have gained is that there is only one right in the world: it is the right of the […]
Pantarchy

I hope this clears things up…

March 7, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Johnson’s (Revised) Universal Cyclopaedia (1886) contained the following explanation, by its creator, of the science of “universology:” Universol´ogy is the name given to a universal science covering the whole ground of philosophy, of the sciences in their general aspects—in which sense it is called “sciento-philosophy”—and of social polity, or the collective life of the human world. As a philosophy, in the more common and general or less precise use of that term, the system is called “integralism,” as that of Comte is called “positivism;” as a new science—in the exact sense […]
Contr'un

Tucker’s “Radical Review”

March 7, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
A complete collection of Benjamin R. Tucker’s “Radical Review” is now available on Google Books. The searchable text is incomplete, but the page prints are better than those that I used to put together my archive of the magazine. With two sets to work from, the process of getting a fully searchable text archive—already well underway—should be accelerated considerably.