Month: December 2011

Contr'un

M. Corbeau’s Gallery of Rogues

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
‎”M. CORBEAU’S Gallery of ROGUES” is the monthly miscellany of radical auto/biography that I’m hoping to launch about January 15, 2012. I’ve said that I won’t release an issue until I have three ready to print, so there are minimal hassles with subscriptions and standing orders. I’m just a couple of dozen pages of translation from that point, and feeling pretty good about how things are coming together. Here are tentative contents for those first three issues.   M. CORBEAU’S Gallery of ROGUES #1   1. Shawn P. Wilbur—“Who was Eliphalet Kimball?” (with texts and working bibliography)2. Charles Malato—“Some Anarchist […]
equitable commerce

Stephen Pearl Andrews on Equitable Commerce, 1850

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Stephen Pearl Andrews was a bizarre, multi-faceted character, whose contributions to anarchism have sometimes been overshadowed by the peculiarity of his contributions in other fields of study. I’ve been slowly-but-surely trying to make sense of my notes on Andrews, and in the course of trying to fill some gaps in the story of his involvement with a sort of perpetual-motion machine scheme (a story in which Josiah Warren also plays at least a bit part), I discovered that the Library of Congress had made large runs of the New York Daily Tribune available online. They […]
bibliography

An Index to “Mother Earth”—Phase One

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
My friend Barry Pateman, of the Kate Sharpley Library, recently provided me with the raw data for an index of Mother Earth magazine. I had a couple of very specific questions that I needed to answer, but looking through the listings reminded me that I had gone as far as copying the contents pages for the full run and starting to digitize them some years back. I set myself the task of at least typing in the listings for a handful of major figures—Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, C. L. James, etc. As it turns out, I managed to accomplish […]
bibliography

Mother Earth author listings

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Leonard D. Abbott, “Some Reminiscences of Ernest Crosby,” — 1, no. 12 (February 1907): 22-27. Leonard D. Abbott, “A Few Words about Ferdinand Earle,” — 2, no. 8 (October 1907): 344-347. Leonard D. Abbott, “An Impression of Maxim Gorky,” — 3, no. 1 (March 1908): 32-34. Leonard D. Abbott, J. William Lloyd and His Message, — 3, no. 10, p. 350. Leonard D. Abbott, Fornaro and His Book, — 4, no. 10, p. 158. Leonard D. Abbott, The Continuing American Interest in Francisco Ferrer, — 5, no. 4, p. 143. Leonard D. Abbott, The Idea of Libertarian Education, — 6, […]
Contr'un

Henri Rochefort and Claude Pelletier in New York, 1874

December 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
–> ARRIVAL OF ROCHEFORT. A LECTURE IN PLACE OF A BANQUET—HIS PLANS. Henri Rochefort arrived in New-York at 7 p. m. on Saturday by the Hudson River Railroad, with Thomas Pain, a French political prisoner, who had escaped with him from New-Caledonia, end Ollivier Benedic, a French acquaintance whom he bad met at Sydney, New-South Wales. On reaching the Grand Central Hotel he took supper with his friends. After breakfasting yesterday he visited a photographer by invitation, and remained at the rooms until 4 p. m. This engagement caused him to miss an appointment with a committee of the French […]
Contr'un

Proudhon’s “Celebration of Sunday,” and other works-in-progress

December 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
You can see parts of three ongoing projects, as they appear, over on From the Libertarian Library. The most interesting is probably Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Celebration of Sunday, the book he wrote just before What is Property? It’s a very interesting read, with something to tell us about a number of aspects of Proudhon’s thought, and it’s something I’ve been puttering away at for several months. I have posted a translation of the first quarter of the book, which is relatively short, and expect to have the second major section, which takes us up to about the halfway point, typed […]
Contr'un

P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — I

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY  [continued] I It is rare that a law can be well understood and appreciated at its true value, if we limit ourselves to considering it separately, and independent of the system to which it is linked: that is a principle of legislative critique which no one contests, and suffers hardly any exceptions. How is it that this rule has been so badly followed with regard to the laws of Moses, that no one has yet thought to present them in their totality? I would not exempt from this criticism even Mr. Pastoret himself, whose work on […]
Contr'un

P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday (continued)

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY [Continued from Preface] _____ “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. “Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work. “But the seventh day is the rest of the Lord: in it thou shall not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: That is why the Eternal has hallowed and blessed the […]
Contr'un

P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — Preface

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY ______ PREFACE The celebrated Sir Francis Bacon was called the reformer of human reason for having replaced the syllogism with observation in the natural sciences; the philosophers, following his example, teach today that philosophy is a collection of observations and facts. But, certain thinkers have said to them, if truth and certainty exist in philosophy, they must also exist in the realm of politics: thus, there is a social science responsive to evidence, which is consequently the object of demonstration, not of art or authority, not, that is, of arbitrary will. This conclusion, so profound in […]