Month: July 2013

Proudhon Library

A Proudhonian summary from the manuscript writings

July 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  The project of working through Proudhon’s works, keyword by keyword, has been rewarding for a variety of reasons. It’s been nearly impossible to get a clear sense of the larger patterns in Proudhon’s use of those keywords without that kind of survey, but the work has also unearthed some important explanations and summaries in unexpected places. The section of the State in The Theory of Taxation is certainly one of the most interesting, but in searching for the surprisingly scarce references to anarchy, I ran across some very interesting material in Napoleon III, a collection of manuscript writings published […]
Contr'un

Proudhon and the coup d’état of 1851

July 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon’s work come from double-checking those things that “everyone knows” about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying “anarchy is order” that I ran across the dubious translations in The General Idea of the Revolution, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that […]
biography

Pauline Roland and the women transported after the December 1851 coup d’etat

July 3, 2013
[I’ve been hoping to put together a collection of Pauline Roland’s writing, but I’ve had difficulties tracking down many of the more important essays. However, her letters from jail and her subsequent transportation to Africa, following Louis Napoleon’s coup, have proven to be a little easier to track down. While the martyrs of December 2 don’t feature very prominently in our own political histories, they were important figures in their own day, and Roland’s letters appeared in English in both the exile press and the feminist papers. Jeanne Deroin circulated a collection of Roland’s letters as part of an announcement […]