Month: July 2014

Proudhon Library

Principles of the Philosophy of Progress (II and III)

July 21, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
II.—THE FORCE IN THE SOCIAL BEING. 1.—There exists between men a tendency or attraction that pushes them to group and act, for their own great interest and the most complete development of their individuality, collectively and as a mass. What is the principle of that tendency? The same as that of the attraction between all beings: It is a property and a condition of their existence (p. 2); it is impossible to know more of it, and consequently senseless to ask more. Let us limit ourselves to reasoning from the point of view of the aim. The tendency in the […]
Proudhon Library

The Conditions of Existence (from “Economy”)

July 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Ms. 2867 contains a section on the “Principles of the Philosophy of Progress,” which focuses on the character of collective beings and collective reason. It opens with the following notes on the “conditions of existence:”] I.—THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE. Man is made up of parts called members or organs. What makes his reality is the animistic gathering of these organs in a whole that, as long as it lives, is called a person. In the same way, a society is made up of parts that are persons or aggregations of persons. What established the social reality is the intellectual consent […]
Contr'un

In Search of the Justicier

July 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I don’t want to wait to work through the details of Proudhon’s analysis before moving forward with the neo-Proudhonian analysis I’ve been developing. At the moment, in fact, I think that the two projects can diverge usefully: There are a lot of important sociological and economic tools to be uncovered, brushed off and modified for present use, tucked away in the works of Proudhon, and there will come a moment—fairly soon, I hope—when we’ll need all of those tools assembled and in working order. At the same time, there are some very basic elements that we have already recovered, which […]
Contr'un

Note on the intitiation into justice

July 15, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
“It is through marriage that man learns, from nature itself, to sense himself as double.” A point that I probably haven’t explored sufficiently, in the course of working through Proudhon’s thoughts on the family, is the extent to which his concept of marriage appears to be not just distanced from sexual and reproductive concerns, but perhaps transformed in a way that makes those concerns almost inessential. His emphasis on chastity was certainly in part a reflection of his own predilections, but those tastes were shared rather widely in his context and were not uncommon among the radical women with whom […]
Proudhon Library

DILEMMA: Red or White (from “Economy”)

July 7, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ms. 2863 (Economy) Paris, March 16 DILEMMA: Red or White A captain of the line assures me—the papers friendly to the government will say tomorrow if the information is exact—that on the occasion of the next elections, the order has been given to prevent, by all possible means, the gentlemen of the military from attending the electoral gatherings. Any disobedience in this regard will be punished by eight days in jail. The government is right. It is consistent with itself. It follows, imperturbably, like Mr. Cabet, its straight line. For sixty years, the French people, leading the rest of the […]
Contr'un

Un Etat, c’est moi

July 6, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] The manuscript of Proudhon’s Pologne keeps slowly giving up its secrets, and some of them are perfectly designed to blow 21st century anarchist minds. Reexamining The Theory of Property as Chapter VII of Pologne has meant that one of the things I have become most interested in is the reason why a “guarantism” involving individual property seems to be called for by the social and political evolution described in the first six chapters. That has meant reuniting the two manuscripts on the Besançon site, as much as is possible, and looking particularly closely for whatever […]
Proudhon Library

A passage missing from “The Theory of Property”

July 5, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
PROJECT: Principles of Nationality and Property I think that most of the concerns that readers have had regarding The Theory of Property have involved the possibility that something alien to Proudhon’s thought might have been introduced by the editors. Having checked most of the published work against the manuscript, I feel fairly confident that that wasn’t the case. It has been a bit more complicated to determine if any important parts of Proudhon’s argument were excluded from the published text. At some point, I will have a copy of the manuscript with all of the material that was incorporated marked […]
Proudhon Library

Poland: Part One, Contents

July 3, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Besançon, Ms. 2834 POLAND: A STUDY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS [Considerations on the Life and Death of Nationalities] PART ONE: PRINCIPLES I.—History and Nationality. The Polish Question.—History understood as a legal inquiry: necessity, in order to write history and judge a nation, of positing some principles.—Doctrine of immanence: that the political organism is the product of social spontaneity, and that where that spontaneity is lacking, the State becoming powerless and impossible, the nationality remains non-existent.—Exhaustion of the spontaneity in nations: Jews, Greeks, Romans and Italians.—Divisions of the history of Poland: conclusion unfavorable to the demands of the Poles. II.—The […]