Month: May 2021

The essay that follows originally appeared in 2010 and, for a time, lent its name, “Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule,” to what is now the “Contrun” blog. It is very much a creature of certain contexts specific to the reemergence of mutualism as an anarchist tendency—contexts that alternately freed and constrained my projects at the time. But it is also a pretty good introduction to Pierre Leroux and his influence on the anarchist tradition.

This is obviously a narrow conception of anarchism, but also one that we will find, combined with other elements, in quite a number of the works he will examine moving forward. In 1840, for example, Proudhon will assure us that, thanks in part to his anarchistic analysis, “the despotism of the will will be succeeded by the reign of reason”—but it isn’t at all clear that the transition will be rapid or the road smooth.

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. I use speculative fiction—mostly vignettes and snippets of prose, stored safely away in notebooks or word-processing files—as a personal tool to supplement more traditional sorts of study and analysis. I have been known to share fragments from that work here in the Labyrinth, but the bits tend to […]

We’re concerned, in these early phases of the survey, with the means by which we might recognize an anarchism emerging in contexts where that term did not yet have any of its familiar associations. What are the conditions for an emerging body of thought to inspire in us the same responses we have to the sorts of anarchism we presently espouse?