Working Translations

Ovide Ducauroy (1887-1953)

Ovide, “Soliloque bénévole,” Par-delà la Mêlée 1 no. 8 (25 Mars 1916): 3.Ovide Ducauroy, “Pour satisfaire mon égoïsme…,” Par-delà la Mêlée 1 no. 13 (mi Juillet 1916): 4. Ovide Ducauroy, “La liberté absolue,” Par-delà la […]

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Margins and Problems: Enter the Anarchist

The 1840s opened with a bang, with Proudhon’s declaration: je suis anarchiste. When we’re examining the conditions of possibility for various possible anarchisms, the emergence of anarchist as a role or identity, a means of self-identification, is undoubtedly a moment that will be hard to top. We have seen the various contexts in which libertarian analyses had already emerged—and the degree to which they were emerging from analyses of the mechanisms of government and authority, whether it was a question of the deconstructive reading of someone like Thomas Skidmore or the alleged mental lapse of P. W. Grayson. Something anarchistic was apparently in the air, but it was a decisive step to give it a name—and what a name!—and also to claim that name as a position within the field of social systems. […]

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E. Armand, “L’Individualisme de la Joie / The Individualism of Joy” (1924)

A painful misadventure had just befallen me, to which I owe the addition of some new wrinkles. It was not the first time in my life that I have, as the saying goes, “left some flesh among the brambles.” But this time, I felt that I risked leaving more than my fleece or my blood: I risked leaving my love for the joy of living. And that is serious. It is the worst that can happen to us, to you or to me, to no longer feel love for the joy of living. It matters little if we lose our reputation or our money, or the esteem of those around us, or, in the worst case, our liberty (and that is still a terrible thing.) But there is no loss that can compare to those of the love of the joy of living. […]

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Margins and Problems: Individualism and Socialism

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. […]

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Margins and Problems: Disquisitions and Demands

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. […]