Month: July 2022

New Proudhon Library

Of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Popular Philosophy—Program (1860)

July 28, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

At the beginning of a new work, we should explain our title and our intentions.

Ever since humanity entered the period of civilization, for as long as anyone can recall, the people, said Paul Louis Courier, have prayed and paid.

They pray for their princes, for their magistrates, for their exploiters and their parasites;

They pray, like Jesus Christ, for their executioners;

They pray for the very ones who should, by rights, pray for them. […]

Anarchist Beginnings

Pierre Mualdes, “Etre anarchiste / To Be an Anarchist” (1924)

July 14, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

To be an anarchist is to be individualist, first of all. It is oneself that one is most keen to liberate, but as one’s total emancipation is intimately linked to that of one’s neighbors, one is communist by force of circumstance. No offense to the most affirmative anti-societarists: I also believe that man is an animal that instinct drives to live in society. A kind of human feeling is thus created that goes from the individual to the species, a feeling that the rabble of the rulers strives to channel to its own profit within the limits of a fatherland, but which has manifested even during the last butchery between “enemies” a feeling that knows no borders. […]