Proudhon Library
P.-J. Proudhon, “Property is Theft” (manuscript)
The theory of indefinites explains how this proposition is an absolute truth, and how nevertheless [property] is an organic and social necessity.
Month: August 2022
Working Translations
“Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf” (1796)
Nature has given to each man an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods. The aim of society is to defend that equality, often attacked by the strong and the mean in the state of nature, and to increase the common enjoyments through the cooperation of all.
From the Archives
Victor Yarros, “Benjamin R. Tucker—The Man”
Of Benjamin R. Tucker, the founder and leading exponent of individualist. philosophical Anarchism, I have written elsewhere. Of Tucker the man, little has been written by anyone, and I propose to record here impressions and recollections of him based on many years close association with him, personal as well as intellectual and ideological.
From the Archives
Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”
Benjamin R. Tucker’s rather sudden conversion to Max Stirner’s philosophy of Egoism was a calamitous accident. There is nothing in common between individualist and philosophical Anarchism as Tucker developed it on the foundations laid by Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Warren, Spooner, Spencer, Herbert, Green and Andrews, and Stirner’s German political metaphysics. Some of Tucker’s adherents uncritically swallowed. Egoism and persuaded themselves that it was a corollary, if not a logical deduction from anarchistic premises. This was a gross error. Egoism is half platitudinous, half fallacious.
Contr'un
Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History
So much energy is wasted in debating anarchist labels that we imagine designate historical tendencies with clear programs, but mostly emerged from contexts where the rich diversity of anarchist ideas was reduced to forms appropriate for some earlier round of sectarian debate. Most of the keywords we fight over in anarchist circles are neither that sort of label not anti-concepts. They are the sort of obvious constructions (individualism, socialism, mutualism, capitalism, feminism, etc.) that you would to be contested in ideology-centered discourse.