Year: 2025

Featured articles

The Anarchists’ Noël: Christmas Tales from “Le Libertaire” (1899-1913)

December 26, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
Links: The Anarchists’ Noël (pdf) ‘Christmas’ [category feed] Posting anarchist Christmas stories has become something of a tradition here in recent years, with some of the best coming from the individualist press, such as the various pieces by E. Armand and Gigi Damiani’s “Jesus and Bonnot: A Christmas Tale.” So I had been intending right along to steal a bit of time before the holiday rolled around to seek out a few new tales to translate. And then a mix of other tasks — work on the “Encounters with Anarchist Individualism,” native seed stratification, etc. — just completely wiped it […]
Contr'un

Encounters with Anarchist Individualism: Bigger on the Inside

September 22, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
Links: E. Armand, What Is an Anarchist? (1908) E. Armand, The Anarchist Individualist Initiation (1923) Contr’un #3: The Anarchic Encounter (pdf) (2013) Anarchism, Plain and Simple / Propositions for Discussion (2015) Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism (2020) Constructing Anarchisms (2020) A Schematic Anarchism (2022) ENCOUNTERS: I am large, I contain multitudes. — Whitman, “Song of Myself” After a rather lengthy delay, I’m settling down to some projects that I had initially intended to begin back in January. As it happens, all three of the tasks at the top of the pile — work on Proudhon’s Justice, an edition […]
Contr'un

The Anarchism of the Encounter: A Distillation

July 28, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ultimately, the most robust forms of anarchist thought are likely to result from the connection — encounter, conjugation, etc. — of more detail-oriented sorts of synthesis with this kind of distillation in the context of ongoing practical application. In a book, the scope of application is obviously limited, but hopefully that can be one kind of strength.

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Contr'un

The Anarchism of the Encounter: The Texts

July 18, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
Let us recall the principle. The reason for the institution of government, as we have said, is the economic anarchy. When the Revolution has regulated this anarchy, and organized the industrial forces, there is no further pretext for political centralization; it is absorbed in industrial solidarity, a solidarity which is based upon general reason, and of which we may say, as Pascal said of the universe, that its center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

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Contr'un

Revenge of the Return of Anarchy and Democracy (Revisited)

June 27, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
The most recent issue of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review includes an article by Wayne Price, “Do Anarchists Support Democracy? The Opinions of Errico Malatesta,” in which he once again takes up the defense of “democracy” as at least consistent with anarchist principles. A brief discussion of the article on the North American Anarchist Studies Association list picked up threads from the 2017 C4SS “Mutual Exchange” on anarchy and democracy.

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Featured articles

E. Armand, “A vous, les humbles” / “To you, the humble ones” (1917) (FR/EN)

June 23, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
O humble ones, we know your jealousies and your grudges. We know that in your morals, you ape the social exalted, when you do not surpass them in ridicule or narrowness. We are fully aware of your prejudices, your fear of what others will say, your servility, your flattening before anyone who exercises authority, wears fine clothes or clinks a purse full of coins.

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Bakunin Library

Mikhail Bakunin, “Philosophical Considerations on the Divine Phantom, the Real World and Man” (1870)

June 13, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
Bakunin’s great unfinished work, The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, covers a lot of ground, but one of its more interesting sections, the “Appendix” called “Philosophical Considerations on the Divine Phantom, the Real World and Man,” is concerned with questions that will be familiar to readers of its best-known fragment, “God and the State.” It is again a question of Bakunin’s elaboration and defense of materialism, with sections on “The System of the World” and “Religion.” Much of the focus is on the nature and proper subject matter of science. Part of the account takes the form of a critique of positivist philosophy, as pursued by the followers of Auguste Comte. 

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Featured articles

“Rational Socialists” vs. the Anarchists

May 31, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
In 2010, I posted a partial translation of Summary of Social Economy, According to the Ideas of Colins, by Agathon de Potter, one of the most active of Colins’ followers. It took fifteen years to come back and finish the job, but — one thing having led to another — the completed translation is one of three newly translated texts by de Potter that I’m sharing today. 

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