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From the Archives

Victor Yarros, “Benjamin R. Tucker—The Man”

August 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
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.

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From the Archives

Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”

August 11, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
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.

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Contr'un

Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History

August 9, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
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.

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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.

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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.

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