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Proudhon manuscripts online

November 10, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Ville de Besançon, home of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, has an excellent digital archive site, which I just discovered includes scans of several of Proudhon’s manuscripts, including Pologne (source of The Theory of Property), Chronos, and notes on a number of the published works. We can hope that Economie and La propriété vaincue will eventually be available, but what is already there amounts to thousands of pages of material most of us have never had a chance to examine.

Proudhon on “libertarians” in 1858

November 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been working my way through those sections of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church which I didn’t have to consult carefully while writing the chapter on the State, as the next step towards organizing the Proudhon book. There have been a few moments when I’ve kicked myself for not going back and looking at sections, and more than a few where passages I read through in 2008-9 look very different to me now. There are two studies which I’ve never even begun to really do justice, but, so far, the most interesting surprise has come […]

Practicing the Encounter: Appropriation (and Ecology)

October 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s get a little practice with all the tools we’ve been assembling. And, to do so, let’s stick, for the moment, with the question of property. It’s been one of my more or less explicit beliefs for a long time now that property theory may be transformed from a tool of capitalism into a tool useful to anarchists, simply by reexamining it very closely with a set of presuppositions informed by the insights of anarchism and ecological science. I’ve also been fairly emphatic that one of the reasons that this has not happened to any great extent, despite the […]

Fourier, “Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy”

October 7, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE NEW INDUSTRIAL WORLD CHAPTER XXVI. Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy. In the course of the preceding sections and the Preface, we have had occasion to jest about a thesis several times repeated and laughable at first glance; it is that (224) in the societary regime gluttony is a source of wisdom, insight, and social accord. I can give that strange thesis the most regular proofs. No passion has been more badly esteemed than gluttony. Can we presume that God considered as a vice the passion to which he […]

Proudhon on the “right to punish”

October 3, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Here is another section from the study on moral sanction, the concluding section of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church.] II. — Does society have the right to punish? The philosophers struggle, and the problem is still unresolved. While the Church invokes divine right, the mandate received by it to cure souls, and, if necessary, to execute the bodies of those who disdain the law, the so-called rationalists allege, some legitimate defense, others the talion or vengeance, these the necessity of the example, those, who we could call semi-theologians, the mental hygiene and good of the culprits. Mr. […]

Proudhon, Justice: Twelfth Study

October 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The final study in Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church deals with the question of “moral sanction.” This section explains the identity, within Proudhon’s thought of the law, the legislator, and the sanction of the law, understood both as the guarantee of its authority (a notion we obviously have to use carefully in this context) and as the rewards or punishments associated with compliance or non-compliance. JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH TWELFTH STUDY ON MORAL SANCTION ____ FRAGMENTS Monsignor, I have come here to the end of this long labor. Accused as it has […]

Mikhail Bakunin, “The Principle of the State” (1871)

September 30, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Principle of the State [manuscript, 1871, Locarno, Switzerland] At base, conquest is not only the origin, it is also the crowning aim of all States, great or small, powerful or weak, despotic or liberal, monarchic, aristocratic, democratic, and even socialist, supposing that the ideal of the German socialists, that of a great communist State, is ever realized. That it has been the point of departure for all States, ancient and modern, can be doubted by no one, since each page of universal history proves it sufficiently. No one contests any longer that the large current States have conquest […]

The Third Gift

September 28, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the consequences of adopting this model of the encounter as a key tool is that we are confronted more directly with the ways in which Proudhon’s sociology complicates oppositions like that between individualism and socialism. On the level playing field we’re exploring, both individual human beings and all of the collective individualities enter the encounter as what I’ve been calling equal uniques, individuals, but on potentially very different scales. In the context of the analysis of Proudhon’s State-theory, I raised the practical difficulties of realizing this sort of encounter in practice between individuals of such different scales, and/or […]

Note on Contr’archy and Guarantism

September 22, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the more difficult tactical questions in this new phase has been the question of vocabulary, of how to stock this “toolkit” that we’ve been assembling. I would love to keep the truly esoteric terminology to a minumum, but even jargon has its uses—chief among them the highlighting of concepts which are themselves more than a bit esoteric. I have a great deal of faith in readers’ abilities to negotiate complex discussion of property, capitalism, socialism, association, etc., without recourse to anything more than the sort of clarification one would expect in any careful study. But when it is […]

Mutualism Revisited

September 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: [Commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Six months ago, I announced, after a lot of soul-searching, that I was going to abandon “mutualism” as a description of my politics, and opted to scrap the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book and begin work on a book examining the lessons of Proudhon for the broader anarchist movement. I always knew that it was going to be easier said than done. If the “mutualist” label covers too much ground, and what passes for a “mutualist movement” is too heterodox to move forward together, pursuing a […]