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The General Idea of the Revolution (partially revised translation)

June 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Since the question of Proudhon’s understanding of “anarchy” is complicated by the fact that the English translation of one of the key texts, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, obscures the range of meanings that term might have, I thought it would be useful to make available a revision of John Beverley Robinson’s translation, which at least restores that particular complexity to the text. I have marked portions of the text in bold: first, I’ve bolded all of the instances in which “anarchie” was originally translated as “chaos,” “disorganization,” etc., and […]

To be a (synthetic, positive) anarchist

June 27, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I want to turn next to some considerations of Proudhon’s keywords, and the development of his use of terminology. This has been a key concern in my previous work on “property,” and promises to emerge again as I look at the various things that Proudhon meant by “anarchy,” and what then it meant to him to “be an anarchist.” There are just a handful of places where he explicitly declared himself an anarchist, the most famous of them being from 1840, in What is Property? In 1853, in The Philosophy of Progress, he referred to that declaration, clarifying what he […]

Here Come the Rogues

June 26, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Welcome to a new chapter in my exploration of the Libertarian Labyrinth. While I start to bear down a bit on some key questions of anarchist theory, over at Contr’un, I want to take some time here to introduce, or reintroduce, readers to some of the colorful characters I have encountered in my travels as a radical historian, and along the way we’ll gradually start to build an account of what these individuals have in common, and what it has to do with “Atercracy.” For those who haven’t been reading Contr’un (the blog formerly known as Two-Gun Mutualism & the […]

The Libertarian Labyrinth and the Antinomies of Anarchy

June 25, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The articles on ungovernability were an attempt to deal with a fairly limited problem: we have a limited vocabulary with which to accomplish the work of anti-authoritarian social change, and arguably we have to use the tools at hand carefully. Without delving too deeply here into questions of traditions, canons, and orthodoxies, we can probably acknowledge that there are both good reasons to exert some measure of control over how broadly the traditional keywords of anarchism are applied, or misapplied, and equally good reasons—especially when we are talking about anarchism and anarchy—to leave room for those terms to “get away […]

Assembling the New Toolkit

June 20, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

There’s been a long and rather pregnant pause between the decision that I really needed to adjust the way I was approaching my work and the beginning of the new phase. Honestly, I really enjoy those periods where you realize that everything you think you know about the things you really care about is just a little (crucial) bit wrong, particularly when the realization has been dawning for some time. It’s best just to get these things out in the open and let the situation breathe, so you can move on. But those times are also terrifying, and the waiting […]

Contr’un

June 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I had been intending to simply go without a “theory” blog for a while, letting this one go dormant while I closed down a couple of the specialized archive-blogs and integrated that material, and new projects, into the new Libertarian Labyrinth site. But as I’ve had a chance to get the new archive news-blog together and have been preparing materials for the Atercracy project, I’ve found that there seems to still be plenty of more or less pressing material that is perhaps better treated as a continuation of this multiply-reinvented project. So I’m reinventing once more, and will continue to […]

Libertarian Labyrinth archive-news blog

June 5, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

As the action gradually moves away from this blog, I’m generally going to split my posting between the newsy stuff that has to do with the Libertarian Labyrinth archive and the history-and-theory stuff. If you want to keep track of major additions to the archive, new collections and exhibits, etc., then you’ll want to check this new blog.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State

June 5, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve spent much of the last six months on a journey down the rabbit hole in search of Proudhon’s theory of the State, and as I suspect my notes on the study have made clear, it’s been quite an adventure. The essay, “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” has been accepted for publication in German, in Nomos’s Staatsverständnisse series. I’ve assembled a pamphlet, containing the English version of the essay, my notes from the blog, and some translations from Proudhon, which is now available in the Labyrinth archive. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State [1] Shawn P. Wilbur [The State] […]

The Pleasures and Perils of “Getting Back to Basics”

June 4, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve talked a bit, in this period of personal and political transition, about the effects of working backwards through the anarchist tradition, “chipping away at … accepted wisdom.” I would hope that the practical difficulties shine through in most of my recent work, whether it is the attempt to grapple with Proudhon’s developing notion of the State, in the period before anti-statism was really a thing, or the discovery that his idea of “anarchy” may have been a bit more complicated than we generally acknowledge. I’m in the last throes of revising my essay on the State right now, and […]

Welcome to the new Libertarian Labyrinth

May 18, 2013

It’s hard to believe, but I began to archive anarchist materials online almost twenty years ago. I was working with an established online archive, but I kept finding that the material that I was most interested in making available tended to sit right on the margins of what was considered appropriate for those collections. I was exploring mutualism, for example, at a time when none of us were quite sure how to think about that school of thought, primarily because we didn’t really know what it was. The first version of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive was essentially just a collection […]