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Anarchist Beginnings

Joseph Déjacque, “The Universal Circulus” (revised translation)(1858)

May 9, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[This remarkable bit of libertarian philosophy by Joseph Déjacque poses all sorts of difficulties for the modern reader, not the least of which is it borrowings from, and reworkings of, the works of Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux. And there are places where it ha been necessary to translate things rather literally, since terms are used suggestively, according to the established uses of none of the writers or schools that they were drawn from. There are also a couple of times when Déjacque’s enthusiasm clearly ran away with the syntax: where catalogs of conditionals come to abrupt stops, without ever […]
translations

Joseph Déjacque, “The Universal Circulus”

May 9, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Universal Circulus  (1858) Joseph Déjacque I The universal circulus is the destruction of every religion, of all arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This being the case, the world can no longer be a duality, mind and matter, body and soul. It cannot be a mutable thing and an immutable one, which involves contradiction—movement excluding immobility and vice versa—but must be, on the contrary, an infinite unity of always-mutable and always-mobile substance, which implies perfectibility. It is through eternal and infinite movement that the infinite and eternal substance […]
individualist anarchism

E. Armand’s Individualist Anarchist Initiation

May 5, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve started posting consecutive sections from E. Armand’s The Individualist Anarchist Initiation on the Libertarian Library blog. I started translating back in October, with the section on reciprocity, and promised at that point to begin at the beginning and work my way through the book. A number of things have intervened, most of them exciting and worthwhile, like the Bakunin project (about which there should be more news soonish), but here we go: Some lines of introduction Sketches of the Social Environment [2018 update — See the link above for the translations.] It’s a big book, with 279 numbered sections, […]
individualist anarchism

The Individual Anarchist Initiation: Sketches of the Social Environment

May 4, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
   THE INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHIST INITIATION PART ONE THE THEORETICAL BASES OF ANARCHIST INDIVIDUALISM 1. Sketches of the Social Environment, Harmful Authority. 1) The social milieu. A chaos of beings, facts and ideas; a harsh, disorderly struggle, without mercy; a perpetual lie; a wheel which turns blindly, one day lifting one to the pinnacle and the next crushing one ruthlessly. A mass, rich and poor, slaves of age-old, inherited prejudices, the first because they find their interests there, and the others because they are immersed in an ignorance from which one does not want they leave; a multitude whose religion is […]
Contr'un

The Gift Economy of Property: From Property to Gifts

April 30, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Gift Economy of Property Thesis From the Self to Property From Property to Gifts Gifting Property    3. I’m obviously not talking about “property” in any of the very narrow senses that it has been given, including the narrower senses given to it by Proudhon. Or, rather, I am seeking a broad, underlying definition, which will allow us to relate those more limited senses of the term to one another. We’ll probably find ourselves drowning in specific definitions pretty quickly here, but for a moment or two more, let’s stay general and try to clarify just what sort of […]
Contr'un

The Gift Economy of Property: From the Self to Property

April 29, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Gift Economy of Property Thesis From the Self to Property  From Property to Gifts Gifting Property  2. Having laid out a little more clearly the philosophical moves I’m making with the “gift economy of property,” I probably need to clarify again the rationale for such a idiosyncratic approach to the question of property. Because it is explicitly a mutualist anarchist approach, and specifically a neo-Proudhonian approach, there’s a whole lot of critique of property at the foundations, a strong sense that, as desirable as the aims of property might be, the available means of founding it appear to be […]
Contr'un

The Larger Antinomy

April 22, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisted: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I. “When Jesus Christ, explaining to the people the different articles of the Decalogue, taught them that polygamy had been permitted to the ancients because of the rudeness of their intelligence, but that it had not been thus in the beginning; that a bad desire is equal to a fornication consummated; that insult and affront are as reprehensible as murder and blows; that he is a parricide who says to his poor father: “This morning I have prayed to God for you; that will benefit […]
Contr'un

The Gift Economy of Property (2.0)

April 22, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Contr’un Revisited: Related: The Gift Economy of Property Trajectories: Proudhon and Property The Larger Antinomy The Gift Economy of Property I. Thesis An adequate, non-simplist, mutualist theory of what is proper to individual human beings, seeking to do justice to the range of things we denominate by the word “property,” will have to account for the nearly unbridgeable separateness that we experience in consciousness, as well as the inextricable interconnection which is our material reality. It will have to, in essence, respond to Max Stirner and Pierre Leroux (or any number of other advocates of a roughly ecological universal circulus.) […]
Contr'un

Picking up dropped threads

April 20, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Lots of things have intervened in the discussion of mutualist property theory over the last two years, not the least of which has been a whole lot of additional research and translation. It has, for one reason or another, been a little more than I could manage to pick up where I left the fairly straightforward exploration of the question which was interrupted in the midst of the “property is impossible” series, way back in June 2010. But there’s no getting on to the next phase of things without wrapping up this particular discussion, so I’m working on finally pulling […]