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mutualism

JUSTICE: Philosophy must be essentially practical

January 15, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section VI. § VI. — That philosophy must be essentially practical. We would be gravely mistaken if we imagined that philosophy, because it defined itself as the Search for the [22] reason of things, has no other end than to make us discover that reason, and that its object is exclusively speculative. Already, by showing that these conditions are those of common sense, its certainty the same for all, its highest conceptions of the same form and quality as its most elementary propositions, we have had occasion […]
Uncategorized

Getting collaborative at Collective Reason

January 8, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Well, I had expected complications in my translating efforts, and they have come already. But the largest complication of the last several days has been of a rather fortunate sort: I have help. As I’ve mentioned before, there has been a fairly long-running, if somewhat desultory conversation about establishing a collaborative translation site. But there has also been a fair amount of practical tinkering going on as well, and it looks like we have one, and potentially more, projects really moving forward. Collective Reason, which I have been using for some of my work, now has a set of simple […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: Metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction

January 7, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section V. § V. — That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction. The definition of philosophy implies by its terms: 1) someone who seeks, observes, analyzes, synthesizes and discovers, which we call the Subject or Moi; 2) something which is observed, analyzed, the reason of which we seek, and which we call the Object or Non-moi. The first – the observer, subject, moi, or mind – is active; the second – the thing observed, object, non-moi, or phenomenon – is passive. Let us not frighten […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: The origin of ideas

January 4, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section IV. IV.– The origin of ideas. Here is the great temptation, I should say the great conspiracy of the philosophers; here is also their chastisement. This principle so luminous, so simple, that in order to know the reason of things, it is necessary to have seen them, has not always been (can you believe it?) accepted in philosophy. Without speaking of those, in so great a number, aspired to sound the nature of things, one encounters profound geniuses who have asked if the human mind, so […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: On the quality of the philosophical mind

January 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section III. § III. — On the quality of the philosophical mind. But here is a rather different affair! It is a question of knowing if philosophy, of which it was first said that the people were incapable, will not, by its very practice, create inequality among men. What can we conclude from our definition? Since philosophy is the search for, and, so far as it is possible, the discovery of the reason of things, it is clear that, in order to philosophize well, the first and […]
mutualism

Justice: The definition of philosophy

January 1, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section II. § II. — The definition of philosophy. Philosophy is composed of a certain number of questions that have been regarded at all times as the fundamental problems of the human mind, and that for that reason have been declared inaccessible to the common people. Philosophy, it was said, is the science of the universal, the science of principles, the science of causes; this is why we can speak of universal science, the science of things visible and invisible, the science of God, of man and […]
Anarchism

Kicking off a year of Justice

January 1, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
2008 was a transitional year for my various projects, and some, like the English-language archiving, suffered a bit from my relocation and the various transitions that surrounded it. I hope that an equivalent service to the movement has been rendered by the translation that has taken up so much of my time. The progress seems glacial in comparison to the years where I was able to add thousands of pages of material, but, as ought to be apparent, developing the skills to dig back into the early French texts has had some very important effects on my overall thinking about […]
Contr'un

Colins’ painful punctuation

December 31, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Warning: Off-topic chatter about the process of translation. Jean Guillaume Cesar Alexandre Hippolyte, baron de Colins was the chief theorist of Rational Socialism, and a frequent critic and intellectual rival of Proudhon. Indeed, Colins’ crew were pitting the two figures against each other long after both had died. I’m planning on finishing up a translation of Adolphe Hugentobler’s Dialogue of Dead Men sometime in 2009. Colins wrote a three-volume work, Justice in Science, apart from the Revolution and the Church, which begins with a 600-page attempted refutation of most of Proudhon’s main theses in Justice in the Revolution and the […]
Contr'un

War: What’s it good for?

December 30, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
It turns out that Proudhon’s answer to the musical question is rather interesting, and challenging. His two-volume War and Peace represents an further exploration of some of the ideas he had developed in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. The turning point in Proudhon’s philosophy came in the 1850s, between the Philosophy of Progress and Justice, when he realized that, as he later put it, “the antinomy does not resolve itself.” The immediate consequence of this realization was a move from the emphasis on synthesis, which had dominated his work from the last sections of What is Property? […]
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Proudhon’s “Kronos”

December 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In the biographical introduction to Tucker’s edition of What is Property? is a brief mention that around 1851 Proudhon’s “entertained the idea of writing a universal history entitled “Chronos.” This project was never fulfilled.” There was probably no shortage of “universal history” in France by 1850, although an entry by Proudhon would no doubt have been novel and interesting. The Saint-Simonians and their allies, including P. J. B. Buchez, Auguste Ott, Pierre Leroux, had written volume after volume on the subject. In 1849, William B. Greene published his Remarks On The History Of Science; Followed By An Apriori Autobiography, which […]