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Revenge of the Return of Anarchy and Democracy (Revisited)

June 27, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
The most recent issue of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review includes an article by Wayne Price, “Do Anarchists Support Democracy? The Opinions of Errico Malatesta,” in which he once again takes up the defense of “democracy” as at least consistent with anarchist principles. A brief discussion of the article on the North American Anarchist Studies Association list picked up threads from the 2017 C4SS “Mutual Exchange” on anarchy and democracy.

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Encounters with Anarchist Individualism

January 1, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
The “anarchic encounter” was always really a metaphor, on which I hoped to eventually hang a more thorough analysis of anarchistic social relations. The elaboration has been slow, but the metaphor has remained surprisingly serviceable — and saw a real revival over the course of the “Constructing Anarchisms” project. The metaphor has its source in a pair of passages from Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church — a work that I have translated over the past couple of years and will continue to revise and annotate in 2025 — which summarize in just a few lines a rudimentary anarchist social system. There is a little more to work with than a bon mot or some etymological cues, but not a great deal more. Again, it is a question of a focus for elaborations that it would probably not be accurate to say all follow directly from the original source. But you have to start somewhere — or start again somewhere, as many times as it is necessary to start again — and the encounter is a somewhere that has served me well for some time now. I’m hoping others will have a similar experience.

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Notes on Anarchy and Hegemony in the Realm of Definitions

November 16, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
The notes that follow are preliminary, as I try to bring together a number of considerations regarding vocabulary, definition, theoretical clarity and such. They begin with some questions raised about the translation of Proudhon’s work, pass through a discussion of Proudhon’s own approach to the definition of key terms — which I hope will be useful as we begin reading and discussion of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church — and end with some general thoughts about anarchists’ engagement with the question of definition in the present.

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Notes on Proudhon’s “Justice”

May 12, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
One key challenge for modern readers of Proudhon’s Justice is that the sections where he presumably provides his mature “solution of the social problem,” his account of basic social relations organized according to principles of immanent justice, are also the sections where his anti-feminism poses the most significant challenges for us. The account itself is hardly a mystery. I translated the “Catechism of Marriage” late in that 2014 campaign. Proudhon’s appropriation of the androgyne theory that had been popular in Saint-Simonian circles is straightforward enough — and, I think, there are also very few obstacles to making of it something useful, which dispenses with the particular forms of biological essentialism that we cite among the sources of the problem in Proudhon’s work. What does seem to remain a bit mysterious is a fairly wide range of details, through which Proudhon moved from some biological notions of dubious validity to a theory of social organization that is in some ways tantalizingly close to what we might hope for from an anarchist social science.

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Justice—and “Justice”—as the Center of Proudhon’s Work

April 9, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
Work on the translation of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and the Church continues steadily and is now well ahead of the schedule I had set myself, despite a bout of the still-lurking plague complicating matters in March. Today, I started translating the Fifth Study, on education and the draft files for the project contain roughly 411,000 words (1280 double-spaced pages) of new or previously unshared translation.

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Reading Proudhon Today

November 16, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is a lot of interesting material in Proudhon’s unpublished manuscripts, not all of which is vital to understanding his project, but there are two sets of texts in particular that any serious student should at least be aware of—if only to know what we don’t know.

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Further Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History

September 28, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
This is a collection of another Twitter thread, in the course of which I’ve been sharing some reminiscences on how “neo-proudhonian” mutualism emerged and how those who have adopted the label or encounter it in anarchist circles might understand the particular gambits involved in its construction. These things necessarily get away from us, once loosed upon the world—and that’s fine, perhaps simply as it should be—but I suspect they may serve others better if they retain some of the character of their origins.  

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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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A Schematic Anarchism (Introduction)

April 27, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
One way to get at what is constant in the widest senses of anarchy and anarchism is to begin with what is least contestable about the elements of those terms. Etymology is certainly no definitive source of meaning — and few things are more tiresome than the attempt to resolve ideological debates with dictionaries — but if we are going to take inspiration from the interpretive freedom extended by Proudhon to his readers, we don’t really have much but the words themselves as references.

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