Contr'un Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

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. […]

New Things and Old Words in Proudhon’s Late Works

March 17, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the things that makes those later works so difficult for anarchists to understand and use is that, while they are the occasion for some of the most interesting developments of Proudhon’s anarchistic social science, they are, almost without exception, addressed to problems within clearly archic social systems. […]

A Schematic Anarchism (draft)

March 6, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Conscious of the difficulties faced by students of anarchist ideas, whether newcomers or old hands, it seems useful to propose some means of exploring the field with confidence. There is no question, particularly in a short piece such as this, of providing a map of that vast, complex territory, but we can certainly identify a few landmarks and propose some tools with which individuals might do their own mapping. […]

Absolutes and Approximations (More Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought)

February 6, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

“Humanity proceeds by approximations.” — Proudhon, Theory of Property — This statement by Proudhon was one of the central elements of what was, in retrospect, the first attempt to understand mutualism as a neo-Proudhonian anarchism in the unfinished series on “The Anarchism of Approximations,” way back in 2007. […]

Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought

October 4, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

Fresh Summer Threads

August 3, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

My sense is that anarchy is always related to the enormous quantities of collective force emerging from modern social organization. In otherwise archic, governmentalist societies, it manifests as an often destructive force, threatening governments but not sparing the people. […]