Contr'un Archives - Page 13 of 56 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

May 31, 1874

June 5, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] A 16-year-old Jack Deames has just been introduced to Henri Rochefort, Paris Communard and escapee from New Caledonia. He shakes the famous hand, mumbles something and retreats. Although young, he has shown the sort of youthful enthusiasm and energy that sometimes gets you introduced as a representative of the next generation. Rochefort is both familiar and largely unknown. Jack’s world is full of stories about the Paris Commune and its protagonists. He has been aware of Rochefort’s escape and journey, and vaguely aware of […]

The Character and Scope of the Mutualist Market

June 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

A Short History of Mutualism: Mutualism (The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism) Scattered Reflections on Mutualism as “Market Anarchism:” Mutualism and “Market Anarchism” (2012) Encounters and Transactions (2013) The Character and Scope of the Mutualist Market (2014) Embracing the Antinomies (2017) Notes on Mutualism and the Problem(?) of Exchange (2019) Note on Mutualism and the Market-Form (2020) Collective Force: Notes on Contribution and Disposition (2020) Historical Mutualist Texts and Proposals: What Mutualism Was (project outline) One of the traditional elements of mutualism that seems to endure is the attraction of what we lovingly call “money crankery.” I’m not sure that there […]

Who is the Contr’un?

May 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Basically, the Contr’un is the star of the show here, the Whitmanesque subject who contains multitudes and is not contained between hat and boots, who spills out over all the property lines we might draw, at the same time drawing the world in without attempting to claim exclusive domain. It is the subject understood in its general economy. It is an individual characterized by an antinomic relationship with its own individuality, a counter-self, the one against the (absolutist) One. It is frustrating, messy (at least in the context of our attempts […]

Meta-ethics of reciprocity

May 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Since the discussion about mutualism began to shift from economics to ethics and sociology, there have been lots of questions, and a few accusations, about the specific ethical framework involved. Let me cut to the chase: I’m not particularly concerned about whether anarchists are driven by deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, etc. Personally, I’m a ethical pragmatist, and I think Proudhon, with whom I’ve obviously found plenty of common ground, was as well. I think a thoroughly anarchistic account of the good and the right is likely to pretty closely resemble Proudhon’s account of the true. And maybe someday I’ll take […]

Moving forward with “The Theory of Property”

May 10, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] I’ve been spending some quality time with the manuscript of Proudhon’s The Theory of Property, now that it is available through the Ville de Besançon site, and it’s been a fascinating experience. Having spent a lot of time with the published version over the last few years, there were a lot of moments when I could look at a page and, once I had deciphered the handwriting, could immediately place the manuscript material in the published work. On my first pass through, the page where Proudhon proclaims that “Humanity proceeds by approximation” […]

Advice for Travelers on the Trail of the Anarchic Encounter

April 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I too have made a sort of transition from critical to constructive concerns, and when one of these half-mad, exploratory jaunts off into the wide-flung realms of intellectual history and theory gets to be a little overwhelming there is a sort of home port to return to. For a long time, the logical working conclusion after pretty much every step in my research was something like: “Okay, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that.” And it was on with the steady unraveling of received wisdom. Questions multiplied, existing explanations […]

Note on the disposition of products and the role of principles

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

“[I]f property is a truth, this can only be on one condition: that the principles of Immanent Justice, Individual Sovereignty and Federation are accepted.” (Theory of Property) I get very little feedback on the theoretical posts here, so it’s hard to know to what extent the implications of Proudhon’s federalist-mutualist-guarantist theory are obvious or, alternately, still pretty uncertain. I know that I frequently get to a point in my own thinking where, having laid out the demands on the application of the theory, I can’t get much past “THAT WOULD BE ANARCHY!” But in my calmer moments, it often […]

The Fundamental Laws of the Universe(!) and the Anarchism of Approximation

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

What would it take to flesh out the federative theory of property hinted at in the last post? What exactly does it mean to say that “property can be understood as an instance of federation”? We’re starting from a provocative reading of bits and pieces from Proudhon’s later works, and leaning hard, for the moment, on a portion of the title of The Theory of Property that didn’t make it out of the manuscript, and we’re going to have to go beyond anything explicitly laid out in Proudhon’s work. Still, I don’t think the extrapolation I’m about to make […]

Flora Tristan, Messiah and Pariah

April 16, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

“God will doubtless pardon you, for you know not what you do, but we will not listen to you, for you know not what you say!” I’ve just posted a fairly finished translation of Flora Tristan’s posthumous work, The Emancipation of Woman, or, The Testament of the Pariah. It’s a strange work, probably in part because it was finished by Alphonse Constant (better known as Eliphas Levi), at a time when Constant had moved on from the neo-Christianity of the Saint-Simonians, but had not yet embarked on his more famous career as an occultist. He writes in the text about […]

Characters

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Much of the attraction of the work I do does not come from the ideas—as fascinating and useful as they may be—but from the amazing gallery of rogues that I get to spend so much of my time with. And the more you work at the margins of the tradition, the stranger and more wonderful the characters get. But one of the more interesting things about the history of anarchism, as opposed to the more-or-less official accounts maintained by the modern movement, is the […]