Contr’un

I’ve had a chance recently to reread some old and in-progress translations from Proudhon’s writings about philosophy, and naturally the impact of those writings changes as my understanding of Proudhon’s larger project grows. But I’m honestly a little embarrassed that the material from the opening sections of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church hasn’t made a stronger impression on me before now. Those sections, which discuss the nature and purpose of philosophy, the role of metaphysics, the accessibility of philosophical thought to the masses, and the relation of philosophy to justice, make a fairly remarkable set of arguments, […]

One of the aspects of Benjamin R. Tucker’s career that has received comparatively little attention is his interest in European literature, and his translation efforts. His Five Stories a Week remains half-mythic for many of us who have devoted a lot of attention to Liberty and the Radical Review, but the same is true for quite a bit of the fiction that appeared in those magazines as well. I’ll admit I’ve only read parts of Sarah E. Holmes’ translation of Georges Sauton’s “Ireland,” despite all the time I have recently devoted to radical feuilleton literature. But as I have been […]

There’s been a sort of elegiac quality to many of the responses to my recent change in focus and keywords. For me, although there are obviously costs involved with shifting from rhetorical ground that I’ve invested a lot in, the changes almost all seem like upgrades and improvements. It’s a question of making the body of work I’ve done and the body of materials I’ve collected as useable as possible. That seems to mean a less partisan focus for the writing and the continuation of some ongoing improvements in the archives. Last year’s big project was to improve the citations […]

With the essay on Proudhon and the state finally in the hands of the reviewers, I’ve been able to think a little more seriously about what portions of the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book are both of general interest and unlikely to be better dealt with in the context of the Atercracy project. After recontextualizing and “rebranding,” there is still a basic study of Proudhon’s thought and its modern application that remains to be written. Here’s a tentative outline of the “replacement” text: EVERYTHING IN THE BALANCE: Exploring the Theory and Practice of Proudhonian Anarchism Introduction: The Long Road Back to […]

It is looking more and more like the new site will combine my various archives, and be much more library-like. There is probably a blog in the future, but it may take some time to materialize. So there will undoubtedly be some wrap-up, reflection and bridging-to-the-future stuff here for a while yet. Some low-traffic wiki and blog projects like the Proudhon Library and Splendors of the Combined Order will be disappearing fairly quickly, and the archives ending up at the new Libertarian Labyrinth site, where I can use them to work through some questions about site design, cataloging, metadata, etc. […]

Among the bridges from “Two-Gun Mutualism” to the broader project I’m taking on, one of the most important is probably the ANARCHISMS Project that I launched last month. The new research and writing program takes off from my always-increasing sense of anarchism’s ungovernability, part of which is displayed in the enormous number of ways in which it has, and continues to be, summarized and advance. The real diversity of anarchist positions is hardly reducible to the sort of short-list of tendencies we tend to rely on, and our reliance on that short-list arguably stifles a considerable amount of past, present, […]

[I see this post is being used as ammo in a particularly trolly attack on anarchism. Those arriving here thinking that “mutualism has been abandoned” might be interested in my tentative return to the label. But simply reading what has actually come “beyond mutualism,” in this post and those that have followed it, should wipe out any notion that anything beyond a particular label was ever abandoned.] It’s really not an April Fool’s joke: I’m preparing to leave “mutualism” behind as the way I describe my politics. It’s a reinvention that I have been contemplating for a long time, but […]