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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — Preface

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY ______ PREFACE The celebrated Sir Francis Bacon was called the reformer of human reason for having replaced the syllogism with observation in the natural sciences; the philosophers, following his example, teach today that philosophy is a collection of observations and facts. But, certain thinkers have said to them, if truth and certainty exist in philosophy, they must also exist in the realm of politics: thus, there is a social science responsive to evidence, which is consequently the object of demonstration, not of art or authority, not, that is, of arbitrary will. This conclusion, so profound in […]
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Paul Brown, Gray Light, V-VIII (1825-1827)

November 24, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
GRAY LIGHT By “$” [Paul Brown] (From The New-Harmony Gazette, Dec. 21, 1825-Jan. 10, 1827) [Continued] GRAY LIGHT—No. V. Any irregularity of the passions is moral evil. According to movements of the passions, the outward actions are shaped. All excess of passion is moral evil. Any of the passions being in excess or attached to an improper object, is moral evil, because the passions, generally, have more or less of voluntary motion in them. Any thing undue, irregular, excessive, of this kind, immediately causes pain. Also these things constitute a predisposition to evil actions. Consecutive to our emotions, we act. […]
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Paul Brown, Gray Light, I-IV (1825-1826)

November 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
GRAY LIGHT By “$” [Paul Brown] (From The New-Harmony Gazette, Dec. 21, 1825-Jan. 10, 1827) For the New-Harmony Gazette. GRAY LIGHT.—NO. I. The inception and first instance of any mode, when not immediately perceived, is not an object of intuition or demonstrative knowledge. Such as that of the commencing of a customary way of subsisting, among the individuals of a race of animals with whatever degree of intelligence endued, must be abstracted to the most general sense, before it can be an object of assurance. To go to particulars, as of time, words, &c., is to carry the subject into […]
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The Impact of the Cost Principle (and Archive Upgrades, VII)

November 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s been sort of a hard week to stay on task, with constant new developments in the Occupy movement and multiple live streams to follow. I’ve also been approached, out of the blue, to collaborate on a Charles Fourier translation that sounds like enough fun to shuffle some things to make room for it in my workflow. As it happens, more of a focus on Fourier will undoubtedly help with projects like Dejacque’s Humanisphere and Proudhon’s Creation of Order, so I’m grateful for the distraction. And work on the archive is still moving right along. I’m at about 525 COinS-equipped […]
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Archive upgrades, VI

November 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Some days the archive work seems to go very slowly, despite the fact that I’m spending 40+ hours each week now doing very little but research, data entry, COinS generation and other tasks directly related to getting the Labyrinth archive straightened out and hammered into a more usable shape. And, ultimately, that’s coming along well enough that I can probably turn most of my attention towards the now-looming Benjamin R. Tucker archive project, and start puttering away at translations again. So here’s your archive update: Max Baginski, “Without Government,” Mother Earth 1, no. 1 (March 1906): 20-26. B. W. Ball, […]
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A low place to haunt, should you be so inclined…

November 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handy Guide to Chicago and World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) contains the following entry among its sightseeing options: Socialists and Anarchists.—These gentry, who received such a salutary lesson in the execution of their leaders, may be found in some of the beer halls of the West Side—beer, anarchy, and socialism being seemingly inseparable companions. Longhaired, of alien birth, entirely innocent of honest work or any kind of bathing, they “haunt low places and herd with the ignorant, possessing just enough knowledge to be mischievous.” They met their Waterloo in the Haymarket Square on that memorable 4th of […]
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Property and the Essence of Mutualism

November 5, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] “My principle, which will appear astonishing to you, citizens, my principle is yours; it is property itself.”—P.-J. Proudhon In my writings on mutualist property theory, I have been attempting to supplement a somewhat strange lacuna in Proudhon’s theory, his failure—in at least one important sense—to ever really directly answer the question posed in his first major work, What is Property? In order to do that, I’ve been drawing on the work of Max Stirner, which, despite Stirner’s sense that he was opposing Proudhon’s position, seems to primarily address “property” in precisely the senses that Proudhon didn’t even make much […]
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Archive upgrades, V

November 1, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
There’s no escaping the fact that some of what is necessary in this process of turning my online filing cabinet into a working archive is pretty slow going, and pretty dull stuff. That’s undoubtedly apparent to readers who see dump after dump of bibliographic listings without necessarily seeing much change in the Libertarian Labyrinth itself. But there’s a kind of geometric progression involved in the transformation of data into information, and more and more often now I’m finding that when I consult my various sources for something simple, like a volume or page number, I’m coming back with completely new […]
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Another side of Eliphalet Kimball

November 1, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
It looks to me like Eliphalet Kimball remained as obscure a figure to most of his peers as he is to us today—right up until the end of his life. And then, curiously, he developed a sort of notoriety, but one entirely unconnected to his writings on anarchy. Kimball seems to have spend most of his adult life in New Hampshire. It appears that he was born in 1799 or 1800 in Orford, NH, and the published works I’ve found all originate from west-central New Hampshire, or over the border in Vermont—except for one which seems to mark a short […]
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Eliphalet Kimball in 1873

October 31, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Here’s a bit of follow-up on the Eliphalet Kimball story I recently posted. More searching has not turned up any more direct account of Kimball’s 1852 presidential platform, but while filling some holes in my bibliography I found an 1873 article in the Boston Investigator which I had not see previously. In many ways, this newly unearthed article repeats the concerns and attitudes of Kimballs contributions in the 1860s, but it also seems to echo very strongly the ideas reported in 1852. My developing sense is that Kimball may have adopted his peculiar variety of anarchism quite early and stayed […]