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Sources: Before the Beginning

September 30, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

We start our journey—start again, that is, as we begin our journey back to the present—in mountainous heights, at the very source of a glacier-fed stream. Below us, farther than the eye can see, stretches the almost impossibly complex system of waterways that represent for us “the anarchist tradition.” Much is, of course, invisible to us, hidden by the twists and folds of a broader landscape more than capable of dwarfing even our most ambitious imaginings of that tradition, with a full accounting of its tributaries and distributaries, and more is simply lost in the far distance.

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Varieties of Anarchist Entente

August 30, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Anarchism had hardly been established as a widely used keyword before the struggles over its scope and proper meaning became equally widespread. Indeed, we might say that anarchism became a keyword precisely as an attempt to draw lines between, on the one hand, authoritarian and anti-authoritarian factions in the International and, on the other, the “modern” anti-authoritarian communists and all other anarchistic tendencies. And the widespread divisions gave rise, just as rapidly, to proposals for unity or at least toleration between anarchists if different currents. We might recognize, then, that, alongside the various tendencies defined by proposed economic and social […]

Anarchist History: No End of Beginnings

July 21, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

After a couple of decades in the wilderness of history, in search of the elusive headwaters of the anarchist tradition, you stop beside some particularly active mountain spring and think that, while no serious seeker would every claim a single source for that tradition, you’ve probably been in the right neighborhood for some time now. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about the return trip.

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Anarchist History: Streamside Reflections and Preparations for the Journey

June 11, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “Neo-Proudhonian Anarchism (A Step toward Synthesis)” (April 19, 2018) “Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1840–1934” (May, 2019) I expect that anyone who has made the experiment—on any scale, really—can attest that it is often much easier to venture out into the wilderness than it is to find our way home again. There is undoubtedly a lesson here for historians of what we call “the anarchist tradition,” and particularly for those of us whose researches have taken us deep into the […]

Anarchist History: Maps and Overland Guides

June 8, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1840–1934” (May, 2019) However cautious I might be about some common metaphors, I have to acknowledge that I have shown much less restraint in talking about mapping and in treating the terrain of anarchist history just a bit literally from time to time. The Libertarian Labyrinth name referred very explicitly to the experience of finding myself dropped—really of dropping myself—into the midst of a history, specifically that of the early anarchists in the United States, […]

Mikhail Bakunin, “Le Gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie” (1878)

June 7, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

The texts presented here are two different French translations of portions of Bakunin’s 1873 work, Государственность и анархия or Statism and Anarchy. Between March 10 and October 21, 1878, a partial translation appeared in L’Avant-garde (Chaux-de Fonds, Switzerland) under the title “Le Gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie.” The parallel text includes the corresponding section from the Archives Bakounine edition. The differences in the translations raise a number of interesting questions, particularly regarding the notion of statism (étatisme), which was a relatively new concept in 1878 and may have appeared only once or twice in Bakunin’s French writings. It also seems useful to […]

Anarchist History: The Metaphor of the Main Stream

June 6, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

As tools for historical and cultural understanding, metaphors are obviously in the “use with great care” category and, as often as not, reveal more about our interpretive preconceptions than they do about the material we seek to interpret. But sometimes that’s just what is called for, as what needs to be more closely examined is at least as much the lens through which we are looking as it is the object of our scrutiny.

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E. Armand, “Plan for an Epitaph” (1923)

May 25, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

f someone asked me what inscription I should like to see appear on my grave marker—if ever the luxury of resting in a tomb was given to me—I would first respond that I desire to sleep my last sleep in the nearest hole in the ground. If my friends insisted, this is the epitaph that I would be pleased to have them place on the slab recalling my memory: He lived. He gave of himself. He died unsatisfied.

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Joseph Déjacque, “Essay on Religion” (1861)

May 20, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

What is Religion today? It is the immutable synthesis of all errors, ancient and modern, the affirmation of absolutist arbitrariness, the negation of attractional anarchism, it is the principle and consecration of every inertism in humanity and universality, the petrification of the past, its permanent immobilization.

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Sylvain Maréchal, “The Last Judgment of Kings” (1793)

April 5, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

No, no, no! we want no more prayers from a priest: the God of the sans-culottes is liberty, it is equality, it is fraternity! You do not know and you have never known those gods. Go instead and exorcise the volcano which must soon punish you and avenge us. Crowned monsters! You should each have died a thousand deaths on the scaffold: but where could we have found the executions who would consent to soil their hands with your vile, corrupted blood? We abandon you to your remorse, or rather to your helpless rage.

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