Featured articles

Featured articles

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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Featured articles

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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drama

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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Contr'un

Anarchist History: A Mutualist’s-Eye-View

January 1, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
My understanding of anarchist history is clearly—and quite consciously—the product of certain trajectories through the field of anarchist studies and through the sectarian landscape of the anarchist milieus. It is perhaps important to underline this fact, particular as it is such a central point of my analysis that the dominant narratives regarding anarchist history have a similar character—and that “anarchist history” might, through relatively small changes in the times and places where it was told, have looked very different and perhaps gone by different names.

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Contr'un

The Shape of Anarchist History

December 9, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
Retracing steps I took in my research 20-25 years ago is a fascinating and frequently rewarding experience, particularly now that I’m working with some figures who are perhaps marginal even to the rather loose, broad account of the anarchist and near-anarchist traditions that I’ve been constructing. Most recently, I’ve been working my way back through the writings of Calvin Blanchard (“Announcer of the Religion of Science, Professor of Religio-Political Physics, Expositor of the Statics and Dynamics of God Almighty, Advocate for the Constitution Manifest in Human Nature, and Head Member of the Society for Abolishing Utopia, and Humbug, and Failure,” etc.), the libertarian Comtean who, perhaps even more than Stephen Pearl Andrews, made a practice of expressing anarchistic ideas in a language far more directly suited to the promotion of regimes of authority.

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Sébastien Faure
Featured articles

Sébastien Faure, “Twelve Proofs of the Non-Existence of God” (1908)

November 20, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
Can any sensible and thoughtful man be found who could accept the existence of this God—of whom we speak as if he was not shrouded in any mystery, as if we were ignorant of nothing about him, as if we had penetrated all his thought and as if we had received all his confidences: “He has done this and done that, and then this and then that. He has said this and that, and then again that. He has acted and spoken with this aim and for that reason. He desires this thing, but he forbids this other thing. He will reward these actions and punish those others. And he has done this and wants that because he is infinitely wise, infinitely just, infinitely powerful, infinitely good”?

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Félix Frenay, “The Law” (1864) (FR/EN)

November 6, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
It is truly interesting to observe that over the course of the centuries that history allows us to nous survey, the human mind, in its slow, but continual march, while undermining institutions, beliefs and prejudices, while attacking all the abominations, has always made one exception. Indeed, when all the religions have fallen or totter on their foundations, one alone will remain upright and solid… and that is the law.

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Hector Morel, “Nationalities Considered from the Point of View of Liberty” (1862)

November 4, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
If there are words that we have used and abused, which we use and abuse every day, they are unquestionably the words nation and homeland. Everything in society which aims to muzzle and exploit the people, to paralyze and hold back the development of human intelligence, is always and invariably advanced in the name of the homeland: Laws and regulations, ordinances and decrees, scaffolds and prisons, police and gendarmes, etc., etc., all this hideous paraphernalia of chains and slavery, of plunder and misery, of exploitation and servitude, has only been invented, only exists, in the interest of the good order and internal security of nations.

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