Featured articles

Contr'un

Neo-Proudhonian Anarchism (A Step toward Synthesis)

April 19, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
The more we learn about the history of mutualism, the clearer it becomes that the conception we have inherited was conceived—primarily by rivals of Proudhon’s thought—as a sort of theoretical foil for the communist “modern anarchism” of the late 19th century. It’s a rather complicated tale, since what Kropotkin called “modern anarchism” was, in fact, anarchism emerging for the first time, unless we count the purely literary emergence of the term in the works of Joseph Déjacque. There had, of course, been anarchists and theories of anarchy.

[…]

Featured articles

Proudhon to Villiaumé, July 13, 1857

April 17, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
My dear Villiaumé, it is too warm for me to venture, with my sick head, all the way to Rue Marsollier. I am thinking instead of fleeing for ten or twelve days to some hole in Franche-Comté, where the devil may perhaps not come to torment me with his pomps and work. But you, who are spry, come some evening after your dinner and we will have a mug at the local cabaret, which will do you as much good as an ample banquet. Friendship, and understanding as well, is surely found in a modest “to your health.”

[…]

Featured articles

Voltairine de Cleyre, “Courting” (1890)

April 4, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third] COURTING Philadelphia, Pa., Sept. 15, ’90. A friend and myself undertook that serious affair the other day, and the results being peculiar I want to take the public into my confidence. People usually prefer privacy on such occasions, but we got into a roomful all intent on the same errand. Specified, the errand was this: The famous “Kreutzer Sonata” was to be tried. Tolstoi, voice by Robert Arundel, was to justify himself before Judge Arnold; the prosecuting attorney, over the heads of a few poor itinerant booksellers, was to tear the asceticism of Galilee in rags, and the public […]
Featured articles

Dyer D. Lum on the Verge (1877-1878)

April 4, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third_last] I’ve been back at work on archiving the works of Dyer D. Lum, this time focusing primarily on his poems, but one thing always seems to lead to another. In the process, I found two essays, a short note, a long review essay and a poem by Lum in a periodical called The Evolution. Comte’s positivism seems to have been one of the interests of the contributors, who included Modern Times resident Henry Edger, and, indeed, we find Lum himself preaching the positivist gospel himself. Even more than Edger, however, his reading of Comte seems ready to become an […]
anarchist individualism

E. Armand, “Without Amoralization, No Anarchization” (1926)

March 27, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Larousse dictionary defines the word morality as: the relation of an act, of the sentiments of a person, with the rule of morals. From this comes the expression “certificate of morality,” to designate an official confirmation of a clean criminal record. Each time that I hear morality spoken of in a publication that calls itself anarchist, to whatever degree, there comes to my mind, unbidden, the idea of a “certificate of good behavior,” delivered by the police chief of the district.

[…]

Featured articles

P.-J Proudhon, “The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d’Etat” (1852)

March 21, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Social Revolution is a radical book with a strangely reactionary reputation. Having already addressed his ideas to all the most likely audiences, during the period when revolutionary hopes were still widespread in France, he turned, during his prison sentence, to less likely audiences. For example, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, which has retained a very radical reputation, was addressed to the bourgeoisie. So it is only through an escalation of his existing strategy that his next work became a call to the newly self-proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III to recognize the inevitability of the Social […]
Contr'un

How does property become anarchist?

March 21, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
If we want a clear indication of the gulf between the possible (resultant) anarchism suggested by Proudhon’s mature work and the historical anarchism that emerged in the late 19th century, we probably don’t have to look beyond the almost universal suspicion that Proudhon’s final works themselves mark a retreat from the anarchist project — and the fact that the resultant anarchy that seems to occupy a central place in that work simply does not seem to register among our theoretical options.

[…]

Contr'un

Anarchy: Historical, Abstract and Resultant

February 9, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
  What follows is a look at three possible senses of anarchy related to Proudhon’s work, together with a sketch of their possible relations as developments from one another. The intention here is to simply present some basic definitions as a kind of hypothetical framework, which can then be tested against close readings of the relevant texts. Historical anarchy: In a society organized around the principle of authority, resistance appears as anarchy, whether it is the active resistance of those oppressed or simply the friction generated by the contradictions of an authority-based society. This is the sense that Proudhon most […]
Contr'un

Anarchy as a Beacon and as a Focus for Synthesis

January 8, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
Posts in the EXTRICATIONS series: A synthetic anarchism is bound to pose some problems, whether we think of anarchism as an ideology or as a set of experimental practices. Most of the difficulties surround the notion of anarchy. Whether we imagine that anarchy is the ideal or principle upon which an evolving ideology should focus with increasing clarity or whether we consider it a placeholder, the name for a discovery or experimental result that we have not yet encountered in any full sense, it remains a largely negative element. As such, anarchy certainly does not provide all the practical direction […]
Contr'un

Theories of Anarchist Development

December 30, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Posts in the EXTRICATIONS series: The question we’re wrestling with remains this: How do we understand the anarchist past and how does that understanding influence our action in the present? This question is ultimately inseparable from questions about how our present understanding of the anarchist project influences our engagement with the anarchist past, but one thing at a time. One important aspect of our coming-to-terms with the anarchist past has to be our general understanding of how anarchism has developed. An adequate theory of anarchist development should probably be able to: account for the historical facts (and particularly, now, for […]