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anarchist individualism

André Colomer, “Reflections on Nietzsche and Anarchy” (1922)

April 26, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_half padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Réflexions sur Nietzsche et l’Anarchie Tant de jeunes gens ont lu Nietzsche de 1890 à 1914 — ceux-là qui ont été mourir pour la patrie et ceux-ci encore qui ont présidé aux nationaux massacres et ceux-ci même qui profitent de ces carnages ! Pourquoi Nietzsche a-t-il eu tant de mauvais disciples — tant de disciples — tant de Nietzschéens qui ont recréé en son nom tout ce que ce que Nietzsche lui-même avait détruit ? Des patriotes nietzschéens, des grands bourgeois nietzschéens, des mercantis nietzschéens, des moralistes nietzschéens… Je relis Nietzsche. Certes il est encore loin de […]
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Looking Forward—Mapping our “Lost Continent”

April 19, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
Despite the potentially daunting number of research and publishing projects I have in progress, I really don’t get overwhelmed by the variety.

That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t get overwhelmed. I do, at fairly frequent intervals, but what is truly daunting about the project-load that I’ve accumulated over the last decade or so is the fact that it is all really just one big project.

Somehow — for my sins, as like as not — I’ve found myself committed to some deep explorations of just how the anarchist tradition developed in its earliest, formative years

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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.

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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.”

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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 […]
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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.

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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 […]
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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.

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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 […]