From the Archives Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760 – 1825)

November 3, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

Links: Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries (pdf) Researching the background and origins of anarchism means engaging to some extent with the works of most of the so-called “utopian socialists.” In recent years, I’ve had a chance to revisit and translate works by Pierre Leroux, Charles Fourier and some more obscure figure, but hadn’t had a chance to get reacquainted — and better acquainted — with Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. It has not been the most appealing of side-projects, simply because the literature of Saint-Simonianism is both extensive — 47 volumes in the main […]

Victor Yarros, “Benjamin R. Tucker—The Man”

August 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Of Benjamin R. Tucker, the founder and leading exponent of individualist. philosophical Anarchism, I have written elsewhere. Of Tucker the man, little has been written by anyone, and I propose to record here impressions and recollections of him based on many years close association with him, personal as well as intellectual and ideological.

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Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”

August 11, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Benjamin R. Tucker’s rather sudden conversion to Max Stirner’s philosophy of Egoism was a calamitous accident. There is nothing in common between individualist and philosophical Anarchism as Tucker developed it on the foundations laid by Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Warren, Spooner, Spencer, Herbert, Green and Andrews, and Stirner’s German political metaphysics. Some of Tucker’s adherents uncritically swallowed. Egoism and persuaded themselves that it was a corollary, if not a logical deduction from anarchistic premises. This was a gross error. Egoism is half platitudinous, half fallacious.

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Dyer D. Lum, “The Science of Social Relations” (1890)

February 25, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

By the law of the Three Stages, so elaborately set forth by Auguste Comte, we are told that every science, each branch of knowledge, passes through three different theoretical conditions; the theological, or mythical; the metaphysical, or speculative; and the positive or scientific. “Hence,” said Comte, “arises three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the other. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed, or definite, state; the second is merely a state of transition.”

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Jacques-Antoine Vila, “Les Mémoires d’un Forçat” (1898)

July 17, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

A Cayenne, quelques-uns de mes camarades de chaîne et moi, ceux dont l’énergie n’était pas atteinte et éteinte par le genre de vie cruelle du terrible pénitencier nous nous étions souvent jurés, si nous parvenions une bonne fois à nous évader, de faire connaître au monde civilisé, à l’univers entier, les horreurs épouvantables, les perpétuelles tortures subies par des êtres humains dans cet autre dit de justice.

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Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers

June 30, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

Enzo di Villafiore in “l’en dehors” (1924-1925)

March 25, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

Bibilography: Enzo di Villafiore, “Réalisme et idéalisme anarchiste,” L’En dehors 3 no. 29/30 (20 Février 1924): 1. Enzo di Villafiore, “L’Individualisme et l’anarchie,” L’En dehors 3 no. 35 (15 Mai 1924): 4. Enzo di Villafiori et E. Armand, “Nos ‘Associations d’égoïstes’: Ce que j’entends par individualisme anarchisme,” L’En dehors 3 no. 45/46 (20 Octobre 1924): 1-2. E. A., “Aux compagnons,” L’En dehors 3 no. 47 (5 Novembre 1924): 4. [includes part of a letter by Enzo di Villafiore] Enzo di Villafiori et E. A., “La blasphème de l’Antéchrist,” L’En dehors 3 no. 49/50 (20 Décembre 1924): 2. Enzo di Villafiori, […]

E. Armand, “The plus grand danger de l’Après-Guerre” (1919)

November 20, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

E. ARMAND Le plus grand danger de l’Après-Guerre Prix: O fr. 25 Edition de l’Auteur 22, CITÉ SAINT-JOSEPH, ORLÉANS 1919 [pdf] [text] Le plus grand danger de l’Après-Guerre I Lorsque Henri III montra à Catherine de Médicis le cadavre du duc de Guise gisant sur le plancher, en le château de Blois, la rusée italienne lui fit, assure l’histoire anecdotique, cette réflexion : « C’est bien décousu, mon fils; il s’agit maintenant de recoudre. » Il ne suffit pas d’avoir fait la guerre cinq ans durant, d’avoir entassé les cadavres et les ruines, d’avoir jeté au gouffre les espèces et […]

Victor Drury in the Trenton Sunday Advertiser (1883-1886)

November 6, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Notes: The Labor Question: Labor as a Polity, a Philosophy, and a Religion. A Course of Fourteen Lectures, by Victor Drury. Victor Drury, “The Labor Question: Lecture 1,” Trenton Sunday Advertiser 1 no. 7 (February 18, 1883): 2. Victor Drury, “The Labor Question: Lecture 2,” Trenton Sunday Advertiser 1 no. 8 (February 25, 1883): 2. Victor Drury, “The Labor Question: Lecture 3,” Trenton Sunday Advertiser 1 no. 9 (March 4, 1883): 2. Victor Drury, “The Labor Question: Lecture 4,” Trenton Sunday Advertiser 1 no. 10 (March 11, 1883): 2. Victor Drury, “The Labor Question: Lecture 5,” Trenton Sunday Advertiser 1 […]

Mutualité immobilière et territoriale / Bellegarrigue et Compagnie

May 2, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

During August and September of 1856, Anselme Bellegarrigue published Le Commanditaire, a paper apparently dedicated to the project of turning a recent law on business associations to libertarian ends. On October 10, Bellegarrigue was in court, facing charges related to the publication, for which it appears he was sentenced to one year in prison (Journal des débats, 11 October 1856.) But by March of the following year, he was promoting a new enterprise, the “Mutualité immobilière et territoriale.” Details are, so far, elusive. Advertisements continued in major newspapers into the spring of 1858, although there seems to have been very […]