mutualism

mutualism

JUSTICE: Philosophy must be essentially practical

January 15, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section VI. § VI. — That philosophy must be essentially practical. We would be gravely mistaken if we imagined that philosophy, because it defined itself as the Search for the [22] reason of things, has no other end than to make us discover that reason, and that its object is exclusively speculative. Already, by showing that these conditions are those of common sense, its certainty the same for all, its highest conceptions of the same form and quality as its most elementary propositions, we have had occasion […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: Metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction

January 7, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section V. § V. — That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction. The definition of philosophy implies by its terms: 1) someone who seeks, observes, analyzes, synthesizes and discovers, which we call the Subject or Moi; 2) something which is observed, analyzed, the reason of which we seek, and which we call the Object or Non-moi. The first – the observer, subject, moi, or mind – is active; the second – the thing observed, object, non-moi, or phenomenon – is passive. Let us not frighten […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: The origin of ideas

January 4, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section IV. IV.– The origin of ideas. Here is the great temptation, I should say the great conspiracy of the philosophers; here is also their chastisement. This principle so luminous, so simple, that in order to know the reason of things, it is necessary to have seen them, has not always been (can you believe it?) accepted in philosophy. Without speaking of those, in so great a number, aspired to sound the nature of things, one encounters profound geniuses who have asked if the human mind, so […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: On the quality of the philosophical mind

January 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section III. § III. — On the quality of the philosophical mind. But here is a rather different affair! It is a question of knowing if philosophy, of which it was first said that the people were incapable, will not, by its very practice, create inequality among men. What can we conclude from our definition? Since philosophy is the search for, and, so far as it is possible, the discovery of the reason of things, it is clear that, in order to philosophize well, the first and […]
mutualism

Justice: The definition of philosophy

January 1, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section II. § II. — The definition of philosophy. Philosophy is composed of a certain number of questions that have been regarded at all times as the fundamental problems of the human mind, and that for that reason have been declared inaccessible to the common people. Philosophy, it was said, is the science of the universal, the science of principles, the science of causes; this is why we can speak of universal science, the science of things visible and invisible, the science of God, of man and […]
Anarchism

Kicking off a year of Justice

January 1, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
2008 was a transitional year for my various projects, and some, like the English-language archiving, suffered a bit from my relocation and the various transitions that surrounded it. I hope that an equivalent service to the movement has been rendered by the translation that has taken up so much of my time. The progress seems glacial in comparison to the years where I was able to add thousands of pages of material, but, as ought to be apparent, developing the skills to dig back into the early French texts has had some very important effects on my overall thinking about […]
mutualism

A book, approximately

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m roughly two weeks away from my cross-country relocation, which explains my relative quiet online lately. I’ve been whittling away at 18 years worth of accumulated stuff and making as much use of the research resources here as I can before heading west, reading Proudhon and Leroux, working on texts for LeftLiberty, etc. I’ve also been doing a lot of talking with friends here about mutualism, following up on this Spring’s informal seminar and a presentation I gave on mutualist institutions. The result has been a significant crystalization of my thoughts about mutualism, and the outline, finally, for a collection […]
Anarchism

Plans and Prospects

November 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
As many of you know, I’ll be relocating from Ohio to Oregon sometime in the late spring/early summer of 2008. Teaching work has dried up out here, so it seems like time to move. I’ll be close to my parents and to a number of friends from Ohio who moved out there. Even if I stay poor, there will be mountains in the background, which is a big consolation for a guy who’s been living on an ancient lake bed for eighteen years. All of this has, of course, meant a little shuffling of priorities. I have access to resources […]
Anarchism

William Beck’s “Money and Banking”

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Money and Banking, Or Their Nature and Effects Considered (Cincinnati, 1839), published, and presumably written, by William Beck, was one of the major sources of William B. Greene’s mutual bank writings. It has also been the most difficult one to access in its entirety, since the microfilm, which is relatively common, has a number of unreadable pages, thanks to an early era of sloppy reproduction. A quick look suggests that this is one that Google Books got right. One more piece in place for the critical edition of Equality and Mutual Banking (1850), which will be my top priority, once […]
Anarchism

Onward and upward!

November 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m obviously disappointed about the early cancellation of the “Roots of American Anarchism” course, but I’ve also already done much of the work to make the course possible. I had already started breaking the graduate-level course down into undergrad/continuing education-sized bites. What I am currently trying to make happen is a 12-week course covering European philosophical roots, Fourier, some early Proudhon, the 1826 Mutualist, John Gray, Paul Brown, Thomas Skidmore and a lot of Josiah Warren. This would be an expansion of the early phases of the announced course and, if successful, would probably be followed by a similar course […]