Our Lost Continent Archives - Page 2 of 4 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Anarchist History: Lessons from the Outbound Journey

April 21, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related Links: Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back [main page] GREAT DIVIDES: Lessons of the Outbound Journey It’s been almost exactly five years since I first proposed “our lost continent” as a metaphor for the most unexplored portions of the anarchist past and made my first uncertain observations regarding the terrain. It’s been almost two years since I proposed the “thought-experiment” of neo-Proudhonian anarchism and proposed a kind of synthesist reconstruction of anarchist history. And it’s been just six months since I started writing the “summary and rationale” posts, outlining the general goals and basic structure of Our Lost […]

Our Lost Continent: Summaries and Rationales

April 1, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back Links: Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936 [project page] Preliminaries (2015-2018) Mappings: Notes for an Introduction (2017-2020) Part I: Our Lost Continent: On the Uses of the Anarchist Past A Dedication of Sorts Anarchist History: Lessons from the Outbound Journey On Anarchy and Anarchism: w/ Propositions for Discussion September 23, 2016 Anarchy and Its Uses Fundamental to everything I’ve been saying about anarchy and anarchism over the last couple of years is a sense that anarchy works as a useful guiding principle only when we take […]

Our Lost Continent: Preliminaries (2015-2018)

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings: Notes for an Introduction Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism. “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) The “lost continent” of anarchist history has been there all along, not so much lost but rather willfully ignored or dismissed, a blank spot on our map marked, not […]

Mappings: Notes for an Introduction

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism. Extrications: History, Tradition, Theory (August 7, 2017) The initial task in these Extrications is analytic: we want to pull things apart a bit, enough to see if we can’t isolate some terms and make some useful distinctions. I want […]

In Search of the Great Divide

March 19, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve decided to devote a section of the project, In Search of the Great Divide, to the pre-1840 period—and specifically to the question of how and when to start a general history of anarchism, addressing some of the alternatives in the beginning and taking the opportunity to look at how various other general histories have tackled the problem.

[…]

Proudhon’s Barbaric Yawp (1840)

February 5, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Every story has to start somewhere. And when the story is that of anarchist history, it seems hard to find a more likely place to begin than Proudhon’s 1840 declaration—je suis anarchiste—which we generally treat as the first instance of at least one kind of anarchist position-taking.

[…]

Our Lost Continent: 1840

February 4, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related Links: Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back [main page] What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with our Anarchist Past [main page] 1840: Our Lost Continent: Chronology: Notes: In the history of “the anarchist idea,” 1840 is not the beginning, but it is clearly one of those moments when something begins, conjured up with what has been a remarkably durable power by P.-J. Proudhon’s anarchist declaration, his barbaric yawp: je suis anarchiste. The fact that historical beginnings and endings are, at least in part, a matter of choice, often with significant consequences, is central to the argument about “anarchist […]

Positive Anarchy, Profusion, Uncertainty and the Uses of History

January 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back Project Page: Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936 RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) “The ‘Benthamite’ anarchism and the origins of anarchist history” (April 5, 1015) “New Uncertainties and Opportunities” (April 6, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with Our Anarchist Past” (January 4, 2019) “Our Lost Continent” [tag stream] “Extrications” [tag stream] — notes on synthesis, anarchist development, etc. MAPPINGS: Notes for an Introduction SOURCES: The First Leg of the Journey DISTRIBUTARIES: The Second Leg A […]

The Uses of a Lost Continent

December 16, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back Project Page: Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936 RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) “The ‘Benthamite’ anarchism and the origins of anarchist history” (April 5, 1015) “New Uncertainties and Opportunities” (April 6, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with Our Anarchist Past” (January 4, 2019) “Our Lost Continent” [tag stream] “Extrications” [tag stream] — notes on synthesis, anarchist development, etc. MAPPINGS: Notes for an Introduction SOURCES: The First Leg of the Journey DISTRIBUTARIES: The Second Leg A […]

Distributaries: “Modern Anarchism”

October 22, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Our fast-moving mountain current has spread out across the a decade’s worth of terrain, splitting off into various distributary currents. We know—or at least the driving metaphor of this work suggests—that the various currents will never unite as fully as perhaps they were mingled before Proudhon’s death. We can certainly point to instances where some form of direct influence seems to carry forward from the earliest period examined through to the anarchism of the 1880s—but we have also inherited narratives that at least flirt with the notion of a rather complete reinvention of anarchist thought in what Kropotkin called “modern anarchism.”

[…]