Proudhon Library Archives - Page 15 of 20 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

“Questions Eliminated…” and “Revolutionary Practice”

September 29, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[I’ve been working through the texts in Ms. 2867, part of Economie, looking for material to include in the forthcoming edition of The Philosophy of Progress, and I’ve been finding all sorts of interesting things. The following section comes immediately after the “New Propositions Demonstrated in the Practice Of Revolutions,” so we should perhaps understand by “this organization” the program laid out at the end of that section: “To set aside the notion of substance and Cause, and move onto the terrain of Phenomena and Law, or of the Group.” While the translation here has a fair number of gaps […]

New Propositions Demonstrated in the Practice Of Revolutions

September 28, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

NEW PROPOSITIONS DEMONSTRATED IN THE PRACTICE OF REVOLUTIONS 1 — The interests established by society are mobile, subject to a constant and fundamentally unstable shifting. 2 — Fixity, permanence or perpetuity in the relations of interests is a chimera. 3 — That mobility of interests is the primary source of revolutions. 4 — An interest, however unjust it may be, can only be abolished on the condition of being replaced by another, which itself could appear every bit as unjust later. 5 — The human mind has a horror of the void; it does not accept pure negation, even if […]

Equality and Justice

September 2, 2015

Let’s take a little extra time to emphasize the flatness of Proudhon’s system. Unity-collectivities at different scales overlap, but their relationships remain horizontal. The anarchistic “State” is, Proudhon tells us, “a kind of citizen” and the principle of political equality applies to all the citizens, no matter their kind. And the collective is a kind of individual almost everywhere we look in Proudhon’s work, and equality extends across widely different scales and between individuals of radically different makeup. The recognition of equality becomes the foundation for justice—and Proudhon’s individualities at various scale crowd the world with potential equals, whose interests […]

Property and Theft: Proudhon’s Theory of Exploitation

August 18, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Part of the task here will be to explain the basics of Proudhon’s social science, the body of work that shows how his basic commitment to anti-authoritarianism and non-governmentalism played out (or didn’t, but could have played out) in a variety of contexts. The goal is to show how most of the principles he developed depend on a fairly small number of observations or assumptions, so that readers can not only make better sense of Proudhon’s work, but also acquire a toolkit that can be applied in new contexts. In the process, we’ll hopefully also debunk some familiar misreadings […]

From “The System of Economic Contradictions”

March 29, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[I discovered that one section of the chapter on property did not appear among the translations I have posted online. After some searching, however, it did appear among my working files.] II The subject and object of science are found; the truth of thought and being are authentically established: it remains for us to find the method. Philosophy, in it more or less deep researches on the object and legitimacy of thought, has not been slow to perceive that it followed, without knowing it, certain forms of dialectic which recurred unceasingly, and which, studied more closely, were soon recognized as […]

The Present Utility and Future Possibility of the State (Sixth article)

December 22, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

(La Voix du Peuple, N 102. — 11 janvier 1850.) Regarding Louis Blanc.—The Present Utility and Future Possibility of the State. (Sixth article.) The following objection has been addressed to me: Your theory is only a sophism. This so-called anarchic organization of credit and banks is only a delegation by the people renewed by the State, a little State alongside the State. So where, if you please, is the difference between the two systems? Why believe that the present state, which is already organized, should not add circulation and credit to its present responsibilities, and administer the […]

Principles of the Philosophy of Progress (IV and V)

November 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

IV.—OF COMPLEX COLLECTIVE ACTION. Everyone has read, in A. Smith, J.-B. Say, and others, the marvelous results of that force; but what few people have noticed, no doubt, is the technical inexactitude with which these two masters of the science explain its nature. They have not seen that what they call division of labor or separation of industries is only an application, in reverse, of the collective force, so that the same scientific demonstration suits them both. And because they have not seen it, not only have they been led to omit from their treatises the initial force, which is […]

Another look at Proudhon (and an invitation to experiment)

August 6, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It is a well-known fact of anarchist history (a term that we’ll be giving some special attention in the coming months) that even the founding figures of the anarchist tradition did not often identify themselves as anarchists until sometime fairly late in the 19th century. Over the weekend, I had a chance to spend some time examining just when, and under what circumstances, that self-identification became more common. There seems to have been a fairly serious shift in the 1870s and 1880s, with a fairly rapid convergence of anti-authoritarians of various […]

Principles of the Philosophy of Progress (II and III)

July 21, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

II.—THE FORCE IN THE SOCIAL BEING. 1.—There exists between men a tendency or attraction that pushes them to group and act, for their own great interest and the most complete development of their individuality, collectively and as a mass. What is the principle of that tendency? The same as that of the attraction between all beings: It is a property and a condition of their existence (p. 2); it is impossible to know more of it, and consequently senseless to ask more. Let us limit ourselves to reasoning from the point of view of the aim. The tendency in the […]

The Conditions of Existence (from “Economy”)

July 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Ms. 2867 contains a section on the “Principles of the Philosophy of Progress,” which focuses on the character of collective beings and collective reason. It opens with the following notes on the “conditions of existence:”] I.—THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE. Man is made up of parts called members or organs. What makes his reality is the animistic gathering of these organs in a whole that, as long as it lives, is called a person. In the same way, a society is made up of parts that are persons or aggregations of persons. What established the social reality is the intellectual consent […]