Proudhon Library

Proudhon Library

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 […]
Proudhon Library

DILEMMA: Red or White (from “Economy”)

July 7, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ms. 2863 (Economy) Paris, March 16 DILEMMA: Red or White A captain of the line assures me—the papers friendly to the government will say tomorrow if the information is exact—that on the occasion of the next elections, the order has been given to prevent, by all possible means, the gentlemen of the military from attending the electoral gatherings. Any disobedience in this regard will be punished by eight days in jail. The government is right. It is consistent with itself. It follows, imperturbably, like Mr. Cabet, its straight line. For sixty years, the French people, leading the rest of the […]
Proudhon Library

A passage missing from “The Theory of Property”

July 5, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
PROJECT: Principles of Nationality and Property I think that most of the concerns that readers have had regarding The Theory of Property have involved the possibility that something alien to Proudhon’s thought might have been introduced by the editors. Having checked most of the published work against the manuscript, I feel fairly confident that that wasn’t the case. It has been a bit more complicated to determine if any important parts of Proudhon’s argument were excluded from the published text. At some point, I will have a copy of the manuscript with all of the material that was incorporated marked […]
Proudhon Library

Poland: Part One, Contents

July 3, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Besançon, Ms. 2834 POLAND: A STUDY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS [Considerations on the Life and Death of Nationalities] PART ONE: PRINCIPLES I.—History and Nationality. The Polish Question.—History understood as a legal inquiry: necessity, in order to write history and judge a nation, of positing some principles.—Doctrine of immanence: that the political organism is the product of social spontaneity, and that where that spontaneity is lacking, the State becoming powerless and impossible, the nationality remains non-existent.—Exhaustion of the spontaneity in nations: Jews, Greeks, Romans and Italians.—Divisions of the history of Poland: conclusion unfavorable to the demands of the Poles. II.—The […]
Proudhon Library

Catechism of Marriage

June 22, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
CATECHISM OF MARRIAGE [from Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, New Edition, Vol. IV] Question. — What is the conjugal couple? Answer. — Every power of nature, every faculty of life, every affection of the soul, every category of the intelligence, needs an organ, in order to manifest itself and act. The sentiment of Justice can be no exception to that law. But Justice, which rules all the other faculties and surpasses liberty itself, not being able to have its organ in the individual, would remain for man a notion without efficacy, and society would be impossible, if […]
Proudhon Library

The Extremes

June 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ms. 18255—Économie. [Gallica] The Extremes. Avoid the extremes, and seek the happy medium, says the Wisdom of the Nations. That aphorism, of course, is very true: but it must be well understood. It is up to philosophy to look into it and demonstrate it. I say that every extreme, in itself, is false and implies a contradiction; but by extreme I mean the element constitutive of every synthesis, an element to which it does not [ ], which constitutes it [i.e. synthesis] that much better as it is found employed more energetically. Thus, the proprietor is a constitutive element of […]
Proudhon Library

Moral Education

June 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
MORAL EDUCATION [Undated fragment from Ms. 2871, Ville de Besançon]   I always see the fathers of families, sufficiently enlightened regarding the value of religious fables, worry nonetheless about the Education to give their children, and ask on what the moral principles that they will be taught will rest. Morals and superstition have been so thoroughly mixed together that the majority of men do not manage to separate them, and, for them, to destroy the latter it is always a matter of compromising the former. I am an honest man, says a father, and I know where I stand on […]
Proudhon Library

Dividing “Pologne”

June 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
It appears that even when writing about Poland, Proudhon ultimately tended toward division. While much of the work of the last few years of his life seems to have been connected to the work on Poland, of which The Theory of Property was an important element, when we look at the notes he left to his literary executors, we see that the manuscript of Pologne, as it has been passed down to us, was ultimately destined to be split into two works: The History of Poland and Political Geography and Nationality. Based on a table of contents included in the […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon’s “Pologne” and the federative project of the 1860s

June 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  “Ma Théorie fédérative est déjà un fragment enlevé à mon travail polonais; la Propriété sera le second…” “My Federative Theory is already a fragment lifted from my Polish work; the [Theory of] Property will be the second…” (Letter to Grandclément, Nov. 17, 1863) One of the nearly miraculous effects of the recent manuscript digitization projects at the International Institute of Social History and the Ville de Besançon has been a sudden and dramatic change in the kinds of questions we can wrestle with, with real hope of success, without international travel or expensive duplication of materials. For me, it […]