Proudhon Library Archives - Page 18 of 20 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

An obscure Proudhon volume

December 16, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Besancon archive contains a number of Proudhon’s manuscripts, but also several scanned books, one of which appears to be quite obscure: Comment les affaires vont en France, et pourquoi nous aurons la guerre, si nous l’avons : à propos des nouveaux projets de traités entre les compagnies de chemin de fer et l’Etat / par P.-J. Proudhon : A. Schnée , 1859. That’s roughly “How Business Goes in France, and Why We Have War, If We Have It: Regarding Some New Plans for Agreements between the Railroad Companies and the State.” Unsurprisingly, given the title, some of the contents […]

Proudhon on “libertarians” in 1858

November 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been working my way through those sections of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church which I didn’t have to consult carefully while writing the chapter on the State, as the next step towards organizing the Proudhon book. There have been a few moments when I’ve kicked myself for not going back and looking at sections, and more than a few where passages I read through in 2008-9 look very different to me now. There are two studies which I’ve never even begun to really do justice, but, so far, the most interesting surprise has come […]

Proudhon on the “right to punish”

October 3, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Here is another section from the study on moral sanction, the concluding section of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church.] II. — Does society have the right to punish? The philosophers struggle, and the problem is still unresolved. While the Church invokes divine right, the mandate received by it to cure souls, and, if necessary, to execute the bodies of those who disdain the law, the so-called rationalists allege, some legitimate defense, others the talion or vengeance, these the necessity of the example, those, who we could call semi-theologians, the mental hygiene and good of the culprits. Mr. […]

Proudhon, Justice: Twelfth Study

October 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The final study in Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church deals with the question of “moral sanction.” This section explains the identity, within Proudhon’s thought of the law, the legislator, and the sanction of the law, understood both as the guarantee of its authority (a notion we obviously have to use carefully in this context) and as the rewards or punishments associated with compliance or non-compliance. JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH TWELFTH STUDY ON MORAL SANCTION ____ FRAGMENTS Monsignor, I have come here to the end of this long labor. Accused as it has […]

A Proudhonian summary from the manuscript writings

July 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The project of working through Proudhon’s works, keyword by keyword, has been rewarding for a variety of reasons. It’s been nearly impossible to get a clear sense of the larger patterns in Proudhon’s use of those keywords without that kind of survey, but the work has also unearthed some important explanations and summaries in unexpected places. The section of the State in The Theory of Taxation is certainly one of the most interesting, but in searching for the surprisingly scarce references to anarchy, I ran across some very interesting material in Napoleon III, a collection of manuscript writings published […]

Proudhon and the coup d’état of 1851

July 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon’s work come from double-checking those things that “everyone knows” about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying “anarchy is order” that I ran across the dubious translations in The General Idea of the Revolution, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that […]

The General Idea of the Revolution (partially revised translation)

June 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Since the question of Proudhon’s understanding of “anarchy” is complicated by the fact that the English translation of one of the key texts, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, obscures the range of meanings that term might have, I thought it would be useful to make available a revision of John Beverley Robinson’s translation, which at least restores that particular complexity to the text. I have marked portions of the text in bold: first, I’ve bolded all of the instances in which “anarchie” was originally translated as “chaos,” “disorganization,” etc., and […]

Proudhon on the State in 1861

February 18, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

You might expect that Proudhon’s theory of the state would be most succinctly expressed in one of his essays on the subject of the state, like “Resistance to the Revolution” of the “Small Political Catechism.” There are certainly key elements of the theory there, and more in The Theory of Property, but the clearest explanation appears to be tucked away in Proudhon’s book on taxation. These are the relevant passages, and it is truly striking stuff: from The Theory of Taxation (1861) Relation of the State and Liberty, according to modern right. Modern right, by introducing itself in the place […]

From Proudhon’s study on the State (“Justice,” 1858)

January 27, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

[These passages are taken from the Fourth Study, on “The State,” in Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church.] [From CHAPTER I.] V. — I will not make my readers wait for the solution. As you have just seen, I reduce all of political science to a single question, that of Stability. Why is it that from ancient times until the present, the constitution of the states has been so fragile, that all the publicists, without exception, have declared them essentially instable? How are we to bestow stability and duration on them? It is from this specific side […]

Henriette, artiste, “Letter to Proudhon” (1849)

September 3, 2012

[“En amour, la propriété c’est le viol.” One of the major voices in French feminist circles around the time of the 1848 Revolution signed her name as “Henriette, artiste,” and was probably Henriette Wild. She argued with Jenny d’Hericourt on the subject of celibacy in the pages of the Voix de Femmes, and she wrote a strange and interesting open letter to Proudhon in the pages of La Démocratie pacifique (January 5, 1849). The heart of the letter comes when Henriette hijacks Proudhon’s famous phrase, “Property is theft”—”la propriété c’est le vol” in French—and changes it to say that “in […]