Proudhon Library Archives - Page 19 of 20 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Eugène Stourm, “God, Women and Proudhon”

June 20, 2012

[Slowly, but surely, I’m assembling the various feminist responses to Proudhon. The pages of L’Opinion des Femmes is rich with that sort of thing, since it was Jeanne Deroin’s primary forum at the time she proposed herself for political office, and drew fire from Proudhon and others. In the May, 1849 issue, the following essay, by Eugène Stourm, appeared. I think it’s an interesting mix of fairly accurate critique and misunderstanding. Certainly, the more details emerge, the more interesting the conflict looks. I think this project is going to be a lot of fun.] God, Women, and Proudhon. The enemies […]

Désirée Gay in “L’Opinion des Femmes,” August 1848

June 20, 2012

[These two short articles by Désirée Gay (Jeanne Desirée Véret Gay, 1810-1891) appeared in the August 1848 issue of L’Opinion des Femmes, which seems to have been a kind of testing of the waters before the launch of the official “First Year” of the paper. That issue had been preceded by a 4-page “Prospectus,” written by Jeanne Deroin, and the paper was essentially a continuation of La Politique des Femmes, but there was still a certain amount of work to do setting the tone for the project, and Gay seems to have taken on much of that work in the […]

Alfred Darimon, “Notice on the Journals of Proudhon” (1884)

March 16, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: A New Proudhon Library [project page] Le Représentant du Peuple: specimen issues Le Représentant du Peuple: misc. writings These journals are now available online at Gallica. From Alfred Darimon, A Travers une Révolution (1884) NOTICE ON THE JOURNALS OF PROUDHON I. — le Représentant du Peuple. The true founder of the Représentant du Peuple was Mr. Jules Viard, a humorous writer who died very young. Mr. Jules Viard published under this title, in 1847, a financial prospectus and two sample issues, one dated October 4, 1847, and the second dated November 13, 1847. It was also M. Jules […]

The Feuding Brothers (1850)

February 22, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

I ran across this one-act parody of French socialism in the January 5, 1850 issue of La Mode, a popular magazine, and was nearly finished with this (rough) translation before I realized that most of the dialogue was lifted straight from the debates between Proudhon, Blanc and Leroux. Indeed, most of the details may have come from a single source, a pamphlet, Actes de la Révolution: Résistance, which reprinted Proudhon’s essays “What is Government? What is God?” and “Resistance to the Revolution.” The second installment of the latter essay is, of course, the source of two partial translations, by William […]

P.-J. Proudhon, The Philosophy of Progress (1853)

January 8, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s coming up on three years since I completed my initial working translation of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Progress. In that time, I’ve subjected the text to three rather complete revisions, and various more minor adjustments. The result is a new edition of the New Proudhon Library volume, which I’ll be releasing as Corvus Editions’ first offset-printed release in the near future. Details of the release are coming together, but it looks like it will be something about midway between previous pamphlets and my hand-bound hardcover editions, with a heavy cover made from repurposed materials. In the meantime, the text […]

“Notice to the Reader,” from Proudhon’s “The Principle of Art”

January 4, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

NOTICE TO THE READER Two days before his death, in the presence of his wife, Proudhon dictated to his eldest daughter a document by which, after having designated a certain number of friends to watch, as much over the interests as his family as the publication of his works, he charged us specially and collectively of this last care. The first time that we have been able to gather the six, we have recognized, for those of us whose position keeps us far from Paris, the impossibility of working actively at the ordering of the manuscripts left by Proudhon. Thus […]

1839: Proudhon on property and theft

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

EPISODES in another history: I. Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time demonstrating how the very suggestive general observations in Proudhon’s What is Property? only really emerge as a property theory when we bring them together with developments in his later writings—and how, even then, we are arguably left to pick up his positive project, imagining a property that would not be theft, ourselves. As it turns out, there are also some clarifications to be made by looking back at Proudhon’s earlier work, from 1839, The Celebration of Sunday. The Celebration of Sunday is a peculiar […]

Proudhon, The Theory of Property – Chapter 2

March 24, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Here’s another short chapter from The Theory of Property: THE THEORY OF PROPERTY Pierre-Joseph Proudhon CHAPTER II That property is absolute: prejudice opposed to absolutism. The recognition or institution of property is the most extraordinary, if not the most mysterious, act of the Collective Reason, an act that much more extraordinary and mysterious as, by its principle, property rejects collectivity and reason equally. Nothing is more simple, more clear than the material fact of appropriation: a corner of land is unoccupied; a man comes and establishes himself there, exactly as the eagle does in his canton, the fox in a […]

Proudhon clears things up

January 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] Proudhon was fond of scandal and provocation—and it got him, and his friends, into hot water. In his System of Economic Contradictions, he wrapped his already provocative thesis about the evolution of institutions around a scandalous narrative about “the hypothesis of God.” Proudhon was fascinated with Christianity, and wrote about it from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of tones, but he is probably best remembered for writings like his “Hymn to Satan” and the final chapter of the first volumes of the Economic Contradictions, where he worked himself up to a sort of declaration of war […]

Proudhon on Force and Rights (War and Peace)

March 31, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

These extracts from Proudhon’s War and Peace will appear in The Mutualist #1 (which will itself appear in the next couple of days.) It’s useful to recall that Proudhon treated “justice” almost entirely as a matter of the balance of forces, and acknowledged that there would be “degrees” of justice, just as there are of liberty, or of the strength and present expression of all human faculties. As early as What is Property?, Proudhon gave a historical account of the development of justice in its earliest stages: balance of strength, followed by balance of strength and guile. His scattered treatments […]