Proudhon Library Archives - Page 6 of 20 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought

October 4, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: These notes will obviously be of most use to those who have followed previous discussions of the individual texts, but it represents what seems to be a fairly promising attempt to deal with the shifting terms of Proudhon’s analysis from 1839 until his death and, as such, may be useful to others, if only as a bit more concrete suggestion that such a resolution is possible. Its early stages have been worked out on social media and it consists of: Two Twitter Threads… I. I’m back to wrestling with Proudhon’s Federative Principle. It’s a weird text, with anarchist […]

P.-J. Proudhon, “Principles of the Philosophy of Progress” (selections)

January 17, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Ms. 2867, part of “Economy,” contains a section on the “Principles of the Philosophy of Progress,” which focuses on the character of collective beings and collective reason, as well as sections applying the principles.] PRINCIPLES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRESS I.—THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE. Man is made up of parts called members or organs. What makes his reality is the animistic [animique] gathering of these organs into 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 establishes the […]

Proudhon on Socialism (“Theory of Property” manuscripts)

February 29, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Socialisme.—Tout mot et sujet a plusieurs acceptations. Si Théorie de la société, ou Science sociale ;—je l’affirmes. Si parti qui affirme une science sociale, la nécessité de réformer la société conformément à la science : j’en fais partie. C’état ce que nous affirmions en 48. Si par socialisme, en entend le droit social, par opposition au droit individuel, j’admets ce système, comme partie intégrante du système entier de l’Humanité ; mais si l’on entend lui donner la prépondérance sur la liberté, je le nie, c’est communisme. Ainsi l’a compris Pierre Leroux ; ainsi il l’a tour à tour attaqué et […]

Review of “Property is Theft!” (Black Flag, 2014)

December 25, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: Proudhon Library (main page) Black Flag 236 (Libcom) Purchase Property is Theft (AK Press) During his lifetime Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published two dozen works, ranging from pamphlets to the six-volume Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. Another fifteen were published posthumously. His published notebooks and correspondence add another seventeen volumes, and his unpublished manuscripts (many of which are now being digitized by the Ville de Besançon) contain several thousand pages of important material. Yet, until recently, all that has been available of Proudhon’s work in English has been four complete volumes (What is Property?, Letter to M. […]

Proudhon’s “What is Property” reviewed in “La Phalange” (1840)

September 16, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is the review referrred to by Proudhon in the Second Memoir. Nous extrayons de l’Impartial de Besançon un fort bon article contenant une réfutation d’un livre de M. Proudhon, intitulé : Qu’est-ce que la Propriété ? Cet article est l’ouvrage d’un de nos amis, M. Hippolyte Renaud, capitaine d’artillerie. Il est à remarquer qu’aucun des journaux plus ou moins conservateurs, qui nous accusent quelquefois de vouloir détruire la Propriété, sans d’ailleurs donner aucune preuve à l’appui de leurs accusations, n’a essayé de réduire à leur juste valeur les fausses théories dirigées récemment contre la Propriété par les Egalitaires, Communistes et […]

Notes on Proudhon and the family

May 2, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

To say anything that is not simply superficial about Proudhon’s infamous anti-feminism requires us to look closely at the content and development of arguments scattered through his works. As part of that process, I’m gathering material from exchanges scattered across various social media platforms that has addressed the question in one way or another. Together with the translations from Sylvain Maréchal, whose theory of patriarchal government seems destined to be some kind of foil for Proudhon’s thought, I hope this notes will form the basis of a more systematic study.

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“The Complete Works of P.-J. Proudhon” (advertisement)

May 1, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Under the title Complete Works, we collect all the publications (books, pamphlets, and journal articles) published during Proudhon’s lifetime, which it would be impossible to find stocked in bookstores today. These works, along with his “posthumous works,” which will be published in the same format and by the same house, will comprise –- if we may allow ourselves to say so –- a veritable Encyclopedia of the issues raised by the Social Revolution. Philosophy, ethics, politics, economics, religious exegesis, literary and artistic criticism: nothing has escaped the great thinker, […]

Reading “What is Property? — The Third Social Form

May 1, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Back in 2014, in the midst of some very general questioning of how we tell anarchist history, I retranslated some of the final sections of Proudhon’s What is Property? and started a close reading of the material. It was two years before I got a chance to fully complete the translation and it’s only really now, in the context of a group reading of the work on Reddit, that I’m getting a chance to return to the close reading. The largest distraction, of course, has been that more general questioning, which has borne fruit quite […]

PROJECT: Proudhon’s Essays in Popular Philosophy

April 28, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

The centerpiece of Proudhon’s mature work is almost certainly the 1860 second edition, in six volumes, of his longest published work: Of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. First published in 1858, with the subtitle “New Principles of Practical Philosophy,” it was substantially revised and expanded for the new edition, which was presented as a series of “essais d’une philosophie populaire” — and we should probably allow the French term essai its full range of possible meanings: essay, but also trial, attempt, etc., to capture the experimental element in Proudhon’s work. The twelve studies in the work on […]

Notes on “What is Property?” (2019)

April 20, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Commentary on What is Property? These notes are from a group reading of the book on Reddit. While fragmentary, they do raise a number of questions that I haven’t had a chance to raise elsewhere. If nothing else, I’m archiving them to use in a future revision of Tucker’s translation. CHAPTER ONE: Think of this work specifically as a product of the French June Monarchy and as a prize essay, written as a kind of “open letter” to a panel of judges at the academy where he had been studying. It actually became a regular feature of many of Proudhon’s […]