Uncategorized Archives - Page 3 of 39 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Max Nettlau, Adjectives and the Possibility of Panarchy

May 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Originally posted at Responsibility, Solidarity, Strategy] I’m setting up this new corner of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive in order to gather material for some forthcoming volumes of work by Max Nettlau, but also to explore more fully his persistent “heresy,” the possibility of “mutual tolerance” between anarchist and non-anarchist currents as a key to advancing the anarchist project. Nettlau drew from the current of “anarchism without adjectives” among Spanish collectivists in his day, but also found inspiration in Paul-Émile de Puydt‘s 1860 proposal for “panarchy,” a sort of “free market in governmental systems.” More than anything, however, he seems to […]

Happy 200th, Bakunin!

May 30, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Bakunin, and I’m personally celebrating by starting a new translation push. With one exception, the texts for the Bakunin Reader have been translated in draft form for a couple of months now, and I’ve been working on other aspects of the project while I’m waiting for that lone, but central translation to come in. There has been no shortage of relevant work to do, of course. The recent digitization project at the International Institute of Social History has made a number of related archives available online (Bakunin Papers, Max Nettlau Papers, Fédération […]

A fragment of a fragment

May 30, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[There are some genuinely fragmentary bits and pieces among the Bakunin texts, including this piece, which appears in a manuscript, copied by Max Nettlau and dated January-February 1876, but seems to have been composed in late 1870 or early 1871, probably in connection with The Knouto-Germanic Empire. I had worked through most of this before realizing it was probably from an earlier period, and I’ll just pass the finished portion along until I can return to the longer fragment in that other context.] Nevertheless we see today in France, this noble country of France, which seems to have received the […]

Bakunin’s recollections of youth

May 29, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Max Nettlau Contributions to the biography of Mikhail Bakunin La Société nouvelle, 1896 INTRODUCTORY REMARK It is only in these last two or three years that a mass of previously unknown documents, published for the first time, have begun to shed light on the lesser-known parts of Bakunin’s life, and even for the portions of that life that we believed sufficiently well known, an abundance of new and surprising facts present themselves. We cite, save the publications of theoretical writings after some manuscripts or rare publications, only the study of his relations with Byelinsky (by Milioukoff), the great correspondence with […]

Rebuilding the Labyrinth

May 7, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Over the almost twenty years (!) since the first version of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive went online, the various elements of my decentralized archive have become truly labyrinthine, with bits and pieces spread over blogs and wikis, as well as the newish Omeka library. There was always a sort of exploratory method to my madness. I’ve never been entirely convinced that people surfing the web really pay that much attention to central portals and front pages, and I’ve also been curious to separate out certain elements of my work to see how they fared on their own. I have always […]

Progress Report: January 2014

January 25, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

While I’ve been posting plenty of draft translations to the blog, it’s been some time since I’ve been able to say much about the progress of the Bakunin Library project. The publisher and I spent quite a bit of last year negotiating the shape of the Bakunin Reader and the subsequent volumes, and there has been a lot of mostly useful back and forth in the process. But progress has not always been without a hitch, and as we entered December of last year I found myself at the beginning of another look through Bakunin’s works, trying to outline a […]

Looking forward to 2013

December 8, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

I spent last weekend in La Jolla, CA, at a Liberty Fund gathering devoted to the work of Gustave de Molinari, discussing a range of his writings with a small group including Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, Gary Chartier, Sheldon Richman, Matt Zwolinski, David Hart and David Friedman. It was an excellent event, and I’ll undoubtedly be coming back to Molinari’s writings in the near future. But it was also a very welcome break in my otherwise relentless, but not always well focused research into anarchist history and theory, with the train trip to and from making the break about a […]

A lighter side of Louise Michel

November 7, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve posted translations of “Old Chéchette,” a first story from Louise Michel’s Tales and Legends for the Children (1884), and “The Clavier of My Over-Dream,” an article/prose-poem contributed (under the name “Louis Michel) to Le Progrès musical in 1867.

Three details

October 14, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

In an issue of l‘Opinion des Femmes, the author of the pamphlet, “Response to Satan on the Subject of Mr. Proudhon, by the Archangel Saint Michael,” is identified as Jeanne Deroin. In the first stage of some sidebar renovation, while I am in the midst of migrating all my translations to the Working Translations blog, the list of Working Translations has been moved to a separate page. The High Hills of Ossapy, my archive of historical materials related to the White Mountains region of New Hampshire is finally getting a bit more systematic attention. While most of the material will […]

Louise Michel’s utopian fiction

October 3, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

Black Coat Press has just published translations of two of Louise Michel’s utopian novels, The Human Microbes (1887) and The New World (1888). They were part of a projected 6-volume science-fiction series. Brian Stableford, who also translated a collection of Han Ryner’s stories, The Superhumans, and who is well-known as a prolific author and translator, did the translations. I’ve read parts of The Human Microbes in French, and it’s a wild ride. I’m putting my order in for these two volumes right away.