Proudhon, What is Government? What is God?

May 26, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur Contr'un, translations

Proudhon’s essay “What is Government? What is God?” appeared first in the Voix du Peuple, November 5, 1849, then as the preface to The Confessions of a Revolutionary, as well as in the Melanges volumes of the Lacroix collected works. It was the occasion for one of the more important responses by Pierre Leroux—a response which seems to have influenced William Batchelder Greene.

About Shawn P. Wilbur 2,750 Articles
Independent scholar, translator and archivist.

Related Articles

Proudhon Library

Frederick R. Burton, “Spencer and Proudhon” (1892)

December 22, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur Proudhon Library
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Spencer and Proudhon. To the Editor of Liberty: About a year ago I enjoyed the highly esteemed privilege of a conversation with Mr. Herbert Spencer. That the distinguished philosopher did the lion’s share of the talking was natural and satisfactory. It was evident that he had prepared himself in some measure for the meeting, for he discoursed fluently on three or four topics without so much as a pause for questions. I was pleased to discover from this slight personal contact what I had gathered from so much study of his […]
Proudhon Library

On the Absolute (1851)

January 14, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur Proudhon Library, Working Translations
P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet no. 9, 112-115): 287-290 [112] July 26 [1851]. — On the Absolute. — All the religions, all the old metaphysics, are based on the notion of the absolute, on the concepts of Substance-Cause, indivisibly united. Now, that conception is nothing other than a datum or hypothesis of the understanding, according to the first experience. It is soon contradicted by a more attentive observation of phenomena and their laws. Enlightened by the sequence and series of natural and human facts, the mind soon abandons this inexact, chimerical point of view, full of obscurities and contradictions, […]
Featured articles

A Schematic Anarchism: Notes on Application

November 9, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur Featured articles, Workshops
It’s no very great leap from the position I had already taken in “A Schematic Anarchism” to the one I’ve been exploring in Proudhon’s manuscripts. In general, I have been proposing that we shift our approach from endless, more or less interminable arguments about whether or not a given ideology or practice is anarchism or not to analyses of proposed anarchisms that ask: “If we treat X as an instance of anarchism, in what sense is that claim true and how does it compare to other instances?” The answers to that question ought to demonstrate that some of the proposed anarchisms only qualify in the most trivial senses, on the basis of the most implausible explanations, while others can be plausibly situated among the ranks of anarchisms on the basis of a variety of plausible narratives.

[…]

1 Comment

  1. “Who knows if we could not discover then that all these governmental formulas, for which the Peoples and citizens have slit each others’ throats for sixty centuries, are only a phantasmagoria of our mind, that the first duty of a free reason is to return to the museums and libraries?”

    Authority is indeed an illusion. It’s simply amazing how people project the state as the institution which grants them their freedom, but it’s not surprising when you understand how people have been conditioned to believe so, and how the most arrogant view the state as an extension of themselves.

    I think I will share this with a friend from college (who is also a philosophy major) since she is interested in anarchism.

Comments are closed.