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.
P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet No. 8, 311): 154 Revolutionary Practice. — Repression, [can] perhaps [be] employed with success against the whimsies of the sects, contagious mental illnesses. — Against a revolution, it can […]
Anarchists can be touchy about any sort of authority, so we are frequently at pains to say that we are not followers of any particular leader or historical figure. That’s good. Among other things, the historical figures we’re most likely to follow were almost all pretty clear about how undesirable that would be. And there’s something a little disconcerting about anarchists when they do invest perhaps a bit too much of their identity in an identification with some one of those anarchist figure, whether historical or current. […]
I’ve spent much of the last six months on a journey down the rabbit hole in search of Proudhon’s theory of the State, and as I suspect my notes on the study have made clear, […]
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“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.