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.
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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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Proudhon on Property: Response
Iain McKay has posted another update on What is Property?, the forthcoming Proudhon anthology.You’ll find links to excerpts from the Second Memoir on Property and from my translation of the concluding chapter of The Theory […]

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“Justice” — A Second Attempt
The goal is to translate the twelve studies in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church—and to do so, where necessary, twice, producing translations of both the 1858 first edition and the expanded and corrected 1860 edition. I’m revising my 2009 translation of the 1860 “Program” for about the third time and will I will tackle the extensive notes and “Nouvelles de la Révolution” (which make up two of the six volumes of the second edition) as I complete the relevant studies, including La Pornocratie, which appears in manuscript form as one more of the “Nouvelles” sections and was originally intended by Proudhon to follow the two studies on “Love and Marriage.”
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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.