A Schematic Anarchism: Anarchy and the Governmental Series

January 21, 2026 Shawn P. Wilbur Featured articles, Our Lost Continent, Workshops

OUR LOST CONTINENT

Related links:

EXPLORATIONS:

PHASE ONE:

RELATED:

SUMMARIES & RATIONALES:

MAPPINGS: Notes for an Introduction
GREAT DIVIDES: Lessons of the Outbound Journey
DEFINING ANARCHY:
SOURCES: The First Leg of the Journey
DISTRIBUTARIES: The Second Leg
A BRAIDED STREAM: The Third Leg
    CONFLUENCES: The Final Leg of the Journey
      Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought (The Federative Principle)

      Introductory note: This is a post that has been sitting in my drafts folder, in more or less completed form, since April 2024, less because it remained incomplete — although there is at least one additional section I intended to complete at the time — than because it felt, at that time, all a bit too new and exploratory to unleash on the world. Given all that has been unleashed in the meantime, I suppose there is no good excuse for being too dainty — and, honestly, rereading it now, it feels like at least a very good start in some useful, if still unexpected and unexplored directions.

      As a bonus, it seems to answer a question posed to me just yesterday on a social media which shall remain nameless.

      Loose Threads

      After a long hiatus, it’s time to return to the beginning of the schematic anarchism project and take the time to address a few lingering questions, before moving forward to the promised “exploratory typology of anarchisms.” Let’s begin with a statement of the problem from the first post on the topic, way back in April 2022:

      As long as we are constructing anarchisms for our own use, we can pretty much do what we want with terminology, provided that the uses we make are clarifying for us, in the context of our own specific contexts and commitments. When we turn to the comparison of anarchisms and the translation between them, the demands are obviously different. Our individual anarchisms may exhibit small inconsistencies or they may be almost wholly incommensurable — and our lack of not just a well-developed common language, but often even any kind of lingua franca, can make it hard to judge the extent to which they can be brought into conversation with one another. We struggle with this in internal debates and in our attempts to defend anarchism in general against entryism, appropriation and recuperation. It also plays a role in our attempts to determine the limits of the anarchist tradition historically.

      Everything that has followed has been part of an attempt to establish a shareable framework for the discussion of anarchism in all of its theoretical complexities and historical diversity. Progress has been made, I think, but I am very conscious of having left a trail of fairly significant, unresolved issues along the way, as I focused on the refinement of my “exploded view” or “formula” of anarchism-in-general. In this post, I want to address three of those, all of which have emerged from my study of the works of Proudhon.

      The first is the most recent to arise, the question of definability that Proudhon introduced in his manuscripts on “Economy.” If anarchism ultimately has to be included among the ranks of the “indefinable notions,” then is the project of clarification proposed doomed from the start or should the existence of an “anarchy of anarchisms” be something that anarchists might even welcome? I’ve had a chance to look more closely at Proudhon’s writings on definability over the last year and will briefly share some of the ways they might aid this project.

      The second concern is the specific case of indefinability — or at least of the lack of a singular definition — when it is a question of anarchy, and particularly the puzzling invocation of “anarchy in all of its senses” by Proudhon in The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. I have been wrestling with this strange indifference on Proudhon’s part for over a decade now, but I think I’m finally ready to address that series that he invokes — a governmental series, from Absolutism to Anarchy — with a real serial analysis, drawing on some comparisons with Fourier’s account of the “series of the cultivation of pears.” Starting from the recognition that the indefinable is not nothing, we’ll have to make some distinctions about what remains to a potentially indefinable notion like anarchism that will allow us to continue to acknowledge, then arrange and analyze, its various manifestations.

      Finally, in the course of learning a bit about serial analysis, both in Fourier’s work and in Proudhon’s appropriation of the method, there will be an opportunity to address perhaps the most famous of Proudhon’s provocations regarding anarchy, which he characterized in The Federative Principle as “a perpetual desideratum.” This has been treated as Proudhon’s abandonment of the anarchist project, but I remain unconvinced that there is really any conflict between his anarchistic ideas and his commitment to the principle of federation. (See the series of “Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought” linked in the sidebar for more on that.) What will concern us about that discussion of a priori anarchy here is the ways in which it might related to questions of definability and help to clarify the rather hastily sketched governmental series from the earlier work.

      The exploration that follows runs the risk of being both excessively complex and, ultimately, either insufficient or perhaps just a bit beside the point. I don’t want to shy away from the fact that (perhaps, just perhaps) dragging in some chunk of Fourier’s infamously fanciful apparatus is not the most obvious way to clarify anything, let alone the status of anarchy in the works of Proudhon — and that it is entirely possible that solving these problems of interpretation in the works of Proudhon is not an entirely obvious path forward either, if the goal is to refine the details of the proposed schematic anarchism. What I hope, however, is that despite its rather deep dive into what are likely to be unfamiliar waters, those who have followed the various threads involved this far will agree that this rather odd context is one in which the rather strange collection of possible paradoxes and provocations we have assembled form a surprisingly coherent whole.

      Questions of Definability

      [T]he indefinition of ideas is not the absence of all ideas;
      Just as chaos is not Nothingness.

      — Proudhon, “Economic Science, Mother Science”
      (Economy, Ms. 18255, BnF)

      In the writings on “Economy,” Proudhon tended to limit the definable to the realm of a priori concepts. “Every definition is in the mind before being in words” — and the words serve, always with more or less efficiency, to call to mind a concept already possessed by the intelligence.

      In the remainder of cases, a word or an attempted definition ought to invoke a series, within the context of which further specification is possible. The series seems to exist in the mind as a kind of approximation, summarizing some shared aspect of a number of actualities. Under these circumstances, specification becomes a matter of putting one series into relation with others, with no single word being capable of suggesting more than a fraction of the qualities of the thing to be described.

      There is arguably a need for a much deeper examination of the relevant connections between Proudhon and Fourier than we can attempt here. We’ll address various details as we turn to the specific example of Proudhon’s governmental series, but before we begin that examination, it’s probably worth recalling some of what Proudhon said about truth:

      The Philosophy of Progress also provides us with two accounts of truth…  In the first, “the truth in all things, the real, the positive, the practicable, is what changes, or at least is susceptible to progression, conciliation, transformation; while the false, the fictive, the impossible, the abstract, is everything that presents itself as fixed, entire, complete, unalterable, unfailing, not susceptible to modification, conversion, augmentation or diminution, resistant as a consequence to all superior combination, to all synthesis.” In the second, “All ideas are false, that is to say contradictory and irrational, if one takes them in an exclusive and absolute sense, or if one allows oneself to be carried away by that sense; all are true, susceptible to realization and use, if one takes them together with others, or in evolution.”

      ⁂

      One more thought: I have suggested in earlier installments, a bit prematurely, that the formula of the schematic anarchism I have proposed might be considered definable in Proudhon’s terms, even if the variables all pretty obviously call for some kind of serial analysis. The deeper I get into the exploration of this material, the more the realm of the definable seems to shrink. To avoid some potential confusions, let’s propose a category of formulable relations, which we can place as seems appropriate when its position becomes clearer. We are, as I said early in this project, “gambling on the similarities between a naive view of anarchism and insights scattered through the anarchist literature,” in order to provide us with a potentially shareable framework for analysis and criticism. It would be nice to find that, in this pursuit of apparent similarities and connections, every gamble paid off, but the potential value of the “naive view” hardly rests on its compatibility with some in-progress Fourier-Proudhon synthesis.

      Now, on to the governmental series, as we find it sketched out in The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, and the “series of the cultivation of pears,” as it appears in the notes to Theory of the Four Movements…

      Of Governments and Pears

      Every idea is established or refuted by a series of terms that are, as it were, its organism, the last term of which demonstrates irrevocably its truth or error. If the development, instead of taking place simply in the mind and through theory, is carried out at the same time in institutions and acts, it constitutes history. This is the case with the principle of authority or government.

      The first form in which this principle is manifested is that of absolute power. This is the purest, the most rational, the most dynamic, the most straightforward, and, on the whole, the least immoral and the least disagreeable form of government.

      But absolutism, in its naïve expression, is odious to reason and to liberty; the conscience of the people is always aroused against it. After the conscience, revolt makes its protest heard. So the principle of authority has been forced to withdraw: it retreats step by step, through a series of concessions, each one more inadequate than the one before, the last of which, pure democracy or direct government, results in the impossible and the absurd. Thus, the first term of the series being Absolutism, the final, fateful [fatidique] term is Anarchy, understood in all its senses.

      Let’s begin by simply assuming that, just as  “the principle of authority or government” has for its “organism” a series of elements — bounded by Absolutism at one extreme and Anarchy at the other — so too does anarchy, which we are informed has a variety of senses. So what does it mean to be embodied in a series?

      The concept of serial analysis is borrowed in large part from Fourier — and those who have never read the account of the Series of the Cultivation of Pears in “Note A” should probably go ahead and do so now. The details of how Fourier believed that this kind of classification would facilitate the emergence of social harmony is really a story for another day, but you’re likely to see some intriguing glimpses even in that short translation. For our purposes here, however, it is enough to note and quickly explore the series he presents, which we will use as a model for exploring the series proposed in much less detail by Proudhon.

      SERIES OF THE CULTIVATION OF PEARS.
      Composed of 32 groups.
      1. Forward outpost. 2 groups. Quince and hard hybrids.
      2. Ascending wing-tip 4 groups. Hard cooking pears.
      3. Ascending wing. 6 groups. Crisp pears.
      4. Center of Series. 8 groups. Soft pears.
      5. Descending wing. 6 groups. Compact pears.
      6. Descending wing-tip. 4 groups. Floury pears.
      7. Rear outpost. 2 groups. Medlars and soft hybrids.

      We have a large number of pear varieties — or more precisely of groups (and groups of groups) of pear varieties — arranged here roughly from hard to soft, with hybrids at the extreme limits of the series. The two groups of quinces, which are described as “ambiguous,” “neither pear nor apple,” nevertheless exist at the limit of both the series of pears and the series of apples, while also functioning as the center of a possible series of quinces, which overlaps with both. As the various parts in the series divide into groups, which then divide further, we are encouraged to consider the possibility of any group of like elements serving as the center of a series and of the transitions between groups or groups of groups as being subject to all sorts of gradations. We also can’t rule out the incorporation of any of the elements included in a given series in any number of other series, arranged with consideration to other qualities of the elements.

      It’s the kind of classification system that we might expect to have appealed to someone like Proudhon, for whom types and categories (setting aside perhaps a few notable exceptions) were to be considered approximations at best, however useful they might be. The question is whether Proudhon’s somewhat offhand invocation of the serial method in The General Idea is faithful enough to Fourier’s general method to allow us to construct a similar series for the manifestations of the principle of authority or government.

      Let’s go right out on a limb and see what we can come up with. Drawing on the quoted passage and some related bits and pieces from other texts, we might, for example, propose something like this:

      SERIES OF THE FORMS OF GOVERNMENT OR AUTHORITY.
      1. Forward outpost. — Absolutism.
      2. Ascending wing-tip. — Dictatorships, monarchies.
      3. Ascending wing. — Intermediate authoritarian forms.
      4. Center of Series. — Routine government in all its forms.
      5. Descending wing. — Intermediate semi-democratic forms.
      6. Descending wing-tip. — Democracies (final concession of authority).
      7. Rear outpost. — Anarchy, self-government.

      I think I have captured the sense of the ascending and descending elements correctly, but it’s not vitally important. What is of some significance is that I have consciously drawn lines, first between absolutism in some general sense and the various forms of “archy with one head” (as Proudhon puts it elsewhere), and then again between the forms of democracy or archy with the greatest number of heads — including “pure democracy or direct government” — and anarchy.

      There are reasons to expect that the analogy between the two series will be less than perfect. For example, Proudhon expects his governmental series to reveal the “truth or error” of the concept they embody and we are left to account for the precise sense in which the series “constitutes history.” In Fourier’s hands, and in his era, […]

      It seems important, if we are going to take anything like full advantage of the serial method, to allow ourselves to imagine absolutism as a medlar and anarchy as a quince.

      ⁂

      We’re working toward an analysis of anarchy as a kind of quince series between the governmental series and, well, whatever series would find its beginnings in the descending wing of a certain kind of series of anarchies. But let’s start at the other end, where we should, following the model, expect to find absolutism in some ambiguous, hybrid form, not government, but also not fully a part of whatever non-governmental series precedes the governmental series, whether logically or chronologically.

      Given what we know about Proudhon’s preoccupations, it seems hard to imagine that, if he had worked out to his own satisfaction what “came before” the governmental series, it would not have been some series of sacred absolutisms, eventually giving way to the secular absolutisms of that series. We could probably build a fairly elaborate series by combing through The System of Economic Contradictions, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, his attempts at “universal history” in the “Chronos” manuscripts, etc., documenting a general passage from a series of revelations to one of revolutions. It may be, as well, that if we had taken the time and care to fully elaborate these two connected series, they might themselves have formed a kind of series of forms of authority, allowing us to distinguish a bit more clearly between terms that Proudhon sometimes used a bit haphazardly.

      The clarification would be nice — and perhaps even a more thorough speculation about those specific possible clarifications would be useful — but I want to keep what is already undoubtedly a peculiar sort of exploration as simple as its peculiarities allow. So we’ll look just a bit more closely at what Proudhon at least seems to say about the nature of absolutism, understood as “the purest, the most rational, the most dynamic, the most straightforward, and, on the whole, the least immoral and the least disagreeable form of government,” and then see if we can, by analogy, come to some conclusions about the series of forms of anarchy — particularly with regard to its “descending wing” and whatever might lurk at its final “outpost.”

      ⁂

      Let’s begin by acknowledging that Proudhon’s governmental series is perhaps doing a kind of double or triple duty. It’s clear that what’s at stake is considerably more than just an ordered classification of governmental forms — as if they were varieties of pears — and that the series not only tells us something about a development of those forms, but also, and “irrevocably,” demonstrates the “truth or error” of the idea for which the governmental series supplies an organism. In order, however, to get any clarity regarding these more complicated issues, we almost certainly have to begin as if we were dealing with pears or apples.

      The idea that we are examining is “the principle of authority or government,” understood as one of those indefinable notions that are only manifested by a series — and presumably a series of actualities or at least fairly specific, “concrete” potentialities. In the pear series, “pear” is the thing to be elaborated and explored, while “quince” is a specific variety of fruit — or perhaps more accurately a name shared by a much smaller group of related varieties that display real mixture or ambiguity when we try to assign them to the ends of either the pear series or the apple series.  If “quince” or “medlar” becomes an idea, rather than the name designating a group of actualities, then we’re probably doing something other than a true serial analysis.

      Let’s imagine an analysis that begins with the idea of “quince” and constructs an ordered series of actual varieties ranging from a group of “true apples” to one of “true pears.” It would probably produce unexpected and somewhat puzzling results for most of us, for whom the quince is not the most familiar of fruits. It would almost inevitably divide one “wing” of the pear series in very different ways than it had been divided when we began our analysis with the idea of “pear.” What I’ve called “true pears” would appear at the center of the pear series because of their average softness — which we might understand as a kind of mixture of the extremes — but feature in the quince series precisely as extremes, because they manifest the characteristic apple-pear mixture of the quince to the slightest degree. At the extreme ends of the series, the actual varieties would, for us, perhaps come closest to the idea of “pear” or “apple,” but would for that very reason be ambiguous as elements of the quince series.

      It’s all a bit dizzying, since the center and the ends of the series are both characteristic and ambiguous with regard to the idea in question, but in different ways. That’s confusing, but it might also ring at least faint bells for those who have read Proudhon’s work on The Federative Principle.

      The Federative Principle is not presented as a work of serial analysis, but I think any of us might be forgiven for thinking that the four “à priori conceptions of the political order” look more than a bit like at least the abstract description of the governmental series we have been exploring.

      Regime of authority

      A) Government of all by one — monarchy or patriarchy;

      a) Government of all by all — panarchy or communism.

      The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the non-division of power.

      Regime of liberty

      B) Government of all by each — democracy;

      b) Government of each by each — an-archy or self-government.

      The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the division of power.

      Of course, Proudhon warns us that all of these pure forms are impossible in practice, that the simple picture of the world that they provide us with — their simplism, to use the word that he borrowed from Fourier — is a trap. In the realm of the actual, “they are fated to remain perpetual desiderata.” He adds: “Despite the powerful appeal of liberty, neither democracy nor anarchy has arisen anywhere, in a complete and uncompromised form” — nor, given their “fate,” should we expect them to.

      The more we know about Proudhon’s work, the less, I think, we should take this as any sort of distancing from the general project of what would become anarchism. If the idea of anarchy is an indefinable notion, it is not, as a result, nothing. The individual pear or apple is not diminished by the existence of varieties and, while the analogy breaks down in a variety of ways if we try to push it too far, it seems reasonable to believe that the series of anarchies — or series of anarchisms — might serve us just fine. The indefinability of the ideas of government, authority, hierarchy, etc. have certainly not prevented their manifestations from working us over pretty good.

      As the ideas of “pear” and “apple” help us to frame our imagined quince series, the à priori conceptions help Proudhon set up what is in many ways simply a further elaboration of the series briefly described in The General Idea of the Revolution. The account is perhaps not quite as linear as before and, once the abstractions have been identified and set aside as such, the focus is more resolutely on the actual. We get two new names or ideas to designate what are essentially the wings of the series:

      All varieties of existing government, in other words, all the political compromises attempted or proposed from the most ancient times to our own day, may be reduced to two principal types, which I shall call, using their current names, empire and constitutional monarchy.

      Still, the ideas that help us identify the ends of the series are quite familiar. We learn that:

      [A]ll existing governments, whatever their motives and however circumspect they may be, fall under one or other of these two headings: the subordination of authority to liberty, or the subordination of liberty to authority.

      We would perhaps be deviating a bit from Proudhon’s usage, but, keeping in mind the earlier account, it is hard to see that much would be changed if we were to talk instead about the subordination of absolutism to anarchy, and vice versa. There also wouldn’t seem to be any particular reason for distancing ourselves from strong distinctions like that which Proudhon made between ideas — “Archy or anarchy then, no middle ground,” for example — provided we recall that nearly all ideas are going to have to rely more on serial elaboration than simple definition for their meanings. All of Proudhon’s talk about the struggle between principles, the relations of subordination established between them, the concessions made, etc. seem to affirm the opposition.

      ⁂

      What we have said here about the governmental series in two of Proudhon’s works should serve us, I think, as a corrective to certain familiar approaches to those works, both of which are widely cited, but perhaps not deeply understood. There are insufficiently examined works by Proudhon, such as his Political Contradictions and the associated history of constitutional forms, which will probably fill at least some of the gaps left in this very preliminary examination. But my intent in tackling these questions of serial method has been more general, as I hope that the method will help clarify the path forward from the very abstract analysis of “a schematic anarchism” to a more direct engagement with various kinds of more-or-less anarchistic actualities.

      It is with that project in mind that I have kept asking myself: What if anarchy is, so to speak, a quince? If government — archy — is the pear, then what is the apple? The temptation is strong to return to the more linear, historical approach that Proudhon seems to have been taking in The General Idea of the Revolution or to simply try to appropriate the later stages of Fourier’s scheme. After all, there is a sort of convergence there, as Fourier declared that the stage following Civilization — the present era — was to be Guarantism or Mutualism. And there are certainly moments when Proudhon’s most extravagant visions of mutualism come to resemble Fourier’s notion of Harmony:

      The ideal republic is an organization that leaves all opinions and all activities free. In this republic, every citizen, by doing what he wishes and only what he wishes, participates directly in legislation and in government, as he participates in the production and the circulation of wealth. Here, every citizen is king; for he has plenitude of power, he reigns and governs. The ideal republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty subordinated to order, as in a constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned in order. It is liberty free from all its shackles, superstitions, prejudices, sophistries, usury, authority; it is reciprocal liberty and not limited liberty; liberty not the daughter but the mother of order.

      We have to imagine a really positive form of positive anarchy, perhaps one in which the liberty and authority of the later writings find themselves balanced, as liberty and order seem to be in the earlier works. In order to do that we almost certainly have to think beyond what Proudhon could himself imagine about balanced social relations, but perhaps he gave us some clues about the path forward.

      We need to search for clues because, while anarchy may be in some ways more definable than most of our ideas — as I’ve tried to show in the work on a schematic anarchism — our clearest senses of the notion still leave us with a privative definition and one that seems destined to deprive us of things that seem to be given. I have suggested in those writings that:

      Anarchy is what happens in the absence of the very things we are led to believe will always be present.

      One of the ways to try to escape that problem is to pursue the series to its wingtips and beyond, to the outposts of other series, where the ambiguity and mixed nature of the manifestations, actual or potential, of our ideas is at its greatest. So we contrast rule with self-rule, imagine each citizen a king with the fullness of kingly powers, imagine an-archy as the ultimate outlier in the series of archies, etc. There is a good deal in Proudhon’s description of the “ideal republic” that goes far beyond this kind of recuperation by serial extension — and quite a bit that suggests its limits, I think — but we shouldn’t be surprised to sometimes find Proudhon engaging in the same kind of rhetoric that posed “self-ownership” as an principle opposed to chattel slavery, etc.

      The forms of serial extension in The Federative Principle are even more ambitious, I think. For example, Proudhon seems to naturalize “authority,” but he does so in a way that seems unlikely to satisfy an authoritarian. There is a tension in a lot of Proudhon’s work between his staunch anti-absolutism and his insistence on a sort of absolutism that is inherent in any developing organism, amounting to the expression of its internal “law” of development. It might have been resolved by some adjustment of vocabulary, had Proudhon been so inclined, but there is a sort of provocative willfulness to it that suggests we are looking at something like a series in the process of formation in his mind.

      We know that Proudhon affirmed the serial method of analysis early, in the 1843 work The Creation of Order in Humanity, and that ten years later, in Philosophy of Progress, he had explicitly embraced another aspect of what I have been calling serial extension:

      I will retain, with the common folk, these three words: religion, government, property, for reasons of which I am not the master, which partake of the general theory of Progress, and for that reason seem to me decisive: first, it is not my place to create new words for new things and I am forced to speak the common language; second, there is no progress without tradition, and the new order having for its immediate antecedents religion, government and property, it is convenient, in order to guarantee that very evolution, to preserve for the new institutions their patronymic names, in the phases of civilization, because there are never well-defined lines, and to attempt to accomplish the revolution at a leap would be beyond our means.

      This shift in strategy comes around the same time that Proudhon is wrestling with the question of definability, in the years when he is beginning the work that will become Of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, and the combined effects of these developments give the mature works much of their unique character. Obvious examples include the focus on mores in Justice, which transforms morality into a kind of more-ality, and the reimagining of the theory of rights in War and Peace, where rights seem to simultaneously lose their specifically political character and their simple attachment to human individuals.

      RIGHT, in general, is the recognition of human dignity is all its faculties, attributes and prerogatives. There are thus as many special rights as humans can raise different claims, owing to the diversity of their faculties and of their exercise. As a consequence, the genealogy of human rights will follow that of the human faculties and their manifestations.

      I want to resist the temptation to linger with these examples, teasing out the other potential influences on Proudhon’s thought in this period. There is almost certainly a dose of universal analogy, another of Fourier’s concepts, in the mixture, along with elements drawn from Auguste Comte, Pierre Leroux and others. What seems important to note is that Proudhon was obviously engaged in a kind of general sifting and sorting of the ideas most relevant to the new science of society that he and those influential peers were trying to construct. What we see in The Federative Principle, where authority and liberty become a power of initiation and a power of reflection, is much less surprising when we begin to dig into these questions of theory and method — and once we recognize the specific dynamics at work, Proudhon’s mature writings arguably present a very different face than has been generally recognized by anarchists or students of political philosophy.

      All of these insights should be useful to those readings the new translations I have produced — or the recently published translation of War and Peace, which has yet to really receive the welcome it arguably deserves among anarchists. And there will undoubtedly be occasions to pursue the questions all-too-quickly addressed in these notes. But I started this particular exploration with the idea that perhaps the method of serial analysis was one of of the tools that I might put to use as I attempt my own sorting and sifting through the varieties of anarchism.

      In particular, I’ve been interested in confronting Proudhon’s suggestion that an analysis centered on the more abstract senses of anarchy might well be a kind of “trap.” But I find, at least for the moment, that this is about as far as I can take the analysis. Perhaps the next step is to return to the “typology” and see in what ways this work ends up informing that project. 

      About Shawn P. Wilbur 2741 Articles
      Independent scholar, translator and archivist.

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