P.-J. Proudhon, Proposal for a Society of the Perpetual Exhibition (1855)

Links:

• A New Proudhon Library (project page)
• Society of the Perpetual Exhibition: Proposal (pdf)

Just a quick update:

The newest draft translation added to the New Proudhon Library project is the proposal for a Society of the Perpetual Exhibition (pdf), in answer to a call by Emperor Napoleon III for uses for the Palais de l’Industrie built in Paris for the 1855 World Fair. The project resembles Proudhon’s mutual credit proposals, as well as the various schemes for association proposed by Bellegarrigue in the 1850s.

2024 translation totals are 589,929 words / 1999 double-spaced pages, as of this morning, for a 2023-2024 project total of 1,839,929 words / 5824 pages. There is still a lot of Proudhon’s work to be translated, but certainly much less than there was even a year ago — and much less, honestly, than I had dared to hope when I started the project. Things have reached a point where we can seriously think about having all of the published work available within a few years, provided interest remains and no serious obstacles in other parts of life intervene.

Among the other recent additions to the New Proudhon Library, perhaps the most notable is a rough-draft translation of How Business is Going in France and Why Will Have War, If We Have It: On the New Proposed Agreements between the Railway Companies and the State (1859, pdf), one of Proudhon’s collaborations with Georges Duchêne, which was typeset and almost published, but withdrawn. It may be the study on agiotage that Proudhon promised in the Eighth Study of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. It’s a strange text, but one that is nice to have added to the project. I’m now working on the manuscripts associated with another unpublished volume, Political Geography and Nationality, in part so that I can complete a revision of Theory of Property, which formed its final chapter.

Revision of the first drafts of Justice is ongoing. I should finish the Appendix to the Eighth Study in the next couple of days and start on the Ninth Study before the end of the weekend. Logistical questions have stalled my release of the first two volumes of revised drafts in print-on-demand form, but I’m working through things gradually.