Proudhon’s “Justice:” Texts and Manuscripts

Links:

• A New Proudhon Library [project page]
• “A New Proudhon Library: Next Steps“

[This text originally appeared on my Patreon.]

All of the truisms about battle-plans not surviving the first combat action apply equally to big scholarly projects. I’m already shuffling commitments a bit with A New Proudhon Library — but in good and largely anticipated ways. Here are a couple of updates:

First of all, I recognize that have been a bit remiss in my support for would-be readers of the Justice drafts. While a complete translation of the expanded edition exists, it is not uniformly accessible. I have known that I need to set aside some time to get the last six Studies into a more usable shape, but there hasn’t been much expressed demand, so it has remained on the to-do list. I have know that I will do a better job of it the later I tackle the work, since everything else I’m doing right now is intended, at least in part, to clarify my choices regarding that central text. But some friends started a reading and I have been a bit tangled up in the big-picture stuff. So — better late than ever, I suppose — I’ve been trying to gather up and tidy up some of the resources I created for my own study, in order to make them more consistently available for others. And then, more or less simultaneously, I got word that a colleague who knows Proudhon’s manuscripts better than I do had some time and some interest in working through the manuscripts related to Justice.

So I’m going to delay work on a couple of non-Proudhon projects for a month or two and see if I can’t continue to make progress on the Reader, while also doing the fussy work required to adequately compare the various states of Justice, published and unpublished, to which we have access, taking advantage of the help offered.

None of the tasks involved are new to me. In my “Justice plan” file, which now contains almost four years of ideas — good and bad, applied and abandoned, etc. — about the shape of the edition, you can find notes like this one:

JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH

1858 French text
1860 French text
1858 English translation
1860 English translation

1858 French manuscript (partial)
1858 French proofs (partial)
1858 English translations and notes: manuscripts/proofs

Unpublished manuscript material — French texts, organized by manuscript
Unpublished manuscript material — English translations, organized by manuscript

Parallel editions:

1858F | 1858E | 1860E | 1860F
1858FM | 1858 FP | 1858F | 1860F
1858EM/P | 1858E | 1860E | notes

That’s a basic accounting of the various major states of Justice, There are, of course, the two editions published by Proudhon, first in Belgium and then in France, along with my translations.

Then there are four bundles of manuscript material at Besançon: “Ms 2849-2852 – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise.” Those manuscripts include portions of the manuscript of the first edition of Justice, as well as portions of the corrected publisher’s proofs. Here are some examples:

The downloadable files are fairly readable, particularly once you have spent considerable time with Proudhon’s handwriting. The files accessible online are slightly better. And, of course, most of the text conforms fairly closely to the published version, so decoding the tiny marginal notes is only absolutely necessary when they are obviously not what appeared in print. Establishing the text — the two texts, really — is demanding work and sometimes slow, but also rather forgiving, in the sense that what will be important to the establishment of the edition is really just an awareness of any significant patterns in editing and any lengthy passages omitted or rewritten in the published version. This is some of the work I’m doing now and, for the moment, I’m enjoying a new immersion in the details of the text.

Next — returning to the note — are three more manuscript bundles: “Ms 2853-2855 – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Brouillons, notes et documents pour De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise.” These manuscripts cover a lot of ground, documenting parts of a version of Justice that preceded the 1858 version, arrange in Letters, rather than Studies, and including quite different material in at least the final three Letters: studies of political and religious indifference, in place of the Studies on Love and Marriage, and what appears to be a rather different version of the fragmentary Study on Moral Sanction. But they are document some of the revision process, between the two published editions, including some material that obviously didn’t make the second edition. To be thorough, we would also have to include some manuscripts that started as part of the revision of Justice — The Pornocracy seems to have begun as one of the “News of the Revolution” sections, which was not included in the published work, but seems to have occupied Proudhon off and on for some time afterward, without ever being finished.

There are a number of other manuscripts that probably need to be accounted for, including more material on moral sanction, the unpublished collaboration with Duchêne, How Business is Going in France, and various materials connected to the public education project ultimately abandoned in favor of the second edition of Justice and its numbered sequels, War and Peace and Theory of Taxation. Sorting through those will undoubtedly be part of what we tackle in this collaborative look at the manuscripts. But once you start trying to account for any of these additional texts, it’s hard to avoid a sense that the work we know as Justice in the Revolution and in the Church really stretches about as far as you might choose to pursue it, both back into Proudhon’s earlier works and forward into his final efforts. That makes it a very interesting center for the study of Proudhon’s project, but also poses another of those research dilemmas, forcing us to go a bit gently in our treatment of the published texts as we learn to account for the rest.

Anyway, I think it is obvious that there are a lot of texts to juggle in this project and, as the remainder of the note, suggests, a lot of obvious comparisons to be made. One of the appeals of print-on-demand publishing at this stage is the possibility of arranging transcriptions and translations in various ways, to solve various problems. For example, I would like, for my own purposes, to be able to consult the four main texts more or less simultaneously, so one of the formats that I have experimented with spreads them across a letter-size, landscape-format book — which might even, in some more finished form, include critical notes, excerpts from the manuscripts, etc.

That’s more than most people will want or need, but knowing that it is possible has been useful — and I expect to print myself a set in something like this format at some point in the project. You can probably decode the abbreviations for the other two “parallel editions” suggested in the note, each of which would serve some complex scholarly purpose — but obviously it would be even simpler to produce parallel French/English volumes or volumes containing both print editions in either French or English, laid out side-by-side. And that brings me back around to the matter of providing tools for reading the drafts…

Most of Justice is available on the Libertarian Labyrinth site in a parallel French format, for those interested in comparing the two texts. Some studies are also available in parallel English format — although these are probably more useful for noting major differences than for fine details of translation. Quite a few of the sections not yet published just need a bit of cleaning up, while others still need to be completed, but all of that work will be a natural extension of the trip through the manuscripts.

More finished comparisons, with revised translations, exist for the preliminary sections and First Study as well in the “Text and Notes” series, which I will return to when I settle down to completing the revision. This format, supplemented with additional notes and occasional passages from the manuscripts, would be my preferred format for a comprehensive study edition of Justice. We’ll just have to wait and see whether the complexities of the project will allow a real integration of all of that material.

My workflow moving forward will depend to some degree on my collaborator, but what I would like to do, as soon as circumstances allow, is to return to the existing “Texts and Notes” posts and see just how chaotic the formatting gets when the first set of manuscripts are accounted for. But I should be able to share a few examples of that accounting soonish.