A New Proudhon Library: Next steps

Links:

• A New Proudhon Library [project page]

[This post originally appeared as a free post on my Patreon.]

After the month-long interruption in April, I’m finally settling down to work on the chronological review of Proudhon’s work that I have mentioned recently — which is also the process that will produce some print-on-demand volumes for A New Proudhon Library. I’ve been working without my usual daily quotas and deadlines, for the first time in over three years, and spending a lot of time thinking — no doubt sometimes over-thinking — about the translation strategies I began to develop a decade ago, while puttering away at Proudhon’s journalism and correspondence.

There is a document on translation strategy in the works, which will need to be completed for the first print volume of A New Proudhon Library. My oft-rewritten draft bears the title ” Rationale for an Indefinitive Edition of the works of P.-J. Proudhon.” It begins with a bit of history, documenting the slow, tardy early efforts to translate Proudhon’s works into English, the emergence of new publications and then the rapid “bulk translation” of the last few years. I engage in a bit of speculation about how the collective love-hate relationship between anarchism and Proudhon has shaped translation efforts — and should shape any edition of his works. My thesis is that, beneath the various specific purposes to which we are putting or would like to put Proudhon, the problem that we share is a kind of general uncertainty about Proudhon’s project. General problems call for general solutions and, while various other kinds of more narrowly translation projects might also move forward, there seems to be a need, if we are to address our general uncertainty, to produce an edition of Proudhon’s works inclusive and uniform enough for us to understand his works as a body.

This is particularly true, given some of the specific qualities of Proudhon’s work and given some of the specific questions that we might want to answer. Let’s look here at two examples:

1. Anarchie / anarchy: I have written quite a bit in the past about “anarchy, understood in all of its senses” and the problems that arise from Proudhon’s serial approach to meaning. Historically, uncertainties about Proudhon’s relationship to anarchy have contributed significantly to that general uncertainty and love/hate relationship that I’ve identified as a fundamental, shared problem. The observation that it may be something rather anarchic in Proudhon’s general relations with ideas that trips us up might be an opening to a different understanding of and relationship with Proudhon. It would, at the very least, help us to avoid problems that have plagued our understanding of his works in the past, like the attempts at clarification made by Robinson in his translation of The General Idea of the Revolution, which instead rendered the references there to “anarchy, understood in all its senses” so puzzling.

2. Proudhon and gender: Of all of the sources of general unease and uncertainty, Proudhon’s remarks about the role of women in society are probably the most significant. There are passages that are perhaps more shocking, but, for better or worse, they tend to exist in an isolation that makes any very specific interpretation difficult or are embedded in the most complex contexts. They necessarily create uncertainty, but don’t offer clear opportunities for resolving our obvious questions. The question of gender in Proudhon’s work is simpler, at least in some ways. The biological rationale given in Justice for a distinction of the sexes seems to be an obviously bad premise, which we should feel free to simply discard, and, in its absence, Proudhon’s use of the theory of the androgyne is at least no worse than those made by many of the feminists of his day. We are free — indeed we are forced — to rethink the theory of the “organ of justice” and basic unity of society in other terms, with few reasons, I think, not to entertain some constructions very distant from the heteronormative, essentialist formula found in Proudhon’s work. There is, however, another layer of gendered analysis in that work, arguably rather poorly supported by the biologism he appeals to in Justice. Proudhon, in his antifeminist passages, often strains the logical consequences of differences in virility well beyond the limits of plausibility, so we are left with references in his analysis connecting women to the ideal, to authority, etc., which don’t seem to have been given much explanation, but which are obviously important to him. The question then becomes to what extent they might compromise his analysis of distinctions vital to anarchist theory — and the answer seems to demand at least a more thorough search, if not ultimately some sort of critical synthesis, across the body of his work.

There are other instances where attention to Proudhon’s serial theory of meaning, combined with a consciousness of the occasional nature of even major works, suggests that the text to be examined in any given instance is all too often going to extend beyond a given article, pamphlet or book. Then there are instances where the recognition of that serial theory ought perhaps to encourage different kind of readings within a given text: War and Peace, for example, seems to revolve around concepts that are at least a bit protean.

Anyway, the general pitch here is first for interpretive modesty, as we are nearly all starting from a position of unease regarding Proudhon’s work, and then for an extensive, comparatively uniform edition as a means of addressing the most general of our shared problems — explicitly as one means of moving forward, intended to address one problem, but just as explicitly as a means that seems to address one real, present problem with resources already available.

There are lots of other possible projects, addressing other problems through more piecemeal translation. There are also other approaches to an edition of Proudhon’s works, but, to take one example, a really finished scholarly edition of even the major works would probably have to be preceded by a considerable amount of collaborative work in French, which seems to be the kind of effort that we are unable to organize at this point, at least in part because of those general uncertainties that we have inherited. We’re in a situation where it seems to me that the only way to eliminate the obstacles to that kind of collaboration would, in fact, be to somehow do enough of the work of translation to make the benefits of more study much more clear — so the task that I have set myself in initiating this phase the New Proudhon Library has been to determine how I can contribute to that intermediate process right now.

The answer won’t surprise anyone who has followed my occasional statements on translation strategy. The “working translations” that I have produced have often focused on preserving patterns of usage in the original texts — sometimes, no doubt, at the cost of a certain kind of literary polish. One of my guiding principles is that no translation can be better than the original, which means that sometimes the greatest care has gone into the preservation of ambiguity, imperfection, contradiction, etc. I laid out the basic principles of my translation philosophy a decade ago and the intervening years have only deepened my sense of its utility, particularly in the case of Proudhon’s writings.

(Other projects have suggested other implementations of the principles. With E. Armand’s writings, for example, it has sometimes seemed useful to make use of multiple translations of the same text. An that practice has helped me to think about the circumstances under which I might also translate Proudhon rather differently than I intend to in the context of the New Proudhon Library.)

Another section of the in-progress document offers an assessment of the existing draft translations as a tool for the study of Proudhon and anarchism. I’ll just include the relevant paragraphs here:

Questions of quality and utility

The “working translations” label has not always inspired great confidence in the work produced, so I suppose it is worth talking for a moment about the quality of the drafts produced so far. There is, I think, a perception in some quarters that all of the work done so far is just preliminary — or that I think of it in that way. There are ways in which I have perhaps earned the faintly damning “perfectionist” label — or, alternately, gained a reputation in some quarters for dithering. I have certainly not been in a hurry to push any of these works to conventional publication. Still, I have been a prolific writer and translator, an extremely active archivist and publisher, for decades now — and everything I have shared has been shared for others to use, generally without much in the way of precise instructions. In the case of the New Proudhon Library drafts, the best of them are, at best, indefinitive, but that alone is no great concern — and may be one of their better qualities. (More on that later.) I feel confident that they are, almost without exception, sufficient for present purposes. Some, I might even dare to believe, are pretty darn good, according to that standard, which seems to me the best general standard available.

Personally, I have more concerns that translations being shared are not actually being read and used than I do that any of those doing the work of translation in the anarchist milieus have failed at our largely self-appointed tasks. But I suspect that, to the extent that this is indeed a problem, our collective uncertainty about Proudhon and his project probably explains it. 

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Those are the highlights of the translation philosophy document. Now, here is the program for finishing an edition characterized by its indefinitive status:

Justice in the Revolution and in the Church is the logical center of any edition of Proudhon’s works. Honestly, in order to do it justice (ahem) on its own, is no small task, as there are two very different editions, a significant volume of manuscript writings, some related texts (The Justice Pursued by the Church, How Business is Going in France… and The Pornocracy) and quite a few interesting responses by other writings, all of which have been untranslated until recently. I sketched out a very incomplete edition of that material a while back — and came up with perhaps as many as nine 200,00-word volumes of material that seemed important enough to translate and publish (without including the more than 2000 pages of Colins’ Justice in Science, Outside the Church and the Revolution, etc.)

The question becomes whether one could usefully start with just that (enormous) chunk of writings — and the answer seems to be “no.” There are a number of watersheds in Proudhon’s career, some of which were marked by precisely the kinds of shifts in terminology, audience, etc. that the edition I am proposing should account for. An important one precedes the first edition of Justice, while another of equal importance seems to take place between the two editions. Talking about the language of The Federative Principle, I’ve found myself going all the way back to What is Property? to find clarifying comparisons.

And then there is the fact that every time I return to those early writings I find them different than I recalled, largely as a result of unlearning the very uncertain lessons of my early education regarding Proudhon.

So my intention is to begin with Proudhon’s earliest writings — or, more precisely, with an encounter between those early writings, The Philosophy of Progress, which I consider the simplest entry point into Proudhon’s work, and a collection of texts drawn from the margin’s of that work, gathered under the provocative title “Between Science and Vengeance.”

One of the most common questions I see about Proudhon and his works is simply Where do I start? And the first two volumes of A New Proudhon Library essentially cover the most common answers I’m likely to give. One logical approach is simple to begin and the beginning, with the underappreciated Celebration of Sunday or with the far more obscure writings that preceded it. Another is to begin with an overview, like the “Life and Work” article, which J.-A. Langlois used as an introduction to the Correspondance and Benjamin R. Tucker used as an introduction to What is Property? Yet another would be to focus first on Proudhon’s underlying philosophy and methodology, with Philosophy of Progress as the most useful summary document available. Then again, given the amount of unlearning that nearly all of us have to do with Proudhon, one might start at the margins, with works that don’t fit easily into the vision of Proudhon that we have inherited. For that, manuscript writings like the abandoned proposal for a “Society of Avengers” or little-known summaries like “What, Finally Is the Republic?” seem ideal. And finally there is What is Property?

Bringing together a mix of early, summary and marginal elements in the first volume of A New Proudhon Library is undoubtedly a choice… If we were to take a survey of the texts that people would like to see in translation, I’m not sure that much of this first volume would make the cut. But that’s sort of the point. If we are generally uncertain about Proudhon, our uncertainty is itself rather narrowly focused and woven rather tightly into a number of familiar, if not particularly compelling narratives about Proudhon and his work. It has been my experience that a more useful understanding of Proudhon — and a more useful understanding of what is problematic in his works — is likely to begin with an increase and broadening of uncertainty, which is one of the things that this new reader is almost certain to provide. In order to pull the disparate elements together, part of the interpretive framework for the volume will be an examination of Proudhon’s various discussions of the criterion of certainty, which was a recurring topic for him.

There are still some things to work out regarding the contents of the first volume. I’ll be working through the material already selected, starting with a new translation of Langlois’ biographical essay, which I have been revising today, and expect to make pretty good time through those pieces, which I will link to the project page for A New Proudhon Library and share here on Patreon as they are completed. The second volume, containing a number of the words on property, will be more straightforward, as the texts that still need to be retranslated are very familiar — and in some cases the new translations are well underway. Translations from the Correspondance are a bit more demanding, simply because of the original typography, but I’m starting to develop the workflow necessary to make steady progress, I think.

In my tentative chronological outline, there are eight volumes that precede Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, but my expectation is that, given the amount of work already accomplished on those volumes, a lot of the decisions to be made about translation and a lot of the questions of interpretation will be resolved — to the extent that I hope to resolve them in A New Proudhon Library — long before I reach the ninth volume and Justice. At some point, it will make sense to return to work on that central text and to prepare the other volumes in the time that the work on Justice allows. I also have a couple of potential collaborations in the works, which might alter timelines in other ways, but the significant thing at this point is that work is really beginning in earnest on an edition destined for print publication.

It will be, as I have said, an indefinitive edition — an edition tailored to what seems to be most pressing in our general engagement with Proudhon at present — but I want to underline the fact that it is indeed that specific set of problems — centered around our general uncertainty about Proudhon — that dictates the translation strategy. There may be other editions to be produced in the future, as we engage with other questions and other kinds of questions, but my intention with the present project is to be, if I may put it this way, as definitive an indefinitive edition as it is within my powers to produce.