1840 Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Proudhon’s Barbaric Yawp (1840)

February 5, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Every story has to start somewhere. And when the story is that of anarchist history, it seems hard to find a more likely place to begin than Proudhon’s 1840 declaration—je suis anarchiste—which we generally treat as the first instance of at least one kind of anarchist position-taking.

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Proudhon’s “What is Property” reviewed in “La Phalange” (1840)

September 16, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is the review referrred to by Proudhon in the Second Memoir. Nous extrayons de l’Impartial de Besançon un fort bon article contenant une réfutation d’un livre de M. Proudhon, intitulé : Qu’est-ce que la Propriété ? Cet article est l’ouvrage d’un de nos amis, M. Hippolyte Renaud, capitaine d’artillerie. Il est à remarquer qu’aucun des journaux plus ou moins conservateurs, qui nous accusent quelquefois de vouloir détruire la Propriété, sans d’ailleurs donner aucune preuve à l’appui de leurs accusations, n’a essayé de réduire à leur juste valeur les fausses théories dirigées récemment contre la Propriété par les Egalitaires, Communistes et […]

Reading “What is Property? — The Third Social Form

May 1, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Back in 2014, in the midst of some very general questioning of how we tell anarchist history, I retranslated some of the final sections of Proudhon’s What is Property? and started a close reading of the material. It was two years before I got a chance to fully complete the translation and it’s only really now, in the context of a group reading of the work on Reddit, that I’m getting a chance to return to the close reading. The largest distraction, of course, has been that more general questioning, which has borne fruit quite […]

Notes on “What is Property?” (2019)

April 20, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Commentary on What is Property? These notes are from a group reading of the book on Reddit. While fragmentary, they do raise a number of questions that I haven’t had a chance to raise elsewhere. If nothing else, I’m archiving them to use in a future revision of Tucker’s translation. CHAPTER ONE: Think of this work specifically as a product of the French June Monarchy and as a prize essay, written as a kind of “open letter” to a panel of judges at the academy where he had been studying. It actually became a regular feature of many of Proudhon’s […]

“Labor destroys Property” (Notes on “What is Property?”)

February 11, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] This is another bit extracted from a social media exchange elsewhere, dealing with the progression of Proudhon’s argument against both property in materials and property in product in “What is Property?” Even if it is a bit out-of-context, it should help emphasize how important getting through all of Chapter III is to understanding Proudhon’s point. And once you’ve done that, you can start your collection of weird conclusions drawn by people who didn’t get all the way through. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I don’t think it’s unreasonable, particularly when dealing with a book that […]

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Third Form of Society” (1840)

September 2, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

[From Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?] 3. Determination of the third social form. Conclusion Therefore, no government, no public economy, no administration is possible with property for a basis. Community seeks equality and law. Property, born of the autonomy of reason and the feeling of individual worth, wants, above all things, independence and proportionality. But community, taking uniformity for law, and leveling for equality, becomes tyrannical and unjust. Property, through its despotism and its invasions, soon shows itself oppressive and unsociable. What property and community seek is good; what both produce is bad. And why? Because both are exclusive, and […]

Reading “The Third Social Form” — I

August 12, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] We have a lot of issues on our plate, but for now let’s stick to the reading of the passage from What is Property? The first thing that strikes me, looking again at this section, is just how rich this early text is with indications and anticipations of Proudhon’s later work. Then I’m struck by how opaque some of those bits can be, given the state of his development in 1840. I would have to work back through the rest of the text to see just how much of this set […]

Another look at Proudhon (and an invitation to experiment)

August 6, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It is a well-known fact of anarchist history (a term that we’ll be giving some special attention in the coming months) that even the founding figures of the anarchist tradition did not often identify themselves as anarchists until sometime fairly late in the 19th century. Over the weekend, I had a chance to spend some time examining just when, and under what circumstances, that self-identification became more common. There seems to have been a fairly serious shift in the 1870s and 1880s, with a fairly rapid convergence of anti-authoritarians of various […]

Property? It’s just a phase… (Proudhon to the Academy of Besançon, 1840)

May 3, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

This response by Proudhon to the Academy of Besançon fills in a bit of the story told in the introduction to What is Property? I’ve been tracking down some of these bits and pieces in order to establish more of the context for that work, as we get ready to do a group reading of the text. This letter has at least one unintentionally funny bit, when Proudhon explains that this property stuff is just a passing interest. Besançon, August 3, 1840 TO THE MEMBERS OF THE ACADEMY OF BESANÇON Gentlemen, I have learned through the confidences of some of […]

“What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us”

January 2, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third][ezcol_2third_end] I was asked to clarify Proudhon’s position on property, by someone reading the AK Press anthology, Property is Theft! I had been under the impression that, although Iain McKay’s introductory material consistently claims that Proudhon did not “change his mind” about property, the concluding chapter of The Theory of Property was included—and there is nothing ambiguous about that material. Unfortunately, besides placing the material from The Theory of Property in an Appendix, and suggesting that Proudhon had considered it of less importance than The Political Capacity of the Working Classes, which he was […]