Encounters with Anarchist Individualism

The “anarchic encounter” was always really a metaphor, on which I hoped to eventually hang a more thorough analysis of anarchistic social relations. The elaboration has been slow, but the metaphor has remained surprisingly serviceable — and saw a real revival over the course of the “Constructing Anarchisms” project. The metaphor has its source in a pair of passages from Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church — a work that I have translated over the past couple of years and will continue to revise and annotate in 2025 — which summarize in just a few lines a rudimentary anarchist social system. There is a little more to work with than a bon mot or some etymological cues, but not a great deal more. Again, it is a question of a focus for elaborations that it would probably not be accurate to say all follow directly from the original source. But you have to start somewhere — or start again somewhere, as many times as it is necessary to start again — and the encounter is a somewhere that has served me well for some time now. I’m hoping others will have a similar experience.