French/English

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “What, Finally, is the Republic?”

May 3, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
Written sometime around 1858, since Proudhon cites the recent publication of 1848 : Historical revelations: inscribed to Lord Normanby, which appeared in that year, “Qu’est-ce que enfin que la République?” seems to have remained an unpublished manuscript until it was included in the posthumous collection Napoléon III, which is a bit of a hodgepodge, with some changes in formatting and some apparent errors in transcription. For this working page, I have tried to restore the majority of the text to the form present in the manuscript, but, for my own purposes, I have included both the uninterrupted program of La […]
Anarchist Beginnings

The Three Eras (May 22, 1848)

April 15, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
What does anarchy mean in the streets, if not the absence of informers and armed police? But if, without armed police, without informers, without gendarmes, order reigns in the streets; if no one is robbed there, if no one is murdered there, if no one is insulted there, will the population not have proven that it can do without this power called gendarmes, police and municipal guards? Will it not have proven that it knows how to guard, protect and govern itself?

[…]

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Miserere” (1845)

March 25, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
On ordinary Sundays, for about three-quarters of the year, the Miserere serves as the introit, or, as one might say, the entrance to the mass. The celebrant, before making the lustral sprinkling, a ceremony preserved from the pagan ritual (among the Jews the sprinkling was done with blood), intones the seventh verse, Asperges me; the choir finishes the antiphon, and all the people respond: Miserere. Neither of them know what they are saying: isn’t it time to teach them?

[…]

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Right to Work and the Right of Property” (1848)

March 23, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
Le droit au travail et le droit de propriété PROLOGUE Il est deux points sur lesquels j’ai besoin d’édifier mes lecteurs, et qui motivent cette publication. 1° Je n’ai pas pris la parole sur le droit au travail, lors de la discussion du préambule de la Constitution, d’abord parce que le droit au travail, tel qu’il m’est donné de le comprendre, étant repoussé par tout le monde, par la gauche révolutionnaire comme par la droite conservatrice, je n’avais rien de mieux à faire que de garder le silence ; — en second lieu, parce que je voulais profiter de l’occasion […]
New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “Revolutionary Ideas” (1849)

March 17, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
These draft translations are part of on ongoing effort to establish an edition of Proudhon’s works in English. They are very much a first step, as there are lots of decisions about how best to render the texts which can only be answered in the course of the translation process. It seems important to share the work as it is completed, even in rough form, but the drafts are not necessarily suitable for scholarly work, particularly without consultation of the original French sources, and are not for publication elsewhere in their present state. A collection of draft translations of all […]
Working Translations

Auguste Beauchery, “Solution of the Problem of Certainty”

February 14, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
We would have liked to offer the reader a summary, however succinct, of the solution to the problem of certainty provided by M. Proudhon using the serial method; but this serious question—which offers to legitimize our knowledge in an absolute way, which claims nothing less than to demonstrate the certainty of our judgments, which has been declared unapproachable by philosophy, which has been attacked on all sides by the greatest geniuses who have elightened humanity, and which has been abandoned after having watched the most profound intelligences follow one after another in vain, for centuries, and die at the task—cannot be accepted as resolved in a quintessence.

[…]