French/English Archives - Page 4 of 25 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

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 […]

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?

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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?

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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 […]

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 […]

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.

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P.-J. Proudhon, “Warning to the Proprietors” (Third Memoir on Property, 1841)

February 3, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

I have read the brochure entitled: Défense du fourièrisme, Réponse à MM. Proudhon, Lamennais, Reybaud, Louis Blanc, etc., and I am pleased with this publication, the author, despite the aberrations of his logic and the injustice of his reproaches, showing himself almost always a friend of progress and full of zeal for science and truth.

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Louis Prat, “Harmonisme / Harmonism” (1927)

January 29, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

Each person is who they are. Their truths are personal to them, living like themselves, and therefore changing. But if souls are reasonable, their thoughts, their passions and their acts can, assembled and combined, present visions that are doubtless diverse, but always beautiful, of universal beauty.

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Emile de Girardin, “Mutualisme / Mutualism” (1852)

January 18, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

Solidarity is to liberty what immobility is to movement, what darkness is to light, what community is to reciprocity, what the old formula, association, is to the new formula, assurance. Solidarity, raised to its highest power, is Communism. Liberty, reduced to its simplest expression, is Mutualism.

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Eugène de Mirecourt, “Proudhon” (1855)

January 12, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

In Besançon, homeland of General Moncey, the Jesuit Nonotte, the academician Suard, Charles Nodier and Victor Hugo, a male child was born on January 15, 1809. The earth trembled, the sky hid its azure. A shiver of terror shook the men.

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