glossary entries Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

A Return to the Question of the “Polity-Form”

March 2, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur

The polity-form, then, in its simplest sense, is the form given to social collectivities when they are accounted for, explained, “realized” (in the language used by Louis Blanc in 1849-50), etc. by a transformation into political units. In this process, individuals — participants in the social relations that give rise to these social collectivities — are reimagined as citizens, subjects, members of the political unit, with rights, duties, privileges, etc. granted or imposed as a result. This governmental relation seems inescapably hierarchical — although in certain instances of extensive, stable consensus that hierarchy might be considered more or less “voluntary” (if only because there is no occasion for enforcement.)

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Polity-form (External constitution)

December 5, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

If we are to follow Proudhon’s an-archic account of social organization, we can expect the social collectivities that we encounter to be self-organizing associations of human beings, onto which some kind of governmental framework has been imposed from the outside. The authoritarian pretense is that society — human association in all its dynamic forms — has not really been established until the material relations of association have been seconded in some way by the establishment of an authority, sitting atop some kind of fundamentally political hierarchy. The anarchic response is that authority and hierarchy are inessential elements that we must learn to do without.

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Neo-Proudhonian Anarchism (A Step toward Synthesis)

April 19, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

The more we learn about the history of mutualism, the clearer it becomes that the conception we have inherited was conceived—primarily by rivals of Proudhon’s thought—as a sort of theoretical foil for the communist “modern anarchism” of the late 19th century. It’s a rather complicated tale, since what Kropotkin called “modern anarchism” was, in fact, anarchism emerging for the first time, unless we count the purely literary emergence of the term in the works of Joseph Déjacque. There had, of course, been anarchists and theories of anarchy.

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Authority (Language of)

April 1, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] In societies where authority is the dominant principle, we can expect to find that the language of authority has become ubiquitous, often adapted to describe relationships in which authority, hierarchy, etc. play no role even in existing societies. This tendency has presented difficulties for anarchists, who wish to speak in the language of the societies of which they are a part, but wish to express ideas that break with the dominant principles of those societies. That has led to a certain amount of wordplay and what we might now call a deconstructive tendency in anarchist […]

Legal Order

February 18, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

In the anarchist context, it is common to approach the question of legal order by asking whether anarchists truly desire a society in which nothing is prohibited. This is, it seems to me, only half of the question that needs to be asked, as an anarchic society would also be one in which nothing is permitted. And it is probably this second aspect that is most helpful in evaluating the antinomian character of anarchy. Legal order exists when society is guided by laws, rules or principles that are considered binding and enforceable. Legal order inevitably depends on some assertion […]

Authority and Authority-effects

February 10, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

A CONTR’UN GLOSSARY RELATED POSTS: But what about the children? (A note on tutelage) Bakunin and Proudhon / Authority and Anarchy Anarchy and its Uses The “authority” of the bootmaker Mikhail Bakunin, “What is Authority” (1870) Authority: The OED presents a wide range of definitions, of which the one most pertinent to anarchist concerns is (II.2) “Power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience; moral, legal, or political supremacy.” The general heading (II.) is “Power to enforce obedience or compliance, or a party possessing it” and this is distinguished from the following set of definitions (III), which […]

Contr’un

May 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Links: A Contr’un Glossary Basically, the Contr’un is the star of the show here, the Whitmanesque subject who contains multitudes and is not contained between hat and boots, who spills out over all the property lines we might draw, at the same time drawing the world in without attempting to claim exclusive domain. It is the subject understood in its general economy. It is an individual characterized by an antinomic relationship with its own individuality, a counter-self, the one against the (absolutist) One. It is frustrating, messy (at least in the context of our attempts to draw clean boundaries, improper […]