Humanisphere Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Joseph Déjacque, “The Humanisphere” — Note on “The Extremes”

November 3, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m working on completing Part I of The Humanisphere, but I decided to finish up this very interesting note before settling down to that task. There are tensions in the work which are pretty remarkable — as we saw in Part III, Déjacque was prepared to call for a war against Civilization (defined, following Fourier, as the form of society of the modern era, and thus something to be progressed beyond) exceeding even that proposed by Ernest Coeurderoy, but, as we will see in Part II, that didn’t prevent him from imagining his anarchic utopia as a kind of thoroughly […]

Joseph Déjacque, “The Humanisphere” (Part III)

November 1, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[I’ve posted parts of The Humanisphere before, and talked a bit about the difficulties involved. Slowly, but surely, I’m working my way through the work, but not necessarily tackling the sections in order. This is the final section.] THE HUMANISPHERE by Joseph Déjacque Part III The Transitional Period. How will the progress be accomplished? What means will prevail? What route will be chosen? That is what is it is difficult to determine in an absolute manner. But whatever these means, whatever the route, if it is a step towards anarchic liberty, I will applaud it. Let the progress take place […]

Joseph Déjacque, The Humanisphere — I

June 16, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[I posted some of this about a year and a half ago, but set it down again, not feeling comfortable enough with some of the contexts to be sure I was getting the details right. With the work that I’ve been doing recently translating Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, and some other works by Joseph Déjacque, I’m feeling much more certain that I’m catching nuances, so I’m going to start posting sections again, beginning with a considerably enlarged first helping.] The Humanisphere Anarchic Utopia Utopia: “A dream not realized, but not unrealizable.” Anarchy: “Absence of government.” Revolutions are conservations. (P. J. […]

Joseph Déjacque and “The Circulus in Universality”

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s long, and the translation is still a little rough, but I would encourage folks to take the time to read Joseph Déjacque’s The Circulus in Universality and to look at the other texts by him: “To the Ci-Devant Dynastics,” Down with the Bosses!, “The Theory of Infinitesimal Humanities,” and the excerpt from The Humanisphere published as “Authority and Idleness.” Once you have some sense of the terrain, you may also want to take a look at the in-progress translation of The Humanisphere that Jesse Cohn has posted. Déjacque is another of those figures who deserves to be more than […]

Anarchist-communism, work, and the virtue of selfishness

December 1, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: Obviously, it’s a big moment when Joseph Déjacque enters the mix, but there’s a lot going on here that would bear fruit later. Adding Déjacque to my list of early anarchist obsessions moved me closer to the recognition of an Era of Anarchy, and discovering the influence of both Fourier and Pierre Leroux in his work would sharpen my interest in the “utopian” roots of anarchism, but the first really dividend from my work on Déjacque was a sense that I had been underestimating the place of egoism among the early anarchists. At […]