notes on the development Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

New Things and Old Words in Proudhon’s Late Works

March 17, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the things that makes those later works so difficult for anarchists to understand and use is that, while they are the occasion for some of the most interesting developments of Proudhon’s anarchistic social science, they are, almost without exception, addressed to problems within clearly archic social systems.

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Absolutes and Approximations (More Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought)

February 6, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

“Humanity proceeds by approximations.” — Proudhon, Theory of Property — This statement by Proudhon was one of the central elements of what was, in retrospect, the first attempt to understand mutualism as a neo-Proudhonian anarchism in the unfinished series on “The Anarchism of Approximations,” way back in 2007.

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Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought

October 4, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: These notes will obviously be of most use to those who have followed previous discussions of the individual texts, but it represents what seems to be a fairly promising attempt to deal with the shifting terms of Proudhon’s analysis from 1839 until his death and, as such, may be useful to others, if only as a bit more concrete suggestion that such a resolution is possible. Its early stages have been worked out on social media and it consists of: Two Twitter Threads… I. I’m back to wrestling with Proudhon’s Federative Principle. It’s a weird text, with anarchist […]

Authority, Liberty and the Federative Principle

February 19, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: Initial Thoughts Proudhon’s Du principe fédératif et de la nécessité de reconstituer le parti de la révolution occupies an interesting place among his works. It has been, prior to my translation of Théorie de la propriété, the only extended portion of Proudhon’s final major project, the study of Poland, available in English. And my sense is that it has been considered one of the “good” late works, like De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, rather than one of the potentially “bad” works, like the work on property—while also being, of course, the work most often cited in […]