Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

A Good Word

Anarchy, Understood in All its Senses

August 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
A Good Word: Anarchy in All its Senses (outline) Anarchy, understood in all its senses—I (Proudhon, introduction) Anarchy, understood in all its senses—II (Proudhon, 1839-1841) Joseph Déjacque and the First Emergence of “Anarchism” Libertarian socialist historiography (Gaston Leval, René Berthier) Eliphalet Kimball, “Law, Commerce and Religion” (1862) William J. Gorsuch, “Tags” (1891) Gaston Leval, “Libertarian Socialist! Why?” (1956) [From Contr’un, June 30, 2013] “The first term of the series being thus Absolutism,  the final, fateful term is Anarchy, understood in all the senses.”–Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution In order to start to address the question posed in the […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon and the coup d’état of 1851

July 13, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon’s work come from double-checking those things that “everyone knows” about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying “anarchy is order” that I ran across the dubious translations in The General Idea of the Revolution, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin and Proudhon / Authority and Anarchy

April 25, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] If (in the passage from God and the State discussed in the last post) Bakunin has not simply changed the meaning of the word “authority” from one paragraph to the next, as he moves from his general critique to his consideration of “the authority of the bootmaker,” then we presumably have a case in which authority must indeed be rejected when considered in general, but cannot be spurned or simply pushed away (repoussé) in the messy realm of practice, where the limits of our knowledge and the limitations of our animality confront us on a regular basis. We find […]
Contr'un

Bakunin and Proudhon / Authority and Anarchy

April 20, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
If (in the passage from God and the State discussed in the last post) Bakunin has not simply changed the meaning of the word “authority” from one paragraph to the next, as he moves from his general critique to his consideration of “the authority of the bootmaker,” then we presumably have a case in which authority must indeed be rejected when considered in general, but cannot be spurned or simply pushed away (repoussé) in the messy realm of practice, where the limits of our knowledge and the limitations of our animality confront us on a regular basis. We find ourselves […]
Proudhon Library

Notes on “La Pornocratie”

April 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
The manuscript carries the “Nouvelles de la Révolution” header, like the sections in the expanded “Justice,” and we know that Proudhon intended it as a follow-up to the studies on “Love and Marriage.” In a letter to Garnier Frères, December 12, 1860, Proudhon wrote: “At this moment I am studying our young literature. I have read, for example, all the novels of Mr. [Edmonde] About: you can be sure that I do not intend to have wasted my time. But I cannot thus leap from one order of ideas to another without transition; and the transitions for me are in […]
Proudhon Library

Notes on “Comment les affaires vont en France et pourquoi nous aurons la guerre”

March 20, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Comment les affaires vont en France et pourquoi nous aurons la guerre NOTES: ___________________ Les cinq sous l’Empire By Alfred Darimon 226-227 Today I received the visit of G. [1], who has come on the part of Proudhon to make me a rather original proposition. Proudhon is in the course of composing a booklet that bears this title: Comment les affaires vont en France et pourquoi nous aurons la guerre. Several sheets of that booklet are already composed; it will be put on sale in a few days. It is a question of getting it into France and here is […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon: Between Science and Vengeance (rough outline)

March 16, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[The Proudhon Library publishing project will be entering its second phase in the next couple of years, with some conventionally published volumes. The first entries planned for the series have been revisions and expansion of the Corvus Editions volumes, but I’ve also been feeling the need for an introductory volume. Rather than compete with Iain McKay’s anthology, Property is Theft!, I’ve opted for a small volume that combines a simple reader’s guide with a selection of shorter material from Proudhon’s notebooks, correspondence and manuscripts. This is a very, very rough attempt to describe the volume, provided here in the hope […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

March 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

March 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

March 8, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]