Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Proudhon Library

Poland: Part One, Contents

July 3, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Besançon, Ms. 2834 POLAND: A STUDY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS [Considerations on the Life and Death of Nationalities] PART ONE: PRINCIPLES I.—History and Nationality. The Polish Question.—History understood as a legal inquiry: necessity, in order to write history and judge a nation, of positing some principles.—Doctrine of immanence: that the political organism is the product of social spontaneity, and that where that spontaneity is lacking, the State becoming powerless and impossible, the nationality remains non-existent.—Exhaustion of the spontaneity in nations: Jews, Greeks, Romans and Italians.—Divisions of the history of Poland: conclusion unfavorable to the demands of the Poles. II.—The […]
Proudhon Library

Catechism of Marriage

June 22, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
CATECHISM OF MARRIAGE [from Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, New Edition, Vol. IV] Question. — What is the conjugal couple? Answer. — Every power of nature, every faculty of life, every affection of the soul, every category of the intelligence, needs an organ, in order to manifest itself and act. The sentiment of Justice can be no exception to that law. But Justice, which rules all the other faculties and surpasses liberty itself, not being able to have its organ in the individual, would remain for man a notion without efficacy, and society would be impossible, if […]
Proudhon Library

The Extremes

June 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ms. 18255—Économie. [Gallica] The Extremes. Avoid the extremes, and seek the happy medium, says the Wisdom of the Nations. That aphorism, of course, is very true: but it must be well understood. It is up to philosophy to look into it and demonstrate it. I say that every extreme, in itself, is false and implies a contradiction; but by extreme I mean the element constitutive of every synthesis, an element to which it does not [ ], which constitutes it [i.e. synthesis] that much better as it is found employed more energetically. Thus, the proprietor is a constitutive element of […]
Proudhon Library

Moral Education

June 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
MORAL EDUCATION [Undated fragment from Ms. 2871, Ville de Besançon]   I always see the fathers of families, sufficiently enlightened regarding the value of religious fables, worry nonetheless about the Education to give their children, and ask on what the moral principles that they will be taught will rest. Morals and superstition have been so thoroughly mixed together that the majority of men do not manage to separate them, and, for them, to destroy the latter it is always a matter of compromising the former. I am an honest man, says a father, and I know where I stand on […]
Proudhon Library

Dividing “Pologne”

June 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
It appears that even when writing about Poland, Proudhon ultimately tended toward division. While much of the work of the last few years of his life seems to have been connected to the work on Poland, of which The Theory of Property was an important element, when we look at the notes he left to his literary executors, we see that the manuscript of Pologne, as it has been passed down to us, was ultimately destined to be split into two works: The History of Poland and Political Geography and Nationality. Based on a table of contents included in the […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon’s “Pologne” and the federative project of the 1860s

June 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  “Ma Théorie fédérative est déjà un fragment enlevé à mon travail polonais; la Propriété sera le second…” “My Federative Theory is already a fragment lifted from my Polish work; the [Theory of] Property will be the second…” (Letter to Grandclément, Nov. 17, 1863) One of the nearly miraculous effects of the recent manuscript digitization projects at the International Institute of Social History and the Ville de Besançon has been a sudden and dramatic change in the kinds of questions we can wrestle with, with real hope of success, without international travel or expensive duplication of materials. For me, it […]
Contr'un

Moving forward with “The Theory of Property”

May 10, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] I’ve been spending some quality time with the manuscript of Proudhon’s The Theory of Property, now that it is available through the Ville de Besançon site, and it’s been a fascinating experience. Having spent a lot of time with the published version over the last few years, there were a lot of moments when I could look at a page and, once I had deciphered the handwriting, could immediately place the manuscript material in the published work. On my first pass through, the page where Proudhon proclaims that “Humanity proceeds by approximation” […]
Proudhon Library

Property? It’s just a phase… (Proudhon to the Academy of Besançon, 1840)

May 3, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
This response by Proudhon to the Academy of Besançon fills in a bit of the story told in the introduction to What is Property? I’ve been tracking down some of these bits and pieces in order to establish more of the context for that work, as we get ready to do a group reading of the text. This letter has at least one unintentionally funny bit, when Proudhon explains that this property stuff is just a passing interest. Besançon, August 3, 1840 TO THE MEMBERS OF THE ACADEMY OF BESANÇON Gentlemen, I have learned through the confidences of some of […]
Contr'un

The Fundamental Laws of the Universe(!) and the Anarchism of Approximation

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  What would it take to flesh out the federative theory of property hinted at in the last post? What exactly does it mean to say that “property can be understood as an instance of federation”? We’re starting from a provocative reading of bits and pieces from Proudhon’s later works, and leaning hard, for the moment, on a portion of the title of The Theory of Property that didn’t make it out of the manuscript, and we’re going to have to go beyond anything explicitly laid out in Proudhon’s work. Still, I don’t think the extrapolation I’m about to make […]
Proudhon Library

More on Proudhon’s “Theory of Property”

April 9, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I needed a change of pace for a couple of days, and went back to work on the still-daunting task of taking Proudhon’s The Theory of Property from the current draft translation to something well-contextualized and publishable. There’s a lot of work to do, including revisiting Proudhon’s earlier works on property, finishing work on the Appendix, translating more contextual material and consulting Proudhon’s manuscripts. Fortunately, more of the relevant manuscript material has become available, and I’ve been able to take some time away from other tasks to finish translating the “Disagreement Regarding the Posthumous Publication of Unpublished Works by P.-J. […]