Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Proudhon Library

“Notice to the Reader,” from Proudhon’s “The Principle of Art”

January 4, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
NOTICE TO THE READER Two days before his death, in the presence of his wife, Proudhon dictated to his eldest daughter a document by which, after having designated a certain number of friends to watch, as much over the interests as his family as the publication of his works, he charged us specially and collectively of this last care. The first time that we have been able to gather the six, we have recognized, for those of us whose position keeps us far from Paris, the impossibility of working actively at the ordering of the manuscripts left by Proudhon. Thus […]
Contr'un

“What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us”

January 2, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third][ezcol_2third_end] I was asked to clarify Proudhon’s position on property, by someone reading the AK Press anthology, Property is Theft! I had been under the impression that, although Iain McKay’s introductory material consistently claims that Proudhon did not “change his mind” about property, the concluding chapter of The Theory of Property was included—and there is nothing ambiguous about that material. Unfortunately, besides placing the material from The Theory of Property in an Appendix, and suggesting that Proudhon had considered it of less importance than The Political Capacity of the Working Classes, which he was […]
Contr'un

Varieties of “theft” and “property”

December 27, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0″] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It’s generally nice to avoid taking complex problems and making them even more complex—but not always. There may be some real advances in clarity to be gained from incorporating our new questions about “theft” into the larger puzzle regarding Proudhon and “property.” But we’re going to have to proceed cautiously. Let’s begin with a sort of catalog of the concepts that may or may not be in play, as we try to unpack Proudhon’s infamous phrase, “property is theft,” in the contents of his remarks […]
Contr'un

1839: Proudhon on property and theft

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
EPISODES in another history: I. Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time demonstrating how the very suggestive general observations in Proudhon’s What is Property? only really emerge as a property theory when we bring them together with developments in his later writings—and how, even then, we are arguably left to pick up his positive project, imagining a property that would not be theft, ourselves. As it turns out, there are also some clarifications to be made by looking back at Proudhon’s earlier work, from 1839, The Celebration of Sunday. The Celebration of Sunday is a peculiar […]
Contr'un

A couple of historical gems

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Roderick Long has posted a translation of a chapter from Gustave de Molinari’s 1893 work on “Labor-Exchanges.” I doubt anyone not already interested in Molinari’s work will be won over, but it’s a very interesting bit of that particular puzzle—and it’s good to see more of Molinari’s work in translation. Our understanding of all the players in anarchist/libertarian circles is enhanced by making more works available to more readers. Readers of French may be interested in P.-J. Proudhon’s review of the “Essai sur l’analyse physique des langues, ou Alphabet méthodique,” by Paul Ackermann, which Woodcock cites as Proudhon’s first published […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — I

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY  [continued] I It is rare that a law can be well understood and appreciated at its true value, if we limit ourselves to considering it separately, and independent of the system to which it is linked: that is a principle of legislative critique which no one contests, and suffers hardly any exceptions. How is it that this rule has been so badly followed with regard to the laws of Moses, that no one has yet thought to present them in their totality? I would not exempt from this criticism even Mr. Pastoret himself, whose work on […]
Contr'un

P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday (continued)

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY [Continued from Preface] _____ “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. “Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work. “But the seventh day is the rest of the Lord: in it thou shall not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: That is why the Eternal has hallowed and blessed the […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — Preface

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY ______ PREFACE The celebrated Sir Francis Bacon was called the reformer of human reason for having replaced the syllogism with observation in the natural sciences; the philosophers, following his example, teach today that philosophy is a collection of observations and facts. But, certain thinkers have said to them, if truth and certainty exist in philosophy, they must also exist in the realm of politics: thus, there is a social science responsive to evidence, which is consequently the object of demonstration, not of art or authority, not, that is, of arbitrary will. This conclusion, so profound in […]
Contr'un

Bevington and Seymour, “Proudhon and Communism” (1894)

July 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] I’ve long admired the “other” Liberty, the anarchist-communist paper published in England by James Tochatti in the 1890s. (You can admire some of the later issues here.) But I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit down with more than just scattered issues until last week, when I spent several hours going through the microfilm of the run. There are a number of articles that I’ll be reproducing here, or in the Labyrinth archive, but the material that is probably of most immediate interest to the readership of this blog is […]
Contr'un

Proudhon’s critics

June 1, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] As I’ve mentioned, I’m working on assembling—and in some cases, translating—responses to Proudhon’s work, with particular emphasis on those responses that really help to contextualize and illuminate that work. In some cases that means tackling head-on some of the thorniest problems posed by Proudhon’s method, the sheer bulk of his output, and, of course, his various failures as a consistent libertarian. The trajectories of my various Proudhon-related projects seem fairly obvious—to me at least. The thing I started with “The Gift Economy of Property” isn’t […]