Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Contr'un

Individualities and Collectivities – Rights and Strengths

April 25, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] In War and Peace, Proudhon defined “rights” in this way: RIGHT, in general, is the recognition of human dignity in all its faculties, attributes and prerogatives. There are thus as many special rights as humans can raise different claims, owing to the diversity of their faculties and of their exercise. As a consequence, the genealogy of human rights will follow that of the human faculties and their manifestations. The right of force is the simplest of all and the most basic: it is the homage rendered to man for his strength. […]
Contr'un

Proudhon on Property: Response

April 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Iain McKay has posted another update on What is Property?, the forthcoming Proudhon anthology.You’ll find links to excerpts from the Second Memoir on Property and from my translation of the concluding chapter of The Theory of Property, along with commentary by Iain. The commentary is valuable, whether or not you agree with the approach and conclusions. There is a lot to tackle, if we want to make sense of Proudhon’s lifetime of work, and the more serious attempts, from different perspectives, the better, from my point of view. Iain’s comments, and his nice plug for The Mutualist, suggest he shares […]
Contr'un

Amant ou mari?

April 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Proudhon (in)famously wrote, in What is Property?: On distingue dans la propriété : 1° la propriété pure et simple, le droit dominal, seigneurial sur la chose, ou, comme l’on dit, la nue propriété ; 2° la possession. « La possession, dit Duranton, est une chose de fait, et non de droit. » Toullier : « La propriété est un droit, une faculté légale; la possession est un fait. » Le locataire, le fermier, le commandité, l’usufruitier, sont possesseurs ; le maître qui loue, qui prète à usage; l’héritier qui n’attend pour […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on Force and Rights (War and Peace)

March 31, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
These extracts from Proudhon’s War and Peace will appear in The Mutualist #1 (which will itself appear in the next couple of days.) It’s useful to recall that Proudhon treated “justice” almost entirely as a matter of the balance of forces, and acknowledged that there would be “degrees” of justice, just as there are of liberty, or of the strength and present expression of all human faculties. As early as What is Property?, Proudhon gave a historical account of the development of justice in its earliest stages: balance of strength, followed by balance of strength and guile. His scattered treatments […]
anarchist mutualism

Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule

February 28, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related links: Pierre Leroux, “Individualism and Socialism“ “Scraping Some Rust off the ‘Two Guns’ of Mutualism” (January 28, 2014) “Avengers Who Never Assemble” (June 13, 2014) “The Capitalist, the Prince, the Père de famille, and the Alternative” (June 23, 2014) “In Search of the Justicier” (July 18, 2014) “TWO-GUN” MUTUALISM and the GOLDEN RULE Thus one remains in perplexity and uncertainty, equally attracted and repulsed by two opposite attractors. Yes, the sympathies of our era are equally lively, equally energetic, whether it is a question of liberty or equality, of individuality or association. The faith in society is complete, but […]
Contr'un

Inheriting Proudhon

February 15, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
2010 is likely to be a good year for mutualism. Last I heard, Crispin Sartwell’s Josiah Warren collection was on its way to the publisher. Kevin Carson’s third book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto, is available in rough form. It looks like I’ll get to do the traveling necessary to put together a first edition of my own Descriptive Bibliography of Equitable Commerce (though several months later than originally planned), and, barring any catastrophic changes in my currently precarious economic situation, the first issue of The Mutualist (successor to LeftLiberty) ought to be available in time for […]
Anarchism

A funny thing happened on the way… (1)

February 14, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Nobody who knows me or my work will be surprised if I admit to working primarily on a large — and sometimes over-large — scale. There are obvious disadvantages to the approach: I have certainly not published as much as I might have, in any of the various fields where I’ve gained some expertise, and much of the writing I have done has been in the form of theoretical “feelers” and thought experiments scattered in a wide variety of forums. The more definitive statements that I have started have been slow to develop. The logistics of serious interdisciplinary study are […]
mutualism

Dyer Lum on Mutualism, and a note on Proudhon

October 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m working on gathering the pieces for a series of pamphlets documenting the mutualist tradition, and ran across this rather strange, but very interesting piece, by the frequently strange, but always interesting Dyer D. Lum. Tucker’s translation of the first volume of The System of Economical Contradictions was published in 1888, and Lum’s 1892 piece seems to be a fairly idiosyncratic commentary on it. [I admit that I have tended to treat the Contradictions as a sort of badly flawed middle-step between the initial critique of property in 1840 and the realization that “the antinomy does not resolve itself” in […]
Uncategorized

James Guillaume on Federation

September 20, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
In the second issue of Solidarité, dated April 1871, James Guillaume contributed this piece on the federative principle, in the context of the Paris Commune. Note the use of Proudhon’s concept of “collective force.” I’m working on translating a series of texts on nationality and the federative principle, to go with forthcoming issues of LeftLiberty. _____ Federalism. The true character of the revolution that was accomplished at Paris commence has been outlined in so marked a fashion that you, even the minds most unfamiliar with political theories, can now perceive it clearly. The revolution of Paris is federalist. The Parisian […]
Uncategorized

Instead of a Translation – Proudhon on the clubs

September 13, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Some 19th century “translations” end up being little more than summaries, and some summaries end up being haphazard translations of bits and pieces. A number of the pieces that introduced Americans to Proudhon and Leroux fit one of these two categories. A series of summaries of chapters from Proudhon’s Confessions appeared in The Spirit of the Age in 1849-50. This is certainly a work that needs full translation, but the summaries are interesting, both for the information they contain and as an example of how many Americans first encountered Proudhon. THE CONFESSIONS OF A REVOLUTIONIST. BY P. J. PROUDHON. CHAPTER […]