Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

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“The current unintelligent tampering…with the moral order of business”

September 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In 1873, William Batchelder Greene was asked by Ezra Heywood to explain Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas on property. Greene sent along translations of the first three, and last three pages of What is Property? and a short, fascinating account of Proudhon and his ideas, based on Greene’s acquaintance with Proudhon during his years in Paris, roughly 1853-1861. It is clear from the account that Greene was most familiar with Proudhon’s earlier works. Some of Greene’s explanation is not consistent with the works from the 1860s, and some of it is consistent, as when Greene likens property to Satan, but in ways […]
Corvus Editions

Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution” as a bilingual pamphlet

September 20, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
A new purpose for an old blog, the raison d’être of which had been largely eliminated by my migration of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive to the wiki site: a new series of downloadable pdf pamphlets from the archive. First up: Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution,” in an English-French bilingual edition. Please let me know if you have any trouble with these pamphlets. I’m also printing actual hard-copy pamphlets for local distribution, and will probably be issuing a few more elaborately produced items as fund-raisers for research materials.
Contr'un

Proudhon, Liberty, Satan, and The Ladies Repository (oh, my!)

September 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Very little of Proudhon’s 6-volume work on Justice in the Revolution and in the Church has been translated, but one in/famous passage has been treated to a number of English renderings. Section XLVII, which ends Chapter 5, “Function of Liberty,” which is itself the final chapter of the Eighth Study, “Conscience and Liberty” (which appears in Justice, Tome III in the Lacroix collected works) contains a passage that begins “Come, Satan, come. . . ,” and which has naturally been handy for those who wanted to demonstrate what an evil dude that French socialist Proudhon was. There is a really […]
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Proudhon on freedom and free will

September 12, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I’m working away at the translation of Proudhon’s chapter (in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church) on “The Nature and Function of Liberty.” It’s a key piece in his overall work, and includes an explanation of the nature and function of “free will,” along with some suggestions about how that explanation would scale up to the realm of social or political liberty. Remember that Proudhon was, from the earliest of his works, concerned with the “collective force” which arises from associated production and exceeds the productive power of the […]
Contr'un

Constitutions and Organic Bases

August 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Tomorrow night’s discussion at Laughing Horse Books will be on “Panarchy and Pantarchy, with a brief look at Proudhon’s theory of the state.” As I told the collective yesterday, “It will be breezier than it sounds.” I had initially meant to pair Paul Émile de Puydt’s 1860 “Panarchy,” which proposes a free market in governments, just with some documents relating to Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Pantarchy, which was an anarchistic outlier, from roughly the same year, strongly influenced by August Comte and heavy on voluntary hierarchy, with Andrews expecting to find himself, voluntarily, pretty much at the top of the heap. […]
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I need a technical assist

July 28, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been pushing ahead with plans to equip one of my wikis for a group transcription/translation of Proudhon’s collected works. The tools developed at Wikisource are in many ways pretty slick, and it looks like they will be adaptable to all the needs of the project. My only problem is that they use the djvu format, and I am living in an all-Macintosh house at the moment. If there’s anyone out there who has the capability to do some pdf-to-djvu conversion for me, I can do the rest of the work to get the OCR work done and the raw […]
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What Is Property? Chapter 2, part 3 notes

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Just a bit more on Destutt-Tracy: on page 61-2, there is one of the clearest expressions of Proudhon’s argument that a significant amount of property theory rests on a semantic slide, and it comes in the context of one of Proudhon’s few direct encounters with the concept of self-ownership. Here’s Proudhon: “Shameful equivocation, not justified by the necessity for generalization! The word property has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say the properties […]
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The unfinished business of Liberty, II

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Let’s do something big! A side thread, during a rather distracted week on the Proudhon seminar list, has involved the possibility of tackling the untranslated portions of Proudhon’s writings in a collaborative setting. I’ve bounced this notion off of a few friends and allies, without a lot of response, but having someone else suggest it reminds me how much I really want to get the job done. There are tools for Mediawiki that should make the two-step process of transcribing and then translating the works. The structure of a wiki ought to make it easy for the participants to also […]
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What Is Property? Chapter 2, part 2 notes

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
I had some unexpected delays of a better sort yesterday, including two rather random encounters with one of my best friends from high school (in California, not Oregon, where I am now), who I haven’t seen in about 20 years. A familiar voice in a coffee shop turned out to be just who it sounded like. And then the voice again, from a parking lot I was walking by, hours later, on my way home from the bookstore. Good stuff. Anyway, we left off at page 54, at the start of section 2, on “Occupation, as the Title to Property.” […]
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What Is Property? Ch. 2 notes, part 1

July 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
These are notes from the ongoing Proudhon seminar. Page numbers refer to the Benjamin R. Tucker translation of What Is Property? Chapter II covers “PROPERTY CONSIDERED AS A NATURAL RIGHT.—OCCUPATION AND CIVIL LAW AS EFFICIENT BASES OF PROPERTY. DEFINITIONS.” Proudhon announced in the first chapter that: “The first of these chapters [Ch. 2] will prove that the right of occupation OBSTRUCTS property; the second [Ch. 3] that the right of labor DESTROYS it.” So we know pretty much what to expect. p. 42: Property is defined as “the right to use and abuse one’s own within the limits of the […]