Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

anarchist mutualism

1848 origins of “agro-industrial federation”

December 5, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: The work doesn’t always move from triumph to triumph. Sometimes there are missteps or bits that were a little less than fully thought through. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] We can’t say he didn’t warn us, but Proudhon, despite his explicit embrace of a certain kind of productive contradiction, challenges readers to keep his antinomies in play, and to follow along as he reasons from the most individualistic of starting positions—complete and absolute insolidarité, the denial of common interests—to something like agro-industrial federation, which involves at least some sort of intense “centralization.” In […]
Contr'un

Anarchist-communism, work, and the virtue of selfishness

December 1, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: Obviously, it’s a big moment when Joseph Déjacque enters the mix, but there’s a lot going on here that would bear fruit later. Adding Déjacque to my list of early anarchist obsessions moved me closer to the recognition of an Era of Anarchy, and discovering the influence of both Fourier and Pierre Leroux in his work would sharpen my interest in the “utopian” roots of anarchism, but the first really dividend from my work on Déjacque was a sense that I had been underestimating the place of egoism among the early anarchists. At […]
Contr'un

An excellent resource on Proudhon

November 30, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: Ten years later, I finally have a copy of my own! [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] I’ve found very little in the literature on anarchism that does much justice to Proudhon’s work. His economic ideas—which were complex, based in a principle of “antinomies,” and expressed at different times in significantly different language—are generally treated without much attention to detail. (The anarchist literature is substantially better in this regard than the Marxist literature, which nearly always simply repeats the judgments of Marx.) One very fine exception to the general rule is Rob Knowles’ Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Communitarian […]