Poland Archives - Page 2 of 2 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

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 […]

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’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 […]

Léon Abensour, “Proudhon et la Pologne” (1920)

May 23, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m in the midst of a line-by-line comparison of the manuscript of The Theory of Property with the published version, as a step towards revising my draft translation and starting to get the work into publishable shape. Because The Theory of Property was initially intended to be part of a larger work, Pologne (Poland) I’ve been spending some time looking at the larger work in order to establish the context. (See my post on Proudhon’s “Pologne” and the federative project of the 1860s.) Much of that work involves working my way through Proudhon’s handwritten manuscripts, but a short section of […]

Letter to Le Constitutionnel, March 19, 1846

December 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Monsieur. I am Russian, and I love my country. It is for that very reason that I make some wishes at this moment, like many Russians, for the triumph of the Polish insurrection polonaise. The oppression of Poland is a shame for my country, and its liberty would perhaps be the beginning of our own. I want first of all to bring my testimony, as an honest man, in an affair which occupies at this moment all the French papers, I want to speak of the persecution of the Basilian nuns of Lithuania. For my part, I am completely convinced […]