Shawn P. Wilbur

Our Lost Continent

Our Lost Continent: Preliminaries (2015-2018)

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings: Notes for an Introduction Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism.   “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) The “lost continent” of anarchist history has been there all along, not so much lost but rather willfully ignored or dismissed, a blank spot on our map marked, not […]
Beyond the Labyrinth

AKA bookish: Cyberstudies

December 22, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
The essays collected here are from an earlier phase of my scholarly career, when I was an active participant and observer in various online “virtual communities.” In those days, I was something of a big fish, in various small virtual ponds, and generally know by the username “bookish.” Related links: Voices from the Net [e-zine] Dromologies: Paul Virilio: Speed, Cinema, and the End of the Political State Futurist Synthesis (Energy and Fear) Running Down the Meme: Cyberpunk, alt.cyberpunk, and the Panic of ‘93 Shawn P. Wilbur ———- Dodging Cultural Traffic It’s a cliché of traditional history that a certain amount […]
Featured articles

Available Now! Anarchy and the Sex Question

October 19, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896-1917 By Emma Goldman Edited by Shawn P. Wilbur Available from PM Press Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) remains one of the best known figures of the political tradition known as anarchism, and with good reason, as few writers have so convincingly explained the evils of authority in government. But Goldman’s anarchism extended beyond the political realm, and arguably found its most essential expressions in her writings on matters more directly connected to everyday life. For Goldman, anarchism was not just an ideology, but a living force in the affairs […]
Contr'un

Back to Basics (now that we may know a few of them)

August 16, 2015
Welcome to the new Mutualism.info, the last of my old Blogger sites to be integrated into the new Libertarian Labyrinth. It’s been just over a decade since I launched the blog In the Libertarian Labyrinth, which was not my first blog, but was the first dedicated primarily to anarchist history and theory. The site has had a number of other names along the way (Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth, Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule and Contr’un) and has migrated once, but the overall project has developed steadily, if sometimes in directions that couldn’t have been predicted ten years ago. […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Anarchy, Panarchy and Peace — I

May 14, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Max Nettlau’s writings on anarchist strategy form an early entry in a well-established anarchist genre: “Writings about Why this ‘Anarchy’ Thing Hasn’t Caught on Like We Thought it Should.” They’re notable for a number of reasons, including Nettlau’s credentials as “the Herodotus of Anarchism” and the fact that they date from such an early period in anarchist history. If my sense of the chronology is correct, anarchism had been a widely used keyword for less than twenty years when “Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle” was published, and Nettlau published his “heresies” to an audience composed of many of […]
Contr'un

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State

June 5, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve spent much of the last six months on a journey down the rabbit hole in search of Proudhon’s theory of the State, and as I suspect my notes on the study have made clear, it’s been quite an adventure. The essay, “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” has been accepted for publication in German, in Nomos’s Staatsverständnisse series. I’ve assembled a pamphlet, containing the English version of the essay, my notes from the blog, and some translations from Proudhon, which is now available in the Labyrinth archive. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State [1] Shawn P. Wilbur [The State] […]
Contr'un

The Lesson of the Pear Growers’ Series

May 25, 2012
The Lesson of the Pear Growers’ Series (Commentary) Given the reputation of “classical” anarchists these days, it might be too much to ask anarchists to consider the lessons of those “utopian” socialists who came before. But I want to do just that. It is generally acknowledged that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was influenced by Charles Fourier, whose Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire Proudhon helped to print in 1829. Fourier’s Theory of Four Movements found an echo in the theory of “four movements” which ends Proudhon’s De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité, and less specialized versions of Fourier’s analysis of series […]
postanarchism

Cohn and Wilbur, What’s Wrong with Postanarchism

July 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
What’s Wrong With Postanarchism? http://www.anarchist-studies.org/article/articleview/26/1/1/ by Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur What is now being called “postanarchism” by some thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word, thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the post- prefix applies to its new object as well—implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete. Together, these two senses of the word form a narrative: […]