The Celebration of Sunday

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1839: Proudhon on property and theft

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
EPISODES in another history: I. Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time demonstrating how the very suggestive general observations in Proudhon’s What is Property? only really emerge as a property theory when we bring them together with developments in his later writings—and how, even then, we are arguably left to pick up his positive project, imagining a property that would not be theft, ourselves. As it turns out, there are also some clarifications to be made by looking back at Proudhon’s earlier work, from 1839, The Celebration of Sunday. The Celebration of Sunday is a peculiar […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — I

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY  [continued] I It is rare that a law can be well understood and appreciated at its true value, if we limit ourselves to considering it separately, and independent of the system to which it is linked: that is a principle of legislative critique which no one contests, and suffers hardly any exceptions. How is it that this rule has been so badly followed with regard to the laws of Moses, that no one has yet thought to present them in their totality? I would not exempt from this criticism even Mr. Pastoret himself, whose work on […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday (continued)

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY [Continued from Preface] _____ “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. “Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work. “But the seventh day is the rest of the Lord: in it thou shall not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: That is why the Eternal has hallowed and blessed the […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — Preface

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY ______ PREFACE The celebrated Sir Francis Bacon was called the reformer of human reason for having replaced the syllogism with observation in the natural sciences; the philosophers, following his example, teach today that philosophy is a collection of observations and facts. But, certain thinkers have said to them, if truth and certainty exist in philosophy, they must also exist in the realm of politics: thus, there is a social science responsive to evidence, which is consequently the object of demonstration, not of art or authority, not, that is, of arbitrary will. This conclusion, so profound in […]