The Era of Anarchy

Featured articles

Félix P….., “Philosophy of Insubmission” (1854)

May 14, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
At any given point in my research, there are always a few texts that top the list of things I would love to read, but am unlikely to get my hands on. Some are of more general interest than others. I remember, for example, that during my early work on mutualism, I was equally keen to track down William Batchelder Greene’s “Omega” articles articles in the Worcester Palladium — arguably one of the key early contributions to the tradition — and a little book called Money and Banking, or Their Nature and Effects Considered, Together with a Plan for the […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Benjamin Colin (1818-1884)

October 21, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur
There are a handful of very early anarchist or at least anarchistic writings identified by Max Nettlau that have remained elusive in my searches. One in particular — “Plus de gouvernement!” by Benjamin Colin — has nagged at me a bit, since I have known that the paper it was published in, L’Homme, journal de la démocratie universelle, was accessible in various forms and included some other anarchism-related content. But I have never got around the making the extra effort or financial outlay necessary to get my hands on it.

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Featured articles

Hector Morel, “Nationalities Considered from the Point of View of Liberty” (1862)

November 4, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
If there are words that we have used and abused, which we use and abuse every day, they are unquestionably the words nation and homeland. Everything in society which aims to muzzle and exploit the people, to paralyze and hold back the development of human intelligence, is always and invariably advanced in the name of the homeland: Laws and regulations, ordinances and decrees, scaffolds and prisons, police and gendarmes, etc., etc., all this hideous paraphernalia of chains and slavery, of plunder and misery, of exploitation and servitude, has only been invented, only exists, in the interest of the good order and internal security of nations.

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Anarchist Beginnings

Mikhail Bakunin, “What is Authority” (1870)

September 7, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
NOTE: This passage is generally known as part of “God and the State” (Dieu et l’État, first published in 1882), but it appears in Bakunin’s manuscript as part of “Sophismes historiques de l’école doctrinaire des communistes allemands,” the second section of the unfinished book L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Révolution Sociale (The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.) This new translation seeks to clarify some passages that may appear contradictory in existing translations. In particularly the verb repousser, which previous translators have tended to simply render as “reject,” has been brought closer to its literal sense of “push back” and some […]
Contr'un

Our Lost Continent

April 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
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 with some dire warning of the “Here be dragons” variety, but rather with the dismissive “Here be precursors.” The problem is that our attempts to simply sail around most of the period between 1840, when we can unquestionably say that there were anarchists, and 1880 or so, when we can point with equal confidence to the emergence of anarchism in one or more forms, tend to commit us to a history—and […]