Before I had seriously begun my 2006 archiving push, John Zube mentioned the work of a French archivist, Vincent Dubuc, who had taken on a large-scale digitizing project. It was one of the encouragements to set a target and begin a regular scanning routine. Thanks to the attention that the Liberty archive has been getting (new thank-you‘s to Ken MacLeod and the Anarchism Community on LiveJournal for recent traffic), Vincent got in touch. His site, La Presse Anarchiste, is well worth some browsing time. Regular readers may be particularly interested in E. Armand’s papers, L’Ère nouvelle and L’Unique, but there is plenty to read through. He has also apparently compiled a CD-ROM collection of L’Autonomie Individuelle (1887-1888), a french individualist anarchist paper, due for release this fall. I’ll keep you posted.
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Liberty archive: phase 1 complete!
It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]
Anarchism
New Anarchist Platformist archive
Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches represented here, there are important issues being wrestled with in all of this stuff, and the more practical issues are not unlike those that any anarchist society will face as it attempts to give itself a working shape. I’m ultimately unsympathetic to the solutions offered by platformism, but value the […]
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“Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle”
A lot of my work right now is sifting through archives, trying to gather together links to the works of various key socialist writers: Proudhon, Leroux, Colins, Considerant, Fourier, Briancourt, Ott, etc., etc. Some of the sifting is easy: all 47(!) volumes of the Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin are available at Gallica. In other cases, it’s a matter of sorting through the rubble at Google Books. Of course, the difficulties involved mean that my searches have been a bit more inclusive than they might otherwise be, and that has paid some handsome dividends. For example: Les Révolutions du XIXe […]