Proudhon and Tucker get psychedelic!

Proudhon’s first major work, The Celebration of Sunday, was subject to quite a number of revisions between the first edition in 1839 and what appears to be the fourth edition in 1850. The Preface and notes seem to have been particularly subject to change. As I have been revising my translation of the text from the 19th-century Œuvres Complètes, I wanted to determine the extent of the changes and turned to the notes published in the 20th-century Rivière edition, including the “Appendix” that I recently translated, which includes some material from a manuscript, perhaps now no longer accessible, that did not appear in any of the editions. That material revealed that at the time of the Rivière edition it was believed that Proudhon’s original 1839 edition was lost, one of the factors prompted the scholarly exchange around the manuscripts. Having access, at present to the 1838 volume, but not the manuscript, I can’t say any more about the sections addressed to the Academy, but I can say that the story of the revisions was a bit more complicated and different in its details than was suggested in that 20th-century exchange. As part of the work of clarifying the details, in preparation for a new Corvus Editions New Proudhon Library release, I’ve translated the first three versions of the Preface.

It’s a very, very good day for those interested in the earliest manifestations of mutualism in the United States. William Henry Channing’s The Spirit of the Age (1849-1850) is now available, in its entirety, with minimal scanning defects, from Google Books. I had previously had the chance to read through an original bound volume, and transcribe some contributions. Now I can finally sit down to read through the entire run. 150 or so pages in, my sense of the importance of this early journal just keeps increasing. Go check it out!

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 […]