Daniel Saurin, “Order through Anarchy” (1893)

Links:

• Daniel Saurin, Order through Anarchy (pdf)

I have seen the title L’Ordre par l’Anarchie — published in the “Bibliothèque Anarchiste” of La Révolte —  in the back pages of various anarchist communist papers from the 1890s, but had never tracked it down. Then, this weekend, I ran across a reference to the book that made it sound like it might be useful in the work I am doing for The Anarchism of the Encounter, so I found a copy online and started to work my way through it. In the end, it has not been as useful as I had hoped for my current projects, but it is a very interesting attempt to construct an anarchist ethics on a “natural rights” foundation — so I decided to work up a translation good enough to share.

Saurin now seems best remembered an an antisemite, with some suggestions in the critical literature that the work presented here was a product of that prejudice. That doesn’t seem to me to be obviously the case, but fair warning…