Year: 2022

Working Translations

E. Armand, “Scènes de Noel / Christmas Scenes” (1901)

December 24, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

A church or a temple. Light, many lights. Candles that illuminate vast crucifixes, or a Christmas tree laden with toys, a fir tree whose evergreen branches evoke the image of eternity. Organs whose sonic flights seem an echo of celestial hymns. Carols that remind us of those with which our mothers rocked us to sleep… Handsome gentlemen in frock coats, tight at the waist, with eight shining gleams; polished, pomaded, combed, varnished, tied. Beautiful, elegant, fragrant ladies, studded with jewels, real or fake, whose slightly raised skirts reveal an expensively shod foot at the end of a finely arched ankle… Good, honest families in their Sunday best, made respectable, troops of children whose happy faces the symbolic tree illuminates… Ease, comfort, joy!… all that is good. […]

Featured articles

Constructing Anarchisms (Reimagined)

November 30, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

When Constructing Anarchisms was interrupted by “reopening” and a growing pile of unanswered questions, plenty of unfinished business remained. I’ve been chipping away at it ever since. The fundamental questions I needed to answer before I could start my historical survey have largely been answered. The toolkit from “A Schematic Anarchism” has been an unexpected bonus. The process of answering those questions seems to have been useful to others as well. […]

Contr'un

Reading Proudhon Today

November 16, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

There is a lot of interesting material in Proudhon’s unpublished manuscripts, not all of which is vital to understanding his project, but there are two sets of texts in particular that any serious student should at least be aware of—if only to know what we don’t know. […]

Featured articles

A Schematic Anarchism: Notes on Application

November 9, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s no very great leap from the position I had already taken in “A Schematic Anarchism” to the one I’ve been exploring in Proudhon’s manuscripts. In general, I have been proposing that we shift our approach from endless, more or less interminable arguments about whether or not a given ideology or practice is anarchism or not to analyses of proposed anarchisms that ask: “If we treat X as an instance of anarchism, in what sense is that claim true and how does it compare to other instances?” The answers to that question ought to demonstrate that some of the proposed anarchisms only qualify in the most trivial senses, on the basis of the most implausible explanations, while others can be plausibly situated among the ranks of anarchisms on the basis of a variety of plausible narratives. […]

Corvus Editions

Rambles in the Fields calendar — 2023

October 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

The local landscape is woven into the work that appears here. My daily walks through the parks near my home are an explicit part of the process in the “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism,” but, in general, the out-of-doors is where the fine points tend to get worked out. Last year, I published a calendar of photographs taken in several local green spaces. This year, I limited things to a single park and focused on the cycle of gradual, but steady change that takes place through the year.
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