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The Incomplete Proudhon (draft)

[This is a first draft of a first section of a strategy document for the consideration of other Proudhon scholars and students of anarchist studies. It is every bit as preliminary as that sounds, but everything has to start somewhere. With the Bakunin Library and Proudhon Library projects both moving steadily towards publication, a good deal of what I have been doing behind the scenes lately has been this kind of assessment of available resources and strategizing about how best to present relatively large bodies of work in print. For those who have not read the draft outline for Proudhon: Between Science […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon: Between Science and Vengeance (rough outline)

[The Proudhon Library publishing project will be entering its second phase in the next couple of years, with some conventionally published volumes. The first entries planned for the series have been revisions and expansion of the Corvus Editions volumes, but I’ve also been feeling the need for an introductory volume. Rather than compete with Iain McKay’s anthology, Property is Theft!, I’ve opted for a small volume that combines a simple reader’s guide with a selection of shorter material from Proudhon’s notebooks, correspondence and manuscripts. This is a very, very rough attempt to describe the volume, provided here in the hope […]
Proudhon Library

“I am a sans-culotte” (excerpt from Justice, Study on Moral Sanction)

  JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH TWELFTH STUDY ON MORAL SANCTION ____ FRAGMENTS Monsignor, I have come here to the end of this long labor. Accused as it has been for seventy years, the Revolution finally becomes, through my mouth and in my person, the accuser. It proves to you today—to all of you, priests, mystics, worshipers of the ideal, apostles of natural religion, conservators and restorers of the principle of authority, privileged of capital and industry, partisans of divine right in property and the State, representatives of all the fictions of the exhausted age—that you do […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Proudhon Library

On Hatred (1847)

Carnets, Vol. 2 (Carnet No. 5, 111-114): 166-167. — All the reformers preach charity: me, I preach hatred. Hatred is nothing other than the zeal for justice, for vengeance. Hatred has contributed as much to the progress of the good as love… Hatred, in the conditions of existence of man, is as necessary, as legitimate, as devotion. — It is the admission of our imperfection, the sentiment of our ugliness, the consciousness of our innate iniquity:… the reaction of our soul against its perverse inclinations and aberrations. Hatred has its excesses, its materialism, its blindness and its outbursts, like love, […]
Contr'un

Property, Individuality and Collective Force

  The events at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have occupied my thoughts since the armed occupation began, not least because I have close family connections to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the region—connections so close that I spent the first few years of my life on refuges very similar to the one at Malheur and have had a “front-row seat,” so to speak, throughout my life, where some of the thorniest debates about the federal lands are concerned. I’ve posted some of that material to the blog, and will probably post more. But the situation on the refuge […]
Proudhon Library

Note on Revolutionary Practice (March, 1851)

[These notes appear to refer to Ms. 2857 in the Besançon archives, “De la Pratique des révolutions,” a draft for a work abandoned in favor of The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century. This is, of course, just one of the places where Proudhon uses “Destruam et ædificabo” as a kind of motto, but it is interesting to find it here, close to the “watershed” between Proudhon’s “critical” and “constructive” projects.] P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet no. 9, 27-28; March 1851): 215. Revolutionary practice. — Book I, chapter I. — If I start with cannibalism, it […]
Proudhon Library

Note on Revolutionary Practice (March, 1851)

[These notes appear to refer to Ms. 2857 in the Besançon archives, “De la Pratique des révolutions,” a draft for a work abandoned in favor of The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century. This is, of course, just one of the places where Proudhon uses “Destruam et ædificabo” as a kind of motto, but it is interesting to find it here, close to the “watershed” between Proudhon’s “critical” and “constructive” projects.] P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet no. 9, 27-28; March 1851): 215. Revolutionary practice. — Book I, chapter I. — If I start with cannibalism, it […]