Contr'un

Reading Proudhon Today

There is a lot of interesting material in Proudhon’s unpublished manuscripts, not all of which is vital to understanding his project, but there are two sets of texts in particular that any serious student should at least be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

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

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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Contr'un

Further Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History

This is a collection of another Twitter thread, in the course of which I’ve been sharing some reminiscences on how “neo-proudhonian” mutualism emerged and how those who have adopted the label or encounter it in anarchist circles might understand the particular gambits involved in its construction. These things necessarily get away from us, once loosed upon the world—and that’s fine, perhaps simply as it should be—but I suspect they may serve others better if they retain some of the character of their origins.   […]