Featured articles Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Benjamin Colin (1818-1884)

October 21, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

There are a handful of very early anarchist or at least anarchistic writings identified by Max Nettlau that have remained elusive in my searches. One in particular — “Plus de gouvernement!” by Benjamin Colin — has nagged at me a bit, since I have known that the paper it was published in, L’Homme, journal de la démocratie universelle, was accessible in various forms and included some other anarchism-related content. But I have never got around the making the extra effort or financial outlay necessary to get my hands on it. […]

Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: First Study

September 10, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

In the First Study, Proudhon attempts to establish the foundation for his study, presenting some basic definitions and axioms, much as he did at the beginning of The Creation of Order in Humanity. The first chapter, where that foundation-building is most elementary, was subject to very light revision in the revised and expanded edition, and I have, for the most part, simply provided the text from 1860. Subsequent chapters were subject to both considerable revision and considerable expansion — and the differences are instructive enough that I’ll focus on them a bit more than in most studies. […]

Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Preliminary Address (concluded)

September 6, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

This selection concludes the “Preliminary Address.” I have repeated the few paragraphs from the third section that I included at the end of the first installment. […]

Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Prologue / Preliminary Address

September 5, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

As a way to focus my efforts on the fine revision and annotation of my translation of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, I’m going to post a series of annotated sections documenting the major changes in the work between the two editions, with preliminary notes for the New Proudhon Library Glossary and some thoughts about some of the major interpretive issues. […]

P.-J. Proudhon, Proposal for a Society of the Perpetual Exhibition (1855)

April 18, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

The newest draft translation added to the New Proudhon Library project is the proposal for a Society of the Perpetual Exhibition, in answer to a call by Emperor Napoleon III for uses for the Palais de l’Industrie built in Paris for the 1855 World Fair. The project resembles Proudhon’s mutual credit proposals, as well as the various schemes for association proposed by Bellegarrigue in the 1850s. […]

Emile Gautier, “Social Darwinism” (1877 / 1880)

April 14, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

Emile Gautier’s 1880 pamphlet, Le Darwinisme sociale, is often cited as the first French use of the term “social Darwinism,” three years after the term was first used in English. Gautier was an anarchist, the a political prisoner, and finally a popular science writer and novelist. He was tried alongside Kropotkin in the “Trial of the 66,” collaborated with Louise Michel, and provided the preface for Sébastien Faure’s La douleur universelle. Drawn into a debate about the application of Darwin’s theories to the solution of social problems, he championed a pro-socialist interpretation of the science, anticipating Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in some ways. A translation of the pamphlet can be found in the pdf linked in the sidebar, but the research for that task also turned up an earlier essay, with the same name and much the same argument, in a periodical, Le Mot d’Ordre, in which Gautier was one of the principal contributors. That essay (also included in the pdf) is presented below. […]

Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Philosophical Letters on Tolerance and the Critique of Hypotheses” (1863-64)

February 14, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

Lettres philosophiques sur la tolérance et la critique des hypothèses. (Première lettre.) Si quelque honorable du sexe barbu a surpris la suscription de la lettre que je reçois de vous, chère Madame, il n’a pas […]

Jenny P. d’Héricourt in the Messager Franco-Americain (1865-1869)

February 14, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

Now, what makes war possible and produces the disastrous results I am pointing out? A lack of equilibrium in social forces. Woman is one of these forces, and she has neither her place nor her liberty of action. If, as I believe, the government of women alone should be bad, it does not seem surprising to me that the government of men alone has produced what we see. It takes the equal influence of both sexes to produce balance, because they are equal by “difference” as much as by philosophically defined law. […]

Georges Duchêne, “Government” (1849-50)

January 31, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

Six thousand years of government have proven abundantly that power is, by its nature, spendthrift, prodigal, unproductive, invasive, despotic. Experience does not seem decisive for certain intelligences; and we are in the necessity, — if we do not want to attempt a new dictatorship, — of combatting the idea of authority, not by its historical antecedents, but in its very principle. […]

Proudhon, “The Philosophy of Progress” (revised and expanded translation)

December 10, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress is one of those books that has simply become part of my basic intellectual toolkit, but in ways that I often forget — at least until I read it again and re-encounter all the delightful ideas and turns of phrase it contains. Returning to it over the last week has been a pleasure, but I’ve also felt a bit pressured to wrap up the preliminaries and get on to the notes on Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. […]