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Notes on Proudhon’s “Justice”

May 12, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

One key challenge for modern readers of Proudhon’s Justice is that the sections where he presumably provides his mature “solution of the social problem,” his account of basic social relations organized according to principles of immanent justice, are also the sections where his anti-feminism poses the most significant challenges for us. The account itself is hardly a mystery. I translated the “Catechism of Marriage” late in that 2014 campaign. Proudhon’s appropriation of the androgyne theory that had been popular in Saint-Simonian circles is straightforward enough — and, I think, there are also very few obstacles to making of it something useful, which dispenses with the particular forms of biological essentialism that we cite among the sources of the problem in Proudhon’s work. What does seem to remain a bit mysterious is a fairly wide range of details, through which Proudhon moved from some biological notions of dubious validity to a theory of social organization that is in some ways tantalizingly close to what we might hope for from an anarchist social science. […]

The Three Eras (May 22, 1848)

April 15, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

What does anarchy mean in the streets, if not the absence of informers and armed police? But if, without armed police, without informers, without gendarmes, order reigns in the streets; if no one is robbed there, if no one is murdered there, if no one is insulted there, will the population not have proven that it can do without this power called gendarmes, police and municipal guards? Will it not have proven that it knows how to guard, protect and govern itself? […]

Justice—and “Justice”—as the Center of Proudhon’s Work

April 9, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

Work on the translation of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and the Church continues steadily and is now well ahead of the schedule I had set myself, despite a bout of the still-lurking plague complicating matters in March. Today, I started translating the Fifth Study, on education and the draft files for the project contain roughly 411,000 words (1280 double-spaced pages) of new or previously unshared translation. […]

“Justice” — A Second Attempt

January 7, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

The goal is to translate the twelve studies in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church—and to do so, where necessary, twice, producing translations of both the 1858 first edition and the expanded and corrected 1860 edition. I’m revising my 2009 translation of the 1860 “Program” for about the third time and will I will tackle the extensive notes and “Nouvelles de la Révolution” (which make up two of the six volumes of the second edition) as I complete the relevant studies, including La Pornocratie, which appears in manuscript form as one more of the “Nouvelles” sections and was originally intended by Proudhon to follow the two studies on “Love and Marriage.” […]

Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Preliminary Discourse (Parallel English)

January 5, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

These draft translations are part of on ongoing effort to translate both editions of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church into English, together with some related works, as the first step toward establishing an edition of Proudhon’s works in English. They are very much a first step, as there are lots of decisions about how best to render the texts which can only be answered in the course of the translation process. It seems important to share the work as it is completed, even in rough form, but the drafts are not suitable for scholarly work or publication elsewhere in their present state. […]

Constructing an Anarchism: Privation

December 2, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

So we are in a peculiar position as anarchists and proponents of anarchism, since, by standards that even we must acknowledge we recognize, that identification and advocacy make us—among other things, of course—champions of privation. […]

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. […]

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. […]

P.-J. Proudhon, “Psychology” (1838)

November 13, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is the most complete and exact map that has been drawn of the human soul to date; consequently, and if our title is true, it is the system of the world. Any man can grasp the whole of it, but no one has sounded its depths. […]

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. […]