Working Translations

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, Correspondence related to the Studies in Popular Philosophy

September 6, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

Under the general title of Popular Philosophy, I begin an indefinite series of publications on all sorts of subjects, history, literature, political economy, morals, biography, etc., men and things. All this judged, appreciated, explained, interpreted with the aid of the new philosophical principle, the highest and most fruitful, at once objective and subjective, idea and sentiment, law of man and law of nature, justice. Give me five years of this popularization, and I dare say that the public, today tired, disgusted, skeptical, will again take courage and conceive what a philosophical system is, a kind of encyclopedia, whose principle, law, method, end, means, is right. […]

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Creation of Order in Humanity” — Chapter III

August 23, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

I must admit it at this solemn moment: what worries me is less the uncertainty of my route than the deep feeling of my weakness; the distractions of my life, and the misfortune of an entirely philosophical and religious education have hardly allowed me to learn anything. It’s not the design, it’s the materials that I lack for the reconstruction. All I know I owe to despair; fortune depriving me of the means of acquiring, I want one day, from shreds picked up during my short studies, to create a science by myself alone. […]

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Creation of Order in Humanity” — Chapter II

August 19, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

Through Religion, the mind remains absorbed in substance: through Philosophy, it frees itself from this passive contemplation, and begins to seek the cause of the phenomena that pass before it, the force that incessantly moves and changes the stage of the world. Hence it is that Philosophy has been defined by some as the science of causes, a lying title, since the cause is as impenetrable to us as the substance. […]

Black and Red Feminism

Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “La Femme affrancie / Woman Emancipated” — Volume II

July 31, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

A daughter of my century, raised with the doctrines summarized by our glorious Revolution, I will not seek the sources of Right and Duty in the world of Supernaturalism. No. I will leave to the last echoes of the ancient world the irrational fantasy of using their argumentation, based on the unknown, to prove that Right is granted and Duty imposed by some God. On the contrary, I say that both have their origins within us; that they result from the ensemble of our faculties, from our destiny, from the necessary relations that sustain us with ourselves, with our fellows, and with nature. […]

Black and Red Feminism

André Léo, “Woman and Mores” (1869)

July 28, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

It is almost overnight that this question rejected at first as chimerical, then combated by ridicule, which however, today, in spite of so many prejudices and sarcasms, is agitated in the two worlds, and each day grows. It was born out of the French Revolution, which created or renewed all questions by the new principle that it proclaimed, in which the equality of woman, like all the others, is contained. […]