Working Translations

Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “Solution of the Social Problem”

March 25, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Republic is the organization by which, all opinions and all activities remaining free, the People, by the very divergence of opinions and will, think and act as a single man. In the Republic, every citizen, by doing what they want and nothing but what they want, participates directly in the legislation and in the government, as they participate in the production and circulation of wealth. There, every citizen is king; for he has the fullness of power; he reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty subjected to order, as in the constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned in order, as the Provisional Government intends. It is liberty delivered from all its shackles: superstition, prejudice, sophistry, stock-jobbing, authority. It is reciprocal liberty, and not the liberty which restricts; liberty, not the daughter of order, but the mother of order. […]

New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Miserere” (1845)

March 25, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

On ordinary Sundays, for about three-quarters of the year, the Miserere serves as the introit, or, as one might say, the entrance to the mass. The celebrant, before making the lustral sprinkling, a ceremony preserved from the pagan ritual (among the Jews the sprinkling was done with blood), intones the seventh verse, Asperges me; the choir finishes the antiphon, and all the people respond: Miserere. Neither of them know what they are saying: isn’t it time to teach them? […]

Working Translations

Auguste Beauchery, “Solution of the Problem of Certainty”

February 14, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

We would have liked to offer the reader a summary, however succinct, of the solution to the problem of certainty provided by M. Proudhon using the serial method; but this serious question—which offers to legitimize our knowledge in an absolute way, which claims nothing less than to demonstrate the certainty of our judgments, which has been declared unapproachable by philosophy, which has been attacked on all sides by the greatest geniuses who have elightened humanity, and which has been abandoned after having watched the most profound intelligences follow one after another in vain, for centuries, and die at the task—cannot be accepted as resolved in a quintessence. […]

New Proudhon Library

Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: First Study (Parallel English)

February 6, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

The theory of Immanence, while resolving the apparent contradictions of morality, still explains all the fictions of the allegedly revealed system. It gives, so to speak, the natural history of theology and worship, the reason for the mysteries, the biography of the gods. It shows us how religion was born from the preponderance given in society to one of the essential elements of the soul, an element which, sovereign in metaphysics, must remain secondary in practice, the Ideal. It is only of yesterday, and we already owe to it that spark which makes the lights of the old faith pale; slandered excessively, it will save us from the corruptions in extremis of a reaction to despair and a religiosity that is dying out. […]