Proudhon, What is Government? What is God?

May 26, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur Contr'un, translations

Proudhon’s essay “What is Government? What is God?” appeared first in the Voix du Peuple, November 5, 1849, then as the preface to The Confessions of a Revolutionary, as well as in the Melanges volumes of the Lacroix collected works. It was the occasion for one of the more important responses by Pierre Leroux—a response which seems to have influenced William Batchelder Greene.

About Shawn P. Wilbur 2,752 Articles
Independent scholar, translator and archivist.

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Contr'un

Proudhon on Property (1846) – Conclusion

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Here is the final section of Proudhon’s study on property, from the Contradictions. The other sections I posted recently will appear, in full or part, in the forthcoming AK Press anthology, but this section didn’t make the cut for various reasons, not the least of which was its difficulty. The translation is still considerably rougher than the others in a few places, but I think most of it is clear and very interesting. As of today, I have officially begun a revision and annotation of Benjamin R. Tucker’s translations of the first two memoirs on property. Since the translations are generally […]
Proudhon Library

On the Absolute (1851)

January 14, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur Proudhon Library, Working Translations
P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet no. 9, 112-115): 287-290 [112] July 26 [1851]. — On the Absolute. — All the religions, all the old metaphysics, are based on the notion of the absolute, on the concepts of Substance-Cause, indivisibly united. Now, that conception is nothing other than a datum or hypothesis of the understanding, according to the first experience. It is soon contradicted by a more attentive observation of phenomena and their laws. Enlightened by the sequence and series of natural and human facts, the mind soon abandons this inexact, chimerical point of view, full of obscurities and contradictions, […]

1 Comment

  1. “Who knows if we could not discover then that all these governmental formulas, for which the Peoples and citizens have slit each others’ throats for sixty centuries, are only a phantasmagoria of our mind, that the first duty of a free reason is to return to the museums and libraries?”

    Authority is indeed an illusion. It’s simply amazing how people project the state as the institution which grants them their freedom, but it’s not surprising when you understand how people have been conditioned to believe so, and how the most arrogant view the state as an extension of themselves.

    I think I will share this with a friend from college (who is also a philosophy major) since she is interested in anarchism.

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