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.
If we step entirely away from legal/governmental conceptions of liberty, where it is a question of permissions and prohibitions, then one of the options is to address liberty in terms similar to those used by Proudhon. He spoke about quantities of liberty within beings and social collectivities, determined by the complexity and intensity of their internal relations. […]
I’ve been thinking, off and on, about running the What is Property? seminar again this summer — and continuing it on past the First Memoir to some of the material that has been translated since […]
[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] The anarcho-Fourierist renaissance continues. In “The Lesson of the Pear Growers’ Series,” I had suggested that there might still be some lessons to be learned from Charles Fourier’s approach […]
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“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.