On January 1, 2019, I began what was, at the time, undoubtedly the too-ambitious project of translating Proudhon’s massive Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” I worked up a decent translation of the opening “Program,” learned some important lessons about what I did not yet understand about Proudhon’s work and promptly moved on to more promising projects.
I have translated a lot of bit and pieces in the years since then and have contemplated taking up the project again. Early in 2019, I made an “immodest proposal” to a group of Proudhon scholars, suggesting that we begin to construct an English-language edition of Proudhon around Justice and some related texts. There wasn’t enough interest to pursue things—and I turned a lot of my attention to the later works associated with Proudhon’s study of Poland: the unpublished Géographie politique et Nationalité, posthumously published Théorie de la propriété, Du Principe fédératif, etc. My understanding of the overall trajectory of Proudhon’s work has steadily increased and I’ve had occasion recently to go back and address one of the bigger holes in my knowledge, finally starting to take a much closer look at the Economie manuscripts, which, it turns out, contained methodological writings I didn’t know I was missing.
Justice, however, has continue to look like a mighty large task to tackle. The publication of a translation of Proudhon’s War and Peace finally pushed me back in that direction, starting me on a read-through of Justice, which immediately preceded it and established the framework for the analysis. That turned out to be a very useful exercise—useful enough that I’ve finally decided to give the translation of the work another try. So here we go…
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.” I have also prepared the texts of Proudhon’s typeset, but unpublished 1859 work, Comment les affaires vont en France, et pourquoi nous aurons la guerre, si nous l’avons : à propos des nouveaux projets de traités entre les compagnies de chemin de fer et l’Etat, and Jenny P. d’Héricourt’s La Femme Affrancie, to fill in some contexts and to provide a bit of variation in my routine if need be.
Initially, the drafts will be very unpolished, while I stack up questions about how best to present the work for modern use. Once I’ve completed drafts of a couple of studies, then I’ll probably start to mix in some revision with the ongoing translation. The pace required to complete the work in a year is not extreme, but it will undoubtedly feel a bit relentless at times—and there are other tasks, including some writing that feels a bit urgent, that will also make demands on my time. I’ll consider any significant dent made in the work a victory and certainly leave myself the option of changing plans if more compelling projects present themselves.
For now, however, things are rolling along pretty well. I have posted a draft of the “Preliminary Discourse” and, for those unfamiliar with the work, I’ll add the “Analytical Table of Contents” from the first edition below:
Analytic Table of Contents
PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE
Argument. — Pyrrhonism, having struck ideas, attacks morals. The problem of philosophical certainty thus leads us back to the problem of rights and duties, or the moral problem, so that the solution to the one would provide the key to the other. However, the moral question can only be resolved by the Revolution or by the Church, the first being an organ of purely juridical thought, the second an organ of religious thought. Any ethics inevitably falls into one system or the other. However, thanks to the opinion that attributes the principle of justice and morality to superhuman considerations, the question of rights has never been completely detached from the question of faith; a bit of religion was always mixed in with the cause of freedom, a little freedom was always introduced into the religious system; and the Revolution could never overthrow the Church, nor the Church prevent the triumph of the Revolution. It seems therefore that the way to have done with this, to save the Revolution along with human conscience and certainty, would be to change hypotheses, first by abandoning any thought of reconciliation between two manifestly incompatible powers; secondly, and most importantly, by posing the question of rights outside of any theodicy. Thus, there are two options: either it is the Church which shall possess the true science of morals, and with it, the reason of humanity and things, and consequently the Revolution should be rejected as immoral; or the contrary shall take place. Such is the crucial question that we have proposed to investigate in these studies.
FIRST STUDY: POSITION OF THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE.
Argument. — For society to be possible, a principle of regularization of human relationships, something like what we call Justice, is needed. But this principle, in order to act effectively, cannot be reduced to a notion of pure intellect; it must be a power, a reality. The universal consensus is in accord with this premise, but it is divided over the conclusion, resulting in two systems: one, that of transcendence, consists in placing outside of man, either a God, or a constituted authority, the Church or the State, the subject or author of the law; the other, that of the Revolution, places the juridical subject within the conscience, and makes it identical to man himself.
SECOND STUDY: PERSONS
Argument. — This study, together with those following, aims to prove that, in any religious hypothesis whatsoever, Justice, having its reality outside of man, is reduced for man to a pure concept of the intellect, without action on the conscience; that moreover, by this removal of his faculty of judgment, an ablation which is the essence of any religion, humanity finds itself constituted in a state of natural degradation and invincible immorality, from which religion is thereafter powerless to remove it. The famous dogma of original sin, common to the whole church and all theodicy; corruption of morals due to the same religion. – Based on this experience, the Revolution explains by what optical illusion of the intellect man projects what is within himself outside of himself, and makes of his own Justice an idol that is no longer himself; how, in the infancy of societies, this hypothesis could serve for the education of consciences; how subsequently, after having been the auxiliary of the conscience, religion has become a tyrant over it. Reductio ad absurdum of the Christian system and all its analogues: there is no salvation for Justice, society, man, outside of the Revolution.
THIRD STUDY: GOODS
Argument. — The hypothesis religious and ecclesiastical constitution, what they are, making the Justice and an external power greater than humanity, the right command, the duty One topic, the result, in social practice, a completely arbitrary, “not only about the people, declared unworthy by nature and without rights, but about the goods, whose distribution along the system, belongs to God and the Church, that is to say at random and arbitrary. Famous theory of favoritism or of grace; profound immorality that follows. The Church’s interest in maintaining the faith in poverty and denied equal property as equal people, even denying any kind of rational economy, leads to the religious community tried to generalize it to the Middle Ages and it strives to restore today. Unlawful interference of the clergy in the business, increasing illegitimacy of ecclesiastical property; risk for families and free labor. — With regard to the absolute lack of distributive justice, inherent in any society incorporated on a mystical idea, the Revolution laid the foundations of the new economy by a simple conversion of reciprocity of respect or personal, in reciprocal service or law real. Theory of equality; overview of the economic equilibrium.
FOURTH STUDY: THE STATE
Argument. — Immorality in the political order is a consequence of immorality in the economic order. By virtue of its dogma, the Church not only accepts this new immorality, which it attributes to Destiny; it confirms it, it consecrates it, by its theories of providential reign and predestination. The fatal instability of States, on which the Church prevails as a testimony to its own eternity; the failed attempt at theocracy; the systematic destruction of morality by the substitution of the reason of State for Justice; the convulsions of society. — In place of this political nihilism, the Revolution proposes its positive and realist theory of social power, impersonal, invisible, anonymous, a resultant of the commutative action of economic forces and of industrial groups, that is, liberty itself.
FIFTH STUDY: EDUCATION
Argument. — Whether religion is a product of a mystical intuition or a metaphysical speculation, and whether the Church that serves as its expression is organized for aristocracy or for communism, since this religion posits the principle of right apart from the human subject, education must also necessarily be outside of humanity, and ends in a system of depravity. Thus, the soul, not cultivated as a living germ that has its law in itself and only asks to develop freely but treated as a uniform, obscure and bad nature that is to be given its path, its movement, and its quality by an extrinsic action, man becomes, by way of the education given him by the Church, a hypocrite, since his conscience is not within himself; a stranger to himself, since his end is outside himself; a stranger to society, which, by way of its State reason, sometimes makes him a serf, sometimes privileges him, but in all cases deprives him of the reason of things and respect for persons; a stranger, finally, to the earth on which he stands like an exile, and which has nothing in common with him. And since the inevitable result of such an education, by depriving him of all of his own justice, of all freedom of spirit, of any regard for his kind, of any communion with nature, is to render existence unhappy, death will be all the more miserable to the extent that the devotion of the subject to its faith will have been greater. – Contrary theories of free conscience, egalitarian teaching, the possession of nature, and a good death.
SIXTH STUDY: LABOR
Argument. — Labor, in its repugnant and painful aspect, creates for man a fatality that constantly tends to throw him back into bondage, which the economic balance, political organization, and education are meant, on the contrary, to stop. There is only one means to overcome this calamity that threatens Justice and undermines civilization: it is to make work passionate, which can only be accomplished on one condition: namely, that every worker makes of his person, during the course of his career, a representative [représentant] of the totality of industrial development. Hence it follows that the problem of passional labor [travail passionel], in other words, of emancipated labor [travail affranchi], is the same as that of the origin of knowledge and the formation of ideas, that the apprenticeship of trades presents itself as a branch of public education. But here, as everywhere, theology is signaled by its anti-practical genius; following it, Church and State have decreed, by the dignity of the spirit, the human bondage to pain. Antipathy of spiritualist philosophy to labor; impotence of charity. – The Revolution, in solving the problem, destroys the revelation in its cause and renders impossible any social hierarchy.
SEVENTH STUDY: IDEAS
Argument. — Since the beginning of civilization, humans have conceived of the truth and law of things as being of an essence superior to individual enlightenment, which the intimate sense and the practice of life denounced at every moment as troubled and contradictory. Private authority, too, was at all times suspect, and one sought the general reason or certainty sometimes in revelations and oracles, sometimes in the spontaneous or reflected consent of peoples, then in metaphysical meditations, finally, and in desperation, in observation and experience. Everything was a law of this research: the opposition of interests, the lie of formulas, the endless variations of the legislator, the even more variable interpretation of the judge, the uncertainties of the philosophers, the continually resurgent contradiction between institutions, on the one hand, and everyday experience on the other. After ignorance of the laws of Justice economic, political and industrial, ignorance of the conditions for the general reason is the biggest cause of demoralization that afflicts the human race. Insufficiency of the guarantees proposed: the corruption of science and the public reason by ecclesiastical authority; universal skepticism, the pact of falsehood, tyranny of the absolute. – The Revolution brings light to these shadows: after determining the positive object and limits of metaphysics, it proclaims the reality of the collective reason, its specific distinction from the individual reason, and, on the ruins of probabilist immorality, founds the indestructible edifice of the public faith.
EIGHTH STUDY: CONSCIENCE AND FREEDOM.
Argument. — Whatever the doctrine and constitution of a church, if this church accepts the reality and efficacity of consciousness, in other words, the principle of immanent Justice, it loses its raison d’être and ceases to exist; if it recognizes, apart from divine commandment, a difference between right and wrong, it ceases to exist; if it has the intelligence of and respect for freedom, again, it ceases to exist. The Church therefore denies the sufficiency of consciousness and the reality of Justice; it denies the justification of humanity itself, which denies the subjective distinction between good and evil, and it accuses freedom, which it does not understand, of being the enemy of God. From this, in the first place, comes the moral pyrrhonism which, under the pretext of divine sanction, is the foundation of all theology; from this, then, comes that system of authority and discipline by which the Church undertook to compel weak and fallen natures to goodness; from this, finally, when religious faith falters, comes the corruption and spirit of tyranny that captured the whole nation in which criticism, having read religion, left morality without foundations. How then raise the company slumped? Will that by the Justice, whose concept, apart from theology, barely exists, and that so long concern about the divine ability to feel, or freedom, which mystery is even more impenetrable, and formally deny that the philosophers? The ancient nations have succumbed to the problem, and we are in danger of succumbing in our turn. – Here again the Revolution raises itself up: it demonstrates, contrary to theological pyrrhonism, the reality and effectiveness of the moral sense; against the sophistry of the reason of Church and reason of State, the certainty of the distinction between good and evil; against the fatalism of the philosophers and the mythology of revelation, the nature and function of freedom.
NINTH STUDY: PROGRESS AND DECADENCE
Argument. — Had it been possible for mankind to remain faithful to the religious thought that inaugurates its existence in spite of the accumulation of its discoveries, the progress of its industry, the evolution of its politics, it would have lived in a state of uninterrupted decadence; scrofulous as a child, it would have been born to rot; its destiny, hideously perverted, would have been but a long decomposition. There is, in this, a threefold cause: 1. Man, by virtue of his religion, incredulous at himself, has faith in the Divinity, which distorts him and soon arrests the movement of justice; 2. By virtue of the same religion, he follows the ideal rather than right, and loses himself in idolatry and immorality; 3. Society, also by the effect of this cult, conceives a false idea of its destiny, which it equates with that of inferior existences; such that, as its thoughts have turned toward death, its institutions and his tendency inexorably push it towards it. And history shows that this, or very close to it, has indeed been the life of humanity: this life is not exactly continuous, it consists of a series of collective existences placed end to end, handing down the torch of civilization from one to the next, but all ending miserably, as if they had received only enough vital force to extend their agony for longer or shorter periods.
The Revolution, in teaching us to deduce from the theory of Justice and Freedom the theory of Progress, puts an end to such despair. It shows, by logic and fact, that if the virtue proper to the soul, if the joy of conscience, following the burst of genius, have suffered a long eclipse under the influence of religious sorrow, this eclipse is coming to an end, and the greatest success, a superior felicity, awaits us.
TENTH STUDY: LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Argument. — Everything in marriage reveals an institution which has as its goal to subordinate love to justice, in accordance with the theory of perfectibility, and to make this passion, essentially idealistic, the most powerful auxiliary of consciousness starting on the the most energetic means of Progress. How is it that Religion, in sanctifying marriage, has not been able to preserve its dignity, to the point that the institution has continued to decline. both in the internal forum and in the external forum; that Christian marriage has remained inferior to pagan marriage, and that the Church has always confused legitimate union with concubinary union? How is it that by dint of deifying love, the mysticism of theologians, as well as the speculation of philosophers, drives it to the most infamous corruption?
ELEVENTH STUDY: LOVE AND MARRIAGE (CONT.)
Argument. — All religions have misunderstood the character of woman: first, they have insulted her; then they exalted her beyond measure, and promised her a destiny equal, if not superior, to that of man. What does this contradiction signify? It is that Religion, taking for itself the mission of sex, which is to bring man to Justice by the attraction of Beauty, no longer knew what to do with woman; that, considering her outside her destiny, she must find in her an impure and objectless being, to whom henceforth she had only to propose celestial nuptials and the glory of the other life.
The Revolution, after having remade the Platonic and Christian utopia of the social equality of the sexes, provides the theory of marriage, disciplines love, restores woman to her role, and says to her: QUEEN OF GRACE, RISE UP ON THE ALTAR.
TWELFTH STUDY: MORAL SANCTION
Argument. — Religion, having no morality, has no moral sanction either; she does not even know what the word sanction means here. Far from encouraging the good and terrifying the wicked with its rewards and punishments, it can boast of having thereby rehabilitated sin and dishonored virtue. — Outline of the contrary effects of a good and a bad conscience, in the individual, the family, the city; in the public economy and government. Revolutionary theory of legal solidarity and sanctioning law; cause and cessation of regicide; constitution of philosophy; solution of the problem of certainty.
