glossary entries

Anarchy 101

A Return to the Question of the “Polity-Form”

March 2, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur

The polity-form, then, in its simplest sense, is the form given to social collectivities when they are accounted for, explained, “realized” (in the language used by Louis Blanc in 1849-50), etc. by a transformation into political units. In this process, individuals — participants in the social relations that give rise to these social collectivities — are reimagined as citizens, subjects, members of the political unit, with rights, duties, privileges, etc. granted or imposed as a result. This governmental relation seems inescapably hierarchical — although in certain instances of extensive, stable consensus that hierarchy might be considered more or less “voluntary” (if only because there is no occasion for enforcement.) […]

Glossary

Polity-form (External constitution)

December 5, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

If we are to follow Proudhon’s an-archic account of social organization, we can expect the social collectivities that we encounter to be self-organizing associations of human beings, onto which some kind of governmental framework has been imposed from the outside. The authoritarian pretense is that society — human association in all its dynamic forms — has not really been established until the material relations of association have been seconded in some way by the establishment of an authority, sitting atop some kind of fundamentally political hierarchy. The anarchic response is that authority and hierarchy are inessential elements that we must learn to do without. […]

Contr'un

Neo-Proudhonian Anarchism (A Step toward Synthesis)

April 19, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

The more we learn about the history of mutualism, the clearer it becomes that the conception we have inherited was conceived—primarily by rivals of Proudhon’s thought—as a sort of theoretical foil for the communist “modern anarchism” of the late 19th century. It’s a rather complicated tale, since what Kropotkin called “modern anarchism” was, in fact, anarchism emerging for the first time, unless we count the purely literary emergence of the term in the works of Joseph Déjacque. There had, of course, been anarchists and theories of anarchy. […]

Glossary

Authority (Language of)

April 1, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] In societies where authority is the dominant principle, we can expect to find that the language of authority has become ubiquitous, often adapted to describe relationships in which authority, hierarchy, […]

Glossary

Legal Order

February 18, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

  In the anarchist context, it is common to approach the question of legal order by asking whether anarchists truly desire a society in which nothing is prohibited. This is, it seems to me, only […]

Glossary

Contr’un

May 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Links: A Contr’un Glossary Basically, the Contr’un is the star of the show here, the Whitmanesque subject who contains multitudes and is not contained between hat and boots, who spills out over all the property […]