It’s a question again of “legitimate authority” and “justified hierarchy,” and specifically of the favorite example used by those who want to leave a space within anarchist theory for those things: the care of very young children. The argument I have encountered repeatedly is that parenting is, at least in the case of those very young children, a necessarily authoritarian relation: children must be ordered about in order to protect them from hazards; parents have a duty and presumably also a right to dictate to their children; and children have an obligation to obey.
It’s one of those debates that all too often comes down to: “WHY WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!” And... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
One should not be mistaken: individualist anarchists are negators, destroyers, demolishers. They are those who believe in nothing, respect nothing. Nothing in fact is exempt from their critique of disintegration, Nothing is sacred.
When do they make a critique?
At every moment. Not one event or one historical fact which can not be critiqued. Not one suffering, not one sorrow, not one mourning which can not give rise to a critique; not one human drama which does not suggest a critique.
Where does one criticize?
In every milieu
How does one criticize?
With enthusiasm. With courage. With sincerity, The individualist critiques if it depended on themselves for their entourage to become an entirely indivi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I have always been the one that I was, and I will always be the one that I could be; for two relative subjects alone are true: the sun could not become the moon, but if by some chance it should become it, it would no longer be the sun. So who is it that wishes to divert my course?
Do not dam the river, if you have good sense.
Let the joyous violence rush along its tranquil bed. Don’t you see how merrily it sings as it hastens towards its ocean?
I say to you, wise ones: Do not make tragic what can be cheerful. That would be an injury to everything, but the worst harm would be at the expense of human beauty.
And let this be said once again to the too-long ears of the ancient aristocracy, for it is not only a ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In the biographical introduction to Tucker’s edition of What is Property? is a brief mention that around 1851 Proudhon’s “entertained the idea of writing a universal history entitled “Chronos.” This project was never fulfilled.” There was probably no shortage of “universal history” in France by 1850, although an entry by Proudhon would no doubt have been novel and interesting. The Saint-Simonians and their allies, including P. J. B. Buchez, Auguste Ott, Pierre Leroux, had written volume after volume on the subject. In 1849, William B. Greene published his Remarks On The History Of Science; Followed By An Apriori Autobiography, which was greeted by Boston’s radical ministers with “i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Besançon, August 3, 1840
TO THE MEMBERS OF THE ACADEMY OF BESANÇON
Gentlemen, I have learned through the confidences of some of my friends that the publication of my Memoir on Propriété, and especially the preface addressed to the Academy of Besançon, which appears at the beginning of that Memoir, have roused your displeasure, not to mention you indignation, against me. That is the motive that enlists me to explain to you here, in few words and in all their simplicity, my conduct and my intentions.
First of all, what has been taken for a dedication is only a simple report, which my condition as the Suard pensionnaire and the obligation imposed on me to make known each year the progress... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
My dear Villiaumé, it is too warm for me to venture, with my sick head, all the way to Rue Marsollier. I am thinking instead of fleeing for ten or twelve days to some hole in Franche-Comté, where the devil may perhaps not come to torment me with his pomps and work.
But you, who are spry, come some evening after your dinner and we will have a mug at the local cabaret, which will do you as much good as an ample banquet. Friendship, and understanding as well, is surely found in a modest to your health.
I regret to learn of the illness of Béranger, whom I have not seen.
I had intended to pay tribute to him this year with a copy of my next book: it is an honor that will be denied me.
It occurs to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I consider life as an experience—or, to be honest, as a series of experiences—that are to be rendered as rich, as abundant and as varied as possible. I think that individuals attains the state of consciousness, of intelligent reaction to the environment, to the degree that we analyze and renew the experiences of life, as we run the gamut of emotions or sensations, sometimes because we encounter them inevitably on the keyboard of our existence, and sometimes because, knowing this and wishing it, we provoke them.
What I say of life in this sense must be understood of the inward or intellectual life, that of the sensations or the affections. Life considered in terms of the accomplishment of organic functions — however ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
[The State] is itself, if I may put it this way, a sort of citizen…”
—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon[2]
For more than a hundred years, anti-statism has been a key principle of anarchism. But this was not always the case. A search of English- and French-language sources suggests that for much of the nineteenth century, the term “statism” (or “étatisme”) did not have its present meaning. In the political realm, it simply meant “statesmanship.” As late as the 1870s, the American anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews used the term to mean “a tendency to immobility,” without apparent fear of confusion, and the American Dental Association considering adopting Andrews... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In the first place, anarchy for the anarchists and not for the syndicalists, the free thinkers or others, who are big enough boys to manage their own affairs. In the second place, concrete realization, logical consequence of the fact that, if we are asocial, we are eminently sociable: Formation of an Anarchist Individualist International based, to begin with, on the following relations:
A) Of the intellectual order: Groups for anarchist education based on free inquiry and the free discussion of the methods and systems addressed to the intellect. Consolidation and selection of minds resistant to all unilateral, dogmatic or class-based education.
Creation of schools (Thursday schools, vacation schools and night schools, if we ca... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Translator’s Introduction: I’ve been working through the texts in Ms. 2867, part of Economie, looking for material to include in the forthcoming edition of The Philosophy of Progress, and I’ve been finding all sorts of interesting things. The following section comes immediately after the “New Propositions Demonstrated in the Practice Of Revolutions,” so we should perhaps understand by “this organization” the program laid out at the end of that section: “To set aside the notion of substance and Cause, and move onto the terrain of Phenomena and Law, or of the Group.” While the translation here has a fair number of gaps in it (which can hopefully be filled by some more work with the manuscr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Modern right, by introducing itself in the place of the ancient right, has done one new thing: it has put in the presence of one another, on the same line, two powers which until now had been in a relation of subordination. These two powers are the State and the Individual, in other words Government and Liberty.
The Revolution, indeed, has not suppressed that occult, mystical presence, that one called the sovereign, and that we name more willingly the State; it has not reduced society to lone individuals, compromising, contracting between them, and of their free transaction making for themselves a common law, as the Social Contract of J.-J. Rousseau gave us to understand.
No, Government, Power, State, as on wishes to call it, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
CARNETS, VOLUME 1
Carnets, Vol. 1 (Carnet No. 1, 17): 27.
Serial law. Everything in nature is simple and complex. What we call a simple idea or element is nothing but the term with which we ended our analysis. Each day I experience the truth of that observation, […]
Carnets, Vol. 1 (Carnet 2, 38): 133.
In order to organize society, to reestablish order, we must not wish to escape antinomic principles; we must seek one that coordinates with them. This principle exists, simpler and more common than anything the laws have ever prescribed: return it to its rank.
Let us not seek a way out of the contradictions that’s press us; there is no way out. Let us manage ourselves [or come to an agreement] with t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Quote:
Property is robbery.
Slavery is murder.
- P. J. Proudhon
Quote:
We are Abolitionists from the North, come to take and release your slaves; our organization is large, and must succeed. I suffered much in Kansas, and expect to suffer here, in the cause of human freedom. Slaveholders I regard as robbers and murderers; and I have sworn to abolish slavery and liberate my fellow-men.
- John Brown
A handful of free soilers have just attempted a relief of slaves on the frontiers of Virginia and Maryland. They have not won and they are dead, but they have at least died fighting; they have sown the future victory in the fields of defeat. John Brown, who had previously fought in K... (From: LibCom.org.)
One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon’s work come from double-checking those things that “everyone knows” about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying “anarchy is order” that I ran across the dubious translations in The General Idea of the Revolution, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that term.
When I started working through what I was finding, I was reminded that some of Proudhon&rs... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
P.-J. Proudhon’s Solution du Problème Social consists of five sections: “Solution du Problème Social;” “Organization du Crédit et de la Circulation;” “Résumé de la Question Social;” “Banque d’Échange;” and “Banque du Peuple.” The collection does not seem to have been included in the Rivière edition of the Oeuvres Complète, so the standard French edition is vol. 8 of the edition by A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven and Co. (1868) This edition is available on microfiche from John Zube’s Libertarian Microfiche Project, and the major untranslated sections will also soon be available in pdf form from the Libertarian Labyr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
It seems to me that our old pro-revolutionary Anarchist literature has ceased to answer the demands of the modern day. Without going now into any discussion as to whether Anarchist literature has ever adequately dealt with the practical application of our ideas, the question at issue now is whether the time has not come for a new and more popular interpretation of our ideas, particularly in light of the World War, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent vital social developments.
I feel that with the almost generally admitted fact of the bankruptcy of Socialism and the growing conviction of the failure of Bolshevism and of revolutionary party dictatorship, the opportunities for Anarchist propaganda have immeasurably increased. Peop... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Relation of the State and Liberty, according to modern right.
Modern right, by introducing itself in the place of the ancient right, has done one new thing: it has put in the presence of one another, on the same line, two powers which until now had been in a relation of subordination. These two powers are the State and the Individual, in other words Government and Liberty.
The Revolution, indeed, has not suppressed that occult, mystical presence, that one called the sovereign, and that we name more willingly the State; it has not reduced society to lone individuals, compromising, contracting between them, and of their free transaction making for themselves a common law, as the Social Contract of J.-J. Rousseau gave us to under... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Translator’s note
This passage is generally known as part of “God and the State” (Dieu et l’État, first published in 1882), but it appears in Bakunin’s manuscript as part of “Sophismes historiques de l’école doctrinaire des communistes allemands,” the second section of the unfinished book L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Révolution Sociale (The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.)
This new translation seeks to clarify some passages that may appear contradictory in existing translations. In particularly the verb repousser, which previous translators have tended to simply render as “reject,” has been brought closer to its literal... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
What is now being called “postanarchism” by some thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word, thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the post- prefix applies to its new object as well — implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete. Together, these two senses of the word form a narrative: an aging, spent force (anarchism) is to be saved from obsolescence and irrelevance by being fuzed with a fresh, vital force (poststructuralism). We would like to question t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)