From Freedom News (20/01/2025).
Instead of anarchist lore, we need historical context and an open mind
Shawn P Wilbur
It’s challenging to think about Pierre-Joseph Proudhon today: like it or not, we struggle with him in his role as a progenitor, precursor, pioneer, as the first to say “Je suis anarchiste”, under circumstances where that declaration simply could not mean what it has meant to subsequent anarchists. We recognize him as the author of the phrase “property is theft,” which we are happy to repeat with or without understanding his specific anti-capitalist critique. We linger (with good reason) on his shortcomings: his public anti-feminism, his private bursts of anti-semitism, perhaps his positions on the strike. We question whether his mutualism was radical enough to achieve anarchy. We are also often told that Proudhon changed his mind about some fundamental things later in life, like property and maybe even anarchy. And when all of the pieces don’t seem to fit together, we settle on him being a “man of paradox”.
The truth is that we don’t know all that much about Proudhon. The anarchist movement has somehow never managed to quite embrace him or distance itself from him, but that ambivalence, particularly in the English-speaking world, has resulted in a rather striking lack of translations and studies of his work. Iain McKay’s groundbreaking Property is Theft! (AK Press, 2011) is presently the only widely available introduction. Many of his key writings remain unpublished and untranslated, accessible only as scans of his handwriting.
In the last two years, I have refocused and intensified my own desultory attempts to translate Proudhon’s work, resulting in the production of more than two million words’ worth of draft translations—from both published and previously unpublished manuscript sources. The centerpiece and first focus of this New Proudhon Library is a translation of his massive masterwork, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, in both of its editions, which should soon be in a state suitable for serious study.
Through this work I am beginning to encounter a Proudhon who often seems to haunt the conversation when I tell other anarchists what I’m working on. I hope that some glimpses of this Proudhon will prove appealing enough for readers to want to explore more of his work. Certain phrases and anecdotes stick out, of course, and it is tempting to present a few as counterpoint to those that are more familiar.
In Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Proudhon gives us glimpses of his lonely, precocious childhood, running around the mountains of the Jura and digging his feet into the mud of his native Franche-Comté. We see him boasting, bristling at those who had declared him an “an enemy of God”, that “circumstances, I say, made me the Epimenides of sans-culottism; perhaps, in another era, I would have been its Spartacus.”
His infamous notebooks contain their share of gems. One personal favorite is this:
All these isms are not worth a pair of boots.
Others are less idiosyncratic, but are perhaps just as striking in their way:
Governments, whatever their form, are the source of every evil.
Men have said: Let’s create an authority in our midst. They should have said: Let’s organise.
In his Philosophy of Progress he describes himself as “the man whose thought always advances, whose program will never be finished.” In that ceaseless advancing, he admits, there have been “a few lapses, or some false steps,” but “far from blushing at so many spills, I would be tempted to boast of them, and to measure my valor by the number of my contusions”.
While in some ways the past is still very distant and hard to decipher, digital technology has made it amazingly more accessible to independent researchers, and certainly more than to those who lived in the eras that interest us. My own work has provided all sorts of opportunities to engage with Proudhon’s thoughts, his literary style, handwriting and compositional process, as they developed over time. It’s all fascinating—deeply so—though in many ways Proudhon still eludes me.
However, once you study Proudhon’s work, you find out that the slogans and bon mots that anarchists and others have appropriated so casually are often attached to a well-developed sort of social science. The phrase “property is theft” gets a bit lost in the exposition, but Proudhon never abandoned the anti-capitalist critique it marks. Indeed, most of the instances where critics have seen him reversing course and distancing himself from anarchism should instead be understood in light of his rather complicated approach to language and the definability of concepts.
A number of very recent publications mark a renewed interest in Proudhon—translations by Cayce Jamil of Pierre Ansart’s Proudhon’s Sociology and by Shaun Murdock of Célestin Bouglé’s French Socialisms, and Mike Tyldesley’s Liberate and Federate, a study of “Proudhonists” in anti-fascist circles. Particularly exciting is the English publication of Proudhon’s War and Peace. A massive, challenging work—edited by Alex Prichard, for whom it was undoubtedly something of a labour of love, and ably translated by Paul Sharkey—it has provided the best opportunity yet for readers to encounter the mature Proudhon at the height of his powers. I hope readers also take advantage of my own translation project to access his work in English, and put away anarchist (and anti-anarchist) lore in favour of historical context and open-minded engagement.
For further English language material by and on Proudhon, see the libcom.org website and The Anarchist Library.
Will the real Proudhon please stand up?
From Freedom News (20/01/2025).
Instead of anarchist lore, we need historical context and an open mind
Shawn P Wilbur
It’s challenging to think about Pierre-Joseph Proudhon today: like it or not, we struggle with him in his role as a progenitor, precursor, pioneer, as the first to say “Je suis anarchiste”, under circumstances where that declaration simply could not mean what it has meant to subsequent anarchists. We recognize him as the author of the phrase “property is theft,” which we are happy to repeat with or without understanding his specific anti-capitalist critique. We linger (with good reason) on his shortcomings: his public anti-feminism, his private bursts of anti-semitism, perhaps his positions on the strike. We question whether his mutualism was radical enough to achieve anarchy. We are also often told that Proudhon changed his mind about some fundamental things later in life, like property and maybe even anarchy. And when all of the pieces don’t seem to fit together, we settle on him being a “man of paradox”.
The truth is that we don’t know all that much about Proudhon. The anarchist movement has somehow never managed to quite embrace him or distance itself from him, but that ambivalence, particularly in the English-speaking world, has resulted in a rather striking lack of translations and studies of his work. Iain McKay’s groundbreaking Property is Theft! (AK Press, 2011) is presently the only widely available introduction. Many of his key writings remain unpublished and untranslated, accessible only as scans of his handwriting.
In the last two years, I have refocused and intensified my own desultory attempts to translate Proudhon’s work, resulting in the production of more than two million words’ worth of draft translations—from both published and previously unpublished manuscript sources. The centerpiece and first focus of this New Proudhon Library is a translation of his massive masterwork, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, in both of its editions, which should soon be in a state suitable for serious study.
Through this work I am beginning to encounter a Proudhon who often seems to haunt the conversation when I tell other anarchists what I’m working on. I hope that some glimpses of this Proudhon will prove appealing enough for readers to want to explore more of his work. Certain phrases and anecdotes stick out, of course, and it is tempting to present a few as counterpoint to those that are more familiar.
In Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Proudhon gives us glimpses of his lonely, precocious childhood, running around the mountains of the Jura and digging his feet into the mud of his native Franche-Comté. We see him boasting, bristling at those who had declared him an “an enemy of God”, that “circumstances, I say, made me the Epimenides of sans-culottism; perhaps, in another era, I would have been its Spartacus.”
His infamous notebooks contain their share of gems. One personal favorite is this:
Others are less idiosyncratic, but are perhaps just as striking in their way:
In his Philosophy of Progress he describes himself as “the man whose thought always advances, whose program will never be finished.” In that ceaseless advancing, he admits, there have been “a few lapses, or some false steps,” but “far from blushing at so many spills, I would be tempted to boast of them, and to measure my valor by the number of my contusions”.
While in some ways the past is still very distant and hard to decipher, digital technology has made it amazingly more accessible to independent researchers, and certainly more than to those who lived in the eras that interest us. My own work has provided all sorts of opportunities to engage with Proudhon’s thoughts, his literary style, handwriting and compositional process, as they developed over time. It’s all fascinating—deeply so—though in many ways Proudhon still eludes me.
However, once you study Proudhon’s work, you find out that the slogans and bon mots that anarchists and others have appropriated so casually are often attached to a well-developed sort of social science. The phrase “property is theft” gets a bit lost in the exposition, but Proudhon never abandoned the anti-capitalist critique it marks. Indeed, most of the instances where critics have seen him reversing course and distancing himself from anarchism should instead be understood in light of his rather complicated approach to language and the definability of concepts.
A number of very recent publications mark a renewed interest in Proudhon—translations by Cayce Jamil of Pierre Ansart’s Proudhon’s Sociology and by Shaun Murdock of Célestin Bouglé’s French Socialisms, and Mike Tyldesley’s Liberate and Federate, a study of “Proudhonists” in anti-fascist circles. Particularly exciting is the English publication of Proudhon’s War and Peace. A massive, challenging work—edited by Alex Prichard, for whom it was undoubtedly something of a labour of love, and ably translated by Paul Sharkey—it has provided the best opportunity yet for readers to encounter the mature Proudhon at the height of his powers. I hope readers also take advantage of my own translation project to access his work in English, and put away anarchist (and anti-anarchist) lore in favour of historical context and open-minded engagement.
For further English language material by and on Proudhon, see the libcom.org website and The Anarchist Library.