Portrait of P.J. Proudhon, 1865 by Gustave Courbet
This is the first opportunity that we have had, as a collective, to celebrate and acknowledge the very impressive work by Shawn P. Wilbur of translating, publishing (into English) and reflecting upon – with others – “classical” anarchist theory and practice.
In particular, his ongoing translation of the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is a contribution of note to making this author’s ideas more accessible to anglophone readers.
His website – if we may be permitted to say “his” -, The Libertarian Labyrinth, is a virtual treasure trove of anarchist literature. And below, from this trove, we share a recent summary of Shawn P. Wilbur’s efforts to synthesise and distil a picture of anarchist theory, largely inspired by the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, along with a collection of quotations from the later’s work that helps us to understand the path that Wilbur has taken.
We can only wish that he may be able to continue this passionate exercise.
Some of the work I have done on anarchist history and theory has taken the form of synthesis, attempting to draw together elements from a variety of anarchist tendencies and milieus, or of a kind of reconciliation, as in the case of the “neo-Proudhonian synthesis,” based on the idea that the apparent discontinuities in anarchist ideas have been, in fact, more apparent than real. But with the material on “a schematic anarchism,” the process has been more a matter of distillation. Rather than engaging in the work of piecing fragments from the at least apparently disparate anarchist traditions together to form a coherent whole, it’s been more a matter of bringing my accumulated knowledge and understanding of anarchism and related traditions to a kind of critical boil, in order to see what is essential, or at least volatile, and what remains inert. It’s that approach that I want to take up again, more consciously, in this new work of general anarchist theory.
Ultimately, the most robust forms of anarchist thought are likely to result from the connection — encounter, conjugation, etc. — of more detail-oriented sorts of synthesis with this kind of distillation in the context of ongoing practical application. In a book, the scope of application is obviously limited, but hopefully that can be one kind of strength.
This work is really the first fruits of my work grappling with the notion of general anarchist history and, more specifically, of my work translating and interpreting Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. It’s important for me that this current work serves as an aid in understanding the work in progress, but part of what ultimately needs to be understood is that, while this sort of analysis almost certainly needs to be grounded somewhere, judgments about the general validity of the account will have to be based on much broader attempts at application. Fortunately, some simple means of moving from specific interpretations of Proudhon to an account that should, I hope, have a really general application can be derived from the same passages by Proudhon that will be examined. For anyone inclined to try a bit of dialectical sublation with regard to Proudhon and his work, well, my sense is that he may have provided the necessary tools himself.
The first conceptual connection to be attempted is between a notion that has played a central role in much of my work on anarchism — the encounter — and another, which recurs in the works of various 19th-century socialists, which we can call omnicentricity. For the first, my usual text has been a passage from the Seventh Study of Proudhon’s Justice, in which he describes “the whole social system:”
Two men meet, recognize their dignity, note the additional benefit that would result for both from the concert of their industries, and consequently guarantee equality, which amounts to saying economy. There you have the whole social system: an equation, and consequently a power of collectivity.
The same scenario is then described, with slightly different emphases, in the Ninth Study of the same work:
What is Justice? The pact of liberty.
Two men meet, with opposing interests. The debate begins; then they compromise: equation, first conquest of right, first establishment of justice. A third arrives, then another, and so on indefinitely: the pact that bound the first two extends to the newcomers; so many contracting parties, so many subjects of Justice. There is therefore progress, progress in Justice, of course, consequently progress in liberty: we will have to investigate later whether or not this progress in Justice and liberty carries with it progress in the totality of human being.
As a conceptual shortcut, a distillation, this is certainly an ambitious one, particularly when we consider all of the complexities introduced into Proudhon’s account of society by his theory of collective force. Still, he appears insistent. In the Seventh Study, he continues:
Two families, two cities, two provinces, contract on the same footing: there are always only these two things, an equation and a power of collectivity. It would imply contradiction, violation of Justice, if there was something else.
So it is a question of taking the leap, taking Proudhon at his word, and exploring this most schematic of “systems.” The problem, of course, is to try to find some equally schematic means of accounting for all the various individualities, collectivities, etc. that might engage in forms of mutual encounter. As my hope is to at least explore a very general theory, my next move has been what is perhaps an even more provocative leap, in order to stage an encounter between this “system” and the notion of omnicentricity.
As I have started to document on the “Texts” page for this project, Proudhon made use, on a number of occasions and in a variety of contexts, of the phrase “the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
Part One: The Anarchy of the Encounter
I. A Theory of the Individuality-Collectivity as an Unbounded Centrality, with particular attention to the constitution of the Human Self as a Free Absolute
The goal in this chapter is an account of the self, conceived in anarchic terms, as a special case among beings and things, themselves conceived as manifestations of evolving and unbounded “centers” or centralities. Along with various suggestive passages from Proudhon, this section will explore a reading of Max Stirner’s einzige as “the only one,” which I started in the “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism,” and some potentially related material from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s self, which both “contains multitudes” and “is not contained between hat and boots,” is perhaps the most approachable models to be examined — and perhaps it gives us something to cling to as we try to come to terms with what looks like an 1850s version of the body without organs in Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress:
The being [or simply being], at its highest degree of existence, is at once self and non-self: it can say equally, speaking of itself as of others, I, you, he, we, you all, they. What establishes the identity and the adequacy of persons within it, in the singular, the dual and the plural, is precisely their conjugation.
Perhaps, given the potential complexities, it won’t hurt to include the original French here as well:
L’être, à son plus haut dégré d’existence, est tout à la fois moi et non-moi: il peut dire indifféremment, parlant de soi comme des autres, je, tu, il, nous, vous, ils. Ce qui établit en lui l’identité et l’adéquateté des personnes, au singulier, au duel et au pluriel, est précisément leur conjugaison.
This first chapter will attempt, step by step, to disentangle a notion of the human self from various rather more amorphous beings or instances of being. It will engage with the idea, borrowed from Charles Fourier, that “every individual is a group,” which is so important to Proudhon’s theory of collective force. Perhaps most importantly, it will attempt to come to grips with the concepts of unity and divisibility as they appear in Proudhon’s work, both to determine how we might best talk about property in relation to human selves, but also to prepare ourselves to talk about organization on the basis of the federative principle and, perhaps a bit unexpectedly, to provide ourselves with some of the tools necessary to understand the peculiar gendering of Proudhon’s worldview.
[Potential sections:
Anarchy and Omnicentricity “The center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”
The Unique “The only one” “Selfiness”
Containing Multitudes “Every individual is a group.” “…life supposes contradiction, contradiction in its turn calls for justice…”
Divisibility “The self is one, identical, indivisible: that is why it remains impenetrable to itself…”]
II. A Partial Inventory of the Varieties of the Non-Self, with Sketches of some possible Encounters between the Human Self and the Various Types
The last passage quoted invokes divisions within being, or beings, of selves and non-selves, as well the identification and adequation of persons. All of that needs to be sorted through, taking into account the surprisingly wide range of possible meanings for each of what seem to be the most important terms. The first chapter will have started that work, staging the encounters between self and non-self in the most general terms, but primarily exploring potential encounters internal to being/beings, including some among the “multitudes” presumably contained by the Whitmanesque self. (“Every individual is a group.”)
The first reflections on property will almost certainly emphasize non-exclusive forms.
But we will still have to account for the non-self, which we can expect to assume that role in a variety of ways. The second chapter will involve a fairly extensive, but necessarily partial enumeration of different types of non-self — ranging from the non-self in general to other human selves, non-human animals, plants, non-living natural elements, natural and social systems, institutions and associations, etc., etc. The goal is to at least get a range of beings and scales involved, with some specific attention paid to the question of reciprocity and its effects.
III. The Production and Disposition of Collective Force, at a variety of scales, with Considerations Regarding the Production and Disposition of Liberty
At this point we have a complicated array of types, all presented in terms of the ways in which they manifest individuality-collectivity and in terms of the kinds of relations they are likely to have with human selves. In the fourth chapter, it will be a question of trying to establish justice in the complex relations among these various types of beings. However, before we can confront the ethical questions, we should take some time to explore the material relations between the various types of entities — and, in the context established, it makes sense to do so through an exploration of Proudhon’s theory of collective force.
This will be an occasion for a deep dive into some 19th-century-style social physics — and also for some critique of that framework. In order to maintain the focus of the study, a lot of the emphasis will be on the various roles that the human self assumes at different scales and as part of different social collectivities, including, of course, plenty of attention to the conflicts, both internal and external, in which these complex relations involve the self.
This will be the place to sketch, however briefly and incompletely, some elements of anarchistic social and economic organization.
IV. Omnicentricity, Right and Justice, with an Exploration of Possibilities in the Realm of Anarchistic Ethics.
Up to this point, the focus of the account will be largely descriptive, as we try to sketch out some general tendencies under conditions of anarchy. In the process, however, we will have noted a wide range of potential conflicts and problems more or less endemic to anarchy, without much attempt to propose means for their solution.
The goal here is to propose a very general sort of anarchistic ethics, pragmatic in character and thus subject to ongoing experimental verification and development. The method will involve an engagement with Proudhon’s reframing of right (droit) and justice in his mature works. Returning to the question of omnicentricity, it seems useful in particular to engage with the provocative account of right in Book Two of War and Peace, where we find this definition:
Right, in general, is the recognition of human dignity in all its faculties, attributes and prerogatives. There are thus as many special rights as humans can raise different claims, owing to the diversity of their faculties and of their exercise. As a consequence, the genealogy of human rights will follow that of the human faculties and their manifestations.
At the same time, it seems necessary, given the complexities of this particular work, to pursue the connections between (human) war and “universal antagonism,” which Proudhon recognized as one of the “fundamental laws of the universe” in 1848, in part to decide whether recognition of the other “fundamental law,” which he called “reciprocity” in 1848, but which seems inseparable from his conception of justice, commits us expanding our concerns to address omnicentric right.
Spoiler alert: I believe that the answer is probably “yes,” but that doesn’t strike me as a deal-breaker for anyone for whom anarchy appears as “the beautiful idea.”
This section should address a lot of the FAQs regarding alternatives to government, decision-making mechanisms, etc., even if it appears impossible to answer them in any very prescriptive manner. The goal is much the same as I have pursued in the Anarchy 101 series: a general framing of those questions in anarchistic terms, with the understanding that, in the context of anarchy, solutions will generally be shaped by local conditions, constraints, needs, desires, etc.
Part Two: The Anarchism of the Encounter
I. A Schematic Anarchism, with Applications in the Realms of History and Ideology
Work on “A Schematic Anarchism” has been ongoing for a couple of years now and was a necessary first step in organizing the present study. For those unfamiliar with the previous work, here is a partial summary:
The schematic anarchism is a formula—or as close to a formula as we are likely to come when describing the range of anarchisms. The “exploded view” I have proposed looks like this:
anarchism ? (((((an + arche)X)ist)X)ism)
The most important variables in the formula are the arche to be dispensed with and the individual or associated group of individuals (marked by the X) who will craft a response to that perceived problem.
It is an “adjectiveless” anarchism in the sense that the specification and focus all comes from those variables and from the specific environment in which the formula informs a particular anarchism. It is definable, in Proudhon’s sense, because the story-telling and series-constructing only starts once we have to account for a particular instance of anarchism.
I have described the various specific, practical anarchisms as “partial,” following suggestions in Voline’s 1924 essay “On Synthesis,” because a narrowing of focus from anarchy as such to an engagement with a particular archy seems more or less inevitable, if we are taking particular struggles seriously. That assumption then becomes the basis for suggesting that anarchist synthesis might be understood as an additional practice, shared by or distributed among all anarchists, with an aim to retaining a shared connection to the fundamental “beautiful idea” in its fullest forms.
I have suggested here, in a preliminary manner, that a distinction between anarchism as formula and anarchism as ideal is probably necessary if we are to capture both the general sense of the term, based on widely recognizable etymological elements, and its general impact as an expression of extreme, potentially intractable ideas.
Most of what I have described so far is a question of specific, individual formulations—products of individual reason or of interactions on scales where we could, with a bit of work, trace the main interactions involved. Even anarchism-as-ideal, if it to function as a guide in the practice of synthesis, arguably has to be something that individual anarchists conceive in their own terms. All of that construction of anarchisms we discussed in the recent workshop remains a fundamental skill to be learned and honed by anarchists.
Anarchism-in-general—understood as the full range of practical, historical manifestations of anarchist thought and activity—seems to be “adjectiveless” simply because of its imponderable inclusiveness. Unlike the various individual constructions, it is a product of collective forces, on which the various individual contributions may have had more or less impact, but which has its particular character precisely because it exists on far larger scales than those of more clearly individual projects. I am probably still using the term in ways that conflate unlike things: the mass of historical events I tend to call the anarchist past and the more-than-individual conception that might exist in the collective reason proposed by Proudhon. At this stage, that probably isn’t a serious problem. We simply need to recognize that our individual (or closely associated) attempts to grapple with anarchism-in-general in its truly collective sense will almost certainly involve some kind of individual interpretation, reduction or construction.
What should be obvious, even without the indications in this outline, is that, while the material in the earlier chapters has been concerned with anarchy — understood as a category of social relations — and our general responses to the conditions involved, the focus here is on anarchism — understood as an ideology, or cluster of ideologies, as a tradition or traditions, etc. It is a distinction that I hope to emphasize in the composition of Part One, stripping out, as much as possible, appeals to tradition, sometimes employing recognizably anarchist sources to challenge elements of anarchist tradition and ideology. The “neo-Proudhonian” project has always had a bit of “alternate history” character to it and part of the task in the early chapters will be to explore what other sorts of anarchism might have emerged from the middle of the 19th century. But, ultimately, the intention is to use what emerges in that work in order to enrich the existing anarchist tradition.
To that end, it will be necessary to stage an encounter between the largely descriptive account of an “anarchy of the encounter” and anarchism in its historical-traditional form, in order finally to propose the rudiments of an “anarchism of the encounter,” with its associated practices. One difficulty is, of course, that the account of anarchy is a fairly extreme distillation, a schematic of sorts, while historical anarchism resists summary. One means of overcoming the difficulty would be to facilitate the encounter with a distillation of all that messy history and tradition — and that is essentially what the schematic anarchism intends to be.
What remains to be done, in order to demonstrate the utility of the schematic anarchism as a distillation is to complete a number of studies already proposed. I’ll undoubtedly start with a new statement of the “formula,” and then move on to the promised “exploratory typology of anarchisms,” exploring a range of possible types, defined in terms of a number of emphases and contexts. Again, there is no question of an exhaustive catalog, but it ought to be possible to get at least to the “proof of concept” stage, illuminating some aspects of anarchist tradition in what I hope will be a novel manner along the way.
II. Anarchist Practice: Its Scope and Essential Elements
The study begins with Proudhon’s claim that “the social system” can be reduced to “an equation, and consequently a power of collectivity.” Over the course of the work, I hope to demonstrate the senses in which this is true, as well as the extent to which this truth does not necessarily carry us far from the concerns of the historical anarchist tradition. But it is one thing to describe a “system,” another to “distill” an ideology, however successfully, and still another to propose practices capable of advancing a project like anarchism.
In the third and fourth chapters, there will have been occasion to propose “elements of anarchistic social and economic organization,” to lay out some basic strategies for conflict resolution and to specifically suggest some practices intended to replace the present, archic apparatus of “justice.” There will undoubtedly be a number of specific examples, designed to clarify what will inevitably be a very general discussion. I suspect, however, that all of that will still leave lots of questions, which will tend to reduce down to one: What, specifically, do anarchist do?
So we will have to return to that initial claim about the simplicity of the “social system” and ask ourselves if, despite the obvious and enormous complexities involved in the real-world manifestation of this “system,” there might not be an equivalent simplicity in the realm of practice — or at least in the realm of specifically anarchist practice.
Much of anarchist practice, and perhaps the vast majority of it, will involve the anarchization of other practices — or simply the avoidance of archic elements in those practices. As I have said on a variety of occasions, it is not anarchy that builds bridges or binds books, so what is fundamentally anarchist about bridge-building or bookbinding in the context of anarchy will be a privative doing-without, which, in the end, we will have presumably adopted for reasons that are at least as much practical as ideological. In the more or less lengthy transition out of archic social relations, that sort of privative practice will undoubtedly involve a conscious effort and manifest itself as a practice, at least as much as it manifests itself as privative non-practice — but I think that most of us expect the practice of anarchism to be more active than that.
So the question is whether this dominant concern with anarchization can, taking cues from our starting point, perhaps lead to a range of practice as simple, in its way, as the “social system.” The answer — as it appears to me in these early stages, at least — seems to be that in the context of a system built from instances of “equation” and collective power, our practice can be distilled into the general categories of encounter and synthesis.
All of that is undoubtedly a bit vague, although those who have followed my work should recognize most of the elements of the analysis and have some idea of how the elaboration might proceed. I will undoubtedly begin to revise things and fill in the blanks more or less immediately. But it has seemed useful to attempt this first summary of a work that is still very much in progress.
The texts collected here will be those most directly related to a number of phrases and formulas that we find repeated in the works of Proudhon. These phrases will, in turn, provide part of the framework for The Anarchism of the Encounter, the work of anarchist theory that I’m in the midst of writing.
“…the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere…”
Celebration of Sunday: Introduction
But how did the Sabbath become, in the thought of Moses, the pivot and rallying symbol of Jewish society? Another law of the intelligence will explain it to us.
In the sphere of pure ideas, everything is connected, supported and demonstrated, not according to the order of filiation, or the principle of consequences, but according to the order of coexistence or coordination of relations. Here, as in the universe, the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere; that is, everything is at once principle and consequence, axis and radius. Moses, having to formulate the totality of his laws by deduction, was free to choose for the culminating point of his system whatever economic or moral idea he wanted. He preferred the weekly division of time, because he needed a sensible and powerful symbol which constantly recalled to the hordes of semi-savage Israel the feelings of nationality, fraternity and unity, without which any subsequent development was impossible. The Sabbath was like the common meeting ground where all the Hebrews should gather themselves in spirit, at the beginning of each week; the monument that expressed their political existence, the link that held together all their institutions. Thus, public and civil right, municipal administration, education, government, worship, customs, hygiene, family and city relations, liberty, public order: the Sabbath supposed all these things, fortified them and created their harmony.
General Idea of the Revolution
Let us recall the principle. The reason for the institution of government, as we have said, is the economic anarchy. When the Revolution has regulated this anarchy, and organized the industrial forces, there is no further pretext for political centralization; it is absorbed in industrial solidarity, a solidarity which is based upon general reason, and of which we may say, as Pascal said of the universe, that its center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere.
Competition between the Waterways and Railways
The railway calls for the man for whom time is even more than money, because it is life, much more than it serves goods, to which the speed of steam very often only adds an unnecessary luxury. The railway, eliminating intervals, makes men everywhere present in each other’s homes; thanks to it, we will be able to say of a State what Pascal said of the universe: The center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. Thus, just as the railway escapes the periodicity of the seasons which is everywhere visible in commerce as well as in the extractive and agricultural industries, so it erases and levels all the inequalities of position and climate, and makes no distinction between the hamlet lost in the plain and the manufacturing center majestically seated on the rivers. It will be up to the railway to completely realize this aphorism: The more the lines of communication become perfect, that is to say, the more easily the merchandise becomes able to move in all directions from the place of production to the place of consumption, the less the producer and the consumer need intermediaries, the less the goods will seek the warehouse.
Confessions of a Revolutionary
There, the government, the state, the power, whatever name you give it, reduced to its just limits, which are, not to legislate or to execute, not even to fight or to judge, but to attend, as commissioner, the sermons, if there are sermons; to attend the debates of the courts and to the debates of the parliament, if there are courts and a parliament; to supervise the generals and the armies, if circumstances oblige you to retain armies and generals; to recall the meaning of the laws and to prevent their contradictions; to procure their execution, and to prosecute offenses: there, I say, the government is nothing but the headmaster of society, the sentinel of the people. Or rather, the government no longer exists, since, by the progress of their separation and their centralization, the faculties which the government formerly united have all, some disappeared, others escaped its initiative: from the an-archy has emerged order. There, finally, you have the liberty of the citizens, the truth of institutions, the sincerity of universal suffrage, the integrity of administration, the impartiality of justice, the patriotism of bayonets, the submission of parties, the impotence of sects, the convergence of all wills. Your society is organized, lively, progressive; it thinks, speaks, acts like a man, and this precisely because it is no longer represented by a man, because it no longer recognizes any personal authority, because in itself, as in every organized being and living, as in Pascal’s infinity, the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.
It is to this anti-governmental constitution that our democratic traditions, our revolutionary tendencies, our need for centralization and unity, our love of liberty and equality, and the purely economic, but so imperfectly applied principle of all our constitutions, lead us inevitably. And that is what I had wanted to make clear, in a few words to the Constituent Assembly, if that Assembly, impatient for platitudes, had been capable of listening to anything other than platitudes; if, in its blind prejudice against every new idea, in its disloyal provocations to the Socialists, it had not seemed to say to them: I defy you to convince me!
The Political Capacity of the Working Classes
Economic right granted, public right will be deduced from it immediately. A government is a system of guarantees; the same principle of mutual guarantee, which must ensure to each instruction, labor, the freedom to disposition his own faculties, the exercise of his industry, the enjoyment of his property, the exchange of his products and services, will equally vouchsafe to everyone order, justice, peace, equality, the moderation of power, the loyalty of public officials, the dedication of all.
Just as the territory was originally divided by nature and defined by a certain membership of regions, so in each region, divided by mutual agreement between municipalities and shared among families – just as, once again labors and industries have each been distributed according to the organic law of division, and have in turn formed consensual groups and corporations;
Similarly, under the new pact, political sovereignty, civil authority and corporate influence are coordinated among the regions, districts, communes and other categories, and through such coordination, become identical with liberty itself.
The old law of unity and indivisibility is repealed. By virtue of the consent, at least presumed, of the various parts of the state to the pact of union, the political center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Each group or variety of people, every race, every language is master in its own territory; each city, secured by its neighbors, is queen of the circle formed by its radius. From now on, the unity is only marked in right by the promise that the various sovereign groups make to one another: 1st, to govern themselves and to follow, along with their neighbors, certain principles; 2nd, to protect against the enemy abroad and tyranny within; 3rd, to collaborate in the interests of their respective farms and businesses, and also to assist one another in the event of misfortune; — in the Government, only by a national council formed by the deputies of States, charged with oversight of the pact’s implementation and the improvement of the common weal.
Thus, carried into the political sphere, what we have hitherto called mutualism or guarantism takes the name of federalism. This simple synonymy gives us the entire revolution, both political and economic…
Carnets II, p. 39.
Divisibility of matter. — […]
Pierre Leroux: “On European Union”
Decentralizing empires, establishing in each province, in each city its own activity, and at the same time breaking down the barriers which separate nations, this is what freedom, science and industry aim for: so that, if their triumph was complete, we could say of the great society of men what Pascal said of the universe: Center everywhere, circumference nowhere.
“Two men meet…” / The Social System
Justice in the Revolution and in the Church
Seventh Study: Ideas
XLII
I. System of public reason, or social system.
How many times have I not heard addressed to myself this compliment that jealous critics would hasten, for the honor of the century, to withdraw, if they understood its significance: You are an admirable destroyer; but you don’t build anything. You throw people out on the street, and you don’t offer them any shelter. What do you put in place of religion? What do you put in the place of the government? What do you put in the place of property?… They say to me now: What do you put in the place of this individual reason, the sufficiency of which, for the sake of your cause, you are reduced to denying?
Nothing, my good man; for I do not intend to suppress anyof what I have so resolutely criticized. I only flatter myself on two things: it is, in the first place, to teach you to put each thing in its place, after having purged it of the absolute and balanced it with the other things; next, to show you that the things you know, and which you are so afraid of losing, are not the only ones that exist, and that there are still more considerable things which you have to take into account. Of this number is the collective reason.
We ask for the true system, the natural, rational, legitimate system of society, since none of those that have been tried can resist the secret action that disorganizes it. This has been the constant preoccupation of socialist philosophers, from the mythological Minos to the director of the Icarians. As we had no positive idea either of Justice, or of the economic order, or of social dynamics, or of the conditions of philosophical certainty, we formed a monstrous idea of social being: we has compared it to a great organism, created according to a formula of hierarchy which, prior to Justice, constituted its own law and the very condition of its existence; it was like an animal of a mysterious species, but which, like all known animals, must have had a head, a heart, nerves, teeth, feet, etc. From this chimerical organism, which everyone has striven to discover, we then deduce Justice, that is to say, we have derived morality from a physiology, or, as we say today, the right of duty, so that Justice always found itself placed outside the conscience, liberty subject to fatalism, and humanity fallen.
I have refuted all these imaginations in advance, by exposing the facts and the principles which rule them out forever.
As regards the substantiality and the organization of the social being, I have shown the first in that increase in effective power which is proper to the group, and which exceeds the sum of the individual forces which compose it; I gave the law of the second, showing that it is reduced to a series of weightings of forces, services and products, which makes the social system a general equation, a balance.
As an organism, society, the moral being par excellence, therefore differs essentially from living beings, in which the subordination of organs is the very law of existence. This is why society is repugnant to any idea of hierarchy, as the formula makes clear: All men are equal in dignity by nature, and must become equivalent in conditions through work and justice.
Now, such is the organization of a being, such will be his reason: this is why, while the reason of the individual affects the form of a genesis, as can be seen by all theogonies, the gnoses , political constitutions, syllogistics; collective reason is reduced, like algebra, by the elimination of the absolute, to a system of resolutions and equations, which comes down to saying that there is really, for society, no system.
It is not a system, in fact, in the sense that we attach ordinarily to this word, only an order in which all relations are relations of equality; where there is no primacy, no obedience, no center of gravity or direction where the only law is that everything submits to Justice, that is to say to balance.
Does mathematics form a system? It doesn’t occur to anyone to say that. If in a treatise on mathematics some trace of systematization is detected, it is due to the author; she does not comeof science itself. So it is with the social name.
Two men meet, recognize their dignity, note the additional benefit which would result for both from the concert of their industries, and consequently guarantee equality, which amounts to saying, economy. This is the whole social system: a power of collectivity, an equation.
Two families, two cities, two provinces, contract on the same footing: there are always only these two things, a power of collectivity and an equation. It would imply contradiction, violation of Justice, that there was something else.
It is for this reason that any institution, any decree which does not depend exclusively on justice and equality, soon succumbs to the attacks of criticism, to the incursions of free examination.
For, just as in nature all existence can be challenged by man in the name of his dignity and freedom, so in society any establishment can be challenged by him in the name of justice; there is only Justice which cannot be challenged in the name of nothing.
Justice is irremovable, immodifiable, eternal; everything else is transient.
And this is how religions, political constitutions, utopias of all kinds, imagined for the reconciliation of individual interest and collective interest, but all claiming to start from higher than Justice, to do more or better than Justice, to use Justice instead of serving it itself, ended by being found all contrary to Justice, and in the name of Justice eliminated. They are creations of individual absolutism, disguised under the mask of divinity.
And it will be the same as long as the thought of the absolute will remain preponderant in the governance of societies. There is no combination of force and cunning, of superstition and Machiavellianism, of aristocracy and misery, which can definitively defeat Justice. And if this Justice is armed with criticism, if you give it as its appearance the daily, universal discussion of institutions and ideas, judgments and acts, the conspiracy cannot last a moment. In the great day of controversy, the monsters born of skepticism and tyranny will be forced to flee and hide their ridiculous faces underground.
One thing then is individual reason, absolutist, proceeding by genesis and syllogisms, constantly tending, by the subordination of persons, functions, characters, to systematize society; and another is collective reason, everywhere eliminating the absolute, proceeding invariably by equations, and energetically denying, as far as the society it represents, any system. Incompatibility of forms, antagonism of tendencies: what more do we want to affirm the distinction of these two natures?
Ninth Study: Progress
CHAPTER II.
Theory of Progress.
XV
We all believe, invincibly, in Progress, as we believe in Liberty and Justice. On this principle, theologians and philosophers, speculation and practice, the proletarian as well as the rich, basically everyone is in agreement. This cruel word: humanity is always the same, as stupid, as miserable and as wicked as the first day, strikes us as a blasphemy; the denial of freedom, moral skepticism, do not wreak our hearts any more.
But what is this progress?
Let’s collect our ideas, then we’ll consult the facts.
Everything moves in the universe, either forwards or backwards, in a curved line or a straight line, with an accelerated movement or a slowed down movement; everything works, everything has always worked, everything will work forever.
Movement is the form of all spontaneity: movement is therefore essential to freedom; there is no positive freedom in rest. Freedom is essentially practical and active; it fails when it surrenders to contemplation. How do the same philosophers, after having conceived it theoretically as the act by which the ideal ego frees itself from nature and subordinates it to itself, define it in practice, consciousness of universal laws and conformity to these laws? How, after positing movement, force, action in principle, do they conclude with quietism?
Therefore, independently of the organic evolutions noted, and which all arise from the necessities of nature, from the spontaneity of things, from the intellectual and social constitution, there is reason to believe that there exists in humanity a deeper movement, which embraces all the others and modifies them, that of Liberty and Justice.
Physical humanity moves; it goes from birth to death: this movement is called life.
Intelligent humanity moves; it goes from instinct to reflection, from intuition to deduction: this movement is logic.
Religious, political, industrial, artistic humanity also moves; it completes more or less long periods, in a continual back and forth.
Reasoning by analogy, all the better because freedom is the antagonist of all that is fatal, I say that liberal, moral, vigilante humanity must also move.
Thus, without worrying any more about the evolutions of nature and history, essentially fatal, which moreover have nothing progressive and in no way account for the so long and so frequently repeated decadences of society, I fix the starting point of my theory in Justice, from where the movement will have to radiate, either for the good, or for the evil, on all the faculties of the human being, collective and individual; and I give this movement Liberty as its driving force.
Let’s continue.
The movement of Justice can operate in two ways, depending on whether it is in development or in retrogression.
In the first case, I call it Sanctification or self-improvement of humanity: it will be, as we shall see presently, Progress.
In the second case, I call it Corruption of humanity by itself: it is Decadence.
In both cases, I say that humanity perfects or corrupts itself, because, if it is a question of the development of Justice, I cannot doubt that this development is due to Liberty, works which have conscience as their principle, being essentially repugnant to selfishness and to all the fatal attractions of man; and, if it is a question of the diminution of Justice, this diminution can only come from the apostasy of Liberty, which nothing, neither in nature nor in humanity, can stand up to.
In this way, progress, having its base of operation in Justice, its driving force in Liberty, can no longer preserve anything fatal: an essential condition, outside of which, progress being confused with organic revolution, one disputes without [listening], and philosophy, like society, remains stationary.
Thus Justice being the pact of Liberty, its movement consisting of a series of equations successively produced or revoked between a greater or lesser number of persons, and relatively to a greater or lesser number of objects, it follows that this movement, free in principle, cannot be subject to any fatal condition of acceleration or slow-down. It is ad libitum, entirely optional, being able, according to free will, to rush, to slow down, to be interrupted, to retrograde, to be reborn; in a word, there is no necessity. Where a necessity lets itself be perceived in the social movement, one can say a priori that it is foreign to progress.
This general conception of the progress of liberty will enable us to account for the multitude of accidents, hesitations, delays and decadences with which the history of humanity abounds, and to which the ordinary theoreticians of progress bravely close their eyes, example of Hegel, who only looked at the whole and neglected the detail, a detail that affects thousands of generations, and trillions of men!
XVI
The problem thus clarified, the solution will not be long in coming. It is predicted, in fact, that it is with the oscillations of freedom as with the gnomon of Hezekiah: nothing is easier to conceive than its advance; the real difficulty, the only difficulty, has to do with hindsight.
Let us first show in what this advance consists, when it takes place; we will then seek what cause stops it; then, this cause found, it will not be difficult for us to discover the remedy.
What is Justice? the equation of liberty.
Two men meet, with opposing interests. The debate begins; then they compromise: equation, first conquest of right, first establishment of freedom. A third arrives, then another, and so on indefinitely: the pact which bound the first two is only extended to receive the newcomers; so many contractors, so many subjects of Justice. So there is progress.
That’s not all. With each object which interests the life of these men a new litigation arises; new transactions become indispensable: so many articles which are added to the primitive pact, so many conquests consequently for Justice. Thus the law of the Noachides is composed of seven precepts, that of Sinai of ten; the code of the desert contains about forty, that of Esdras or Helcias has more than five hundred. I do not mean to say that the morality and progress of a people should be judged by the number of written laws: long before Jesus Christ this proposition had become an untruth; I say that progress in justice is measured by the number of laws which are observed, which is very different.
We call progression, in mathematics, a series of which each term is composed of the previous one increased by reason or multiplied by reason.
These are the following two series:
[table]
Read backwards, these two series form a regression. (Bezout’s arithmetic.)
Such is, in a regularly constituted society, which, without losing any of its fundamental principles, constantly adds new definitions, adopted and followed by all consciences, the image of the legal movement: the good being added to the good in Because of the number of persons and the multiplicity of interests, the beam of justice extending unceasingly, there is necessarily progress.
The opposite will take place if Justice is in decline: if the laws have no sanction except in force, if they no longer understand each other, if, by the influence of economic inequality and reason of State, they gradually fall disuse; if skepticism, invading consciences, undermines the bases of public morality; if hypocrisy and contempt bring back social war. Then there will be regression, as Bezout says, of Justice, that is to say depravity of society and decadence.
No difficulty for the intelligence in this double movement, of which one could, for each nation, establish the account on two columns, expressing by their difference the acquisitions and the losses of Justice.
All this, compared to the sublime and scholarly theories of which I have given the analysis, is of such simplicity that there is only reason to be surprised at one thing, which is that the theoreticians of progress have not seen it. If they had remembered their arithmetic, they would have understood that the whole mystery lay, not in the forward movement, but, as all peoples and all theologies had guessed, in the cause and the possibility of hindsight.
What is it that hinders Justice, since it is clear that without this hindrance progress, as essential to Justice as movement is to freedom, would not cease, and that we would all be saints and blessed?
In theological language, what is the origin of sin?
XVII
Let us pause for a moment in front of the problem.
Justice, we have said several times, is the pact of Liberty, its sacrament. It is through Liberty that the idealizing social feeling acquires that penetrating virtue which makes it the most lively of our inclinations and the most sublime of our ideas, Justice. Moreover, no influence constrains Liberty to this equation, except its own dignity, its glory. In all respects, […] Justice must be dear to her, which she puts above all else.
On the other hand, Liberty is sovereign; and there is no power in the universe, there is no fatalism of nature and of the mind, which stands before it; it denies, subordinates and destroys all that is foreign to it and stands in its way. How then is the cessation of Justice in a society, how its demotion, possible? How can this demotion go, it has been seen, until the annihilation of all public virtue and the dissolution of the social body? In short, how can humanity, capable by the energy of its consciousness of rising for a time towards good, then sink into evil?
In the individual, the failures of conscience can, up to a certain point, be explained by the uncertainty of the law and the mistrust of the intentions of the neighbor, uncertainty and mistrust which throw man on the defensive and provide him with less of an excuse. But this state of antagonism and reserve is not corruption, and no one can mistake it. I am talking about this spontaneous failure which, after a more or less long period of fervor, seizes the social body, invades souls, paralyzes freedom, dignity, justice, all noble feelings, and delivers people en masse to decomposition.
To accuse the institutions, the government, here would be puerile. Why are institutions and laws established? By reason of right, no doubt. How, then, is the same reason not sufficient to correct morals as soon as the latent vice is recognized? How is power, more and more prevaricating, suffered?… Justice is the first law of man; now, no animal fails in its instinct: how can man fail in his law, if this law, as I have demonstrated, asany sane philosophy is forced to admit it, is truly in him, if she is of him, if she possesses him as the first of her loves? For what does it matter that, in the general decadence, a few pure souls protest and groan, if the mass is enervated, if the grace of right no longer appeals to it, if, to overcome evil, it only has the feeling of its incapacity ?
Who can, I say, thus exhaust a society of all virtue? Is it an external and fatal cause? So our whole theory of freedom crumbles: man is a slave. Let’s not talk about Justice anymore; let us submit in all humility to reasons of state.
Could it be that the human soul possesses only a sum of virtue, as the body a sum of life; and that the provision spent, immorality succeeds, dragging death in its train? In this case, it is Justice that is insufficient and ineffective; it calls for comfort, a superior grace: which brings us back to the system of innate, original decay.
So the horrible nightmare still pursues us. Twenty times in these studies we have struck down the hydra, and when we believe ourselves delivered, we find it more threatening, challenging us to a last combat. What fascination obsesses us, and makes us constantly find, on analysis, evil and death, where the instinct of our heart promised us life and virtue? Oh what! you say you are progressing because you are not quite dead? But the Egyptians, Indians, Bactrians, Assyrians, Persians are dead; but the Greeks and the Romans died in their turn; and you. French, Germans, Angles, Slavs, peoples of the East and peoples of the West, you are all very sick. Come, shake off this decrepitude, make your old age green again: otherwise, on your knees before the Crucified, whose blood shedhas alone revived condemned humanity, and will sustain it in its trials until the last day.
XVIII
Whether there is progress or not, I will first be granted one thing: it is that, in spite of the extinction of so many noble races which perished in the struggle, civilization has always risen again, and, as it subsists only through Justice, that the latter at least never perishes. According to the Church, there would even be progress in Justice since the propagation of the Gospel. Is this progress real, and should it be attributed to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? This is a question that for the moment I leave aside. I limit myself to noting this serious fact, that Justice alone, in humanity, does not pass. However weak it has been from the beginning of the world down to our day, how constant its action has been, while the causes of dissolution have only acted at intervals and in conflict with each other, one can say that it at least has always remained; it has survived all the dissolutions, all the catastrophes, bursting out at times with a terrible noise, as in the French Revolution.
It is the privilege of Justice, in fact, that the faith it inspires be unshakable, and that it cannot be dogmatically denied or challenged. All peoples invoke it: even when it violates it, reason of state claims to rely on it; religion exists only for it; skepticism conceals itself before it; irony has power only in its name; crime and hypocrisy pay him homage. If Liberty is not an empty word, it acts, functions, only for the service of the law; and despite his revolts, Liberty, at bottom, does not curse him. When Justice should be ranked, for energy, below all the motives that agitate man and society, even if this energy were to decline, it would suffice in the long run to have this universality of respect, this constancy of opinion, to make the law prevail. Progress would go more slowly; he wouldn’t stop.
It is therefore not too much to say, basing myself on the experience of nations, that Justice is stronger by itself than all the causes which combat it, and that if, for forty centuries, there has been no If there is no progress in Justice, the status quo, and all the more reason, hindsight, shows an anomaly against which psychological reason protests.
Progress, in a word, according to the notion of justice and according to facts, is not only possible, it is the natural state of the human soul, an effect of its constitution.
From which I conclude that if nevertheless the progress does not take place, if it is suspended, if it even changes into retrogression, the impediment can only come from a cause capable of doing violence or illusion to the [consciousness] of humanity.
What is this cause?
Nature? Before consciousness, nature is passive; moreover, we have seen, in treating of distributive justice and the natural laws of economy, that nature is in agreement with justice, and that of itself it pushes us to equality.
Passions? We have just recalled that, united all together, they weigh less in the final analysis in the universal conscience than Justice.
The only power capable of defeating Justice is Liberty. How? This is what we will say presently.
Thus, after having shown Liberty as the driving force of Right, we are led, by arigorous induction, to point it out as the author of the evil: one more step, and we have the answer to the riddle.
XIX
That Liberty can resist Justice, as well as all fatalisms, there is no difficulty there, since without that it would not be free, which implies a contradiction. And since one cannot, at the risk of making it disappear again, suppose it has motives other than itself, the question comes down to asking how Liberty comes to prefer itself to Justice, which is its pact, its ideal. of predilection, his oath, to perjure himself, finally, to the point of letting fate regain the upper hand, and thus signing his own downfall.
An impenetrable mystery, as long as philosophical reason remained inclined before transcendent reason, but which was to be dissipated, like so many others, as soon as a bold hand had torn the veil.
Man, by his free will, tends to realize in himself and around him, in the people who touch him and in the things that belong to him, in the city he lives in and in the nature that surrounds him, in all his thoughts and in all his acts, the sublime and the beautiful, the absolute.
The absolute to be realized is his faith, his law, his destiny, his beatitude, in a word, his ideal.
Of all the realizations of the ideal, the highest, that which dominates the others, is Justice.
Justice, indeed, apart from the rules of law which constitute its reason, which form the domain of the [jurist] and give birth to a positive science, ethics; Justice is that powerful ideality, under the influence of which man tends to become, from a simply sociable creature, a just, a saint, a hero, a God. From this point of view, which is that of free will or of the ideal, Justice is no longer only the imperious order of sociability; it is the principal, pivotal object of aesthetics, compared to which the other realizations of the ideal appear only as secondary creations, subordinated to Justice as means to their end.
In other words, man, by his free will, is an artist, and the first object of his art is his conscience; all the manifestations of his ideal have as their object, in the final analysis, its justification: this is why we are all, at heart, puritans and rigorists. But as much self-indulgence inspires disesteem as much the hypocrisy of rebellious puritanism.
To realize Justice, the first condition is to know its law: for, as we have explained, if free will goes beyond necessity, it supposes it: no ideal, no art, no holiness, therefore, apart from the reason of persons and the reason of things.
Now, science is far from keeping pace with the imagination; that industry, social economy, law, be as prompt in their development as poetry and art. Various causes, which as they become more complicated, multiply ad infinitum, retard the progress of legislation and jurisprudence: primitive barbarism, naïveté of understanding, inexperience in social relations, prejudices of religion, power, caste, property, etc. ; then, tradition, acquired possession; then doubt, contradiction, war. It took four thousand years to discover the system of the world: the system of the human soul is not yet known, and we have occupied ourselves with it a hundred times more.
However, Liberty cannot wait: what it does not know, it divines or supplements. Man is impatient to possess himself and to enjoy his glory; he needs to know oneself to be just, heroic, brave and beautiful; he cannot defer his felicity to a late revelation, which moreover only matters to him as an element of his ideal. Free will therefore always and necessarily precedes science: with the data such as it has, it produces its ideal, and this ideal, more or less in conformity with the reason of things, becomes its juridical formula: it is for it the subject, object, type, image, condition, principle, pledge, of Justice.
Having thus realized the absolute, Liberty rests in the contemplation of her work: she has arrived at her [nec plus ultra]. Like the God of Genesis, who applauds each of his days, separating his creations, so to speak, with a point of admiration; like the young girl looking at herself in her mirror, Liberty smiles at herself in the ideal she creates; she says to herself, after saying: Good! and believing herself to have arrived at her last labor she lies down in her glory: Requievit ab opere quod patrârat.
There is not a man of art or industry, not a scholar, not a peasant, not a man of action, not a virtuous soul, who does not suspect what I mean. Whenever man has accomplished a task, completed an experiment, executed a job, delivered a speech, struck a blow, fulfilled a duty, he collects himself, judges himself, and, in a more or less prolonged reverie, thrives on his idea, let us speak more exactly, of his ideal.
And what is this ideal? A miniature of freedom, a test of the absolute.
So therein lies the trap.
By virtue of its free will, the soul seeks its beatitude in Justice and the ideal, which it identifies: in what fundamentally it is not mistaken. But, owing to the imperfection of its notions, its legal formula is first of all erroneous, and while, thanks to the ideal with which it clothes it, it believes that it has grasped Justice in the sublimity of its essence, it has produced only a false divinity, an idol.
Now, until freedom has learned, by a long exercise of right and reason, to reduce to its just value this increment of its fantasy, it is inevitable that it will take it for a manifestation of the Absolute. , author and subject of Justice; that she is passionate about this image, forgets herself and neglects for this disastrous cult Justice, alone worthy of her respect; and this with a reason all the more plausible in that Justice itself appears to be only the command, more or less obscure, of this divine Absolute, of which it believes it possesses the pledge and the word.
Idolatry, in a word, Christianity has said it very well, but without understanding in the least its own word, idolater that it was itself: this is the first cause of sin, the principle of all failures and social dissolutions.
It is thus that the first societies made so many idols of caste, of slavery, of polygamy, of despotism; and any individual who fails in justice, without prejudice to the excuse provided by the state of antagonism in which he lives, acts in the same way: he obeys an ideal.
It was of all our errors the greatest and the most disastrous, to attribute the evil to a perverse inclination, to an evil principle or to a satanic influence.
The first cause of sin, independently of the legal insufficiency of the first founders and of the state of war which consequently became generalized everywhere, this long-sought cause is in what is most legitimate and most holy in the soul. , in the fundamental, but unperceived, identity of Justice and the ideal, the first incomplete in its notions, the second taken for the absolute; it must be progressively weakened by the rectification of the law, and its equation with the ideal.
XX
This is the whole theory of Progress: a theory of the origin of moral evil, or of the cause which arrests and demotes man in Justice, a cause which is explained by a lack of balance between right and [the ideal]. Strictly speaking, there is no theory of Progress, since Progress is given by the sole fact that man possesses Justice and that he is free; there is only one theory of sin or backsliding.
Let us take it up again, this theory, theological in terms, at bottom so unchristian, and which the Revolution has the right to claim as the fundamental article of its ethics.
Man does not want evil; he dreams of the sublime and the beautiful, seeks, with all the energy of his freedom, the ideal. He tends to realize this ideal, first in himself by Justice, then by a sort of extension to things of the ideal which his soul has conceived for itself, of which it alone is the principle, subject and end. Hence the external works of freedom, in metaphysics, theology, poetry, art, politics, social economy, science and industry. In freedom, the universe and humanity form but one realm, the realm of the ideal.
But at first man only imperfectly knows the law of his morals; experience soon made him realize how imperfect his legal relations were and how little corresponded to the sublimity of his idols. It is then that he resists: he clings to his religion as the very source of all justice; to the works of his art, as to the pledges of his primary virtue; in short, from being the justiciary he wants to be, he becomes an idolater, and in fact a sinner. It’s notthe more the right he pursues is his pleasure, his vanity.
Now, such is the corruption of the collective conscience, such is produced, on a lesser scale, individual immorality. In every detail of his life, even in eating and drinking, man is an idealist; he feels that he honors himself, that he elevates himself by the ideal. But this aesthetic delight is always accorded to him only with a view to Justice; as soon as he loses sight of it he becomes filthy, Epicuri de grege porcus.
Man, indeed, as an animal, is incapable of sinning; subject only to the attractions of sensibility, he does not think of the absolute, he has no ideal and knows nothing of Justice.
Only the intelligent man is capable of sinning. But it is not by the senses that he is seduced: in this respect the language of the moralists lacks precision; he is seduced by the ideal which his understanding makes him perceive in things, by the conception of the absolute.
It is idealism that corrupts human thought at its source and falsifies all its judgments: this truth has been amply demonstrated in our previous studies.
What have we, in fact, encountered everywhere as the primary, efficient, and until further notice irresistible cause of immorality, if not the conceptions of transcendence, theological speculation, the spirit of religion and of the church , the social hierarchy, the providential government: all things in which it has been easy for us to recognize productions, effigies, formulas, the absolute?
And when we wanted to remedy this mental corruption, which threatens today to infect the most positive sciences, what did we propose as hygiene to the intelligences, if not the expurgation of the absolute?
Thus, in determining the conditions of Justice, we did the theory of humanitarian progress; by pointing out the causes, metaphysical and theological, which divert souls from Justice, we discovered the secret of social retrogradation.
What remains for us to say now, except that the reign of the absolute is coming to an end, and that, the enticement of the ideal, the source of such frightful debauches, being once brought back to its just measure, progress will be accomplished in a continuous manner, without convulsions and revolts? The gods are gone; skepticism, which today seems to threaten Justice, has exterminated them. The hour will soon strike for perpetual assizes and incorruptible judgment.
Shawn P. Wilbur: An exercise in theoretical synthesis-distillation of anarchist thought and practice
This is the first opportunity that we have had, as a collective, to celebrate and acknowledge the very impressive work by Shawn P. Wilbur of translating, publishing (into English) and reflecting upon – with others – “classical” anarchist theory and practice.
In particular, his ongoing translation of the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is a contribution of note to making this author’s ideas more accessible to anglophone readers.
His website – if we may be permitted to say “his” -, The Libertarian Labyrinth, is a virtual treasure trove of anarchist literature. And below, from this trove, we share a recent summary of Shawn P. Wilbur’s efforts to synthesise and distil a picture of anarchist theory, largely inspired by the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, along with a collection of quotations from the later’s work that helps us to understand the path that Wilbur has taken.
We can only wish that he may be able to continue this passionate exercise.
The Anarchism of the Encounter: A Distillation
Shawn P. Wilbur, The Libertarian Labyrinth, 28/07/2025
Introduction: Distilling Anarchism
Some of the work I have done on anarchist history and theory has taken the form of synthesis, attempting to draw together elements from a variety of anarchist tendencies and milieus, or of a kind of reconciliation, as in the case of the “neo-Proudhonian synthesis,” based on the idea that the apparent discontinuities in anarchist ideas have been, in fact, more apparent than real. But with the material on “a schematic anarchism,” the process has been more a matter of distillation. Rather than engaging in the work of piecing fragments from the at least apparently disparate anarchist traditions together to form a coherent whole, it’s been more a matter of bringing my accumulated knowledge and understanding of anarchism and related traditions to a kind of critical boil, in order to see what is essential, or at least volatile, and what remains inert. It’s that approach that I want to take up again, more consciously, in this new work of general anarchist theory.
Ultimately, the most robust forms of anarchist thought are likely to result from the connection — encounter, conjugation, etc. — of more detail-oriented sorts of synthesis with this kind of distillation in the context of ongoing practical application. In a book, the scope of application is obviously limited, but hopefully that can be one kind of strength.
This work is really the first fruits of my work grappling with the notion of general anarchist history and, more specifically, of my work translating and interpreting Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. It’s important for me that this current work serves as an aid in understanding the work in progress, but part of what ultimately needs to be understood is that, while this sort of analysis almost certainly needs to be grounded somewhere, judgments about the general validity of the account will have to be based on much broader attempts at application. Fortunately, some simple means of moving from specific interpretations of Proudhon to an account that should, I hope, have a really general application can be derived from the same passages by Proudhon that will be examined. For anyone inclined to try a bit of dialectical sublation with regard to Proudhon and his work, well, my sense is that he may have provided the necessary tools himself.
The first conceptual connection to be attempted is between a notion that has played a central role in much of my work on anarchism — the encounter — and another, which recurs in the works of various 19th-century socialists, which we can call omnicentricity. For the first, my usual text has been a passage from the Seventh Study of Proudhon’s Justice, in which he describes “the whole social system:”
The same scenario is then described, with slightly different emphases, in the Ninth Study of the same work:
As a conceptual shortcut, a distillation, this is certainly an ambitious one, particularly when we consider all of the complexities introduced into Proudhon’s account of society by his theory of collective force. Still, he appears insistent. In the Seventh Study, he continues:
So it is a question of taking the leap, taking Proudhon at his word, and exploring this most schematic of “systems.” The problem, of course, is to try to find some equally schematic means of accounting for all the various individualities, collectivities, etc. that might engage in forms of mutual encounter. As my hope is to at least explore a very general theory, my next move has been what is perhaps an even more provocative leap, in order to stage an encounter between this “system” and the notion of omnicentricity.
As I have started to document on the “Texts” page for this project, Proudhon made use, on a number of occasions and in a variety of contexts, of the phrase “the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
Part One: The Anarchy of the Encounter
I. A Theory of the Individuality-Collectivity as an Unbounded Centrality, with particular attention to the constitution of the Human Self as a Free Absolute
The goal in this chapter is an account of the self, conceived in anarchic terms, as a special case among beings and things, themselves conceived as manifestations of evolving and unbounded “centers” or centralities. Along with various suggestive passages from Proudhon, this section will explore a reading of Max Stirner’s einzige as “the only one,” which I started in the “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism,” and some potentially related material from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s self, which both “contains multitudes” and “is not contained between hat and boots,” is perhaps the most approachable models to be examined — and perhaps it gives us something to cling to as we try to come to terms with what looks like an 1850s version of the body without organs in Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress:
Perhaps, given the potential complexities, it won’t hurt to include the original French here as well:
This first chapter will attempt, step by step, to disentangle a notion of the human self from various rather more amorphous beings or instances of being. It will engage with the idea, borrowed from Charles Fourier, that “every individual is a group,” which is so important to Proudhon’s theory of collective force. Perhaps most importantly, it will attempt to come to grips with the concepts of unity and divisibility as they appear in Proudhon’s work, both to determine how we might best talk about property in relation to human selves, but also to prepare ourselves to talk about organization on the basis of the federative principle and, perhaps a bit unexpectedly, to provide ourselves with some of the tools necessary to understand the peculiar gendering of Proudhon’s worldview.
[Potential sections:
“The center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”
“The only one”
“Selfiness”
“Every individual is a group.”
“…life supposes contradiction, contradiction in its turn calls for justice…”
“The self is one, identical, indivisible: that is why it remains impenetrable to itself…”]
II. A Partial Inventory of the Varieties of the Non-Self, with Sketches of some possible Encounters between the Human Self and the Various Types
The last passage quoted invokes divisions within being, or beings, of selves and non-selves, as well the identification and adequation of persons. All of that needs to be sorted through, taking into account the surprisingly wide range of possible meanings for each of what seem to be the most important terms. The first chapter will have started that work, staging the encounters between self and non-self in the most general terms, but primarily exploring potential encounters internal to being/beings, including some among the “multitudes” presumably contained by the Whitmanesque self. (“Every individual is a group.”)
The first reflections on property will almost certainly emphasize non-exclusive forms.
But we will still have to account for the non-self, which we can expect to assume that role in a variety of ways. The second chapter will involve a fairly extensive, but necessarily partial enumeration of different types of non-self — ranging from the non-self in general to other human selves, non-human animals, plants, non-living natural elements, natural and social systems, institutions and associations, etc., etc. The goal is to at least get a range of beings and scales involved, with some specific attention paid to the question of reciprocity and its effects.
III. The Production and Disposition of Collective Force, at a variety of scales, with Considerations Regarding the Production and Disposition of Liberty
At this point we have a complicated array of types, all presented in terms of the ways in which they manifest individuality-collectivity and in terms of the kinds of relations they are likely to have with human selves. In the fourth chapter, it will be a question of trying to establish justice in the complex relations among these various types of beings. However, before we can confront the ethical questions, we should take some time to explore the material relations between the various types of entities — and, in the context established, it makes sense to do so through an exploration of Proudhon’s theory of collective force.
This will be an occasion for a deep dive into some 19th-century-style social physics — and also for some critique of that framework. In order to maintain the focus of the study, a lot of the emphasis will be on the various roles that the human self assumes at different scales and as part of different social collectivities, including, of course, plenty of attention to the conflicts, both internal and external, in which these complex relations involve the self.
This will be the place to sketch, however briefly and incompletely, some elements of anarchistic social and economic organization.
IV. Omnicentricity, Right and Justice, with an Exploration of Possibilities in the Realm of Anarchistic Ethics.
Up to this point, the focus of the account will be largely descriptive, as we try to sketch out some general tendencies under conditions of anarchy. In the process, however, we will have noted a wide range of potential conflicts and problems more or less endemic to anarchy, without much attempt to propose means for their solution.
The goal here is to propose a very general sort of anarchistic ethics, pragmatic in character and thus subject to ongoing experimental verification and development. The method will involve an engagement with Proudhon’s reframing of right (droit) and justice in his mature works. Returning to the question of omnicentricity, it seems useful in particular to engage with the provocative account of right in Book Two of War and Peace, where we find this definition:
At the same time, it seems necessary, given the complexities of this particular work, to pursue the connections between (human) war and “universal antagonism,” which Proudhon recognized as one of the “fundamental laws of the universe” in 1848, in part to decide whether recognition of the other “fundamental law,” which he called “reciprocity” in 1848, but which seems inseparable from his conception of justice, commits us expanding our concerns to address omnicentric right.
Spoiler alert: I believe that the answer is probably “yes,” but that doesn’t strike me as a deal-breaker for anyone for whom anarchy appears as “the beautiful idea.”
This section should address a lot of the FAQs regarding alternatives to government, decision-making mechanisms, etc., even if it appears impossible to answer them in any very prescriptive manner. The goal is much the same as I have pursued in the Anarchy 101 series: a general framing of those questions in anarchistic terms, with the understanding that, in the context of anarchy, solutions will generally be shaped by local conditions, constraints, needs, desires, etc.
Part Two: The Anarchism of the Encounter
I. A Schematic Anarchism, with Applications in the Realms of History and Ideology
Work on “A Schematic Anarchism” has been ongoing for a couple of years now and was a necessary first step in organizing the present study. For those unfamiliar with the previous work, here is a partial summary:
What should be obvious, even without the indications in this outline, is that, while the material in the earlier chapters has been concerned with anarchy — understood as a category of social relations — and our general responses to the conditions involved, the focus here is on anarchism — understood as an ideology, or cluster of ideologies, as a tradition or traditions, etc. It is a distinction that I hope to emphasize in the composition of Part One, stripping out, as much as possible, appeals to tradition, sometimes employing recognizably anarchist sources to challenge elements of anarchist tradition and ideology. The “neo-Proudhonian” project has always had a bit of “alternate history” character to it and part of the task in the early chapters will be to explore what other sorts of anarchism might have emerged from the middle of the 19th century. But, ultimately, the intention is to use what emerges in that work in order to enrich the existing anarchist tradition.
To that end, it will be necessary to stage an encounter between the largely descriptive account of an “anarchy of the encounter” and anarchism in its historical-traditional form, in order finally to propose the rudiments of an “anarchism of the encounter,” with its associated practices. One difficulty is, of course, that the account of anarchy is a fairly extreme distillation, a schematic of sorts, while historical anarchism resists summary. One means of overcoming the difficulty would be to facilitate the encounter with a distillation of all that messy history and tradition — and that is essentially what the schematic anarchism intends to be.
What remains to be done, in order to demonstrate the utility of the schematic anarchism as a distillation is to complete a number of studies already proposed. I’ll undoubtedly start with a new statement of the “formula,” and then move on to the promised “exploratory typology of anarchisms,” exploring a range of possible types, defined in terms of a number of emphases and contexts. Again, there is no question of an exhaustive catalog, but it ought to be possible to get at least to the “proof of concept” stage, illuminating some aspects of anarchist tradition in what I hope will be a novel manner along the way.
II. Anarchist Practice: Its Scope and Essential Elements
The study begins with Proudhon’s claim that “the social system” can be reduced to “an equation, and consequently a power of collectivity.” Over the course of the work, I hope to demonstrate the senses in which this is true, as well as the extent to which this truth does not necessarily carry us far from the concerns of the historical anarchist tradition. But it is one thing to describe a “system,” another to “distill” an ideology, however successfully, and still another to propose practices capable of advancing a project like anarchism.
In the third and fourth chapters, there will have been occasion to propose “elements of anarchistic social and economic organization,” to lay out some basic strategies for conflict resolution and to specifically suggest some practices intended to replace the present, archic apparatus of “justice.” There will undoubtedly be a number of specific examples, designed to clarify what will inevitably be a very general discussion. I suspect, however, that all of that will still leave lots of questions, which will tend to reduce down to one: What, specifically, do anarchist do?
So we will have to return to that initial claim about the simplicity of the “social system” and ask ourselves if, despite the obvious and enormous complexities involved in the real-world manifestation of this “system,” there might not be an equivalent simplicity in the realm of practice — or at least in the realm of specifically anarchist practice.
Much of anarchist practice, and perhaps the vast majority of it, will involve the anarchization of other practices — or simply the avoidance of archic elements in those practices. As I have said on a variety of occasions, it is not anarchy that builds bridges or binds books, so what is fundamentally anarchist about bridge-building or bookbinding in the context of anarchy will be a privative doing-without, which, in the end, we will have presumably adopted for reasons that are at least as much practical as ideological. In the more or less lengthy transition out of archic social relations, that sort of privative practice will undoubtedly involve a conscious effort and manifest itself as a practice, at least as much as it manifests itself as privative non-practice — but I think that most of us expect the practice of anarchism to be more active than that.
So the question is whether this dominant concern with anarchization can, taking cues from our starting point, perhaps lead to a range of practice as simple, in its way, as the “social system.” The answer — as it appears to me in these early stages, at least — seems to be that in the context of a system built from instances of “equation” and collective power, our practice can be distilled into the general categories of encounter and synthesis.
All of that is undoubtedly a bit vague, although those who have followed my work should recognize most of the elements of the analysis and have some idea of how the elaboration might proceed. I will undoubtedly begin to revise things and fill in the blanks more or less immediately. But it has seemed useful to attempt this first summary of a work that is still very much in progress.
The Anarchism of the Encounter: The Texts
Shawn P. Wilbur, The Libertarian Labyrinth, 18/07/2025
The texts collected here will be those most directly related to a number of phrases and formulas that we find repeated in the works of Proudhon. These phrases will, in turn, provide part of the framework for The Anarchism of the Encounter, the work of anarchist theory that I’m in the midst of writing.
“…the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere…”
Celebration of Sunday: Introduction
But how did the Sabbath become, in the thought of Moses, the pivot and rallying symbol of Jewish society? Another law of the intelligence will explain it to us.
In the sphere of pure ideas, everything is connected, supported and demonstrated, not according to the order of filiation, or the principle of consequences, but according to the order of coexistence or coordination of relations. Here, as in the universe, the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere; that is, everything is at once principle and consequence, axis and radius. Moses, having to formulate the totality of his laws by deduction, was free to choose for the culminating point of his system whatever economic or moral idea he wanted. He preferred the weekly division of time, because he needed a sensible and powerful symbol which constantly recalled to the hordes of semi-savage Israel the feelings of nationality, fraternity and unity, without which any subsequent development was impossible. The Sabbath was like the common meeting ground where all the Hebrews should gather themselves in spirit, at the beginning of each week; the monument that expressed their political existence, the link that held together all their institutions. Thus, public and civil right, municipal administration, education, government, worship, customs, hygiene, family and city relations, liberty, public order: the Sabbath supposed all these things, fortified them and created their harmony.
General Idea of the Revolution
Let us recall the principle. The reason for the institution of government, as we have said, is the economic anarchy. When the Revolution has regulated this anarchy, and organized the industrial forces, there is no further pretext for political centralization; it is absorbed in industrial solidarity, a solidarity which is based upon general reason, and of which we may say, as Pascal said of the universe, that its center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere.
Competition between the Waterways and Railways
The railway calls for the man for whom time is even more than money, because it is life, much more than it serves goods, to which the speed of steam very often only adds an unnecessary luxury. The railway, eliminating intervals, makes men everywhere present in each other’s homes; thanks to it, we will be able to say of a State what Pascal said of the universe: The center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. Thus, just as the railway escapes the periodicity of the seasons which is everywhere visible in commerce as well as in the extractive and agricultural industries, so it erases and levels all the inequalities of position and climate, and makes no distinction between the hamlet lost in the plain and the manufacturing center majestically seated on the rivers. It will be up to the railway to completely realize this aphorism: The more the lines of communication become perfect, that is to say, the more easily the merchandise becomes able to move in all directions from the place of production to the place of consumption, the less the producer and the consumer need intermediaries, the less the goods will seek the warehouse.
Confessions of a Revolutionary
There, the government, the state, the power, whatever name you give it, reduced to its just limits, which are, not to legislate or to execute, not even to fight or to judge, but to attend, as commissioner, the sermons, if there are sermons; to attend the debates of the courts and to the debates of the parliament, if there are courts and a parliament; to supervise the generals and the armies, if circumstances oblige you to retain armies and generals; to recall the meaning of the laws and to prevent their contradictions; to procure their execution, and to prosecute offenses: there, I say, the government is nothing but the headmaster of society, the sentinel of the people. Or rather, the government no longer exists, since, by the progress of their separation and their centralization, the faculties which the government formerly united have all, some disappeared, others escaped its initiative: from the an-archy has emerged order. There, finally, you have the liberty of the citizens, the truth of institutions, the sincerity of universal suffrage, the integrity of administration, the impartiality of justice, the patriotism of bayonets, the submission of parties, the impotence of sects, the convergence of all wills. Your society is organized, lively, progressive; it thinks, speaks, acts like a man, and this precisely because it is no longer represented by a man, because it no longer recognizes any personal authority, because in itself, as in every organized being and living, as in Pascal’s infinity, the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.
It is to this anti-governmental constitution that our democratic traditions, our revolutionary tendencies, our need for centralization and unity, our love of liberty and equality, and the purely economic, but so imperfectly applied principle of all our constitutions, lead us inevitably. And that is what I had wanted to make clear, in a few words to the Constituent Assembly, if that Assembly, impatient for platitudes, had been capable of listening to anything other than platitudes; if, in its blind prejudice against every new idea, in its disloyal provocations to the Socialists, it had not seemed to say to them: I defy you to convince me!
The Political Capacity of the Working Classes
Economic right granted, public right will be deduced from it immediately. A government is a system of guarantees; the same principle of mutual guarantee, which must ensure to each instruction, labor, the freedom to disposition his own faculties, the exercise of his industry, the enjoyment of his property, the exchange of his products and services, will equally vouchsafe to everyone order, justice, peace, equality, the moderation of power, the loyalty of public officials, the dedication of all.
Just as the territory was originally divided by nature and defined by a certain membership of regions, so in each region, divided by mutual agreement between municipalities and shared among families – just as, once again labors and industries have each been distributed according to the organic law of division, and have in turn formed consensual groups and corporations;
Similarly, under the new pact, political sovereignty, civil authority and corporate influence are coordinated among the regions, districts, communes and other categories, and through such coordination, become identical with liberty itself.
The old law of unity and indivisibility is repealed. By virtue of the consent, at least presumed, of the various parts of the state to the pact of union, the political center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Each group or variety of people, every race, every language is master in its own territory; each city, secured by its neighbors, is queen of the circle formed by its radius. From now on, the unity is only marked in right by the promise that the various sovereign groups make to one another: 1st, to govern themselves and to follow, along with their neighbors, certain principles; 2nd, to protect against the enemy abroad and tyranny within; 3rd, to collaborate in the interests of their respective farms and businesses, and also to assist one another in the event of misfortune; — in the Government, only by a national council formed by the deputies of States, charged with oversight of the pact’s implementation and the improvement of the common weal.
Thus, carried into the political sphere, what we have hitherto called mutualism or guarantism takes the name of federalism. This simple synonymy gives us the entire revolution, both political and economic…
Carnets II, p. 39.
Divisibility of matter. — […]
Pierre Leroux: “On European Union”
Decentralizing empires, establishing in each province, in each city its own activity, and at the same time breaking down the barriers which separate nations, this is what freedom, science and industry aim for: so that, if their triumph was complete, we could say of the great society of men what Pascal said of the universe: Center everywhere, circumference nowhere.
“Two men meet…” / The Social System
Justice in the Revolution and in the Church
Seventh Study: Ideas
XLII
I. System of public reason, or social system.
How many times have I not heard addressed to myself this compliment that jealous critics would hasten, for the honor of the century, to withdraw, if they understood its significance: You are an admirable destroyer; but you don’t build anything. You throw people out on the street, and you don’t offer them any shelter. What do you put in place of religion? What do you put in the place of the government? What do you put in the place of property?… They say to me now: What do you put in the place of this individual reason, the sufficiency of which, for the sake of your cause, you are reduced to denying?
Nothing, my good man; for I do not intend to suppress anyof what I have so resolutely criticized. I only flatter myself on two things: it is, in the first place, to teach you to put each thing in its place, after having purged it of the absolute and balanced it with the other things; next, to show you that the things you know, and which you are so afraid of losing, are not the only ones that exist, and that there are still more considerable things which you have to take into account. Of this number is the collective reason.
We ask for the true system, the natural, rational, legitimate system of society, since none of those that have been tried can resist the secret action that disorganizes it. This has been the constant preoccupation of socialist philosophers, from the mythological Minos to the director of the Icarians. As we had no positive idea either of Justice, or of the economic order, or of social dynamics, or of the conditions of philosophical certainty, we formed a monstrous idea of social being: we has compared it to a great organism, created according to a formula of hierarchy which, prior to Justice, constituted its own law and the very condition of its existence; it was like an animal of a mysterious species, but which, like all known animals, must have had a head, a heart, nerves, teeth, feet, etc. From this chimerical organism, which everyone has striven to discover, we then deduce Justice, that is to say, we have derived morality from a physiology, or, as we say today, the right of duty, so that Justice always found itself placed outside the conscience, liberty subject to fatalism, and humanity fallen.
I have refuted all these imaginations in advance, by exposing the facts and the principles which rule them out forever.
As regards the substantiality and the organization of the social being, I have shown the first in that increase in effective power which is proper to the group, and which exceeds the sum of the individual forces which compose it; I gave the law of the second, showing that it is reduced to a series of weightings of forces, services and products, which makes the social system a general equation, a balance.
As an organism, society, the moral being par excellence, therefore differs essentially from living beings, in which the subordination of organs is the very law of existence. This is why society is repugnant to any idea of hierarchy, as the formula makes clear: All men are equal in dignity by nature, and must become equivalent in conditions through work and justice.
Now, such is the organization of a being, such will be his reason: this is why, while the reason of the individual affects the form of a genesis, as can be seen by all theogonies, the gnoses , political constitutions, syllogistics; collective reason is reduced, like algebra, by the elimination of the absolute, to a system of resolutions and equations, which comes down to saying that there is really, for society, no system.
It is not a system, in fact, in the sense that we attach ordinarily to this word, only an order in which all relations are relations of equality; where there is no primacy, no obedience, no center of gravity or direction where the only law is that everything submits to Justice, that is to say to balance.
Does mathematics form a system? It doesn’t occur to anyone to say that. If in a treatise on mathematics some trace of systematization is detected, it is due to the author; she does not comeof science itself. So it is with the social name.
Two men meet, recognize their dignity, note the additional benefit which would result for both from the concert of their industries, and consequently guarantee equality, which amounts to saying, economy. This is the whole social system: a power of collectivity, an equation.
Two families, two cities, two provinces, contract on the same footing: there are always only these two things, a power of collectivity and an equation. It would imply contradiction, violation of Justice, that there was something else.
It is for this reason that any institution, any decree which does not depend exclusively on justice and equality, soon succumbs to the attacks of criticism, to the incursions of free examination.
For, just as in nature all existence can be challenged by man in the name of his dignity and freedom, so in society any establishment can be challenged by him in the name of justice; there is only Justice which cannot be challenged in the name of nothing.
Justice is irremovable, immodifiable, eternal; everything else is transient.
And this is how religions, political constitutions, utopias of all kinds, imagined for the reconciliation of individual interest and collective interest, but all claiming to start from higher than Justice, to do more or better than Justice, to use Justice instead of serving it itself, ended by being found all contrary to Justice, and in the name of Justice eliminated. They are creations of individual absolutism, disguised under the mask of divinity.
And it will be the same as long as the thought of the absolute will remain preponderant in the governance of societies. There is no combination of force and cunning, of superstition and Machiavellianism, of aristocracy and misery, which can definitively defeat Justice. And if this Justice is armed with criticism, if you give it as its appearance the daily, universal discussion of institutions and ideas, judgments and acts, the conspiracy cannot last a moment. In the great day of controversy, the monsters born of skepticism and tyranny will be forced to flee and hide their ridiculous faces underground.
One thing then is individual reason, absolutist, proceeding by genesis and syllogisms, constantly tending, by the subordination of persons, functions, characters, to systematize society; and another is collective reason, everywhere eliminating the absolute, proceeding invariably by equations, and energetically denying, as far as the society it represents, any system. Incompatibility of forms, antagonism of tendencies: what more do we want to affirm the distinction of these two natures?
Ninth Study: Progress
CHAPTER II.
Theory of Progress.
XV
We all believe, invincibly, in Progress, as we believe in Liberty and Justice. On this principle, theologians and philosophers, speculation and practice, the proletarian as well as the rich, basically everyone is in agreement. This cruel word: humanity is always the same, as stupid, as miserable and as wicked as the first day, strikes us as a blasphemy; the denial of freedom, moral skepticism, do not wreak our hearts any more.
But what is this progress?
Let’s collect our ideas, then we’ll consult the facts.
Everything moves in the universe, either forwards or backwards, in a curved line or a straight line, with an accelerated movement or a slowed down movement; everything works, everything has always worked, everything will work forever.
Movement is the form of all spontaneity: movement is therefore essential to freedom; there is no positive freedom in rest. Freedom is essentially practical and active; it fails when it surrenders to contemplation. How do the same philosophers, after having conceived it theoretically as the act by which the ideal ego frees itself from nature and subordinates it to itself, define it in practice, consciousness of universal laws and conformity to these laws? How, after positing movement, force, action in principle, do they conclude with quietism?
Therefore, independently of the organic evolutions noted, and which all arise from the necessities of nature, from the spontaneity of things, from the intellectual and social constitution, there is reason to believe that there exists in humanity a deeper movement, which embraces all the others and modifies them, that of Liberty and Justice.
Physical humanity moves; it goes from birth to death: this movement is called life.
Intelligent humanity moves; it goes from instinct to reflection, from intuition to deduction: this movement is logic.
Religious, political, industrial, artistic humanity also moves; it completes more or less long periods, in a continual back and forth.
Reasoning by analogy, all the better because freedom is the antagonist of all that is fatal, I say that liberal, moral, vigilante humanity must also move.
Thus, without worrying any more about the evolutions of nature and history, essentially fatal, which moreover have nothing progressive and in no way account for the so long and so frequently repeated decadences of society, I fix the starting point of my theory in Justice, from where the movement will have to radiate, either for the good, or for the evil, on all the faculties of the human being, collective and individual; and I give this movement Liberty as its driving force.
Let’s continue.
The movement of Justice can operate in two ways, depending on whether it is in development or in retrogression.
In the first case, I call it Sanctification or self-improvement of humanity: it will be, as we shall see presently, Progress.
In the second case, I call it Corruption of humanity by itself: it is Decadence.
In both cases, I say that humanity perfects or corrupts itself, because, if it is a question of the development of Justice, I cannot doubt that this development is due to Liberty, works which have conscience as their principle, being essentially repugnant to selfishness and to all the fatal attractions of man; and, if it is a question of the diminution of Justice, this diminution can only come from the apostasy of Liberty, which nothing, neither in nature nor in humanity, can stand up to.
In this way, progress, having its base of operation in Justice, its driving force in Liberty, can no longer preserve anything fatal: an essential condition, outside of which, progress being confused with organic revolution, one disputes without [listening], and philosophy, like society, remains stationary.
Thus Justice being the pact of Liberty, its movement consisting of a series of equations successively produced or revoked between a greater or lesser number of persons, and relatively to a greater or lesser number of objects, it follows that this movement, free in principle, cannot be subject to any fatal condition of acceleration or slow-down. It is ad libitum, entirely optional, being able, according to free will, to rush, to slow down, to be interrupted, to retrograde, to be reborn; in a word, there is no necessity. Where a necessity lets itself be perceived in the social movement, one can say a priori that it is foreign to progress.
This general conception of the progress of liberty will enable us to account for the multitude of accidents, hesitations, delays and decadences with which the history of humanity abounds, and to which the ordinary theoreticians of progress bravely close their eyes, example of Hegel, who only looked at the whole and neglected the detail, a detail that affects thousands of generations, and trillions of men!
XVI
The problem thus clarified, the solution will not be long in coming. It is predicted, in fact, that it is with the oscillations of freedom as with the gnomon of Hezekiah: nothing is easier to conceive than its advance; the real difficulty, the only difficulty, has to do with hindsight.
Let us first show in what this advance consists, when it takes place; we will then seek what cause stops it; then, this cause found, it will not be difficult for us to discover the remedy.
What is Justice? the equation of liberty.
Two men meet, with opposing interests. The debate begins; then they compromise: equation, first conquest of right, first establishment of freedom. A third arrives, then another, and so on indefinitely: the pact which bound the first two is only extended to receive the newcomers; so many contractors, so many subjects of Justice. So there is progress.
That’s not all. With each object which interests the life of these men a new litigation arises; new transactions become indispensable: so many articles which are added to the primitive pact, so many conquests consequently for Justice. Thus the law of the Noachides is composed of seven precepts, that of Sinai of ten; the code of the desert contains about forty, that of Esdras or Helcias has more than five hundred. I do not mean to say that the morality and progress of a people should be judged by the number of written laws: long before Jesus Christ this proposition had become an untruth; I say that progress in justice is measured by the number of laws which are observed, which is very different.
We call progression, in mathematics, a series of which each term is composed of the previous one increased by reason or multiplied by reason.
These are the following two series:
[table]
Read backwards, these two series form a regression. (Bezout’s arithmetic.)
Such is, in a regularly constituted society, which, without losing any of its fundamental principles, constantly adds new definitions, adopted and followed by all consciences, the image of the legal movement: the good being added to the good in Because of the number of persons and the multiplicity of interests, the beam of justice extending unceasingly, there is necessarily progress.
The opposite will take place if Justice is in decline: if the laws have no sanction except in force, if they no longer understand each other, if, by the influence of economic inequality and reason of State, they gradually fall disuse; if skepticism, invading consciences, undermines the bases of public morality; if hypocrisy and contempt bring back social war. Then there will be regression, as Bezout says, of Justice, that is to say depravity of society and decadence.
No difficulty for the intelligence in this double movement, of which one could, for each nation, establish the account on two columns, expressing by their difference the acquisitions and the losses of Justice.
All this, compared to the sublime and scholarly theories of which I have given the analysis, is of such simplicity that there is only reason to be surprised at one thing, which is that the theoreticians of progress have not seen it. If they had remembered their arithmetic, they would have understood that the whole mystery lay, not in the forward movement, but, as all peoples and all theologies had guessed, in the cause and the possibility of hindsight.
What is it that hinders Justice, since it is clear that without this hindrance progress, as essential to Justice as movement is to freedom, would not cease, and that we would all be saints and blessed?
In theological language, what is the origin of sin?
XVII
Let us pause for a moment in front of the problem.
Justice, we have said several times, is the pact of Liberty, its sacrament. It is through Liberty that the idealizing social feeling acquires that penetrating virtue which makes it the most lively of our inclinations and the most sublime of our ideas, Justice. Moreover, no influence constrains Liberty to this equation, except its own dignity, its glory. In all respects, […] Justice must be dear to her, which she puts above all else.
On the other hand, Liberty is sovereign; and there is no power in the universe, there is no fatalism of nature and of the mind, which stands before it; it denies, subordinates and destroys all that is foreign to it and stands in its way. How then is the cessation of Justice in a society, how its demotion, possible? How can this demotion go, it has been seen, until the annihilation of all public virtue and the dissolution of the social body? In short, how can humanity, capable by the energy of its consciousness of rising for a time towards good, then sink into evil?
In the individual, the failures of conscience can, up to a certain point, be explained by the uncertainty of the law and the mistrust of the intentions of the neighbor, uncertainty and mistrust which throw man on the defensive and provide him with less of an excuse. But this state of antagonism and reserve is not corruption, and no one can mistake it. I am talking about this spontaneous failure which, after a more or less long period of fervor, seizes the social body, invades souls, paralyzes freedom, dignity, justice, all noble feelings, and delivers people en masse to decomposition.
To accuse the institutions, the government, here would be puerile. Why are institutions and laws established? By reason of right, no doubt. How, then, is the same reason not sufficient to correct morals as soon as the latent vice is recognized? How is power, more and more prevaricating, suffered?… Justice is the first law of man; now, no animal fails in its instinct: how can man fail in his law, if this law, as I have demonstrated, asany sane philosophy is forced to admit it, is truly in him, if she is of him, if she possesses him as the first of her loves? For what does it matter that, in the general decadence, a few pure souls protest and groan, if the mass is enervated, if the grace of right no longer appeals to it, if, to overcome evil, it only has the feeling of its incapacity ?
Who can, I say, thus exhaust a society of all virtue? Is it an external and fatal cause? So our whole theory of freedom crumbles: man is a slave. Let’s not talk about Justice anymore; let us submit in all humility to reasons of state.
Could it be that the human soul possesses only a sum of virtue, as the body a sum of life; and that the provision spent, immorality succeeds, dragging death in its train? In this case, it is Justice that is insufficient and ineffective; it calls for comfort, a superior grace: which brings us back to the system of innate, original decay.
So the horrible nightmare still pursues us. Twenty times in these studies we have struck down the hydra, and when we believe ourselves delivered, we find it more threatening, challenging us to a last combat. What fascination obsesses us, and makes us constantly find, on analysis, evil and death, where the instinct of our heart promised us life and virtue? Oh what! you say you are progressing because you are not quite dead? But the Egyptians, Indians, Bactrians, Assyrians, Persians are dead; but the Greeks and the Romans died in their turn; and you. French, Germans, Angles, Slavs, peoples of the East and peoples of the West, you are all very sick. Come, shake off this decrepitude, make your old age green again: otherwise, on your knees before the Crucified, whose blood shedhas alone revived condemned humanity, and will sustain it in its trials until the last day.
XVIII
Whether there is progress or not, I will first be granted one thing: it is that, in spite of the extinction of so many noble races which perished in the struggle, civilization has always risen again, and, as it subsists only through Justice, that the latter at least never perishes. According to the Church, there would even be progress in Justice since the propagation of the Gospel. Is this progress real, and should it be attributed to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? This is a question that for the moment I leave aside. I limit myself to noting this serious fact, that Justice alone, in humanity, does not pass. However weak it has been from the beginning of the world down to our day, how constant its action has been, while the causes of dissolution have only acted at intervals and in conflict with each other, one can say that it at least has always remained; it has survived all the dissolutions, all the catastrophes, bursting out at times with a terrible noise, as in the French Revolution.
It is the privilege of Justice, in fact, that the faith it inspires be unshakable, and that it cannot be dogmatically denied or challenged. All peoples invoke it: even when it violates it, reason of state claims to rely on it; religion exists only for it; skepticism conceals itself before it; irony has power only in its name; crime and hypocrisy pay him homage. If Liberty is not an empty word, it acts, functions, only for the service of the law; and despite his revolts, Liberty, at bottom, does not curse him. When Justice should be ranked, for energy, below all the motives that agitate man and society, even if this energy were to decline, it would suffice in the long run to have this universality of respect, this constancy of opinion, to make the law prevail. Progress would go more slowly; he wouldn’t stop.
It is therefore not too much to say, basing myself on the experience of nations, that Justice is stronger by itself than all the causes which combat it, and that if, for forty centuries, there has been no If there is no progress in Justice, the status quo, and all the more reason, hindsight, shows an anomaly against which psychological reason protests.
Progress, in a word, according to the notion of justice and according to facts, is not only possible, it is the natural state of the human soul, an effect of its constitution.
From which I conclude that if nevertheless the progress does not take place, if it is suspended, if it even changes into retrogression, the impediment can only come from a cause capable of doing violence or illusion to the [consciousness] of humanity.
What is this cause?
Nature? Before consciousness, nature is passive; moreover, we have seen, in treating of distributive justice and the natural laws of economy, that nature is in agreement with justice, and that of itself it pushes us to equality.
Passions? We have just recalled that, united all together, they weigh less in the final analysis in the universal conscience than Justice.
The only power capable of defeating Justice is Liberty. How? This is what we will say presently.
Thus, after having shown Liberty as the driving force of Right, we are led, by arigorous induction, to point it out as the author of the evil: one more step, and we have the answer to the riddle.
XIX
That Liberty can resist Justice, as well as all fatalisms, there is no difficulty there, since without that it would not be free, which implies a contradiction. And since one cannot, at the risk of making it disappear again, suppose it has motives other than itself, the question comes down to asking how Liberty comes to prefer itself to Justice, which is its pact, its ideal. of predilection, his oath, to perjure himself, finally, to the point of letting fate regain the upper hand, and thus signing his own downfall.
An impenetrable mystery, as long as philosophical reason remained inclined before transcendent reason, but which was to be dissipated, like so many others, as soon as a bold hand had torn the veil.
Man, by his free will, tends to realize in himself and around him, in the people who touch him and in the things that belong to him, in the city he lives in and in the nature that surrounds him, in all his thoughts and in all his acts, the sublime and the beautiful, the absolute.
The absolute to be realized is his faith, his law, his destiny, his beatitude, in a word, his ideal.
Of all the realizations of the ideal, the highest, that which dominates the others, is Justice.
Justice, indeed, apart from the rules of law which constitute its reason, which form the domain of the [jurist] and give birth to a positive science, ethics; Justice is that powerful ideality, under the influence of which man tends to become, from a simply sociable creature, a just, a saint, a hero, a God. From this point of view, which is that of free will or of the ideal, Justice is no longer only the imperious order of sociability; it is the principal, pivotal object of aesthetics, compared to which the other realizations of the ideal appear only as secondary creations, subordinated to Justice as means to their end.
In other words, man, by his free will, is an artist, and the first object of his art is his conscience; all the manifestations of his ideal have as their object, in the final analysis, its justification: this is why we are all, at heart, puritans and rigorists. But as much self-indulgence inspires disesteem as much the hypocrisy of rebellious puritanism.
To realize Justice, the first condition is to know its law: for, as we have explained, if free will goes beyond necessity, it supposes it: no ideal, no art, no holiness, therefore, apart from the reason of persons and the reason of things.
Now, science is far from keeping pace with the imagination; that industry, social economy, law, be as prompt in their development as poetry and art. Various causes, which as they become more complicated, multiply ad infinitum, retard the progress of legislation and jurisprudence: primitive barbarism, naïveté of understanding, inexperience in social relations, prejudices of religion, power, caste, property, etc. ; then, tradition, acquired possession; then doubt, contradiction, war. It took four thousand years to discover the system of the world: the system of the human soul is not yet known, and we have occupied ourselves with it a hundred times more.
However, Liberty cannot wait: what it does not know, it divines or supplements. Man is impatient to possess himself and to enjoy his glory; he needs to know oneself to be just, heroic, brave and beautiful; he cannot defer his felicity to a late revelation, which moreover only matters to him as an element of his ideal. Free will therefore always and necessarily precedes science: with the data such as it has, it produces its ideal, and this ideal, more or less in conformity with the reason of things, becomes its juridical formula: it is for it the subject, object, type, image, condition, principle, pledge, of Justice.
Having thus realized the absolute, Liberty rests in the contemplation of her work: she has arrived at her [nec plus ultra]. Like the God of Genesis, who applauds each of his days, separating his creations, so to speak, with a point of admiration; like the young girl looking at herself in her mirror, Liberty smiles at herself in the ideal she creates; she says to herself, after saying: Good! and believing herself to have arrived at her last labor she lies down in her glory: Requievit ab opere quod patrârat.
There is not a man of art or industry, not a scholar, not a peasant, not a man of action, not a virtuous soul, who does not suspect what I mean. Whenever man has accomplished a task, completed an experiment, executed a job, delivered a speech, struck a blow, fulfilled a duty, he collects himself, judges himself, and, in a more or less prolonged reverie, thrives on his idea, let us speak more exactly, of his ideal.
And what is this ideal? A miniature of freedom, a test of the absolute.
So therein lies the trap.
By virtue of its free will, the soul seeks its beatitude in Justice and the ideal, which it identifies: in what fundamentally it is not mistaken. But, owing to the imperfection of its notions, its legal formula is first of all erroneous, and while, thanks to the ideal with which it clothes it, it believes that it has grasped Justice in the sublimity of its essence, it has produced only a false divinity, an idol.
Now, until freedom has learned, by a long exercise of right and reason, to reduce to its just value this increment of its fantasy, it is inevitable that it will take it for a manifestation of the Absolute. , author and subject of Justice; that she is passionate about this image, forgets herself and neglects for this disastrous cult Justice, alone worthy of her respect; and this with a reason all the more plausible in that Justice itself appears to be only the command, more or less obscure, of this divine Absolute, of which it believes it possesses the pledge and the word.
Idolatry, in a word, Christianity has said it very well, but without understanding in the least its own word, idolater that it was itself: this is the first cause of sin, the principle of all failures and social dissolutions.
It is thus that the first societies made so many idols of caste, of slavery, of polygamy, of despotism; and any individual who fails in justice, without prejudice to the excuse provided by the state of antagonism in which he lives, acts in the same way: he obeys an ideal.
It was of all our errors the greatest and the most disastrous, to attribute the evil to a perverse inclination, to an evil principle or to a satanic influence.
The first cause of sin, independently of the legal insufficiency of the first founders and of the state of war which consequently became generalized everywhere, this long-sought cause is in what is most legitimate and most holy in the soul. , in the fundamental, but unperceived, identity of Justice and the ideal, the first incomplete in its notions, the second taken for the absolute; it must be progressively weakened by the rectification of the law, and its equation with the ideal.
XX
This is the whole theory of Progress: a theory of the origin of moral evil, or of the cause which arrests and demotes man in Justice, a cause which is explained by a lack of balance between right and [the ideal]. Strictly speaking, there is no theory of Progress, since Progress is given by the sole fact that man possesses Justice and that he is free; there is only one theory of sin or backsliding.
Let us take it up again, this theory, theological in terms, at bottom so unchristian, and which the Revolution has the right to claim as the fundamental article of its ethics.
Man does not want evil; he dreams of the sublime and the beautiful, seeks, with all the energy of his freedom, the ideal. He tends to realize this ideal, first in himself by Justice, then by a sort of extension to things of the ideal which his soul has conceived for itself, of which it alone is the principle, subject and end. Hence the external works of freedom, in metaphysics, theology, poetry, art, politics, social economy, science and industry. In freedom, the universe and humanity form but one realm, the realm of the ideal.
But at first man only imperfectly knows the law of his morals; experience soon made him realize how imperfect his legal relations were and how little corresponded to the sublimity of his idols. It is then that he resists: he clings to his religion as the very source of all justice; to the works of his art, as to the pledges of his primary virtue; in short, from being the justiciary he wants to be, he becomes an idolater, and in fact a sinner. It’s notthe more the right he pursues is his pleasure, his vanity.
Now, such is the corruption of the collective conscience, such is produced, on a lesser scale, individual immorality. In every detail of his life, even in eating and drinking, man is an idealist; he feels that he honors himself, that he elevates himself by the ideal. But this aesthetic delight is always accorded to him only with a view to Justice; as soon as he loses sight of it he becomes filthy, Epicuri de grege porcus.
Man, indeed, as an animal, is incapable of sinning; subject only to the attractions of sensibility, he does not think of the absolute, he has no ideal and knows nothing of Justice.
Only the intelligent man is capable of sinning. But it is not by the senses that he is seduced: in this respect the language of the moralists lacks precision; he is seduced by the ideal which his understanding makes him perceive in things, by the conception of the absolute.
It is idealism that corrupts human thought at its source and falsifies all its judgments: this truth has been amply demonstrated in our previous studies.
What have we, in fact, encountered everywhere as the primary, efficient, and until further notice irresistible cause of immorality, if not the conceptions of transcendence, theological speculation, the spirit of religion and of the church , the social hierarchy, the providential government: all things in which it has been easy for us to recognize productions, effigies, formulas, the absolute?
And when we wanted to remedy this mental corruption, which threatens today to infect the most positive sciences, what did we propose as hygiene to the intelligences, if not the expurgation of the absolute?
Thus, in determining the conditions of Justice, we did the theory of humanitarian progress; by pointing out the causes, metaphysical and theological, which divert souls from Justice, we discovered the secret of social retrogradation.
What remains for us to say now, except that the reign of the absolute is coming to an end, and that, the enticement of the ideal, the source of such frightful debauches, being once brought back to its just measure, progress will be accomplished in a continuous manner, without convulsions and revolts? The gods are gone; skepticism, which today seems to threaten Justice, has exterminated them. The hour will soon strike for perpetual assizes and incorruptible judgment.