From Freedom News, an obituary for the anarchist Daniel Colson (11/01/2026) by David Berry, followed by a translation of a lecture by him entitled, “Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism”.
A singular and generous thinker of anarchism, his work traced living lines of revolt and creation
Daniel Colson, anarchist theorist and labour historian, died on 9 January in Lyon. He was 82.
Colson was an active member of the anarchist movement in Lyon from the early 1970s, a member of the collective that ran the city’s anarchist bookshop ‘La Gryffe’ from its creation in 1978, and a member of the editorial collective that has produced the anarchist review Réfractions since 1997. A professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Etienne, he published extensively on labour history, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism and, latterly, philosophy.
Colson first moved to Lyon, France’s second biggest city, in 1966, when he went to university there to study sociology, after two years studying philosophy at a seminary near Clermont-Ferrand. At the university he discovered revolutionary politics, and soon became active in the student movement, which was dominated in the late 1960s by Maoists, Trotskyists and other assorted ‘gauchistes’ (‘leftists’—originally a pejorative term used of the student revolutionaries of 1968 by the French Communist Party, referencing Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder).
Through his friendship with the libertarian communist Michel Marsella, Colson also learned about anarchism, the Socialism or Barbarism group around Cornelius Castoriadis, Situationism, Luxemburgism, etc. Like so many of his contemporaries he was involved in the campaign against US imperialism and in particular the Vietnam war, and was the prime mover in the ‘Vietnam Committee’ in Lyon’s old town. The group produced a newsletter, Informations rassemblées à Lyon (IRL), and after the repression and collapse of the 1968 movement, the Vietnam Committee transformed itself into the ‘Comité de quartier du Vieux-Lyon’ (Old Lyon Neighbourhood Committee).
When asked years later what the objectives of this committee had been, Colson replied: “Nothing less than creating the embryo of an insurrection at a local level.” Influenced by the automobile workers occupying the local Berliet factories, the group decided to occupy the local ‘Maison des jeunes’ (youth centre), which had been where the committee had met over the previous months. “We were very ambitious. We were seriously hoping, when the right conditions arose, to take over the local police station—including its armoury.” That plan never materialised, although the group did occupy the town hall briefly.
Colson was inspired by 1968 and especially by his experience of “spontaneity in action and in organisation”, including widespread co-operation between students and workers. He was also inspired by the discovery of three important books: the four-volume history of the First International written by the Swiss anarchist James Guillaume; the Russian anarchist Voline’s The Unknown Revolution (originally published in French in 1947, but republished in the aftermath of 1968 in a series edited by Daniel Guérin and the anarchist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel); and Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Not that he understood Anti-Œdipus at all when he first tried to read it—he found it “pretty indigestible” in fact— and even ten years later when he tried again, it was only the first chapter that he really got to grips with: for Colson, that chapter successfully demolished the “enormous Marxist theoretical apparatus” that dominated the French left at that time, and made clear “not only the theoretical but also the emancipatory, ethical, philosophical and practical power of anarchism”.
Colson was actively involved with a number of anarchist newspapers: the Cahiers de mai (the May Notebooks, which was launched in June 1968 and was the voice of the Action Committees which had sprung up across France), ICO (Informations et Correspondences Ouvrières, Workers’ News and Letters, focussed on autonomous workers’ struggles, outside of trade unions and parties), and IRL (Informations rassemblées à Lyon, literally News Gathered in Lyon, which published eye-witness accounts and documents on social struggles in the Lyon area not published by the mainstream press or the main left-wing papers). IRL, which Colson helped create, was interested in workers’ struggles, but also illegalism and other forms of resistance, and discussed a range of movements: anarchism, council communism, feminism, ecology, antimilitarism, sexual liberation, etc.
In 1978, Colson was one of the original group of anarchist activists who set up the La Gryffe bookshop in Lyon, and the collective is still going strong. As well as selling the usual range of anticapitalist, antiauthoritarian material, La Gryffe also has a meeting room that regularly hosts debates, exhibitions, film showings, etc. When Colson published a book about the collective in 2020, he was careful not to give an idealised view of a successful anarchist collective at work, but to highlight also the long and sometimes difficult history that La Gryffe was built on, including some serious differences of opinion and conflicts within the collective, but conflicts which were worked through and resolved according to anarchist principles.
Having returned to academia, Colson gained his doctorate in 1983 with a thesis—later published as a book—on anarcho-syndicalism and communism in the labour movement in Saint-Etienne, 1920-25. (If ever you’ve been confused about the difference between the terms ‘syndicalism’, ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, and how the once revolutionary syndicalist French labour movement came to be dominated by Communism, this is the book for you.) A second historical-sociological book followed in 1998 on the iron and steel industry—and its owners, the famous ‘iron barons’ or forgemasters—in Saint-Etienne from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War.
Colson explained once in a talk he gave on ‘Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism’ [see below]—the main thrust of which was to argue for the rehabilitation of Proudhon, who remained unpopular in anarchist circles—that he had discovered Proudhon at about the same time in the 1970s that he discovered “the left-wing Nietzscheanism” of Foucault and especially Deleuze. Deleuze, he argued, “developed an emancipatory thought which had a lot in common with Proudhon.”
Indeed, moving away from his earlier sociological work, and after writing books on Proudhon and Malatesta, Colson became increasingly focussed on philosophy, and was especially interested in Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (among others) and how their thinking related to anarchism. This led to a number of conference papers, journal articles and books on these subjects—in 2022, for instance, he published a book on ‘working-class anarchism and philosophy’. Unfortunately only one of his books has been translated (by Jesse Cohn) into English: the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism. From Proudhon to Deleuze—“a provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought”.
Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism
Daniel Colson
The text below is a supplement to the section of the course “History and Construction of the Humanities” dealing with Proudhon. It is an oral lecture given to an Italian audience (University of Catania).
The work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon has had a strange fate, at least in France. It continues to provoke a dual reaction, contradictory but ultimately leading to a common effect.
On the one hand, and most often, Proudhon arouses contempt and indifference. At best, his thinking is considered to be an implausible and formless chaos, without much significance anyway. At worst, it is considered to be one of the many sources of fascism and reactionary thought, when Proudhon is not simply labelled with the most extravagant titles, such as “the father of modern anti-Semitism”.
On the other hand, still in France and sporadically, Proudhon has never ceased to arouse keen interest among a wide variety of authors, once they have decided to read him, from the moralists of the late 19th century to the sociologist Georges Gurvitch in the early 1950s, including Georges Sorel, the Durkheimians, syndicalists, anarchists, but also royalists and quite a few reactionaries of all stripes. But this interest in Proudhon has always been fragmented, contradictory and short-lived. And it is true that Proudhon is difficult to read, including for technical reasons related to the publication of his books, their excessive quantity, but above all the heterogeneous, involved and circumstantial nature of a mode of thought and writing that lends itself very poorly to the formation of a school or a unified interpretation. However, a first conclusion can be drawn from these readings. Once you have the good fortune (or misfortune) of really starting to read Proudhon, you can no longer set him aside. One cannot shake off the particular idea that his texts awaken in each of his readers, whether they curse him and pursue him with tenacious hatred, or whether they discover in the most minor of his writings, in the turn of a phrase, an idea that completely captivates them and transforms them overnight into singular and original Proudhonists, just as others may have found themselves Spinozists without meaning to, by accident, but definitively, on a plane of immanence, as Deleuze would say, where no school, no orthodox standardisation is necessary, where the greatest differences resonate and echo each other in the most intimate and hidden way.
There are many examples of the surprise, or rather the shock, that reading Proudhon provokes. It acts like love at first sight or like Montaigne’s remark about La Boétie: “because it was him, because it was me”, or, as Deleuze recalls, like Nietzsche discovering Spinoza and writing to his friend Overbeck: “I am astonished, delighted… I knew almost nothing about Spinoza; if I have just felt the need for him, it is the effect of an instinctive act…”.[1] Like many other things, and as he himself shows in his philosophy, the discovery of Proudhon involves particular relationships which, in anarchism proper, as in libertarian thought in the broad sense, are precisely thought through two important concepts: the concept of analogy and the concept of affinity. You are surely aware of the importance of the concept of affinity in the libertarian movement, particularly through the practice of “affinity groups”, without which it is impossible to understand the logic and subversive nature of anarchism. Well, anarchist affinity, in its dual practical and theoretical form, is exactly the same as Goethe’s elective affinities, or the notion of affinity as used by Max Weber to illustrate the unlikely encounter between Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. As Spinoza says, we do not know what a body can do, what a body is capable of. And it is encounters with others, both good and bad encounters, that reveal this to us in their effects, which are in turn good or bad, oppressive or emancipatory. In short, handling affinity between beings requires a great deal of practical sense and sensitivity, experimentation and caution. So if you start reading Proudhon, beware, no one can know what the outcome will be.
The notion of affinity is central to libertarian thought and projects, to their conception of federalism and their vision of the emancipatory association of human beings. But this notion has its theoretical counterpart: the concept of analogy or homology. The concept of analogy, which is very important in Proudhon’s thinking, allows us to understand and, in a certain way, to predict, the quality of affinities or repulsions between beings, and therefore their effects. Analogy assumes that the link between beings is not based on external resemblance or the continuity of causes and effects. It is always based on the difference and discontinuity between beings. I will not attempt to explain how Proudhon develops this notion of analogy, particularly through what he calls “serial dialectics”. But here again, it is Spinoza who, with an example, best helps us to grasp this idea of analogy. He says this (I quote from memory): from the point of view of movement and rest, there is less connection between a plough horse and a racehorse than between a plough horse and an ox. In short, depending on the perspective we adopt in a given situation, at a given moment, the unity and classification of things break down and are recomposed in a different way. Our friends and enemies are no longer the same, and there is no longer any reason to say that the friends of our friends are necessarily our friends. The unity and classification of things break down. Plough horses cease to belong to the same species as racehorses. Oxen, draught horses and ruminating thinkers begin to compose a world opposed to that of greyhounds, racehorses and light-footed philosophers. With the Spinozist and Proudhonian analogy, everything becomes possible, both the best and the worst, and it is on this ground of analogy, of affinity, but also from our own point of view at a given moment, that we can understand how Proudhon was received by his readers, but also the randomness of these receptions. I would like to give two recent examples of positive encounters that illustrate Proudhon’s ceaseless novelty.
The first is Robert Damien, a French philosopher who heads a philosophy research centre at the CNRS, a research centre long concerned with Marxism and based at the University of Besançon. This group of philosophers works with others on the question of networks, internet networks, technology, cities and Whitehead’s philosophy. It was in the course of this research that Robert Damien stumbled, somewhat by chance, upon a minor text by Proudhon, a commissioned pamphlet entitled De la concurrence entre les chemins de fer et les voies navigables [On Competition between Railways and Waterways]. This text may seem far removed from philosophy and anarchy. And yet, 150 years later, it resonates with a contemporary philosophical problem, with Robert Damien’s thinking. For more on the effects of this unlikely encounter between Proudhon and Damien, I refer you to the text that the latter published in 2001, a text with a very significant title. It is entitled Transport ferroviaire et ordre politique, Proudhon, une pensée philosophique des réseaux? [Rail Transport and Political Order, Proudhon, a Philosophical Thought on Networks?][2] The title however ends with a significant question mark at the end of the second part of the title. As if to underline that, despite being constantly rediscovered, Proudhon never quite managed to carve his name in stone in the annals of official knowledge.
The second example is even more recent. It no longer concerns a philosopher but a strict legal scholar, Sophie Chambost, who has just published a book entitled Proudhon et la norme, Pensée juridique d’un anarchiste [Proudhon and the Norm: The Legal Thought of an Anarchist].[3] It is a law thesis that has won several prestigious awards. I hope that one day you will be able to read this thesis in Italian. Here again we find the mysteries of good and bad encounters between beings that Spinoza had already contributed to thinking about, these mysteries of anarchist affinity and analogy that Proudhon’s analyses in turn help to explain by revealing their material conditions of possibility and impossibility. We need to understand why and how the lawyer Sophie Chambost had the bizarre idea of taking Proudhon as the subject of her thesis. What is certain, as she explains in her book, is that at the time she shared the prejudices about Proudhon held by those who have not read him, who have not even tried to read him, who consider him a confused and politically dubious anarchist, necessarily an enemy of laws and justice, full of contradictions, an inexhaustible and exhausting hack. And then, like many others, Sophie Chambost began to read Proudhon and could not stop. Even Proudhon’s numerous and implausible diatribes on women failed to discourage her. She read the nineteen large volumes of his actual works. Then she tackled the equally voluminous volumes of his Carnets, before undertaking to read his gigantic correspondence, determined to get to the bottom of all the nonsense that the incoherent Proudhon had said about law. It was then that she went from one surprise to another. The more she read Proudhon – on subjects as varied as the church, railways, peace, literary property, war, women, stock market speculation, revolution, the Bible, marriage, Sunday worship, the working classes, Saint-Ouen station, etc. the more Sophie Chambost read, the more she was astonished by the extreme coherence, from a legal point of view, of a body of thought generally presented as irremediably chaotic and formless. For the results of this research, and the coherence it reveals, which are not without interest, I refer you to Chambost’s book.
I will give a third example of the effects of encountering Proudhon’s work. It is a personal example and one from the past. I apologise for having to talk about myself, but it is only as an example, not a model. It is also because this example allows me to address the question of the link between Proudhon and the relevance of anarchism today. Personally, I discovered libertarian thought in 1968, during the events of that period. I was a sociology student. Anarchism at that time, at least among students, was indisputably, viscerally even, linked to the history and experience of the libertarian movement. But theoretically, we were more Marxist. In our eyes, Proudhon and Bakunin suffered from all the discredit mentioned earlier. The very idea of trying to read them did not even cross our minds. Our practical and historical anarchism was quite satisfied, in terms of theory and argumentation, with ultra-left Marxism or, of course, the Hegelian Marxism of the Situationists. It is true, however, that Proudhon was not completely inaccessible to us, thanks to the work of an important French sociologist who, I hope, may have been translated into Italian. This is Pierre Ansart, a student of Georges Gurvitch. Ansart had published the results of his thesis on Proudhon in a book significantly entitled Marx et l’anarchisme [Marx and Anarchism].[4] This book, written by a renowned sociologist and published by an equally renowned publisher (Les Presses Universitaires de France), led the relatively conformist rebel that I was at the time to buy and read it. I wonder if I would have done so if the publisher had been more honest and chosen to put Proudhon’s name in the title. In any case, I read the book, without understanding everything, but I did understand one thing: that Proudhon’s thinking was fascinating, original and, above all, that it expressed much better than Marxist rhetoric the experience we had just gone through during the events of 1968. But all this was not very clear to me. I borrowed a lot from Ansart and did not see the point of spending time and energy reading an author who, despite everything, seemed to me to belong to the dead worlds of the 19th century.
My systematic and attentive reading of Proudhon (as well as of Bakunin) came later and was linked to another intellectual event of the 1970s: the emergence of left-wing Nietzscheanism, particularly with Foucault and above all Deleuze. For reasons that would take too long to explain, I began reading Deleuze, starting with Anti-Oedipus, the manifesto of what was then pejoratively referred to as the “desiring-anarchists” [“anarcho-désirants”]. Reading Deleuze, I had the feeling that I had already encountered this line of thinking somewhere before. It directly echoed what I had learned about Proudhon from Ansart. Without ever quoting Proudhon, whom he had obviously never read, Deleuze developed an emancipatory thought that echoed Proudhon’s, an intimate echo, as Bakunin would say, based on very different references and theoretical approaches. The affinity was no longer between me as a reader and Proudhon or me and Deleuze, but I discovered it between Proudhon and Deleuze, through a perspective and analogical relationships that opened up immense horizons, providing the weapons and reasons for a long struggle that was worth fighting, investing most of one’s life and energy in it. In a way, you could say that I discovered Proudhon and Deleuze at the same time. What is certain is that I read them at the same time. And it was through this confrontation that I began to glimpse how anarchism was part of a vast human and philosophical tradition, from Spinoza to Deleuze, to mention only the modern era, via Leibniz, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tarde, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Benjamin, Simondon and many others that a critic rightly calls the “library of Deleuze”, and which can be found in the Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme [A Short Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism][5] and in the Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste [Three Essays on Anarchist Philosophy][6] that I have just published.
It is this openness or contemporary reinvention of anarchism that I would now like to address.
We can therefore say that anarchism is part of a vast tradition of thought. However, this statement alone is not enough to characterise the importance of this political ideology. To be more precise, we should immediately add that anarchism is also the movement that gives substance and gives birth to this vast tradition of which it is a part. This point is difficult to explain, but despite its paradoxical nature, it is essential to understanding the nature of anarchism and its worldview.
From a genealogical point of view, anarchism is the inventor of the tradition in which it is embedded and which gives it its power, in a relationship where the son begets the father, since in the libertarian conception of what is, everything is already there, potentially, fathers as well as sons, before as well as after, here as well as elsewhere.
To make this paradoxical relationship between anarchism and time and space less obscure, we must first clarify what we mean by anarchism. Broadly speaking, it seems to me that there is a certain consensus that anarchism refers to two main things, two things that are closely linked. Firstly, it refers to a way of thinking or a philosophy, a philosophical conception of life, the world and what human beings can be. Secondly, it refers to an extremely rich and complex collective experience, linked to the history of workers’ struggles and movements in the early days of capitalism. From a historical and geographical point of view, these two dimensions of anarchism are fairly clearly defined. Proudhon and Bakunin were 19th-century theorists and, more specifically, from a geographical point of view, European theorists, representing only a tiny part of the world. As for the experiences of libertarian labour movements, which are extremely diverse and complex, they are also doubly limited. First, from a spatial point of view, they are specific to an economic and social development that can be broadly described as Western. But secondly, from a temporal point of view, these experiences lasted less than a century. Their explicit limits were the birth of the First International in the mid-19th century for their beginnings, and the crushing of the revolution in Catalonia in the spring of 1937 for their end.
An important but somewhat complicated point must be noted here in order to understand how Proudhon contributes to the current development of anarchist thought. The historically and geographically limited and circumscribed nature of anarchism does not detract from its importance and significance for the countless events and situations, present, past and future, from which it is clearly absent, where anarchism is not an issue. Born in Europe in the 19th century, in a philosophical and working-class form, anarchism continues to be relevant to any human situation, whether Chinese or Arab, even though libertarian workers’ movements disappeared almost a century ago. But it is also here that we must avoid misunderstanding and fully grasp the originality of the anarchist project. The value of anarchism, today as yesterday, is neither timeless nor eternal. It does not derive from some universal and abstract meaning of its project and message. Anarchism is not a hidden deity without age or place of residence. In Nietzschean terms, we can say that the value and meaning of anarchism are untimely. By completely escaping the chronological and illusory time of calendars, anarchism traverses the infinite multitude of beings and situations that endure, the infinite multitude of singular events that make up the lives of human beings, today as yesterday and tomorrow, here in Catania in this month of January as in Milan or Paris in a few days or a few hours. The value and meaning of anarchism, today as yesterday, do not depend on a universal faculty capable of transcending situations and moments. On the contrary, like everything else, they depend on the singularity of situations in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as today in China, India and, of course, Europe and America. The value and significance of anarchism, today as yesterday, do not lie in the historical superiority and role of Europe and the West, whether we think of them in religious terms through divine providence, or in Marxist terms through dialectical materialism, or even, but it is still the same thing, in capitalist terms through the inexorable march of market globalisation and profit. The value and significance of anarchism, today as in the past, lie in a decisive assertion, which, following Proudhon, can be described as neo-monadological, and which can be formulated as follows. Every being, every thing, every entity, however small, secondary and fleeting it may be, carries within itself – but from a certain point of view – the totality of what is, the good as well as the bad, the emancipatory as well as the oppressive. This is true of anarchism as it is of everything else. Anarchism in the 19th and 20th centuries, in its dual theoretical and practical form, carries within itself a singular inflection of what is capable of opening up to the infinite totality of possible situations and moments, here as elsewhere, today as yesterday and as in ten thousand years. The French anarchist singer Léo Ferré grasped this neo-monadological dimension of anarchist thought and project when he said in one of his songs that he was speaking for two thousand years hence. In saying this, Léo Ferré does not simply mean that he does not care if no one understands him today. Above all, he means that any statement, anarchist in this case, is both closely and entirely linked to its present conditions of expression, but also to all other possible conditions, here and elsewhere, today as yesterday, as tomorrow, in two thousand or ten thousand years.
I do not have time to present, even briefly, all the reasons that lead us to believe that we may currently be witnessing the emergence of an anarchist thought and project that is both completely new and completely faithful to its initial inspiration. In conclusion, I will simply make three remarks on the conditions for this renaissance of anarchist thought and project.
The first is more of a methodological remark. Faced with the gap between, on the one hand, a historically and geographically situated anarchism and, on the other hand, a contemporary situation that bears little relation to the one that gave rise to it, anarchists have often been tempted to revise or modernise the libertarian project and, above all, libertarian thought. For example, by turning to Marxism even as Marxism itself was about to lose its raison d’être. But also, more generally, by relegating anarchism to a past that is irretrievably gone, considering Proudhon, Bakunin and nearly a century of libertarian history and experience to be outdated. This attitude seems to me to be a dead end and a profound mistake. The emergence of a radically new anarchism, capable of subverting an equally new world of domination and oppression, requires, on the contrary, a return to the origins of anarchism, a return to Proudhon, to Bakunin and to the experience of libertarian workers’ movements, to return to the meaning and strength of a project and a way of thinking whose potential we are far from having exhausted.
The second point I would like to make concerns an important aspect of this return and the novelty it allows: the relationship between Nietzsche and anarchism. The encounter between Nietzsche and anarchism is not really new. It already took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. But it was cut short for a number of reasons related to the tragic events of the 20th century, the crushing of the libertarian movement and the attempt by the fascist and Nazi regimes to appropriate Nietzsche. It seems to me that the conditions are right for a second encounter, but on a larger scale and in greater depth, starting in particular with the work of Proudhon. In a small book published around 1906, Overbeck, Nietzsche’s closest friend, whom I have already mentioned, emphasises the great similarity between Nietzsche and Proudhon. For me, it is obvious that this needs to be explored and developed further.
My third and final remark follows on from the previous one. The encounter between Nietzsche and anarchism did not merely mark an opening up of the libertarian movement. With Nietzsche and Proudhon, anarchism demonstrated its ability to permeate and subvert a large number of situations and authors from within. This point is linked to everything I have been trying to say. Anarchism is not just a reality confined to a recognisable era, place or camp, circumscribed in space and claiming, from its small liberated territory, to oppose the rest of the world. Anarchism has no territory. It permeates everything. And it would be cruel of me to show how, conversely, the spaces, movements and organisations that call themselves anarchist, entrusting their flag with the task of proclaiming it, are themselves permeated by a multitude of relationships, forces and desires that have nothing anarchist about them. And the opposite is even more true. The immensity of works, movements, relationships and thoughts that appear to have nothing anarchist about them are also permeated by relationships, forces and desires that unquestionably belong to a libertarian and anarchist logic and dynamic. It is in this sense, and to stay solely within the realm of philosophy, that it seems obvious to me, as I pointed out in my short lexicon of anarchist philosophy, to see how the works of Tarde, Whitehead and many others are, in a whole dimension of what they are, part of an anarchist project and approach that should be developed and affirmed at the beginning of the 21st century.
[1] Letter of F. Nietzsche to F. Overbeck, July 30 1881. Quoted by Deleuze in Spinoza, philosophie pratique, éditions de minuit, 1981, p. 173.
[2] In Penser les réseaux, Champ vallon, 2001.
[3] L’univers des normes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004.
[4] Marx et l’anarchisme, Presses universitaires de France, 1969.
[5] Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme: de Proudhon à Deleuze, Livre de poche, 2001.
[6] Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste, L. Scheer, 2004.
For a selection of writings by Daniel Colson translated into English, see The Anarchist Library here.
Suggested readings in French:
“D’un mai 68 lyonnais : entretien avec Daniel Colson”, À contretemps, 26/06/2016.
Daniel Colson, “Deleuze, Guattari et l’anarchie”, Le Portique: Revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines, nº 20, 2007.
Daniel Colson, “Une tradition révolutionnaire et philosophique”, Le monde diplomatique, January 2009.
Daniel Colson, “L’anarchisme est extrêmement réaliste”, Ballast, 02/02/2015.
A select bibliography in French:
Anarcho Syndicalisme et Communisme. Saint-Étienne 1920-1925, préface de Pierre Ansart, éd. Centre d’Études Foréziennes/Atelier de Création Libertaire, 1986.
La compagnie des fonderies forges et aciéries de Saint-Étienne (1865-1914), autonomie et subjectivité techniques, 1998.
Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze, Le Livre de poche, 2001.
Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste : Islam, histoire, monadologie, éd Léo Scheer. Broché, 2004
Proudhon et l’anarchie, éd. Atelier de création libertaire, 2017
For Daniel Colson (1943-2026)
From Freedom News, an obituary for the anarchist Daniel Colson (11/01/2026) by David Berry, followed by a translation of a lecture by him entitled, “Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism”.
A singular and generous thinker of anarchism, his work traced living lines of revolt and creation
Daniel Colson, anarchist theorist and labour historian, died on 9 January in Lyon. He was 82.
Colson was an active member of the anarchist movement in Lyon from the early 1970s, a member of the collective that ran the city’s anarchist bookshop ‘La Gryffe’ from its creation in 1978, and a member of the editorial collective that has produced the anarchist review Réfractions since 1997. A professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Etienne, he published extensively on labour history, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism and, latterly, philosophy.
Colson first moved to Lyon, France’s second biggest city, in 1966, when he went to university there to study sociology, after two years studying philosophy at a seminary near Clermont-Ferrand. At the university he discovered revolutionary politics, and soon became active in the student movement, which was dominated in the late 1960s by Maoists, Trotskyists and other assorted ‘gauchistes’ (‘leftists’—originally a pejorative term used of the student revolutionaries of 1968 by the French Communist Party, referencing Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder).
Through his friendship with the libertarian communist Michel Marsella, Colson also learned about anarchism, the Socialism or Barbarism group around Cornelius Castoriadis, Situationism, Luxemburgism, etc. Like so many of his contemporaries he was involved in the campaign against US imperialism and in particular the Vietnam war, and was the prime mover in the ‘Vietnam Committee’ in Lyon’s old town. The group produced a newsletter, Informations rassemblées à Lyon (IRL), and after the repression and collapse of the 1968 movement, the Vietnam Committee transformed itself into the ‘Comité de quartier du Vieux-Lyon’ (Old Lyon Neighbourhood Committee).
When asked years later what the objectives of this committee had been, Colson replied: “Nothing less than creating the embryo of an insurrection at a local level.” Influenced by the automobile workers occupying the local Berliet factories, the group decided to occupy the local ‘Maison des jeunes’ (youth centre), which had been where the committee had met over the previous months. “We were very ambitious. We were seriously hoping, when the right conditions arose, to take over the local police station—including its armoury.” That plan never materialised, although the group did occupy the town hall briefly.
Colson was inspired by 1968 and especially by his experience of “spontaneity in action and in organisation”, including widespread co-operation between students and workers. He was also inspired by the discovery of three important books: the four-volume history of the First International written by the Swiss anarchist James Guillaume; the Russian anarchist Voline’s The Unknown Revolution (originally published in French in 1947, but republished in the aftermath of 1968 in a series edited by Daniel Guérin and the anarchist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel); and Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Not that he understood Anti-Œdipus at all when he first tried to read it—he found it “pretty indigestible” in fact— and even ten years later when he tried again, it was only the first chapter that he really got to grips with: for Colson, that chapter successfully demolished the “enormous Marxist theoretical apparatus” that dominated the French left at that time, and made clear “not only the theoretical but also the emancipatory, ethical, philosophical and practical power of anarchism”.
Colson was actively involved with a number of anarchist newspapers: the Cahiers de mai (the May Notebooks, which was launched in June 1968 and was the voice of the Action Committees which had sprung up across France), ICO (Informations et Correspondences Ouvrières, Workers’ News and Letters, focussed on autonomous workers’ struggles, outside of trade unions and parties), and IRL (Informations rassemblées à Lyon, literally News Gathered in Lyon, which published eye-witness accounts and documents on social struggles in the Lyon area not published by the mainstream press or the main left-wing papers). IRL, which Colson helped create, was interested in workers’ struggles, but also illegalism and other forms of resistance, and discussed a range of movements: anarchism, council communism, feminism, ecology, antimilitarism, sexual liberation, etc.
In 1978, Colson was one of the original group of anarchist activists who set up the La Gryffe bookshop in Lyon, and the collective is still going strong. As well as selling the usual range of anticapitalist, antiauthoritarian material, La Gryffe also has a meeting room that regularly hosts debates, exhibitions, film showings, etc. When Colson published a book about the collective in 2020, he was careful not to give an idealised view of a successful anarchist collective at work, but to highlight also the long and sometimes difficult history that La Gryffe was built on, including some serious differences of opinion and conflicts within the collective, but conflicts which were worked through and resolved according to anarchist principles.
Having returned to academia, Colson gained his doctorate in 1983 with a thesis—later published as a book—on anarcho-syndicalism and communism in the labour movement in Saint-Etienne, 1920-25. (If ever you’ve been confused about the difference between the terms ‘syndicalism’, ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, and how the once revolutionary syndicalist French labour movement came to be dominated by Communism, this is the book for you.) A second historical-sociological book followed in 1998 on the iron and steel industry—and its owners, the famous ‘iron barons’ or forgemasters—in Saint-Etienne from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War.
Colson explained once in a talk he gave on ‘Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism’ [see below]—the main thrust of which was to argue for the rehabilitation of Proudhon, who remained unpopular in anarchist circles—that he had discovered Proudhon at about the same time in the 1970s that he discovered “the left-wing Nietzscheanism” of Foucault and especially Deleuze. Deleuze, he argued, “developed an emancipatory thought which had a lot in common with Proudhon.”
Indeed, moving away from his earlier sociological work, and after writing books on Proudhon and Malatesta, Colson became increasingly focussed on philosophy, and was especially interested in Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (among others) and how their thinking related to anarchism. This led to a number of conference papers, journal articles and books on these subjects—in 2022, for instance, he published a book on ‘working-class anarchism and philosophy’. Unfortunately only one of his books has been translated (by Jesse Cohn) into English: the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism. From Proudhon to Deleuze—“a provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought”.
Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism
Daniel Colson
The text below is a supplement to the section of the course “History and Construction of the Humanities” dealing with Proudhon. It is an oral lecture given to an Italian audience (University of Catania).
The work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon has had a strange fate, at least in France. It continues to provoke a dual reaction, contradictory but ultimately leading to a common effect.
On the one hand, and most often, Proudhon arouses contempt and indifference. At best, his thinking is considered to be an implausible and formless chaos, without much significance anyway. At worst, it is considered to be one of the many sources of fascism and reactionary thought, when Proudhon is not simply labelled with the most extravagant titles, such as “the father of modern anti-Semitism”.
On the other hand, still in France and sporadically, Proudhon has never ceased to arouse keen interest among a wide variety of authors, once they have decided to read him, from the moralists of the late 19th century to the sociologist Georges Gurvitch in the early 1950s, including Georges Sorel, the Durkheimians, syndicalists, anarchists, but also royalists and quite a few reactionaries of all stripes. But this interest in Proudhon has always been fragmented, contradictory and short-lived. And it is true that Proudhon is difficult to read, including for technical reasons related to the publication of his books, their excessive quantity, but above all the heterogeneous, involved and circumstantial nature of a mode of thought and writing that lends itself very poorly to the formation of a school or a unified interpretation. However, a first conclusion can be drawn from these readings. Once you have the good fortune (or misfortune) of really starting to read Proudhon, you can no longer set him aside. One cannot shake off the particular idea that his texts awaken in each of his readers, whether they curse him and pursue him with tenacious hatred, or whether they discover in the most minor of his writings, in the turn of a phrase, an idea that completely captivates them and transforms them overnight into singular and original Proudhonists, just as others may have found themselves Spinozists without meaning to, by accident, but definitively, on a plane of immanence, as Deleuze would say, where no school, no orthodox standardisation is necessary, where the greatest differences resonate and echo each other in the most intimate and hidden way.
There are many examples of the surprise, or rather the shock, that reading Proudhon provokes. It acts like love at first sight or like Montaigne’s remark about La Boétie: “because it was him, because it was me”, or, as Deleuze recalls, like Nietzsche discovering Spinoza and writing to his friend Overbeck: “I am astonished, delighted… I knew almost nothing about Spinoza; if I have just felt the need for him, it is the effect of an instinctive act…”.[1] Like many other things, and as he himself shows in his philosophy, the discovery of Proudhon involves particular relationships which, in anarchism proper, as in libertarian thought in the broad sense, are precisely thought through two important concepts: the concept of analogy and the concept of affinity. You are surely aware of the importance of the concept of affinity in the libertarian movement, particularly through the practice of “affinity groups”, without which it is impossible to understand the logic and subversive nature of anarchism. Well, anarchist affinity, in its dual practical and theoretical form, is exactly the same as Goethe’s elective affinities, or the notion of affinity as used by Max Weber to illustrate the unlikely encounter between Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. As Spinoza says, we do not know what a body can do, what a body is capable of. And it is encounters with others, both good and bad encounters, that reveal this to us in their effects, which are in turn good or bad, oppressive or emancipatory. In short, handling affinity between beings requires a great deal of practical sense and sensitivity, experimentation and caution. So if you start reading Proudhon, beware, no one can know what the outcome will be.
The notion of affinity is central to libertarian thought and projects, to their conception of federalism and their vision of the emancipatory association of human beings. But this notion has its theoretical counterpart: the concept of analogy or homology. The concept of analogy, which is very important in Proudhon’s thinking, allows us to understand and, in a certain way, to predict, the quality of affinities or repulsions between beings, and therefore their effects. Analogy assumes that the link between beings is not based on external resemblance or the continuity of causes and effects. It is always based on the difference and discontinuity between beings. I will not attempt to explain how Proudhon develops this notion of analogy, particularly through what he calls “serial dialectics”. But here again, it is Spinoza who, with an example, best helps us to grasp this idea of analogy. He says this (I quote from memory): from the point of view of movement and rest, there is less connection between a plough horse and a racehorse than between a plough horse and an ox. In short, depending on the perspective we adopt in a given situation, at a given moment, the unity and classification of things break down and are recomposed in a different way. Our friends and enemies are no longer the same, and there is no longer any reason to say that the friends of our friends are necessarily our friends. The unity and classification of things break down. Plough horses cease to belong to the same species as racehorses. Oxen, draught horses and ruminating thinkers begin to compose a world opposed to that of greyhounds, racehorses and light-footed philosophers. With the Spinozist and Proudhonian analogy, everything becomes possible, both the best and the worst, and it is on this ground of analogy, of affinity, but also from our own point of view at a given moment, that we can understand how Proudhon was received by his readers, but also the randomness of these receptions. I would like to give two recent examples of positive encounters that illustrate Proudhon’s ceaseless novelty.
The first is Robert Damien, a French philosopher who heads a philosophy research centre at the CNRS, a research centre long concerned with Marxism and based at the University of Besançon. This group of philosophers works with others on the question of networks, internet networks, technology, cities and Whitehead’s philosophy. It was in the course of this research that Robert Damien stumbled, somewhat by chance, upon a minor text by Proudhon, a commissioned pamphlet entitled De la concurrence entre les chemins de fer et les voies navigables [On Competition between Railways and Waterways]. This text may seem far removed from philosophy and anarchy. And yet, 150 years later, it resonates with a contemporary philosophical problem, with Robert Damien’s thinking. For more on the effects of this unlikely encounter between Proudhon and Damien, I refer you to the text that the latter published in 2001, a text with a very significant title. It is entitled Transport ferroviaire et ordre politique, Proudhon, une pensée philosophique des réseaux? [Rail Transport and Political Order, Proudhon, a Philosophical Thought on Networks?][2] The title however ends with a significant question mark at the end of the second part of the title. As if to underline that, despite being constantly rediscovered, Proudhon never quite managed to carve his name in stone in the annals of official knowledge.
The second example is even more recent. It no longer concerns a philosopher but a strict legal scholar, Sophie Chambost, who has just published a book entitled Proudhon et la norme, Pensée juridique d’un anarchiste [Proudhon and the Norm: The Legal Thought of an Anarchist].[3] It is a law thesis that has won several prestigious awards. I hope that one day you will be able to read this thesis in Italian. Here again we find the mysteries of good and bad encounters between beings that Spinoza had already contributed to thinking about, these mysteries of anarchist affinity and analogy that Proudhon’s analyses in turn help to explain by revealing their material conditions of possibility and impossibility. We need to understand why and how the lawyer Sophie Chambost had the bizarre idea of taking Proudhon as the subject of her thesis. What is certain, as she explains in her book, is that at the time she shared the prejudices about Proudhon held by those who have not read him, who have not even tried to read him, who consider him a confused and politically dubious anarchist, necessarily an enemy of laws and justice, full of contradictions, an inexhaustible and exhausting hack. And then, like many others, Sophie Chambost began to read Proudhon and could not stop. Even Proudhon’s numerous and implausible diatribes on women failed to discourage her. She read the nineteen large volumes of his actual works. Then she tackled the equally voluminous volumes of his Carnets, before undertaking to read his gigantic correspondence, determined to get to the bottom of all the nonsense that the incoherent Proudhon had said about law. It was then that she went from one surprise to another. The more she read Proudhon – on subjects as varied as the church, railways, peace, literary property, war, women, stock market speculation, revolution, the Bible, marriage, Sunday worship, the working classes, Saint-Ouen station, etc. the more Sophie Chambost read, the more she was astonished by the extreme coherence, from a legal point of view, of a body of thought generally presented as irremediably chaotic and formless. For the results of this research, and the coherence it reveals, which are not without interest, I refer you to Chambost’s book.
I will give a third example of the effects of encountering Proudhon’s work. It is a personal example and one from the past. I apologise for having to talk about myself, but it is only as an example, not a model. It is also because this example allows me to address the question of the link between Proudhon and the relevance of anarchism today. Personally, I discovered libertarian thought in 1968, during the events of that period. I was a sociology student. Anarchism at that time, at least among students, was indisputably, viscerally even, linked to the history and experience of the libertarian movement. But theoretically, we were more Marxist. In our eyes, Proudhon and Bakunin suffered from all the discredit mentioned earlier. The very idea of trying to read them did not even cross our minds. Our practical and historical anarchism was quite satisfied, in terms of theory and argumentation, with ultra-left Marxism or, of course, the Hegelian Marxism of the Situationists. It is true, however, that Proudhon was not completely inaccessible to us, thanks to the work of an important French sociologist who, I hope, may have been translated into Italian. This is Pierre Ansart, a student of Georges Gurvitch. Ansart had published the results of his thesis on Proudhon in a book significantly entitled Marx et l’anarchisme [Marx and Anarchism].[4] This book, written by a renowned sociologist and published by an equally renowned publisher (Les Presses Universitaires de France), led the relatively conformist rebel that I was at the time to buy and read it. I wonder if I would have done so if the publisher had been more honest and chosen to put Proudhon’s name in the title. In any case, I read the book, without understanding everything, but I did understand one thing: that Proudhon’s thinking was fascinating, original and, above all, that it expressed much better than Marxist rhetoric the experience we had just gone through during the events of 1968. But all this was not very clear to me. I borrowed a lot from Ansart and did not see the point of spending time and energy reading an author who, despite everything, seemed to me to belong to the dead worlds of the 19th century.
My systematic and attentive reading of Proudhon (as well as of Bakunin) came later and was linked to another intellectual event of the 1970s: the emergence of left-wing Nietzscheanism, particularly with Foucault and above all Deleuze. For reasons that would take too long to explain, I began reading Deleuze, starting with Anti-Oedipus, the manifesto of what was then pejoratively referred to as the “desiring-anarchists” [“anarcho-désirants”]. Reading Deleuze, I had the feeling that I had already encountered this line of thinking somewhere before. It directly echoed what I had learned about Proudhon from Ansart. Without ever quoting Proudhon, whom he had obviously never read, Deleuze developed an emancipatory thought that echoed Proudhon’s, an intimate echo, as Bakunin would say, based on very different references and theoretical approaches. The affinity was no longer between me as a reader and Proudhon or me and Deleuze, but I discovered it between Proudhon and Deleuze, through a perspective and analogical relationships that opened up immense horizons, providing the weapons and reasons for a long struggle that was worth fighting, investing most of one’s life and energy in it. In a way, you could say that I discovered Proudhon and Deleuze at the same time. What is certain is that I read them at the same time. And it was through this confrontation that I began to glimpse how anarchism was part of a vast human and philosophical tradition, from Spinoza to Deleuze, to mention only the modern era, via Leibniz, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tarde, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Benjamin, Simondon and many others that a critic rightly calls the “library of Deleuze”, and which can be found in the Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme [A Short Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism][5] and in the Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste [Three Essays on Anarchist Philosophy][6] that I have just published.
It is this openness or contemporary reinvention of anarchism that I would now like to address.
We can therefore say that anarchism is part of a vast tradition of thought. However, this statement alone is not enough to characterise the importance of this political ideology. To be more precise, we should immediately add that anarchism is also the movement that gives substance and gives birth to this vast tradition of which it is a part. This point is difficult to explain, but despite its paradoxical nature, it is essential to understanding the nature of anarchism and its worldview.
From a genealogical point of view, anarchism is the inventor of the tradition in which it is embedded and which gives it its power, in a relationship where the son begets the father, since in the libertarian conception of what is, everything is already there, potentially, fathers as well as sons, before as well as after, here as well as elsewhere.
To make this paradoxical relationship between anarchism and time and space less obscure, we must first clarify what we mean by anarchism. Broadly speaking, it seems to me that there is a certain consensus that anarchism refers to two main things, two things that are closely linked. Firstly, it refers to a way of thinking or a philosophy, a philosophical conception of life, the world and what human beings can be. Secondly, it refers to an extremely rich and complex collective experience, linked to the history of workers’ struggles and movements in the early days of capitalism. From a historical and geographical point of view, these two dimensions of anarchism are fairly clearly defined. Proudhon and Bakunin were 19th-century theorists and, more specifically, from a geographical point of view, European theorists, representing only a tiny part of the world. As for the experiences of libertarian labour movements, which are extremely diverse and complex, they are also doubly limited. First, from a spatial point of view, they are specific to an economic and social development that can be broadly described as Western. But secondly, from a temporal point of view, these experiences lasted less than a century. Their explicit limits were the birth of the First International in the mid-19th century for their beginnings, and the crushing of the revolution in Catalonia in the spring of 1937 for their end.
An important but somewhat complicated point must be noted here in order to understand how Proudhon contributes to the current development of anarchist thought. The historically and geographically limited and circumscribed nature of anarchism does not detract from its importance and significance for the countless events and situations, present, past and future, from which it is clearly absent, where anarchism is not an issue. Born in Europe in the 19th century, in a philosophical and working-class form, anarchism continues to be relevant to any human situation, whether Chinese or Arab, even though libertarian workers’ movements disappeared almost a century ago. But it is also here that we must avoid misunderstanding and fully grasp the originality of the anarchist project. The value of anarchism, today as yesterday, is neither timeless nor eternal. It does not derive from some universal and abstract meaning of its project and message. Anarchism is not a hidden deity without age or place of residence. In Nietzschean terms, we can say that the value and meaning of anarchism are untimely. By completely escaping the chronological and illusory time of calendars, anarchism traverses the infinite multitude of beings and situations that endure, the infinite multitude of singular events that make up the lives of human beings, today as yesterday and tomorrow, here in Catania in this month of January as in Milan or Paris in a few days or a few hours. The value and meaning of anarchism, today as yesterday, do not depend on a universal faculty capable of transcending situations and moments. On the contrary, like everything else, they depend on the singularity of situations in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as today in China, India and, of course, Europe and America. The value and significance of anarchism, today as yesterday, do not lie in the historical superiority and role of Europe and the West, whether we think of them in religious terms through divine providence, or in Marxist terms through dialectical materialism, or even, but it is still the same thing, in capitalist terms through the inexorable march of market globalisation and profit. The value and significance of anarchism, today as in the past, lie in a decisive assertion, which, following Proudhon, can be described as neo-monadological, and which can be formulated as follows. Every being, every thing, every entity, however small, secondary and fleeting it may be, carries within itself – but from a certain point of view – the totality of what is, the good as well as the bad, the emancipatory as well as the oppressive. This is true of anarchism as it is of everything else. Anarchism in the 19th and 20th centuries, in its dual theoretical and practical form, carries within itself a singular inflection of what is capable of opening up to the infinite totality of possible situations and moments, here as elsewhere, today as yesterday and as in ten thousand years. The French anarchist singer Léo Ferré grasped this neo-monadological dimension of anarchist thought and project when he said in one of his songs that he was speaking for two thousand years hence. In saying this, Léo Ferré does not simply mean that he does not care if no one understands him today. Above all, he means that any statement, anarchist in this case, is both closely and entirely linked to its present conditions of expression, but also to all other possible conditions, here and elsewhere, today as yesterday, as tomorrow, in two thousand or ten thousand years.
I do not have time to present, even briefly, all the reasons that lead us to believe that we may currently be witnessing the emergence of an anarchist thought and project that is both completely new and completely faithful to its initial inspiration. In conclusion, I will simply make three remarks on the conditions for this renaissance of anarchist thought and project.
The first is more of a methodological remark. Faced with the gap between, on the one hand, a historically and geographically situated anarchism and, on the other hand, a contemporary situation that bears little relation to the one that gave rise to it, anarchists have often been tempted to revise or modernise the libertarian project and, above all, libertarian thought. For example, by turning to Marxism even as Marxism itself was about to lose its raison d’être. But also, more generally, by relegating anarchism to a past that is irretrievably gone, considering Proudhon, Bakunin and nearly a century of libertarian history and experience to be outdated. This attitude seems to me to be a dead end and a profound mistake. The emergence of a radically new anarchism, capable of subverting an equally new world of domination and oppression, requires, on the contrary, a return to the origins of anarchism, a return to Proudhon, to Bakunin and to the experience of libertarian workers’ movements, to return to the meaning and strength of a project and a way of thinking whose potential we are far from having exhausted.
The second point I would like to make concerns an important aspect of this return and the novelty it allows: the relationship between Nietzsche and anarchism. The encounter between Nietzsche and anarchism is not really new. It already took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. But it was cut short for a number of reasons related to the tragic events of the 20th century, the crushing of the libertarian movement and the attempt by the fascist and Nazi regimes to appropriate Nietzsche. It seems to me that the conditions are right for a second encounter, but on a larger scale and in greater depth, starting in particular with the work of Proudhon. In a small book published around 1906, Overbeck, Nietzsche’s closest friend, whom I have already mentioned, emphasises the great similarity between Nietzsche and Proudhon. For me, it is obvious that this needs to be explored and developed further.
My third and final remark follows on from the previous one. The encounter between Nietzsche and anarchism did not merely mark an opening up of the libertarian movement. With Nietzsche and Proudhon, anarchism demonstrated its ability to permeate and subvert a large number of situations and authors from within. This point is linked to everything I have been trying to say. Anarchism is not just a reality confined to a recognisable era, place or camp, circumscribed in space and claiming, from its small liberated territory, to oppose the rest of the world. Anarchism has no territory. It permeates everything. And it would be cruel of me to show how, conversely, the spaces, movements and organisations that call themselves anarchist, entrusting their flag with the task of proclaiming it, are themselves permeated by a multitude of relationships, forces and desires that have nothing anarchist about them. And the opposite is even more true. The immensity of works, movements, relationships and thoughts that appear to have nothing anarchist about them are also permeated by relationships, forces and desires that unquestionably belong to a libertarian and anarchist logic and dynamic. It is in this sense, and to stay solely within the realm of philosophy, that it seems obvious to me, as I pointed out in my short lexicon of anarchist philosophy, to see how the works of Tarde, Whitehead and many others are, in a whole dimension of what they are, part of an anarchist project and approach that should be developed and affirmed at the beginning of the 21st century.
[1] Letter of F. Nietzsche to F. Overbeck, July 30 1881. Quoted by Deleuze in Spinoza, philosophie pratique, éditions de minuit, 1981, p. 173.
[2] In Penser les réseaux, Champ vallon, 2001.
[3] L’univers des normes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004.
[4] Marx et l’anarchisme, Presses universitaires de France, 1969.
[5] Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme: de Proudhon à Deleuze, Livre de poche, 2001.
[6] Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste, L. Scheer, 2004.
For a selection of writings by Daniel Colson translated into English, see The Anarchist Library here.
Suggested readings in French:
“D’un mai 68 lyonnais : entretien avec Daniel Colson”, À contretemps, 26/06/2016.
Daniel Colson, “Deleuze, Guattari et l’anarchie”, Le Portique: Revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines, nº 20, 2007.
Daniel Colson, “Une tradition révolutionnaire et philosophique”, Le monde diplomatique, January 2009.
Daniel Colson, “L’anarchisme est extrêmement réaliste”, Ballast, 02/02/2015.
A select bibliography in French:
Anarcho Syndicalisme et Communisme. Saint-Étienne 1920-1925, préface de Pierre Ansart, éd. Centre d’Études Foréziennes/Atelier de Création Libertaire, 1986.
La compagnie des fonderies forges et aciéries de Saint-Étienne (1865-1914), autonomie et subjectivité techniques, 1998.
Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze, Le Livre de poche, 2001.
Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste : Islam, histoire, monadologie, éd Léo Scheer. Broché, 2004
Proudhon et l’anarchie, éd. Atelier de création libertaire, 2017