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Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

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Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Proudhon: Solution of the Social Problem

Shawn Wilbur has a pdf workup of extracts from "Proudhon's Solution of the Social Problem," by Henry Cohen. Cohen's work includes an expanded version of William Greene's translation of Solution du Probleme Social, along with Dana's Proudhon and His Bank of the People and a stripped-down version of the 1871 edition of Greene's Mutual Banking. This pdf version consists of the translations from Proudhon's original work.

Clarence L. Swartz translated additional sections of Solution du Problème Social....

A rough collation of Solution du Problème Social and Proudhon's Solution of the Social Problem: the opening section, "Solution du Problème Social," (pages 1-87 in the original) remains untranslated, except for its closing paragraph's which include the phrase "liberty not the daughter but the mother of order," which appeared on the masthead of Tucker's Liberty. Of the section "Organisation du Crédit et de la Circulation," (pages 89-131 in the original) pages 94-111 and 120-131 remain untranslated. The portion that have been translated focus on the Bank of Exchange, and Proudhon's larger economic programme is largely ignored. The section "Banque d'Échange" (pages 133-258 in the original) begins with an untranslated "Préface" by Alfred Darimon (pages 133-147). Three addition sub-sections— "Qu'est ce que la Propriété?" (147-155), "Comptabilité Propriétaire" (155-168), and "Identité de la Question Politique et de la Question Économique—Méthode de Solution" (168-180) follow. Swartz's translation picks up again with the sub-section "Banque d'Échange" (and about every third section seems to have some variation of this title) and covers, with minor omissions., the remainder of the section, omitting only a final section, "Autre Response au NATIONAL" (237-258). "Banque du Peuple," (259-284) which treats the mutual bank which Proudhon actually attempted, is translated in full, but the "Rapport de la Commission des Délégués du Luxembourg et des Corporations ouvrièrs" (284-312), which was published with it, is not.

2 Comments:

Blogger Shawn P. Wilbur said...

Thanks for the mention, Kevin. There are a couple of errors in my post to the mutualist list, all involving the original appearances of Proudhon's essays. They don't effect the collation against the collected edition. I will correct them soon in a blog post. I'm working on scanning the rest of the original french text, along with some sections of Stephen Pearl Andrews' 1855 French textbook, to tide over the curious until we can translate this stuff. I'm hoping to do quite a bit of that work, but I'm sort of reshuffling projects right now. More on all of that soon...

June 28, 2006 8:24 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The problem with economic systems is that humans run them.

June 29, 2006 10:15 AM  

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