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Welcome to The World of Tomorrow, everyone. This is from Chapter 9 of Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 exercise in Singularity futurism, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. The chapter is entitled 2009, and it’s supposed to tell us what the world would be like by, well, now. It’s long, so I’ll let you know now that I have some commentary below.

(Oh, and in case you’re curious, the weird exchange at the end is this goofy technique that Kurzweil uses at the end of each chapter in the book. It’s supposed to be a dialogue with his imagined reader. So, yeah.)

2009

It is said that people overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term, and underestimate the changes that will occur in the long term. With the pace of change continuing to accelerate, we can consider even the first decade in the twenty-first century to constitute a long-term view. With that in mind, let us consider the beginning of the next century.

The Computer Itself

It is now 2009. Individuals primarily use portable computers, which have become dramatically lighter and thinner than the notebook computers of ten years earlier. Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments. Computers with a high-resolution visual interface range from rings and pins and credit cards up to the size of a thin book.

People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies, which are networked using body LANs (local area networks).^[1] These computers provide communication facilities similar to cellular phones, pagers, and web surfers, monitor body functions, provide directions for navigation, and a variety of other services.

For the most part, these truly personal computers have no moving parts. Memory is completely electronic, and most portable computers do not have keyboards.

Rotating memories (that is, computer memories that use a rotating platen, such as hard drives, CD-ROMs, and DVDs) are on their way out, although rotating magnetic memories are still used in server computers where large amounts of information are stored. Most users have servers in their homes and offices where they keep large stores of digital objects, including their software, databases, documents, music, movies, and virtual-reality environments (although these are still at an early stage). There are services to keep one’s digital objects in central repositories, but most people prefer to keep their private information under their own physical control.

Cables are disappearing.^[2] Communication between components, such as pointing devices, microphones, displays, printers, and the occasional keyboard, uses short-distance wireless technology.

Computers routinely include wireless technology to plug into the ever-present worldwide network, providing reliable, instantly available, very-high-bandwidth communication. Digital objects such as books, music albums, movies, and software are rapidly distributed as data files through the wireless network, and typically do not have a physical object associated with them.

The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) dictation software, but keyboards are still used. CSR is very accurate, far more so than the human transcriptionists who were used up until a few years ago.

Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces (LUIs), which combine CSR and natural language understanding. For routine matters, such as simple business transactions and information inquiries, LUIs are quite responsive and precise. They tend to be narrowly focused, however, on specific types of tasks. LUIs are frequently combined with animated personalities. Interacting with an animated personality to conduct a purchase or make a reservation is like talking to a person using videoconferencing, except that the person is simulated.

Computer displays have all the display qualities of paper—high resolution, high contrast, large viewing angle, and no flicker. Books, magazines, and newspapers are now routinely read on displays that are the size of, well, small books.

Computer displays built into eyeglasses are also used. These specialized glasses allow users to see the normal visual environment, while creating a virtual image that appears to hover in front of the viewer. The virtual images are created by a tiny laser built into the glasses that projects the images directly onto the user’s retinas.^[3]

Computers routinely include moving picture image cameras and are able to reliably identify their owners from their faces.

In terms of circuitry, three-dimensional chips are commonly used, and there is a transition taking place from the older, single-layer chips.

Sound producing speakers are being replaced with very small chip-based devices that can place high resolution sound anywhere in three-dimensional space. This technology is based on creating audible frequency sounds from the spectrum created by the interaction of very high frequency tones. As a result, very small speakers an createvery robust three-dimensional sound.

A $1,000 personal computer (in 1999 dollars) can perform about a trillion calculations per second.^[4] Supercomputers match at least the hardware capacity of the human brain—20 million billion calculations per second.^[5] Unused computers on the Internet are being harvested, creating virtual parallel supercomputers with human brain hardware capacity.

There is increasing interest in massively parallel neural nets, genetic algorithms, and other forms of chaotic or complexity theory computing, although most computer computations are still done using conventional sequential processing, albeit with some limited parallel processing.

Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the human brain through both destructive scans of the brains of recently deceased persons as well as non-invasive scans using high resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of living persons.

Autonomous nanoengineered machines (that is, machines constructed atom by atom and molecule by molecule) have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls. However, nanoengineering is not yet considered a practical technology.

Education

In the twentieth century, computers in schools were mostly on the trailing edge, with most effective learning from computers taking place in the home. Now in 2009, while schools are still not on the cutting edge, the profound importance of the computer as a knowledge tool is widely recognized. Computers play a central role in all facets of education, as they do in other spheres of life.

The maority of reading is done on displays, although the installed base of paper documents is still formidable. The generation of paper documents is dwindling, however, as books and other papers of largely twentieth-century vintage are being rapidly scanned and stored. Documents circa 2009 routinely include embedded moving images and sounds.

Students of all ages typically have a computer of their own, which is a thin tabletlike device weighing under a pound with a very high resolution display suitable for reading. Students interact with their computers primarily by voice and by pointing with a device that looks like a pencil. Keyboards still exist, but most textual language is created by speaking. Learning materials are accessed through wireless communication.

Intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning. Recent controversial studies have shown that students can learn basic skills such as reading and math just as readily with interactive learning software as with human teachers, particularly when the ratio of students to human teachers is more than one to one. Although the studies have come under attack, most students and their parents have accepted this notion for years. The traditional mode of a human teacher instructing a group of children is still prevalent, but schools are increasingly relying on software approaches, leaving human teachers to attend primarily to issues of motivation, psychological well-being, and socialization. Many children learn to read on their own using personal computers before entering grade school.

Preschool and elementary school children routinely read at their intellectual level using print-to-speech reading software until their reading skill level catches up. These print-to-speech reading systems display the full image of documents, and can read the print aloud while highlighting what is being read. Synthetic voices sound fully human. Although some educators expressed concern in the early ’00 years that students would rely unduly on reading software, such systems have been readily accepted by children and their parents. Studies have shown that students improve their reading skills by being exposed to synchronized visual and auditory presentations of text.

Learning at a distance (for example, lectures and seminars in which the participants are geographically scattered) is commonplace.

Learning is becoming a significant portion of most jobs. Training and developing new skills is emerging as an ongoing responsibility in most careers, not just an occasional supplement, as the level of skill needed for meaningful employment soars ever higher.

Disabilities

Persons with disabilities are rapidly overcoming their handicaps through the intelligent technology of 2009. Students with reading disabilities routinely ameliorate their disability using print-to-speech reading systems.

Print-to-speech reading machines for the blind are now very small, inexpensive, palm-sized devices that can read books (those that still exist in paper form) and other printed documents, and other real-world text such as signs and displays. These reading systems are equally adept at reading the trillions of electronic documents that are instantly available from the ubiquitous wireless worldwide network.

After decades of ineffective attempts, useful navigation devices have been introduced that can assist blind people in avoiding physical obstacles in their path, and finding their way around, using global positioning system (GPS) technology. A blind person can interact with her personal reading-navigation systems through two-way voice communication, kind of like a Seeing-Eye dog that reads and talks.

Deaf persons—or anyone with a hearing impairment—commonly use portable speech-to-text listening machines, which display a real-time transcription of what people are saying. The deaf user has the choice of either reading the transcribed speech as displayed text, or watching an animated person gesturing in sign language. These have eliminated the primary communication handicap associated with deafness. Listening machines can also translate what is being said into another language in real time, so they are commonly used by hearing people as well.

Computer-controlled orthotic devices have been introduced. These walking machines enable paraplegic persons to walk and climb stairs. The prosthetic devices are not yet usable by all paraplegic persons, as many physically disabled persons have dysfunctional joints from years of disuse. However, the advent of orthotic walking systems is providing more motivation to have these joints replaced.

There is a growing perception that the primary disabilities of blindness, deafness, and physical impairment do not necessarily impart handicaps. Disabled persons routinely describe their disabilities as mere inconveniences. Intelligent technology has become the great leveler.

Communication

Translating Telephone technology (where you speak in English and your Japanese friend hears you in Japanese, and vice versa) is commonly used for many language pairs. It is a routine capability of an individual’s personal computer, which also serves as her phone.

Telephone communication is primarily wireless, and routinely includes high-resolution moving images. Meetings of all kinds and sizes routinely take place among geographically separated participants.

There is effective convergence, at least on the hardware and supporting software level, of all media, which exist as digital objects (that is, files) distributed by the ever-present high-bandwidth, wireless information web. Users can instantly download books, magazines, newspapers, television, radio, movies, and other forms of software to their highly portable personal communication devices.

Virtually all communication is digital and encrypted, with public keys available to government authorities. Many individuals and groups, including but not limited to criminal organizations, use an additional layer of virtually unbreakable encryption codes with no third-party keys.

Researcher Translation

Haptic technologies are emerging that allow people to touch and feel objects and other persons at a distance. These force-feedback devices are widely used in games and in training simulation systems.

Interactive games routinely include all-encompassing visual and auditory environments, but a satisfactory, all-encompassing tactile environment is not yet available. The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments where you can meet people with full visual realism.

People have sexual experiences at a distance with other persons as well as virtual partners. But the lack of the surround tactile environment has thus far kept virtual sex out of the mainstream. Virtual partners are popular as forms of sexual entertainment, but they’re more gamelike than real. And phone sex is a lot more popular now that phones routinely include high-resolution, real-time moving images of the person on the other end.

Business and Economics

Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity due to the dominance of the knowledge content of products and services. The greatest gains continue to be in the value of the stock market. Price deflation concerned economists in the early ’00 years, but they quickly realized it was a good thing. The high-tech community pointed out that significant deflation had existed in the computer hardware and software industries for many years earlier without detriment.

The United States continues to be the economic leader due to its primacy in popular culture and its entrepreneurial environment. Since information markets are largely world markets, the United States has benefited greatly from its immigrant history. Being comprised of all the world’s peoples—specifically the descendents of people from around the globe who had endured grea risk for a better life—is the ideal heritage for the new knowledge-based economy. China has also emerged as a powerful economic player. Europe is several years ahead of Japan and Korea in adopting the American emphasis on venture capital, employee stock options, and tax policies that encourage entrepreneurship, although these practices have become popular throughout the world.

At least half of all transactions are conducted online. Intelligent assistants which combine continuous speech recognition, natural-language understanding, problem solving, and animated personalities routinely assist with finding information, answering questions, and conducting transactions. Intelligent assistants have become a primary interface for interacting with information-based services, with a wide range of choices available. A recent poll shows that both male and female users prefer female personalities for their computer-based intelligent assistants. The two most popular are Maggie, who claims to be a waitress in a Harvard Square café, and Michelle, a stripper from New Orleans. Personality designers are in demand, and the field constitutes a growth area in software development.

Most purchases of books, musical albums, videos, games, and other forms of software do not involve any physical object, so new business models for distributing these forms of information have emerged. One shops for these information objects by strolling through virtual malls, sampling and selecting objects of interest, rapidly (and securely) conducting an online transaction, and then quickly downloading the information using high-speed wireless communication. There are many types and gradations of transactions to gain access to thes products. You can buy a book, musical album, video, etcetera, which gives you unlimited personal access. Alternatively, you can rent access to read, view, or listen once, or a few times. Or you can rent access by the minute. Alternatively, access may be limited to a particular computer, or to any computer accessed by a particular person or by a set of persons.

There is a strong trend toward the geographic separation of work groups. People are successfully working together despite living and working in different places.

The average household has more than a hundred computers, most of which are embedded in appliances and built-in communications systems. Household robots have emerged, but are not yet fully accepted.

Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel. Once your car’s guidance system locks onto the control sensors on one of these highways, you can sit back and relax. Local roads, though, are still predominantly conventional.

A company west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line has surpassed a trillion dollars in market capitalization.

Politics and Society

Privacy has emerged as a primary political issue. The virtually constant use of electronic communication technologies is leaving a highly detailed trail of every person’s every move. Litigation, of which there has been a great dea, has placed some constraints on the widespread distribution of personal data. Government agencies, however, continue to have the right to gain access to people’s files, which has resulted in the popularity of unbreakable encryption technologies.

There is a growing neo-Luddite movement, as the skill ladder continues to accelerate upward. As with earlier Luddite movements, its influence is limited by the level of prosperity made possible by new technology. The movement does succeed in establishing continuing education as a primary right associated with employment.

There is continuing concern with an underclass that the skill ladder has left fare behind. The size of the underclass appears to be stable, however. Although not politically popular, the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high levels of affluence.

The Arts

The high quality of computer screens, and the facilities of computer-assisted visual rendering software, have made the computer screen a medium of choice for visual art. Most visual art is the result of a collaboration between human artists and their intelligent art software. Virtual paintings—high-resolution wall-hung displays—have become popular. Rather than always displaying the same work of art, as with a conventional painting or poster, these virtual paintings can change the displayed work at the user’s verbal command, or can cycle through collections of art. The displayed artwork can be works by human artists or original art, created in real time by cybernetic art software.

Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians. The creation of music has become available to persons who are not musicians. Creating music does not necessarily require the fine motor coordination of using traditional controllers. Cybernetic music creation systems allow people who appreciate music but who are not knowledgeable about music theory and practice to create music in collaboration with their automatic composition software. Interactive brain-generated music, which creates a resonance between the user’s brain waves and the music being listened to, is another popular genre.

Musicians commonly use electronic controllers that emulate the playing style of the old acoustic instruments (for example, piano, guitar, violin, drums), but there is a surge of interest in the new air controllers in which you create music by moving your hands, feet, mouth, and other body parts. Other music controllers involve interacting with specially designed devices.

Writers use voice-activated word processing; grammar checkers are now actually useful; and distribution of written documents from articles to books typically does not involve paper and ink. Style improvement and automatic editing software is widely used to improve the quality of writing. Language translation software is also widely used to translate written works in a variety of languages. Nevertheless, the core process of creating written language is less affected by intelligent software technologies than the visual and musical arts. However, cybernetic authors are emerging.

Beyond music recordings, images, and movie videos, the most popular type of digital entertainment object is virtual experience software. These interactive virtual environments allow you to go whitewater rafting on virtual rivers, to hang-glide in a virtual Grand Canyon, or to engage in intimate encounters with your favorite movie star. Users also experience fantasy environments with no counterpart in the physical world. The visual and auditory experience of virtual reality is compelling, but tactile interaction is still limited.

Warfare

The security of computation and communication is the primary focus of the U.S. Department of Defense. There is general recognition that the side that can maintain the integrity of its computational resources will dominate the battlefield.

Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle. Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices. Many of these flying weapons are the size of small birds, or smaller.

The United States continues to be the world’s dominant military power, which is largely accepted by the rest of the world, as most countries concentrate on economic competition. Military conflicts between nations are rare, and most conflicts are between nations and smaller bands of terrorists. The greatest threat to national security comes from bioengineered weapons.

Health and Medicine

Bioengineered treatments have reduced the toll from cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other health problems. Significant progress is being made in understanding the information processing basis of disease.

Telemedicine is widely used. Physicians can examine patients using visual, auditory, and haptic examination from a distance. Health clinics with relatively inexpensive equipment and a single technician bring health care to remote areas where doctors had previously been scarce.

Computer-based pattern recognition is routinely used to interpret imaging data and other diagnostic procedures. The use of noninvasive imaging technology has substantially increased. Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a pattern-recognition-based expert system. Doctors routinely consult knowledge-based systems (generally through two-way voice communication augmented by visual displays), which provide automated guidance, access to the most recent medical research, and practice guidelines.

Lifetime patient records are maintained in computer databases. Privacy concerns about access to these records (as with many other databases of personal information) have emerged as a major issue.

Doctors routinely train in virtual reality environments, which include a haptic interface. These systems simulate the visual, auditory, and tactile experience of medical procedures, including surgery. Simulated patients are available for continuing medical education, for medical students, and for people who just want to play doctor.

Philosophy

There is renewed interest in the Turing Test, first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a means for testing intelligence in a machine. Recall that the Turing Test contemplates a situation in which a human judge interviews the computer and a human foil, communicating with both over terminal lines. If the human judge is unable to tell which interviewee is human and which is machine, the machine is deemed to possess human-level intelligence. Although computers still fail the test, confidence is increasing that they will be in a position to pass it within another one or two decades.

There is serious speculation on the potential sentience (that is, consciousness) of computer-based intelligence. The increasingly apparent intelligence of computers has spurred an interest in philosophy.

---

… Hey Molly.

Oh, so you’re calling me now.

Well, the chapter was over and I didn’t hear from you.

I’m sorry, I was finishing up a phone call with my fiancé.

Hey, congratulations, that’s great. How long have you known ….

Ben, his name is Ben. We met about ten years ago, just after you finished this book.

I see. So how have I done?

You did manage to sell a few copies.

No, I mean with my predictions.

Not very well. The translating telephones, for one thing, are a little ridiculous. I mean, they’re constantly screwing up.

Sounds like you use them, though?

Well, sure, how else am I going to speak to my fiancé’s father in Ieper, Belgium, when he hasn’t bothered to learn English?

Of course. So what else?

You said that cancer was reduced, but that’s actually quite understated. Bioengineered treatments, particularly antiangiogenesis drugs that prevent tumors from growing the capillaries they need, have eliminated most forms of cancer as a major killer.^[6]

Well, that’s just not a prediction I was willing to make. There have been so many false hopes with regard to cancer treatments, and so many promising approaches proving to be dead ends, that I just wasn’t willing to make that call. Also, there just wasn’t enough evidence when I wrote the book in 1998 to make that dramatic a prediction.

Not that you shied away from dramatic predictions.

The predictions I made were fairly conservative, actually, and were based on technologies and trends I could touch and feel. I was certainly aware of several promising approaches to bioengineered cancer treatments, but it was still kind of iffy, given the history of cancer research. Anyway, the book only touched tangentially on bioengineering, although it’s clearly an information-based technology.

Now with regard to sex—

Speaking of health problems…

Yes, well, you said that virtual partners were popular, but I just don’t see that.

It might just be the circle you move in.

I have a very small circle—mostly I’ve been trying to get Ben to focus on our wedding.

Yes, tell me about him.

He’s very romantic. He actually sends me letters on paper!

That is romantic. So, how was the phone call I interrupted?

I tried on this new nightgown he sent me. I thought he’d appreciate it, but he was being a little annoying.

I assume you’re going to finish that thought.

Well, he wanted me to kind of let these straps slip, maybe just a little. But I’m kind of shy on the phone. I don’t really go in for video phone sex, not like some friends I know.

Oh, so I did get that prediction right.

Anyway, I just told him to use the image transformers.

Transformers?

You know, he can undress me just at his end.

Oh yes, of course. The computer is altering your image in real time.

Exactly. You can change someone’s face, body, clothing, or surroundings into someone or something else entirely, and they don’t know you’re doing it.

Hmmm.

Anyway, I caught Ben undressing his old girlfriend when she called to congratulate him on our engagement. She had no idea, and he thought itwas harmless. I didn’t speak to him for a week.

Well, as long as it was just at his end.

Who knows what she was doing at her end.

That’s kind of her business, isn’t it? As long as they don’t know what the other is doing.

I’m not so sure they didn’t know. Anyway, people do spend a lot of time together up close but at a distance, if you know what I mean.

Using the displays?

We call them portals—you can look through them, but you can’t touch.

I see, still no interest in virtual sex?

Not personally. I mean, it’s pretty pathetic. But I did have to write the copy for a brochure about a sensual virtual reality environment. Being low on the totem pole, I really can’t pick my assignments.

Did you try the product?

I didn’t exactly try it. I just observed. I would say they put more effort into the virtual girls than the guys.

How’d your campaign make out?

The product bombed. I mean, the market’s just so cluttered.

You can’t win them all.

No, but one of your predictions did work out quite well. I took your advice about that company north of the Mason-Dixon line. And, hey, I’m not complaining.

I’ll bet a lot of stocks are up.

Yes, the boats keep getting higher.

Okay, what else?

You’re right about the disabled. My office mate is deaf, and it’s not an issue at all. There’s nothing a blind or deaf person can’t do today.

That was really true back in 1999.

I think the difference now is that the public understands it. It’s just a lot more obvious with today’s technology. But that understanding is important.

Sure, without the technology, there’s just a lot of misconception and prejudice.

True enough. I think I’m going to have to get going, I can see Ben’s face on my call line.

He looks like a St. Bernard.

Oh, I left my image transformers on. Here, I’ll let you see what he really looks like.

Hey, good-looking guy. Well, good luck. You do seem to have changed.

I should hope so.

I mean I think our relationship has changed.

Well, I’m ten years older.

And it seems that I’m asking you most of the questions.

I guess I’m the expert now. I can just tell you what I see. But how come you’re still stuck in 1999?

I’m afraid I just can’t leave quite yet. I have to get this book out, for one thing.

I do have one confusion. How is that you can talk to me from 1999 when I’m here in the year 2009? What kind of technology is that?

Oh, that’s a very old technology. It’s called poetic license.

¹ A consortium of eighteen manufacturers of cellular telephones and other portable electronic devices is developing a technology called Bluetooth, which provides wireless communications within a radius of about ten meters, at a data rate of 700 to 900 kilobits per second. Bluetooth is expected to be introduced in late 1999 and will initially have a cost of about $20 per unit. This cost is expected to decline rapidly after introduction. Bluetooth will allow personal communications and electronics devices to communicate with one another.

² Technology such as Bluetooth (see note 1) will allow computer components such as computing units, keyboards, pointing devices, printers, etc. to communicate with one another without the use of cables.

³ Microvision of Seattle has a product called a Virtual Retina Display (VRD) that projects images directly onto the user’s retinas while allowing the user to see the normal environment. The Microvision VRD is currently expensive and is sold primarily to the military for use by pilots. Microvision’s CEO Richard Rutkowski projects a consumer version built on a single chip before the year 2000.

⁴ Projecting from the speed of personal computers, a 1998 personal computer can perform about 150 million instructions per second for about $1,000. By doubling every twelve months, we get a projection of 150 million multiplied by 2¹¹ (2,048) = 300 billion instructions per second in 2009. Instructions are less powerful than calculations, so calculations per second will be around 100 billion. However, projecting from the speed of neural computers, a 1997 neural computer provided about 2 billion neural connection calculations per second for around $2,000, which is 1 billion calculations per $1,000. By doubling every 12 months, we get a projection of 1 billion times 2¹² (4,096) = 4 trillion calculations per second in 2009. By 2009, computers will routinely combine both types of computations, so if even 25 percent of the computations are of the neural connection calculation type, the estimate of 1 trillion calculations per second for $1,000 of computing in 2009 is reasonable.

⁵ The most powerful supercomputers are twenty thousand times more powerful than a $1,000 personal computer. With $1,000 personal computers providing about 1 trillion calculations per second (particularly of the neural-connection type of calculation) in 2009, the more powerful supercomputers will provide about 20 million billion calculations per second, which is about equal to the estimated processing power of the human brain.

⁶ As of this writing, there has been much publicity surrounding the work of Dr. Judah Folkman of Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and the effects of angiogenesis inhibitors. In particular, the combination of Endostatin and Angiostatin, bioengineered drugs that inhibit the reproduction of capillaries, has been remarkably effective in mice. Although there has been a lot of commentary pointing out that drugs that work in mice often do not work in humans, the degree to which this drug combination worked in these laboratory animals was remarkable. Drugs that work this well in mice often do work in humans.

See HOPE IN THE LAB: A Special Report. A Cautious Awe Greets Drugs That Eradicate Tumors in Mice, New York Times, May 3, 1998.

— Ray Kurzweil (1999), The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Chapter 9, 2009, pp. 189-201. New York: Penguin.

Oh, well, whatever.

I think what’s interesting about this is not so much what Kurzweil predicts which hasn’t come to pass, but rather the number of things he failed to predict which have come to pass—and why the things he predicts coming to pass haven’t come to pass. Sometimes it’s because Kurzweil is too optimistic about technologies that never materialized, or which are still in their incipient stages at best. But a lot of the time, it’s just that people found they have better things to do with their limited time and resources. So it turns out that a lot of people do book travel reservations online now, but nobody books it by talking with some animated virtual customer service agent. Not because it would be impossible for clever folks to program that sort of thing, if they’d spent the last 10 years working on it. But rather, even if they did, who would want to waste time on that kind of goofy shit, when you can just get the tickets through Kayak? Similarly, I’m sure that if folks had spent the last 10 years working on virtual reality games, or on establishing fancy new paperless Information Superhighway channels for great big established media companies to push their DRMed-up chosen publications, you probably would have seen something like what Kurzweil predicts. But instead of that, we have people who put their time into developing IndyMedia, Craigslist, blogging software, and Flickr, MySpace, and so on—tools which, technically speaking, are mostly dead-simple HTML over HTTP. The real awesomeness of the future — so far, at least — turns out to have not nearly so much to do with technical fireworks and the kinds of techno-conveniences that brute-force computational power can achieve, but rather with the new lifestyles, new patterns of autonomy, and the new forms of social relationships that relatively simple but increasingly pervasive technologies, have helped facilitate. And which are going to continue to grow, and transform, and, ultimately, are going to turn this old world upside-down and inside-out.

Have an awesome new decade, y’all.

William Lloyd Garrison was famous for his uncompromising, strident, and deliberately polarizing moral tone when writing about the sin of slavery and the call for immediate abolition. One of his most famous statements on the matter was a comment to his friend and fellow abolitionist Samuel May — a comment that has been often quoted but also often difficult to track down sources for, because the conversation was not recorded in the pages of Garrison’s paper The Liberator, but only in May’s memoirs. This passage is from Henry Mayer’s 1998 biography of William Lloyd Garrison, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press) discusses Garrison’s rhetorical choices, and recounts the conversation with May.

Unlike the self-effacing Lundy, Garrison had deliberately chosen to make himself an issue. There shall be no neutrals; men shall either like or dislike me, he announced. The editor–and the newspaper as an extension of himself–would draw energy, like a lightning rod, to galvanize the cause. His statements poured forth with an intensity that seemed more like a spontaneous eruption than a composed literary style, which was precisely the effect Garrison wanted. He could have been as smooth and politic as anyone, the editor once observed, but declared that he much preferred nature to art. It was nonetheless a deliberate decision, not an irresistible impulse, that led him to write as he did. He chose his words, one close friend said, with the care of a pharmacist weighing out a prescription.

Nearly every visitor commented upon the surprising contrast between the private Garrison and the public firebrand. People walked in expecting to find a stout, rugged, dark-visaged desperado, as one guest put it, and found instead a pale, delicate, and apparently over-tasked gentleman scurrying from desk to case to imposing stone, making light of the work with an unending series of hymn tunes and jokes, and stopping occasionally to stroke the pussycat stretched out affectionately on the periphery of the work space. Never too busy to talk, it seemed, Garrison stimulated an unending flow of conversation–copious, strong-minded, and fervent–that often turned the printing office into a seminar or Sunday school. The self-effacing Knapp formeda silent backdrop to conversation, as he struggled with the ledgers, the slips of paper containing fragments of subscription information, and the stack of bills. Knapp worked hard, spoke little, and quietly nursed the petty resentments that would one day rupture the bond with his more exuberant partner.

Each week Garrison took a perverse delight in reprinting the jibes of editors who called him everything from an officious and pestiferous fanatic to a mawkish sentimentalist who wept over imaginary suffering like boarding school misses and antiquated spinsters. The insults, he said, are like oil to the flame of my zeal. When New York’s Mordecai Noah, one of the most caustic editors in the country, dismissed Garrison as a printer by trade and a reformer of empires by profession, he accepted the sneer as a compliment. He had less patience, however, with people who professed sympathy for the cause but insisted that he moderate his conduct before committing themselves. Such demands came, significantly, from well-to-do whites; the editor’s black constituents seldom found his language too harsh or angry. A pinch of practical help–donations, subscribers, a supply of larger paper–would do more for the cause than all the admonitions to reform the reformers, Garrison said. It was not his language that caused offense, for virtually every editor engaged in the freewheeling style that seemed the essenec of a bumptious and aggressive free press, but rather the subject to which Garrison applied his words.

Yet even Samuel May, who understood more than most the dramaturgy of Garrison’s editorship, once entreated him to be more temperate. While out for a walk in early spring, Garrison listened patiently and tenderly, May recalled, as the older man rehearsed the concerns of their more timorous friends. Then, however, Garrison exploded, insisting that he would only soften his language when the poor downtrodden slaves tell me that I am too harsh.

O, my friend, urged May, do try to moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire.

Garrison stopped walking and looked straight at his beloved friend. He laid his hand upon May’s shoulder with a kind but emphatic pressure and, speaking slowly, with deep emotion, said:

Brother May, I have a need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice around me to melt.

The two friends stood there in the street, silent for a moment, and May could feel the pressure on his shoulder long after Garrison had withdrawn his hand. From that hour, May wrote forty years later, I have never said a word to Mr. Garrison in complaint of his style.

—Henry Mayer (1998), All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 118-120

In the reference notes, on page 645, Mayer notes that the source for the all on fire conversation is Samuel Joseph May, Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (Boston, 1869), pp. 36-37.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

New York, 1874: Claude Pelletier, who liked to sign his books backwards, was developing his system of Atercratie—anarchy by a name with none of the baggage of the original—in a series of French-language texts, drawing heavily on familiar figures like Proudhon and Pierre Leroux. His Socialist Soirees of New York lays out the basics of atercratie, but he also wrote a long play about the Hussites which included quite a bit of commentary on 19th century socialists. And he compiled one of the various socialist dictionaries which were produced in the period. The project of producing a political program by defining keywords is one with a long history. Daniel Colson's Petit lexique philosophique de l'anarchisme: de Proudhon à Deleuze is a modern example. The Belgian "rational socialists" produced a fascinating dictionary in which many of their critiques of Proudhon were incorporated into the definitions. There is something illuminating, and frequently delightful, in dipping into some potentially innocuous entry, and finding what deep political implications it raised for the compilers. This entry, from the single volume (Vol. 2) of Pelletier's dictionary that I have been able to track down, is fairly pedestrian stuff, compared to some entries, but is probably useful to those who have yet to encounter this particular form of political tome. Here, for you edification, is the definition of "quarry:"

QUARRY. Location dug in the ground, where on extracts by means of shafts and galleries, or even from a single level, stone, coal and other minerals, such as lead, copper, gold, silver, etc...

Today the quarries which should belong to the nation, are abandoned to capitalists who exploit them for their own personal interests; and their private interest drives them to convert them into a monopoly in order to reap enormous profits, by augmenting, as it says in the entry for MONOPOLIZATION, the sale price of their product, and reducing the wages of their workers. It follows that they become millionaires in a few years and that against the discomfort and misery into which they cast the laborers gives rise to strikes, jealousies, hatred, and recriminations which sooner or later lead to hateful disputes and bloody conflicts: witness the coal miners’ societies of Pennsylvania and the vengeances of the Molly-Maguires.

All this would not occur if we were willing to recognize that what nature has produced and given freely to all, should not be the exclusive property of a man or of a small society of capitalists.

It is said that many of the things have been discovered only because private interests were in play and that many quarries, shafts and mines would not have been exploited, if the companies had not obtained some advantages which come to reassure them a bit about the random threats to their capital.

This is true; but it is true only because industry and its transactions rest on private credit instead of revolving on a social credit, as described in the entries BANK, CAPITAL, CREDIT and others in this Dictionary.

As long as Societies do not furnish the instruments of labor and the substratum of the products to the citizens whose industrial function will be to extract or transform them, the natural riches of the globe, which are the patrimony of all, will belong to a few of the rich and will serve to separate the people into different classes. This is obvious.

The people will be happy and free only when the oligarchs of capital, the idlers, soldiers, priests, spies and other parasites have disappeared from our midst, not as a result of a violent revolution; but by that of a new economic arrangement of the productive forces of society.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

I'm working on gathering the pieces for a series of pamphlets documenting the mutualist tradition, and ran across this rather strange, but very interesting piece, but the frequently strange, but always interesting Dyer D. Lum. Tucker's translation of the first volume of The System of Economical Contradictions was published in 1888, and Lum's 1892 piece seems to be a fairly idiosyncratic commentary on it.

[I admit that I have tended to treat the Contradictions as a sort of badly flawed middle-step between the initial critique of property in 1840 and the realization that "the antinomy does not resolve itself" in 1858, but I have been spending a lot of time with it recently, translating the study on property for the forthcoming Proudhon reader, and working through some of the rest of it to establish contexts--and I have become rather enthusiastic about the work. Proudhon's suggestion that institutions had to be grappled with in the context of the political and economic "series" of which they formed only a part (the fruit of his engagement with Fourier's thought in The Creation of Order in Mankind (1842)) is key to understanding the ways that he continued to evaluate institutions, and particularly the institution of property, in his later works. Proudhon himself created a series of commentaries on property: the truth of property--or at least the truth of Proudhon's conception of property--is in the series, and in the additional steps implied, rather than in any of the particular, decidedly approximate, analyses that Proudhon made.]

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The Twentieth Century. May 19, 1892. 7-10.

MUTUALISM

DYER D. LUM

We often derive a coign of vantage in reviewing old scenes through the lens of a different word; though the field of vision be a familiar one, the various word-lenses we use often bring out in bolder or less relief the features of the picture. The triune formula of Hegel, used so effectively by Proudhon in his analysis of industrial relations, may here offer us such an instrument for the survey of history in the same field; for, after all, history is but the biography of the race-soul in its effort to construct a cosmos from the chaotic web of events in which it finds itself immersed. In fact, it is the ceaseless transformation and flux of social relations which create the various vestments of humanity, which we ticket in the race-wardrobe as religion, poetry, philosophy, science, politics, etc. A never-ending process which actually is "the roaring loom of time which weaves for God in the garment we see him by."

In Hegel's thought, which he applied to all knowledge, from the two contradictions, is, and is not, the "roaring loom of time" weaves for us a neutral point in becoming. Without accepting his ontology, his dialectical method remains a most exhaustive instrument for synthetic generalization. Nor is this neutral point by any means a compromise between opposites, for the notion returns enriched by the process, becomes the substantial union of both its terms, richer in scope and harmony. Though the writer differs widely from his logic, his method opens rich fields when applied to the philosophy of history, of which one such is my present purpose.

In the biography of the race we see this exemplified in the evolution of industrialism. From the crude, disjointed efforts of the savage, we find industrial relations marked by two opposing characterizations of human activity: the rule of personal and impersonal will. Let us briefly scan these:

1. Slavery, the first step towards the solidarite of effort, was the cradle of industry. It was in this subordination to the personal rule of others that the first lever of civilization, division of labor, lifted mankind out of the animal phase of "each scratching for himself." Less barbarous than the slaughter of the captive, it made possible the development of the softer, or human, feelings which now are asserting mastery over the brute in man.

Excess in products became possible, and pari passu increased socialization. Through the first capital was born, and by this and the second slavery became modified to serfdom. But the advantage resulting rested mainly with the master. National wealth augmented, in which it is true all share somewhat, but the essential feature of this phase, personal rule, still dominated if but indirectly.

2. Capital supplants personal rule. It required the electric spark of the French Revolution to end the transitional agony, but since then capital has assumed a more mobile character; it has become impersonal, in itself, though confined yet by the leading strings of legalization to personal guidance in a large measure.

Labor has by this change become organized under capital. The essential spirit of this regime is free capital, but as it nears its maturity, to provide for the increasing surplus of labor, a surplusage dangerous to it, the economic struggle for existence finds manifestation in seeking new markets in new lands, Asia, Africa, South America. But this is but a struggle for breathing room only, and indicates that the world's activity is in another transition period; the issue being less how to doctor up a moribund system than to more clearly discern the phase toward which it leads and for which it is preparing the ground.

The rule of capital having been based, in itself, on freedom, it has only resulted to the benefit of those who could "corner" capital; further, that the impersonal rule of capital has too often degraded the labor it organized; that the capitalist as such is exempt from labor, and the laborer is doomed to crave as a favor the permission to use his muscles productively; all points inevitably to the conclusion that greater freedom can alone be in harmony with evolution, can meet the idea which has dominated past phases and prepared the way for each transitional change.

3. We may therefore find the third phase, the synthetic unity of the preceding ones, in free association, combining the necessity to labor of the first and the broader generalization of the second.

Both the personal rule of the one and the impersonal rule of the other, centered in the widened Self of social evolution, find the spirit of each materialized in mutual accord. The rivalry of excess of products and increased socialization merges self-will into the higher selfhood of interrelated humanity. And it is precisely because of this contradiction between the narrow self-will seen in slavery, and the broadened free-will to which capital aspires, that free association for mutual interests alone presents synthetic unity. Macaulay said that the remedy for the evils of capitalism will find their remedy in greater freedom to capital, which in turn preserves the economic benefit of slavery in the transformation of the egoistic self into the higher self of human interrelations.

We may again consider these phases under other terms. 1. Authority, the genius of the past, manifesting itself in priestcraft, statecraft, wherein "divine right" becomes personal rule intrenched in position. 2. Freedom, manifesting itself in rebellion, insubordination, the rebound to egoistic will: the negation not only of authority, but order as well. Activity, from the evils of a false cosmos, endeavoring to return to chaos, opposition. 3. Mutualism, or free association, is the synthesis wherein the race returns to enrich the union of thesis and antithesis with their harmonization in the higher self.

In other words, to use Hegel's, the formula is Position, Opposition, Composition. The position once intrenched in law, custom, tradition, etc., is negatived by opposition, of which illustrations are seen on every hand; but find their composition, or synthesis, in the order which invariably follows rather than precedes progress.

As in relogion the race has swung between the position of Faith, and the opposition of Doubt, Denial, so we may even now see philosophy seeking their composition in a reconciliating Conviction. So in the clearer consciousness of the Greater Self, the consensus of all past activity and the Over Soul of present endeavor, the ever increasing interweaving of higher and broader thought into the warp and woof of existence, the condition of social life--we may already discern reason harmonizing personal and impersonal will in the richer and fuller outgrowth and ingrowth--mutual will.

Thus through the lens, Mutualism, we view the scene of human activity, and lo! the relations which constitute it are seen to be the same we had already grown familiar with as scanned through the lens--Anarchy!

Northampton, Mass.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

In the second issue of Solidarité, dated April 1871, James Guillaume contributed this piece on the federative principle, in the context of the Paris Commune. Note the use of Proudhon's concept of "collective force." I'm working on translating a series of texts on nationality and the federative principle, to go with forthcoming issues of LeftLiberty.

_____

Federalism.

The true character of the revolution that was accomplished at Paris commence has been outlined in so marked a fashion that you, even the minds most unfamiliar with political theories, can now perceive it clearly.

The revolution of Paris is federalist.

The Parisian people want to have the liberty to organize themselves as they intend, without the rest of France having to mix in Parisian affairs; and at the same time, they renounce on their side all interference in the affairs of the departments, by urging them each to organize as their please, in the fullness of communal autonomy.

The different organizations which would be in this way freely constituted could then freely federate in order to mutually guarantee their rights and their independence.

It is important not to confuse federalism as it is understood by the Paris Commune with the so-called federalism which exists in Switzerland and in the United States of America.

Switzerland is simply a federative State, and that word alone already expresses all the differences between these two systems. Switzerland is a State, that is, it is a national unity; and, as a result, despite the federative appearance, sovereignty there is attributed to the nation in its ensemble. The cantons, instead of being considered as distinct individualities and absolute sovereigns, are supposed to be only fractions of a whole which is called the Swiss nation. A canton does not have the free disposition of itself: it can indeed, to a certain degree, manage its own affairs; but it does not possess true autonomy, its legislative faculties are limited by the federal constitution; and that federal constitution is not a contract, in the true sense of the word; it has not been accepted individually by each of the parties: it has been imposed on the cantons by the vote of a majority. A canton does not have the right to terminate the federal contract; it is forbidden from leaving the federation; it is even forbidden, as we see at this moment in the affairs of the Tessin, to divide in order to form new cantons. The least political or socialist movement, a strike for example, can bring federal troops into the canton.

Thus, federation, in Switzerland, is only in the words. It is not federation which is the true name of the Swiss system, it is decentralization. Switzerland realizes closely the system that had been established in France by the constitution of 1791, and that the Assembly of Versailles, “inspired by the great principles of 1789,” proposes to restore in order to seem to give in to federalist aspirations.

Federalism, in the sense given to it by the Paris Commune, and that was given to it many years ago by the great socialist Proudhon, who first scientifically outlined the theory,—federalism is above all the negation of the nation and the State.

For federalism, there is no more nation, no more national or territorial unity. There is only an agglomeration of federated communes, an agglomeration which has for its determining principle only the interests of the contracting parties, and which consequently has no regard for the questions of nationalism or of territory.

There is equally no more State, no more central power superior to the groups and imposing it them its authority: there is only the collective force resulting from the federation of the groups, and that collective force, which acts to maintenance and guarantee of the federal contract,—a true synallagmatic contract this time, stipulated individually by each of the parties,—this collective force, we say, can never become something prior and superior to the federated groups, something analogous to what the State is today to society and to the communes. The centralized and national State thus no longer exists, and the Communes enjoying the fullness of their independence, there is truly an-archy, absence of central authority.

But let us not believe that after having suppressed the States and nationalism, federalism leads to absolute individualism, to isolation, to egoism. No, federalism is socialist, and for it solidarity is inseparable from liberty. The communes, while remaining absolutely autonomous, feel themselves, by the force of things, in solidarity; and, without sacrificing any of their liberty, or, to put it better, to better assure their liberty, they unite themselves tightly by federative contracts, where they stipulate all that which touches their common interests: the large public services, the exchange of products, the guarantee of individual rights, and mutual aid in case of any aggression.

Let the French people, awakened finally by their misfortune, open their eyes to the light of truth: let them be in 1871 the initiators of the Federalist and Social Republic, as they were in 1793 the proclaimers of the rights of men; and in Europe, preserved from the gothic restoration with which the German Empire threatens it, will shine in a near future the days of liberty and equality.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Some 19th century "translations" end up being little more than summaries, and some summaries end up being haphazard translations of bits and pieces. A number of the pieces that introduced Americans to Proudhon and Leroux fit one of these two categories. A series of summaries of chapters from Proudhon's Confessions appeared in The Spirit of the Age in 1849-50. This is certainly a work that needs full translation, but the summaries are interesting, both for the information they contain and as an example of how many Americans first encountered Proudhon.

THE CONFESSIONS OF A REVOLUTIONIST.

BY P. J. PROUDHON.

CHAPTER XVIII

21st MARCH : LAW CONCERNING THE CLUBS.

Reaction made another step, from the republicans of the morrow to the doctrinaires; but one more false move of the democrats, and we fell into the hands of the Jesuits. Step by step we advanced towards the completion of the revolution, the annihilation of authority. It was necessary first that government should show itself incapable of existing either with the constitution, with free institutions, with principles or classes; the first was attacked by Odillon Barrot, the second by Leon Faucher, in his bill against the clubs, the others would come afterwards, under the government of Louis Bonaparte, who was destined to lead governmental authority to the final act of its suicidal course; and this was done with a consistency and strictness that belong to no other country; for the French are the most logical people in the world.

The attack upon the clubs was an attack upon all the institutions established and confirmed by the revolution; it was, as M. Cremieux loudly declared on the 21st March, a direct violation of the constitution. Henceforth there were two classes in the country; a majority and a minority, the oppressors and the oppressed; for everywhere the socialists were hunted down, and those who were only suspected of opinions then looked upon as aggravating circumstances, were treated as common malefactors,

The right of insurrection can only exist under an absolute government, where the people have no voice in the constitution; but in the present case, universal suffrage remaining to us, our only legitimate mode of defeating our adversaries was by legal resistance; and the plan proposed by Le Peuple, namely, an organized refusal to pay the taxes all over the country, would have been a most effectual instrument. Since the 13th June, however, this is no longer practicable or necessary; my proposition was received with distrust by the radicals: if the people refuse to pay taxes once, said these slavish advocates of government, they will refuse them altogether, and then government will be impossible: and my reward was a fine of 10,000 francs and ten years' imprisonment.

But to my shame, I must confess, we were all blind to our own real interest, and the event has proved that radicalism was better served by its own incapacity than it could have been by the means I proposed. Since the 13th June, we have done with parties and governments; and that is much better than to have established the mountain in the room of the doctrinaires and Jesuits. The revolution has left us nothing further to do. II mondo va da se! The world moves of itself.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire:

At the Mises Institute today I was looking through the library and noticed Murray Rothbard’s copy of American Negro Slave Revolts, the 1943 study by Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. One passage stood out because Rothbard had marked it with heavy lightning-bolt squiggles and marginal comments like “Right,” “Good,” “Great.”

Aptheker, discussing the claim that “cruelty was characteristic of the institution of American Negro slavery,” writes:

Many, perhaps most, writers on this subject have denied this and assert, on the contrary, that “kindliness [was] the rule” under the system. … A recent repetition of this idea urges the reader to bear in mind that “owners of slaves were hardly likely to be cruel or careless with expensive pieces of their own property,” just as most people do not abuse their horses or automobiles.

Aptheker goes on to provide ample empirical evidence to the contrary; but first he attacks the theoretical argument, and this is the section that excited Rothbard’s enthusiastic approval:

[T]he fatal error in the above proposition is the assumption that one may accurately compare any two pieces of property, even if they be so far apart and so distinct as is a horse from a human being.

There are, however, fundamental differences. Basic is the reasoning faculty which leads men, unlike automobiles, to compare, plan, hope, yearn, desire, hate, fear, which leads them to seek pleasure and shun pain, to spin dreams and build philosophies and struggle and gladly die for them. Human beings, in fine, or, at least, many human beings, do possess the glorious urge to improve themselves and their environment. And people who are beaten, branded, sold, degraded, denied a thousand and one privileges they see enjoyed by others will be discontented, and will plan, or at least, think of bettering their lot.

This was the slaveholders’ nightmare. This it was that led them to erect theologic, economic, social and ethnologic justifications for their system, that led them to build a most elaborate machine of physical repression and terrorization. For, and here was another crucial difference, most slaves were owned as investments, not as ornaments or commodities of consumption, as are most automobiles. Slaves were instruments of production, were means by which men who owned land were able to produce tobacco and rice and sugar and cotton to be sold and to return them a profit. Their existence had no meaning other than this for the employers. Profit must be gotten from these workers – whom the bosses owned – no matter what blood and sweat and tears this entailed, and the more profit the better.

When one combines the differences, then, he finds the slaves to have been not inanimate ornaments or instruments of pleasure, but thinking, living commercial investments, rational machines of production. It may be said, therefore, that cruelty was an innate, inextricable part of American Negro slavery, for these peculiar machines, possessed of the unique quality of human beings – reason – had to be maltreated, had to be made to suffer physical cruelty, had to be chained and lashed and beaten into producing for a profit. The latter was the reason for their existence and incorrigibility, protest, disobedience, discontent, rebelliousness were bad in themselves, and disastrous as examples. Instead of the slave’s value preventing cruelty, it was exactly because of that value, and that greater value he could produce – when forced – that cruelty existed. (pp. 132-133)

It occurs to me this Aptheker-Rothbard argument also raises a problem for Hans Hoppe’s contention that monarchs can be expected to be relatively benign because they take the attitude of private ownership toward the realms they rule.

Read the whole thing at Austro-Athenian Empire.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section XIII.

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§ XIII. — CONCLUSION

The papacy having been broken, Catholicism is brought low: there is no more religion in the civilized world.

The Protestant churches, a sort of middle term between religious thought and philosophical thought, that remained in opposition to the Roman Church, perish in their turn, obliged as they will be either to decisively adopt philosophy, and consequently to consummate their abjuration, or to undergo a restoration of unity, and consequently to contradict themselves.

Eclecticism itself no longer has any raison d'être; of what could it remain composed? Willy-nilly, it must join the revolutionary antithesis, unless it is to dissolve into pure skepticism. Isn't it already towards the latter sad alternative that minds are inclining in France and in all of Europe? Before December 2, the governments, by a kind of tacit pact, pursued a moderate course in politics; they tended to balance themselves, and followed one another in the application of the constitutional system. Now, all political and social development is suspended; the reason of State, which had been in the process of reconciling itself with the rationality of law, floats randomly, free from any suggestion of fear, mistrust, and ancient antagonism. International relations are disturbed; there are no more principles; the despair of minds pushes them toward war.

Has England, which first, out of hatred of democracy, applauded December 2, any principles? The question has become almost laughable. For some years, England has astonished the world by its contempt for divine and human law... I am mistaken: yes, England has one principle, to destroy, one by the others, the powers of the continent.

Does Russia have principles? — If Russia had principles, if for example it believed in the inviolability of nations, then either it would restore Poland, or else it would not permit this so-called emancipation of the Italians. If Russia had principles, it would understand that there is no transition between the immorality of servitude and the recognition of the rights of man and citizen; it would be its night of August 4; instead of haggling over the liberty of its peasants, it would free them straightaway, in a revolutionary manner.

Does Austria have principles? How then is it perpetually at odds with its peoples, suspect to its neighbors, unfaithful to its allies, ungrateful to its benefactors, odious to all?

Does Germany have principles? Let us hope so. Germany is the land of philosophy, as France is the land of the Revolution. Now, a German has said that Revolution and philosophy are one and the same thing. But, since December 2, that connection has been broken: Germany, which fears a new Tugendbund perhaps more than a new Napoleon, dreams of centralization, which could well mean, one day, denationalization. With Germany centralized, there would be five empires in Europe: four military empires, the French, Austrian, German and Russian; and one mercantile, the British. These five empires, when they did not battle one another, would form a holy alliance by which they would reciprocally guarantee the obedience of their subjects and the exploitation of their plebs. But then there would be no more nations in Europe, nothing being more destructive of nationalities than military and malthusian mores.

Does Italy have principles? Is Italy imperial, pontifical, royal or federal? It does not know itself. Poor Italy! In place of the Revolution, we have brought it revolt; it has hurled back at us the tempest.

There are no more principles: Europe has descended into the chaos of December 2, and we advance through the void, per inania régna. What is sad is that we know it, we speak of it everywhere, and we accept it. We take our part in it as a natural thing, as an inevitable phase. "France has fallen; the times of the Late Empire have come for it:" this is the talk in the cafes of Paris. As one said in 93, France is revolutionary; in 1814, France is liberal; in 1830, France is conservative; in 1848, France is republican. A little while longer, and we will say with the same carelessness: France is rotten; and we will record its moral death.

Let Napoleon III now do as he wishes: the papacy struck down, nothing can call it back to life. The faith of the peoples no longer sustains it. The judgment is without appeal: neither restrictions, nor amendments will do a thing. The pope can absolve the emperor, the emperor, confessed, reconciled, will not save the pope. And as there is not a nation in Europe of which one could not note, proofs in hand, the intellectual and moral decadence, the fall of the papacy becomes the signal of the debacle.

Now, the time of the initiating races is past. The movement will not be reborn in Europe, neither in the east, nor the west, nor the center; today, regeneration can be neither Greek, nor Latin, nor Germanic. It can only come, as eighteen centuries ago, from a cosmopolitan propaganda, sustained by all people who, after having renounced the ancient gods, protest, without distinction of race nor of language, against corruption.

What will be their flag? They can have only one: the Revolution, Philosophy, Justice.

The Revolution is the French name for the new idea; Philosophy is its German name;

Let Justice become its cosmopolitan name.

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind
   
4. The origin of ideas
   
5. That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction
   
6. That philosophy must be essentially practical
   
7. The character that must be presented by the guarantee of our judgments and the rule of our actions.--Conversion from speculative to practical reason: determination of the criterion.
   
8. Justice, universal reason of things: science and conscience.
   
9. Supremacy of Justice.
10. Conditions for a philosophical propaganda.
    
11. Law of Progress. Social destination.
    
12. A word about the situation.
    
13. Conclusion.

And that concludes the "Program," from Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. This working translation is a Collective Reason effort, by Jesse Cohn and Shawn P. Wilbur. At this point, however, the imperfections and incompletions should be considered mine. Now, I need to turn my attention to Pierre Leroux for a few days.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section XII.

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§ XII. — A word about the situation.

It is by their principles, religious or philosophical, that societies live.

Before 89, France was Christian: its monarchy was of divine right, its economic constitution established on feudality. Christian, monarchical and feudal, the French nation could be said to be as well disciplined in its thought as it was in its government. She had principles, doctrines, a tradition, a morals; she had rights. Under Louis XIV it arrived, using its principles, at the highest degree of power and glory. No nation disputed its precedence: elder child of the Church, it walked at the head of one hundred million catholics.

The Revolution of 89 changed this position, but did not reduce it. From the Christian, monarchical, and feudal nation that had been emerged one that was philosophical, republican, and egalitarian. Then too, and more than before, it could be praised for having principles, rights, and morals. Its tradition, which up to that point had been confounded with its religion, was displaced: it was the tradition of free reason, older than catholic feudality, more imprescriptible than divine right. One moment, by this abrupt conversion, France could believe itself isolated in the midst of the peoples. But it had become initiator; soon it could judge that its word was accommodated everywhere. An incalculable future opened before it; it had only to wait until philosophy had brought minds to a state of maturity.

The revolutionary whirlwind lasted ten years.

In 1799, a thought of conciliation emerged and seized the government. Minds were divided; the country aspired to rest. It was believed that it was possible, through mutual concessions, to make an accord between the conquests of '89 and the old religious and monarchical tradition: this was the whole intent behind the consular restoration. All in good faith, and because it was in any case impossible for it to do better, France was at the same time Christian and philosophical, monarchical and democratic, propertarian and egalitarian.

Was this eclecticism founded in reason as it appeared to be founded, for more than half a century, in fact? We cannot believe it. The reception given in 1814 to the Bourbons, the bearers of the Charter, the revolution of 1830, that of 1848, proved that this system of conciliation was only a work of circumstance, and that as the nation was permeated by the new right, the Revolution took on an increasingly decisive preponderance. In any case, it is at least certain that eclectic and liberal France, just like that of ‘89 and ‘93, just like feudal France, had principles, ideas, and that its internal and external policy was the expression of these. Principles! It seemed, in its moderation, to confound the antagonistic thoughts of two modes: many intelligent people, it must be said, were seduced by it. Also, after ‘99, French power experienced an extraordinary development: Europe followed, dragged along rather than overcome, and we shall never know what would have happened if the genius of the emperor and of the governments that succeeded him, had been equal to their aspirations.

Was this system, which, following the revolutionary period as it did, had certainly had its raison d'être, exhausted when, at the end of 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the Republic, seized power?

We are strongly inclined to believe so: this is even, we maintain, what explains the success of the coup d'état. December 2nd, and the regime that has been in place since then, are not the work of one man, nor an incident of history: it is a situation. An impure generation, partly born since the restoration, which of liberalism understood only libertinage, of the philosophy of the eighteenth century only impiety, of the Revolution only dissolution, of eclecticism only skepticism, of the parliamentary system only intrigue, and of eloquence only verbosity; a greedy generation, as coarse as its own native soil, without dignity, started to dominate in the country: it still dominates there. It is this generation that inaugurated, under cover of an imperial restoration, the reign of impudent mediocrity, official advertisements, open swindle. It is this generation which dishonors France and poisons it ...

Whatever the causes that so abruptly brought about the end of the middle course [juste-milieu], republican and monarchical, there is one unquestionable fact: it is, on one side, that the fear of falling into an extreme of revolution or counter-revolution drove the masses to accept the coup d’état, and that however, since this fatal date of December 2nd, France, which was once catholic, monarchical and feudal, then philosophical and democratic, finally eclectic, conciliatory and moderate—I will not use the ill-sounding epithet doctrinaire—France no longer had principles, public spirit, tradition, nor ideas, not even morals.

The France of December 2nd follows neither the Gospel, nor the Declaration of the Rights of Man; it is neither a divine-right monarchy, nor a democracy according to the Revolution, nor a government of the middle classes, with balanced powers, as the Charters of 1814 and 1830 wished to establish. A purely arbitrary despotism, a thing from a fantasy,—without precedent in the national tradition nor in the first empire, which, in spite of its military exigencies, still followed principles, nor in the dictatorship of ‘93, which certainly also had its principles, nor in the monarchy of Louis XIV, who cannot be reproached for having lacked any,—more arbitrary, finally, than Machiavelli had dreamed of, for if Machiavelli did not recoil before despotism, at least he placed it in the service of an idea: that is the France of December 2nd.

One will, I expect, cry calumny: one will quote the constitution of 1852, renewed from that of 1804; the Napoleonic idea, which served Prince Louis as a program, and this multitude of declarations, messages, decrees, circulars, professions of faith, brochures, etc, that the imperial government never stops producing. Why doesn't one add to it the reports of the limited-liability societies and their advertisements? . . . Oh! if words were a guarantee of principles, there would be few governments so well-founded in theory as the empire of the past eight years. But it is by facts, by acts, that a government reveals its essence and proclaims its thought: in this respect, and without at all wishing to reduce my criticisms to a critique of persons, I dare state that the government of Napoleon III, to his misfortune and to ours, has no principles, or, if it has principles, that it has not yet revealed them. Testimonies abound close at hand: since December 2nd, I have recorded them each day. Let us cite the latest, which is at the same time the most serious.

The middle course charted by the first Consul, which had its apogee under Louis-Philippe, recognized that the existence of Catholicism is indissolubly related to that of the papacy, and that the papacy itself, after the abrogation of the pact of Charlemagne, has only the prestige that that it draws from its temporal sovereignty. Under the Caesars, and later under the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, the Franks, and the Germans, the Pope could do without the title and power of prince: religion made him the vicar of God on earth. Charlemagne consecrated this vicariate, not by separating the two powers in the manner that this is understood today, but by opposing them and binding them to one another in a system which embraced the world. As for the gifts of land that accompanied this imperial and papal constitution, it was initially, like the three crowns that ornament the tiara, only a jewel, a badge, a kind of glorification of the pontificate. It is not what made the power of Gregory VII, of Urban II, of Innocent III, of Boniface VIII.—After the papacy, rebuffed by Philip the Fair, had been transported to Avignon, the State having broken with the church on all points and dissolved the old pact, the papacy was still supported, and Catholicism remained standing, thanks to the temporal sovereignty that the popes had gained, in part through the lands donated, and in part by force of arms. But one soon saw how powerless this sovereignty was to preserve Catholic unity. First, there was the great schism caused by the removal of the papal seat; then the Reformation, which removed half of Christendom from the Holy See. Consequently, the authority of the sovereign pontiff, of the Catholics themselves, has been steadily decreasing: the severities of Louis XIV, the legal concordat of 1802, and the capture of Savone, are the signs of this decline. Destroy the temporal holdings of the popes, and Catholicism degenerates into Protestantism, the religion of Christ falls into the dust. Those who say that the pope will never be better understood than when he deals exclusively with the affairs of heaven are either speaking in political bad faith, endeavoring to disguise atrocious deeds behind devout words, or foolish Catholics, incapable of understanding that in the affairs of life, the temporal and the spiritual, just like the soul and the body, are interdependent.

However, in the presence of this tottering papacy, what was the line of conduct taken by the French moderates?

The moderates had as their principle the reconciliation of religion and philosophy, monarchy and democracy, Church and Revolution. They were therefore very careful not to touch the papacy; they would not have dared to assume the responsibility for this great ruin, first of all, because they did not feel able to substitute their own teaching for the religious ideas, and secondly, because the hour of Protestantism seemed to them, with good reason, to have passed, there was, according to them, no longer enough faith in France to be worth the costs of a Reformation, and they would have been ashamed to indenture the conscience of the country any more to Anglican hypocrisy than to German theology; because, finally, in this serious state of uncertainty, it could neither renounce the legitimate influence exerted by France over 130 million Catholics spread across the surface of the glove nor support the formation of an Italian State whose area would have proportionally reduced the French prepotency. It is, indeed, not a matter of burning the old papacy on the furnace bridge of philosophy; it is necessary that the temporal not have to suffer from this decapitation of the spiritual.

The government of Napoléon III has had none of these scruples. Would this be an indication of change of policy on its part, the sign of a return to principles? ... After having showered the clergy with his favors, restored the religious communities, recalled the Jesuits, returned control to the Church over its teaching, and given, on all occasions, evidence of his piety; after having disputed the protectorate of the Holy See in Austria for ten years, as had Louis-Philippe, how is it that suddenly, under pretext that the events that he himself has caused are beyond his control, that their logic is inexorable, he tells the Sovereign pontiff that his royalty is no longer for this century, that consequently he has to resign himself to leaving the government of his States in lay hands and condescend to accept from Catholic nations, in compensation for their temporal treasure, a revenue! ...

For my part, I applaud the crucifixion of the Church, but on one condition, that the new chief of France should tell us what spirit he intends to substitute for the Catholic spirit: does he propose, after the example of the kings of England and the tsars of Russia, to seize the princedom and the pontificate, or to return purely and simply to the Revolution?

Alas! I am quite afraid that Napoleon III does not even suspect that one can address such questions to him. As the expression of his time, carried to the crest of power by an imbroglio, he constantly testifies, like all of his supporters, to his horror of ideas; he believes only in matter and force. He does not want a Revolution: he proved that by his public safety laws in 1851 and 1852; since then, he has never stopped proclaiming this in all of his acts, both official and unofficial or pseudonymous; he has just repeated this in his letter to the pope of December 31, 1859. He no longer wants the bourgeois moderates: he broke with them irreconcilably with his coup d'etat, and he will take care not to be exposed to their criticism. Through the fault of his situation much more than of his will, Napoleon III does not and cannot want any principle, any guarantee, any freedom. If he sacrifices the pope, it is, as he himself says, because events have forced him to this pass; because he does not have in him what he would require in order to control events, i.e., principles, ideas, a faith, a law. But at the same time that he pronounces the forfeiture of the Holy Father, that he intercepts the bishops’ mandates, that he threatens the Jesuits and bombards the catholic newspapers with warnings, he removes speech from the democracy, and condemns in his courts the philosophers, accused of insult to public and religious morals.

Therefore, neither Christian nor revolutionist, nor anything in between, in a word, nothing: this is the France, not made, but revealed at this point in time by the government of December 2.

The vulgar had not seen this character of the imperial policy initially, not to have not principles and to walk blindly. According to the habit of the French spirit all to pay to the master, one said of Napoleon III: See how happy he is! Everything succeeds to him. The ones rented its spirit of conciliation: it said itself which it was the end of the old parties. The Church greeted in him a new Constantine, while the plebs recommended it, as it had made her uncle, the herald of the Revolution. Maintaining all is discovered: the imperial government is a government without principles, and the emperor cannot about it but; as for its alleged successes, still a little time, and, the things remaining what they are, one will see only calamities there.

No, I tell you, no principles, no true successes: to support the opposite would be to grant to a man a power that the philosophers refuse even to God, that of making something of nothing.

Of what use was the expedition to the Crimea? We prided ourselves on relieving the Ottoman Empire: the peace having been made, we abandoned it like a corpse.—We wanted to halt Russian encroachment: Russia has just conquered the Caucasus, no less important, as the future will show, than Constantinople. Russia has Armenia; its colonists extend over the southernmost coast from the Black Sea to the front door of the sultans’ palace. And France does not have even a foothold in Asia Minor.—Is it the English alliance, or the European equilibrium, that profited from the capture of Sebastopol? The Malakoff’s dead were not buried before Napoleon III, disgusted with the English, signed a peace with the tsar, and contemplated an alliance posing a different threat to the freedoms of the world than the protectorate of Russia on the East. At this moment, admittedly, there is a cooling of the Russian alliance, and a reheating of the English alliance. Protestant England applauds the failure of Catholicism; it reasons, from its point of view, exactly like the French centrists. To strike at the papacy, the Revolution not being there, it is to break the catholic faisceau, it is to lessen France. It proclaims the author of the booklet the La Pape et le Congrès as great a theologian and statesman as Jacques I and Henri VIII, and perhaps will condescend she to sign with him a commercial treaty. How long that will that last? As long as any alliance formed without principles: and England does not trust it.

The empire,—the body of a society that has abandoned the idea,—the empire is agitated, burns powder, makes a din; its glory is not kindled. It could not, or did not know how to preserve the Ottoman empire from its dissolution; it did not put up a barrier to the incursions of Russia; it did not dare to advance to the Adriatic and it left the Austrians in the Peninsula; it does not have even courage to keep its promises to Villafranca; now it lets fall the pope which it wanted to make the federal president of Italy, and which for ten years it had supported. Let us suppose that after the annexation of the duchies and Romagnes in Piedmont comes, with the aid of British diplomacy and the party of unity, that of Venice and Naples; would Napoleon III prevent it? He could not, committed as he is by his own words, bound by his raging hunger for alliance with the English. He would only dare to claim that the will of the people is sacred, as long as nothing is at stake but the sovereignty of the Holy Father, but the annexation of the insurgent territory in the Sardinian States is another thing. The only fruit of the Italian campaign would thus have been used as instrument of the policy of Monsieurs Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Orsini; to have aroused a powerful neighbor, who cannot love us, who has never loved us, and to have consumed the investment of France.—Can we, say the policies of December 2, prevent Italy from realizing its unity? How would we have the right? Doesn't the Revolution itself make a principle of respecting nationalities?—Thus Make it then, I will answer them, make the Revolution; attach yourself to it, to its Right, its maxims; and, superior to the world by the power of your principles, and you will not have anything to fear from the expansion of your neighbors… I do not want Prussia at midday, said General Cavaignac. He was right a thousand times, since he was an eclectic. On December 2 he renounced this policy: for the little that the Italians wanted to be there to lend, we would have at our doors an empire of twenty-six million men. Is this the county of Nice or Savoy which would compensate us?

A government without principles is a science without method, a philosophy without a criterion, a religion without a God. We have just seen which sad fruits the policy of December 2 produced outside of France; the results not happier at home. Its balance sheet can be summarized in eight articles:

The tax has been raised from 1,500 to 1,800 million;

The national debt increased by three billion;

Conscription raised from 80 to 100, 120 and 140 thousands of men;

Failure of the middle class and proportional increase in the proletariat;

Reduction of the population;

Depravity of national manners;

Decline of literature and the arts;

Failure of all enterprises of the government.

To speak only about this last article, the litany of the disappointments of the imperial government would be long.

In 1852, the government reduced the government stock from 5 p.c. to 4½. And everyone applauded. We know what purely artificial rise reigned, during that first year, over all values. But the continuation by no means responded to these hopes; the Bank did not decrease its discount; more than once even it raised it up to 6 and 7 p.c., and in last analysis the 4 1/2 remained fixed at 90, which means that, in spite of the reduction, 5 p.c. is always the normal rate of the interest. Any tax, any reduction of assessed income on the property, to be just, must be general. The conversion having remained an isolated measurement, it is as if the government had declared bankruptcy to the shareholders of ½ p.c. Was this a success? The imperial government claimed to create a land-bank: it did not succeed;—to make a credit mobilier: its credit mobilier is a work of agiotage;—to establish docks: the Society of the Docks was finished by the police;—to put the rents at a cheap rate, and half of the Parisian population is driven out of the capital. It had prided itself on relieving the merchant marine; and in spite of the granted or promised subsidies, nothing is done. It had accepted the protectorate of the excavation of the isthmus of Suez; it gives up it today; is this because the business appears bad to it, or in consequence of its change of policy? What to say of the Palace of Industry, the hackney carriages, and so many other things in which the imperial government had a hand? By its commercial treaty with England, it just took the first step in a career of the free trade, i.e., of the permission of all foreign businessmen, disinterested in the question, to ensure, in the French market, and in French waters, the preponderance of England. Free trade, thanks to its name, is one of fantasies of contemporary democracy, which has never shone, as we know, by the light of economic science. There is no need, however, to be a great economist to see only the free trade, which is nothing only than the each by himself, each for himself [chacun chez soi , chacun pour soi], held in such contempt by this same democracy, is not a principle, and that without principles, i.e. without Justice, without guarantees, without reciprocity, political economy, just like politics, is fertile only in disaster. I would only like the small lesson of political economy which appealed to His Majesty to be given to France via its minister of State, to prophesy that it will be with the customs reform issued by Napoleon III as it was with that of Robert Peel: perhaps the price of imported food products will drop, but the people will be more exhausted than before. It is thus so difficult to understand, for example, that if the French wines obtain a considerable outlet in England, the price will raise, and that the French people will drink less of it than before; that it will be the same for meat, butter, vegetables, and fruit; that if, in addition, irons and wrought cottons from England arrive to us at cheaper prices, the wages of the French workers will drop by as much; as a result, that the improvements of price, on the two sides of the strait, will benefit with the shareholders, the owners, with some intermediaries, brokers, merchants; that there will be displacement of businesses and fortunes, but that all in all, industrial competition and capitalist absorption being exerted on a greater scale, the fate of the masses will worsen? … Free exchange has as a condition the exemption from payment of the discount: is one able to carry out, in these terms, the balance of trade?—The imperial government will have the honor of completing the railroads, and even of having built far too many: but it will be able to be also to boast of having delivered the country to the financial aristocracy; to have restored in favor of its creatures the contemptible regime of the pot-de-vin, and to have caused the nation to contract the habit, unknown before, of gambling. Completion of the railroads by the imperial government and its intervention in all businesses, will mark for France the ruin of the middle class, which is to say the disorganization of French society.

The government of the emperor conceived the thought, worthy of praise, to be the restorer of manners, as it had had the ambition to be the founder of the credit. There is to this end an office of propaganda to the ministry for the interior. However, see as this government moralist plays of misfortune! A Mr. Giblain, stockbroker, is accused of embezzlement in the exercise of his charge and of diversion of funds. The facts are noted by experts; the offence is obvious; 1,800 diversions and as many forgeries. The judgment appears inevitable. But no. The jury returns a verdict of not guilty: do you know why? It was determined from the debates, by the jury as well as the Court, that the facts complained of to Mr. Giblain were common with all the corporations of stockbrokers, and declared honourable by the magistrates. This is at the moment when the Court of Cassation, by its confirmative decree against the unofficial brokers, granted to the stockbrokers the privilege of the futures market, that the prosecution pursued a stockbroker accused 1° of having traded in futures, like all his fellows; 2° to have done so on his own account, like all his fellows; 3° to this end to have kept an account of the aforesaid deals, like all his fellows; 4° finally, to have profited, sometimes lost—all is not profit in this trade—on the deals which he made, like all his fellows! … Obviously, the court of appeal and the prosecution did not go in agreement. The judgment was impossible. Do you believe that if the imperial prosecutor had announced his resolution to push the investigation until the end, and to bring before the bench, if it were needed, the swindlers from all the corporations of stockbrokers; if at the same time the court of appeal had withered the aforesaid corporation, by declaring it inadmissible in its request against the unofficial brokers, do you believe, I ask, that the jury would have dared to answer: Not guilt? But the corporation is one of the pillars of the State, for this reason considered holy and inviolable. Under Louis-Philippe, the Testes and Cubières, were the exception, and the jury condemned them. Today, they are the rule, and the jury discharges them. To a power without principles, virtue itself does not succeed. In the absence of the jury, the stones would shout: Hypocrisy!

Let us be fair, however. Undoubtedly, since December 2, a lowering of public morality has taken place in France; the nation lost its self-regard; it feels its own unworthiness, and, as is habitual, it blames the government for it. That is the principle that will bring down the empire, if its unworthiness can likewise be translated into indignation. But the government is in this, like everywhere, merely the expression of the conscience of the country; and if one can only say of it that, for the fidelity with which it expresses the perdition of their hearts, it deserves the recognition of its citizens, then one cannot say that it has deserved their hatred. The humiliation of France begins to reach farther than the coup d'état; Napoleon III, if it were possible to summon him before a jury, would have only a rather small share in that. Does one think by chance that, if the dynasty of Bonaparte had suddenly disappeared, the situation of the country would have changed? That would be a serious error. France can remake itself only through the Revolution; it is not there. After rejoicings such as those which followed the death of Commodius, there would be the biddings of Didius Julianus. This is why we declare, hand on our heart: between us and Napoleon III there is neither envy nor hatred; he neither misled us nor supplanted us; we have upheld him in nothing, we do not aspire to become his successors. He is the official representative, not the personification, of an era of misfortune: that is all. Apart from the acts of Strasbourg, Boulogne and December 2, his complicity does not extend. We will allow ourselves however to recall to him, without any threat, the word of the Gospel: Voe autem homini illi per quem scandalum venit. Which means, in military language: Sentinel, guard yourself!

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind
   
4. The origin of ideas
   
5. That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction
   
6. That philosophy must be essentially practical
   
7. The character that must be presented by the guarantee of our judgments and the rule of our actions.--Conversion from speculative to practical reason: determination of the criterion.
   
8. Justice, universal reason of things: science and conscience.
   
9. Supremacy of Justice.
10. Conditions for a philosophical propaganda.
    
11. Law of Progress. Social destination.
    
12. A word about the situation.
    
13. Conclusion. (next)
    

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section XI.

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§ XI. — Law of progress: Social destination.

An objection is posed.—If the center or pivot of philosophy, namely Justice, is, like that of being, invariable and fixed, the system of things, which, in fact and in right, rests on that center, must also be defined in itself, and consequently fixed in its ensemble and tending to immutability. Leibnitz regarded this world as the best possible; he should have said, in virtue of the law of equilibrium that presides over it, that it is the only possible one. One can thus conceive of creation, at least in its thought, as being completed, the universal order being realized in a final manner: then, as the world would no longer have a reason to exist, since it would have reached its perfection, all would return to the universal repose. This is the secret thought of the religions: The end of things, they say, is for the Creator, just as for the creature, the consummation of glory. But strip away the mythology: underneath this unutterable glory, one finds immobility, death, nothingness. The world, drawn from nothing, i.e. inorganic immobility, amorphous, dark, returns, under the terms of its law of balance, to immobility; and our justification is nothing other than the work of our annihilation. Justice, balance, order, perfection, is petrification. Movement, life, thought, are bad things; the ideal, the absolute, the Just, which we must continually work to realize, is plenitude, immobility, non-being. It follows that, for the intelligent, moral and free being, happiness is to be found in death, in the quiet of the tomb. Such is the Buddhist dogma, expressed by this apothegm: It is better to sit than stand, to sleep than to sit, and to be dead than to sleep. Such is also the conclusion to which one of the late philosophers of Germany arrived; and it is difficult to deny that any philosophy of the absolute, just as any religion, leads to the same result. But common sense is repelled by this theory: it judges that life, action, thought are good; morality itself is repelled by it, since it gives us constantly to work, to learn, and to undertake, in a word, to do the very things that, according to our final destiny, we should regard as bad. How to escape from this contradiction?

We believe that, as the space in which the worlds whirl about is infinite; time infinite; matter, hurled into infinite space, also infinite; consequently, the power of nature and the capacity for movement infinite: in the same way, without the principle and the law of the universe changing, creation is virtually infinite, in its extent, its duration and its forms. Under this inevitable condition of the infinity, which falls on creation, the assumption of a completion, of a final consummation, is contradictory. The universe does not tend to an opposition to progress; its movement is perpetual, because the universe itself is infinite. The law of balance which presides over it does not lead it to uniformity, to an immobilism; it assures, on the contrary, eternal renewal by the economy of forces, which are infinite.

But if such is the true constitution of the universe, it mustg be admitted that such is also that of Humanity. We are not heading for any ideal perfection, for a final state that we might reach in a moment by crossing, through death, the gap that separates us from it. We are carried, along with the rest of the universe, in a ceaseless metamorphosis, which is all the more surely and gloriously achieved as we develop more in intelligence and morality. Progress thus remains the law of our heart, not in the sense only that, by the perfection of ourselves, we must approach unceasingly absolute Justice and the ideal; but in the sense that Humanity renewing themselves and developing without end, like creation itself, the ideal of Justice and beauty which we have to carry out always changes and always increases.

Thus, the contemplation of the infinite, which led us to quietism, is precisely what cures us of it: we are participants in universal, eternal life; and the more we can reflect the image of it in our own life, through action and Justice, the happier we are. The small number of days which is allotted to us has nothing to do with this: our perpetuity is in the perpetuity of our race, which in turn is linked to the perpetuity of the Universe. Even if the very globe upon which we live, which we presently know with some scientific certainty to have had a beginning, should crumble beneath our feet and disperse in space, we should see in this dissolution merely a local metamorphosis, which, changing nothing with respect to the universal organization [l’organisme universel], could not cause us despair, and consequently would not affect our happiness in any way. If the joy of the father of of a family on his deathbed is in the survival of his children, why shouldn't it be the same for our terrestrial humanity, the day when it will feel life become exhausted in its soil and consequently in its veins? After us, other worlds! … Would this idea be beyond the reach of the simple, or too low for the philosophers?

Thus determined in its nature, its conditions, its principle and its object, philosophy gives us, in its own manner, the word of our destiny.

What is philosophy?

Philosophy is the search, and, as far as the strength of the human mind permits, the discovery of the reason of things. Philosophy is thus defined as opposed to theology, which would be defined, we dare say, as the knowledge of the first cause, the inmost nature, and the final end of things.

Who created the universe?

Theology answers boldly, without understanding the meaning of its proposition: It is God. Philosophy, on the contrary, says: The universe, such as it appears to the eyes and the reason, being infinite, exists for all eternity. In it, life and spirit are permanent and indefectible; justice is the law that governs all its metamorphoses. Why should the world have a beginning? Why an end? Reason sees no need of it, and repudiates it.

What is God?

God, says theology, is the author, the creator, the preserver, the destroyer, and the sovereign lord of all things.

God, says metaphysics, auxiliary and interpreter of theology, is the infinite, absolute, necessary and universal being, which serves the universe as its substratum and hides behind its phenomena. This being is essentially one, consequently possibly personal, intelligent and free; moreover, because of its infinity, it is perfect and holy.

God, philosophy says finally, is, from the ontological point of view, a conception of the human mind, the reality of which it is impossible to deny or affirm authentically;—from the point of view of humanity, a fantastic representation of the human soul raised to the infinite.

Why was man created and put on the earth?

To know God, says theology, to love him, serve him, and by this means, to acquire eternal life.

Philosophy, pruning the mystical data from theology, answers simply: To carry out Justice, to exterminate evil, to contribute by the good administration of his sphere to the harmonious evolution of the worlds, and by this means, to obtain the greatest sum of glory and happiness, in his body and his soul.

We will continue this questionnaire. The catechism, with its mythology and its mysteries, served, for eighteen centuries, as a basis for the instruction of the people. Today, children no longer want it. Would philosophy, concrete and positive, arriving at its moment, prove less popular than the catechism has ever been?

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind
   
4. The origin of ideas
   
5. That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction
   
6. That philosophy must be essentially practical
   
7. The character that must be presented by the guarantee of our judgments and the rule of our actions.--Conversion from speculative to practical reason: determination of the criterion.
   
8. Justice, universal reason of things: science and conscience.
   
9. Supremacy of Justice.
10. Conditions for a philosophical propaganda.
    
11. Law of Progress. Social destination.
    
12. A word about the situation. (next)
13. Conclusion.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.