LeftLiberty 1 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

LeftLiberty: The Unfinished Business of Liberty
"The antimony does not resolve itself." It is not resolved. This is the key
to Proudhon's later work. In 1840, when he published What is Property? he
believed in the possibility of a rather vague, more or less Hegelian,
"synthesis of communism and property." By 1846, and his System of
Economic Contradictions, he had developed a general theory within which
social manifestations, ideas and institutions, were assumed to have both
positive and negative aspects, which resolved somehow through dialectical
conflict into a higher synthesis. This was the work of which Marx was so
critical, and it is in many ways not really convincing, despite a lot of
interesting insights, largely because Proudhon had yet to untangle his
analysis of progress, specifically the progress of the Revolution in the realm
of Humanity, a collective being, from his dialectical analysis. By the time he
wrote The Philosophy of Progress, he seems to have advanced a number of
steps in that clarifying process. Arguably, it is Fourier, with his serial
analysis, who looms largest in the background of that work. The work is full
of long series of approximations, none of which are "true," and all of which
respond to a developmental "law" which is certainly not portrayed as simply
a matter of better and better balances.
There is a developmental analysis, tracing the character of Proudhon's
dialectic and serial analysis through a number of works, including the
overtly Fourierist Creation of Order in Mankind, which it would be
premature—for me, at least—to attempt at the moment, but we can certainly
mark some key questions here, and we can read The Philosophy of Progress
with the later developments in mind.
The Foreward
In the opening pages of the essay, Proudhon paints a picture of France
as a nation fundamentally at odds with itself, which "profits at this moment
only by the very ideas that it has proscribed." "Every era," he says, "is ruled
by an idea," however much it may struggle against it, apparently. The state
of France, its impasse, he seems to suggest, expresses, if in a somewhat
backhanded manner, the idea which ought to free it,—Democracy, or
perhaps Progress. This is not the first place where Proudhon gestures
towards a "general idea" and then provides us with some options. What is
Property? suffers, if that is the right word, from similar ambiguities. But
this is one of the places where a serial analysis may serve us, though on a
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