History
The first issue of Cahiers du cercle Proudhon appeared in January - February 1912 and included a Déclaration:
The founders - republicans, federalists, integral nationalists, and syndicalists - having resolved the political problem or dismissed it from their minds, are all enthusiastically in favour of an organisation of French society in accordance with principles taken from the French tradition which they find in Proudhon's works and in the contemporary syndicalist movement, and they are all completely in agreement on the following points: Democracy is the greatest error of the past century. If one wishes to live, if one wishes to work, if one wishes in social life to possess the greatest human guarantees for production and culture, if one wishes to preserve and increase the moral, intellectual and material capital of civilisation, it is absolutely necessary to destroy all democratic institutions.Berth and Valois had been brought together by Georges Sorel when he was planning a Nationalist and socialist-leaning journal La Cité française in 1910. This journal never appeared, except as heralded in a flyer entitled Déclaration de la Cité francaise signed by Sorel, Valois, Berth, Jean Variot, and Pierre Gilbert. However Variot quarrelled with Valois and went on to publish material with Sorel's support in L'Indépendence.
Controversy surrounds differing historical interpretations particularly following the publication of Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France and The Birth of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell.
Many anarchists rejected the Cercle Proudhon interpretation of Proudhon's works. For example, american mutualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker argued that Cercle Proudhon purposely misrepresented Proudhon's views,
Democracy is an easy mark for this new party, and it finds its chief delight in pounding the philosopher of democracy, Rousseau. Now, nobody ever pounded Rousseau as effectively as Proudhon did, and in that fact the Cercle Proudhon finds its excuse. But it is not to be inferred that, because Proudhon destroyed Rousseau's theory of the social contract, he did not believe in the advisability of a social contract, or would uphold a monarchy in exacting an oath of allegiance (Proudhon and Royalism, 1913).Read more about this topic: Cercle Proudhon
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)