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Title: Dialectics and Its Object
Author: Pierre Ansart
Language: en
Topics: Sociology, Dialectics, Proudhon
Source: Translated by Shaun Murdock. Originally Published in: Ansart, Pierre. 1984. Proudhon. Le Livre de Poche.

Pierre Ansart

Dialectics and Its Object

Chapter 2. Dialectics and its object

Proudhon, politically opposed to conservatives, liberals, republicans,

and communists, also

wanted to analyse his opponents’ theoretical positions (theology,

statism, utopia) and put forward a

way of thinking that explains and proves his conclusions. Hence, for

him, the critical importance of

an intellectual method to avoid the pitfalls of dogmatism. His

conclusions are understood only by

reference to his framework of thought: dialectics.

Dialectics

In this long investigation, whose steps can be followed from 1840 to

1848, he was aided by

an impressive appetite for reading.

At the same time, he read the Bible, Fourier, Saint-Simon and the

Saint-Simonians, Sismondi,

Adam Smith, Ricardo, the French economists, and also translations or

fragments of Kant, Leibniz,

Fichte, Feuerbach, Strauss, Hegel, and many others. But he never

devoured these diverse texts to

obey one school, but always to define his own method, one that, in his

view, could not be

established by theologians, bourgeois intellectuals, or socialist

utopians. Karl Grün, who dreamed of

converting him to the school of Feuerbach, linked this independent

spirit to his friend’s Franc-

Comtois origins:

“The French say that Germans are straightforward people. Plain,

stubborn, rigid: this is also

true of the Franc-Comtois Proudhon. I will please the German

nationalists by speaking to them of

this native of the highlands... and I will draw their attention to the

pattern that Fourier, Considérant,

Muiron, Proudhon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all derive their origin from

the foothills of the Jura. They

are all stubborn, straightforward people.”

164/K. GRUN, Die soziale Bewegung... [The Social Movement...], C.W.

Leske, p. 40.

When he wrote his “First Memoir” on property in 1839–1840, Proudhon

already had a

precise intellectual method.

His theory of social conflict was also imposed on him during his

experience as a printing

worker, and then as an independent printer, where he would face all the

difficulties of the worker

and the artisan vis-à-vis the owners of capital. It was in this

experience of work, bankruptcy, and

paying interest and debt, that Proudhon theorised the relationship

between capital and labour. In

this experience, the Saint-Simonians’ assertions on the exploitation of

man by man in work and the

analyses of Eugène Buret on the Misère des classes laborieuses...

[Poverty of the Working Classes...]

pointed the way for Proudhon to pursue the analysis of socio-economic

conflict.

Reading Kant was an important moment in this development. Besides the

theory of morality,

to which he would often return, the critical and rationalist conception

of problems confirmed his

intuitions. He would also continue to update the Kantian lesson, not

asking the classic question:

What is God? What is Property or the State? but instead asking: Where

does the idea of God come

from? How is property created? Why do we believe in the myth of the

State?

“For him, Kant is essentially a ‘moralist’, the greatest of the

moralists, which is why he

crowns him with so many garlands. From the First Memoir, Kant appears in

Proudhon’s works as the

one who wanted to solve the ‘problem of certainty’, and thus the

ultimate philosophical problem.

However, in 1840, he found ‘the metaphysics of Reid and Kant to be still

farther removed from the

truth than that of Aristotle’. But that did not stop him three years

later, in Creation, from presenting

himself as the successor of Kant, who came close to the ‘series’ without

reaching it: ‘the illustrious

author of the Analytic’ stopped too soon on his road, though he had had

the intuition of unity in

diversity and thus anticipated the ‘serial law’ through which the

‘anxieties of scepticism’ could finally

be overcome. It was Kant who revealed the ‘law of antinomy’ and the ‘law

of balance’: he counts

‘among the profoundest philosophers of modern times’. [...]

It was also Kant who, rather than asking himself the classic question

What is God? had the

brilliant idea of asking himself: Why does it happen that I believe in

God? He thus ushered in a

revolution comparable to that of Descartes, and deserved ‘the greatest

glory’ possible. He is truly

‘the one whom no philosopher has ever equalled, the immortal Kant’.

However, Kant could not free himself of the Absolute. After having

eliminated it in his

Critique of Pure Reason, he returned to it in his Practical Reason.

Nevertheless, what he sought,

wanted, called for in the best of his thought, is a ‘purely human’, not

transcendental, absolute – in

short, the absolute that Proudhon calls Justice, and which is seated in

the human conscience. Finally,

like all the great philosophers, Kant was ‘essentially a moralist’, and

while the immortal author of

Critique of Pure Reason did not understand the high morality, necessity,

divinity of war, which he

considered detestable, it did not escape him that ‘in the final

analysis, the only certainty about

human intelligence is that it derives from the conscience’.”

165/P. HAUBTMANN, Proudhon, Marx et la pensée allemande [Proudhon, Marx

and German

Thought], Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, pp. 23–24.

Reading Kant also forced him to answer the problem of mental categories,

the question of

whether dialectics is the essence of the human mind, of reason, or

whether it is an objective

dimension of reality. Proudhon rejects such a dichotomy between

rationalism and empiricism, and

likewise between spiritualism and materialism. It seems essential him to

recognise both the

objectivity of what he called “real series”, i.e. objective, ordered

divisions and distinctions, and, on

the other hand, “ideal series”, i.e. the systems of relations which the

mind learns from the real, but

which are not just reflections of reality. By ideal series, the mind

invents and reconstructs reality,

and can combine relations that do not exist in reality.

“The series is natural when it is proper and specific to the object,

when it arises from its

nature and properties.

The series is artificial when it is transferred from the object which is

proper to it another

which is foreign to it. Most products of art and industry are artificial

series. [...]

In nature, each series develops according to its proper object, without

being combined or

mixed up; then comes man who, having sovereignty over the earth [...],

begins, by transposing the

natural series, a second creation within creation itself.”

166/Création de l’ordre... [Creation of Order...], pp. 176–177.

Proudhon explains that this acquisition of “ideal series”, categories of

understanding and

logical structures, comes from action and in particular from labour. It

is through action that man

experiences the relations between things, corrects his ideas and invents

new relations. Philosophy

itself has been devised based on labour:

Philosophy is only a way of generalising and abstracting the results of

our experience, that is,

our work.”

167/Ibid., p. 119.

Thus, using Kantian philosophy in a very free and personal way, Proudhon

read Feuerbach

and Hegel with the same critical distance.

From Feuerbach, he takes the idea of alienation, essential to his

analysis, but by transposing

it to other objects, in particular to the critique of the State. While

for Feuerbach the alienation to be

analysed is that whereby man ascribes to God what properly belongs to

him, for Proudhon it is

specifically in the formation of Capital that this dispossession and

alienation is reproduced. But he

distrusted what he called “Feuerbach’s metaphysics”, the humanism

according to which humanity is

the site of the sacred: he suspects this philosophy of recreating a new

“mysticism”:

Certainly, if there is a prejudice, a mysticism, which now seems to me

deceptive in a high

degree, it is no longer Catholicism, which is disappearing, but rather

this humanitarian philosophy,

making man a holy and sacred being on the strength of a speculation too

learned not to have

something of the arbitrary in its composition; proclaiming him God; that

is, essentially good and

orderly in all his powers, in spite of the disheartening evidence which

he continually gives of his

doubtful morality.”

168/Système des contradictions économiques... [System of Economic

Contradictions...], t. I, p. 395.

Human beings necessarily carry contradiction within themselves.

“When man, reconciled with himself, shall cease to look upon his

neighbour and nature as

hostile powers, then will he love and produce simply by the spontaneity

of his energy; then it will be

his passion to give, as it is today to acquire; and then will he seek in

labour and devotion his only

happiness, his supreme delight. Then, love becoming really and

indivisibly the law of man, justice will

thereafter be but an empty name, a painful souvenir of a period of

violence and tears.

Certainly I do not overlook the fact of antagonism, or, as it will

please you to call it, of

religious alienation, any more than the necessity of reconciling man

with himself; my whole

philosophy is but a perpetuity of reconciliations. You admit that the

divergence of our nature is the

preliminary of society, or, let us rather say, the material of

civilisation. This is precisely the fact, but,

remember well, the indestructible fact of which I seek the meaning.

Certainly we should be very

near an understanding, if, instead of considering the dissidence and

harmony of the human faculties

as two distinct periods, clean-cut and consecutive in history, you would

consent to view them with

me simply as the two faces of our nature, ever adverse, ever in course

of reconciliation, but never

entirely reconciled. In a word, as individualism is the primordial fact

of humanity, so association is its

complementary term; but both are in incessant manifestation, and on

earth justice is eternally the

condition of love.

Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a special and

transitory state of

human reason and morality: it is the spontaneous confession, in symbolic

phrase, of this fact as

astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to

evil, of our race. Curse upon me a

sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the

human race. [...] Religion, in

giving this idea concrete and dramatic form, has indeed gone behind

history and beyond the limits of

the world for that which is essential and immanent in our soul; this, on

its part, was but an

intellectual mirage; it was not mistaken as to the essentiality and

permanence of the fact.”

169/Ibid., p. 368.

Critical reflection on Hegel’s work was no less important. Although

Proudhon could only

read translations, as early as 1840 he noted his critical interest in

Hegelian thought, in the definition

of dialectics, and in the thesis of the identity of the categories of

the real and the categories of the

understanding, which he would revisit in his own version. However, from

his first readings, he

distrusts an intellectual construction that seems highly abstract and

obeys only its own law.

“In particular, he criticises Hegel for being ‘like Fourier’ (sic);

i.e., starting from ‘some true

principles’ (he does not say which), and wanting to ‘construct the

history of the mind by reasoning,

instead of following the line of observation’: ‘the science of

observation is the opposite of the

Hegelian mind’. But while ‘this method may be good for teaching, for

making a science it is

worthless’. And it leads Hegel to ‘explain and legitimise by true axioms

what is false and inexplicable,

such as property!’

Hegel’s system certainly implies a keen imagination, but ‘how can one

accept a supposed

philosophy in which the thing we are talking about continually changes

in nature, by turns

substance, matter or mind, or modification, or faculty, or relation, or

abstraction of our mind?’.

Likewise, when Hegel speaks of ‘the general spirit of humanity’, is this

not an ‘abstraction’? This is

the danger of general expressions, and overly ‘metaphysical’ languages.

Moreover, Hegel saw that

‘the categories of understanding must also be those of the world’, which

is even ‘the substance of

his philosophy’, and this is to be congratulated; but ‘he has not made

any use of this discovery’.

These were his first impressions of Hegel in 1840. As we can see, they

are severe. Clearly,

Hegel thus comes into his esteem far below Kant, Leibniz, and Fichte, to

mention only them.”

170/P. HAUBTMANN, Proudhon, Marx et la pensée allemande, Presses

Universitaires de Grenoble,

pp. 26–27.

Hegel is thus not conducting science, but philosophy. The distance

between his dialectic and

that of the Franc-Comtois thinker is indeed significant. Not only does

Proudhon reduce this

trinitarian scheme to being only one possible case of dialectical

relations, never proposing to reduce

human reality to this dialectic, but more importantly, he develops the

most lively criticism against

the notion of “synthesis”. Indeed, he denies – and this refusal is of

great significance to his whole

political conception – that all dialectic culminates in a synthesis. He

denies that terms in

contradiction are necessarily sublated and resolved in a new system. On

the contrary, he suspects

this synthesis of being a destructive representation of movement, and

possibly, in human reality, of

being the moment of power, the moment of oppression in which a State

intends to synthesise the

opposites as it destroys them.

“The antinomy does not resolve itself; there is the fundamental vice of

the whole Hegelian

philosophy. The two terms of which they are composed balance, either

among themselves, or with

other antinomic terms.”

171/De la justice..., t. II, p. 155.

Georges Gurvitch (professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, who devoted

particularly relevant

studies to Proudhon) highlights Proudhon’s anti-Hegelianism:

“Let us first note that the general orientation of Proudhon’s thought is

exactly the opposite

of Hegel’s. The latter turns human society and history into a theodicy.

Proudhon exaggerates his

militant atheism. He proclaims: God is evil! and contrasts him with

Prometheus, who makes his own

history through properly human labour. Hegel ‘eternalises’ private

property, which his dialectic

sublates into living eternity. Proudhon considers private property to be

the source of all abuses. It

must disappear by being assigned to a federal subject, which transforms

the very nature of property.

In a short and striking phrase which became famous, Proudhon exclaims:

‘Property is theft!’. Hegel

deifies the State and sees in it, as in the concept, the mystical

vehicle of the absolute mind.

Proudhon considers the State and private property – dominium and

imperium – to be linked. He is

anti-statist and affirms, after a period of hesitation, first that the

social revolution will cause the

State to disappear, and then that the State can be transformed if it is

‘counterbalanced’ and limited

by an autonomous economic society based on ‘industrial democracy’. And

he proclaims, in another

famous phrase: ‘Government is anarchy’, which for him means that the

sovereignty of State power

will preferably be replaced with the ‘sovereignty of social law’ created

by society.

Hegel remains dominated by the tradition of Roman law, while Proudhon,

observing ‘the

perpetual plagiarism between individualism and statism’ (ultimately

between dominium and

imperium), contrasts with Roman law a ‘new law’ asserting totalities

immanent in the multiplicity of

participants and thus advocating the statutory law of autonomous groups

and the spontaneous law

of economic society – the basis of industrial planning based on worker

self-management.

So one will not be surprised by Proudhon’s extreme hostility to the

Hegelian dialectical

method, which he criticises as much in its substance as in its

applications. [...] ‘The antinomic terms

do not resolve any more than the opposite poles of an electric battery

destroy each other. The

problem consists of finding not their fusion, which would be their

death, but their continuously

unstable equilibrium, variable according to the very development of

society’. (Théorie de la propriété

[Theory of Property] p. 52). The unstable equilibrium between the two

terms ‘is not born of a third

term, but of their reciprocal action’. The Hegelian formula is only a

triad by the good pleasure or the

error of the master, who counts three terms where there truly exists

only two, and who has not seen

that the antinomy does not resolve itself, but that it indicates an

oscillation or antagonism

susceptible only to equilibrium. By this point of view alone, the system

of Hegel would be entirely

remade’. (De la justice, Vol. I, pp. 28–29).

Hegel’s synthesis ‘suppressing’ the thesis and antithesis (aufheben:

this an error by the

translators used by Proudhon, who also says ‘absorbing’) is

governmental. It is, he adds with great

finesse, ‘anterior and superior to the terms it unites’, and it is this,

Proudhon notes, that leads Hegel

‘to the prepotency of the state’ and ‘to the restoration of authority’

(La Pornocratie [Pornocracy],

Œuvres posthumes [Posthumous Works]).”

172/G. GURVITCH, Dialectique et sociologie [Dialectics and Sociology],

Flammarion, 1962, pp. 129–

131.

The Proudhonian dialectic is thus highly original and undogmatic. It is

an intellectual method

based on proposition and counter-proposition, as Plato taught, and it

prepares to perceive the

antinomies of social reality (thus: monopoly and competition, in

economics; authority and freedom,

in social relations), to think less about terms than the relations

between the terms, their conflicts

and their transformation. It is not reducible to a simple and always

identical model, but instead must

invent diverse models of relations: antagonistic, conflicting, and

complementary, corresponding to

the diversity of real antinomies.

Social dialectics

Dialectics is not only a method of thinking but the very characteristic

of social realities. As

the socio-economic analysis set out in System of Economic Contradictions

explains at length, social

reality consists of numerous contradictions which social science must

account for. Some of these

contradictions are destined to be resolved in an equilibrium (thus

“constituted value”); others must

persist as they contribute to economic dynamism (thus the antinomy of

monopoly and competition).

“Against the Hegelian dialectic, Proudhon opposes another: his own. It

is not just an

antinomic, negative, antithetic dialectic, rejecting all synthesis. It

is a dialectical method aiming to

seek diversity in all its details. But diversity in all its details can

only be grasped by experience. In this

sense, Proudhon’s dialectical method approaches dialectical empiricism.

[...]

Already in his first book, The Celebration of Sunday, Proudhon proclaims

that his method is

the search for equilibrium in diversity. So we must note all the actual

diversities, and when they have

been fully described, we must study the possibility of integrating the

diversities found in groups and

totalities, which are also numerous, but where diversities of the same

kind could be balanced. This

leads, on the one hand, to non-hierarchical totalities precluding any

‘subordination of component

elements’, and, on the other, to a plurality of totalities among which

balances may also be

established.

This point of view is developed with greater precision in The Creation

of Order. Proudhon

speaks here of ‘the intuition of diversities of totalisations in their

division’. These diversities and

‘totalisations’ (the latter term is adopted by Sartre, who does not seem

to know its origin) are

irreducible. ‘There is an independence of the diverse orders of series

and the impossibility of a

universal science... The multiplicity of points of view is essential’,

as is the multiplicity of associations

in social reality, and the plurality of social groups in which they are

integrated. ‘To resolve today’s

diversity into an identity is to abandon the question’, as Schelling and

Hegel did, writes Proudhon.

[...]

The Proudhonian dialectic is further elaborated in the two volumes of

Economic

Contradictions (1846). Proudhon firstly makes an effort to make this

dialectic as realistic as possible.

The method of antinomies must be applied not only to doctrines and

ideas, but even more so to the

social realities which engender them and which are themselves in

dialectical motion, which is

especially shown in their economic manifestations.”

173/Ibid., pp. 131–134.

“[...] while in Nature the synthesis of opposites is contemporary with

their opposition, in

society the antithetic elements seem to appear at long intervals, and to

reach solution only after

long and tumultuous agitation. Thus there is no example – the idea even

is inconceivable – of a

valley without a hill, a left without a right, a north pole without a

south pole, a stick with but one

end, or two ends without a middle, etc. [...]

In society, on the contrary, as well as in the mind, so far from the

idea reaching its complete

realisation at a single bound, a sort of abyss separates, so to speak,

the two antinomical positions,

and even when these are recognised at last, we still do not see what the

synthesis will be. The

primitive concepts must be fertilised, so to speak, by burning

controversy and passionate struggle;

bloody battles will be the preliminaries of peace. At the present

moment, Europe, weary of war and

discussion, awaits a reconciling principle; and it is the vague

perception of this situation which

induces the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences to ask, ‘What are

the general facts which

govern the relations of profits to wages and determine their

oscillations?’; in other words, what are

the most salient episodes and the most remarkable phases of the war

between labour and capital?

If, then, I demonstrate that political economy, with all its

contradictory hypotheses and

equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organisation of privilege and

misery, I shall have proved

thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organisation

of labour and equality, since,

as has been said, every systematic contradiction is the announcement of

a composition; further, I

shall have fixed the bases of this composition. Then, indeed, to unfold

the system of economical

contradictions is to lay the foundations of universal association; to

show how the products of

collective labour come out of society is to explain how it will be

possible to make them return to it;

to exhibit the genesis of the problems of production and distribution is

to prepare the way for their

solution.”

Système des contradictions économiques..., t. I, pp. 134–136.

“The world, society, and man are composed of irreducible elements,

antithetical principles,

and antagonistic forces.”

174/Théorie de l’impôt [Theory of Taxation], p. 239.

This dialectical character of social reality, according to Proudhon,

responds to the problem

of the nature of social relations which are neither assimilable to a

physical reality (materialism) nor

reducible to logical systems (idealism). It would be one of Proudhon’s

obsessions to answer this

question, to establish a theory that highlights the specificity of the

social as opposed to other objects

of thought. He proposes to call this theory “ideo-realistic”. Social

relationships are, in some way, real

and ideal. The social relation is both a reality and a logic or, as

Proudhon says, an “idea”. By this, he

means not that social dialectics are intellectual exchanges, but that

social relations continuously

carry an internal logic that is integral to them. In this sense, they

are “dialectical” realities.

This specificity of the social has multiple consequences. It will be

understood, for example,

that representations, beliefs, and ideologies play important roles in

history through particular

mechanisms. It is in this sense that we must understand the pithy phrase

about ideas: “The idea,

with its categories, is born from action and must return to action,

under penalty of decline for the

agent” (De la justice, 6th Study, t. III, p. 69).

“A social revolution, such as that of ’89, which working-class democracy

is continuing under

our eyes, is a spontaneous transformation that takes place throughout

the body politic. It is the

substitution of one system for another, a new organism replacing one

that is outworn. But this

change does not take place in a matter of minutes [...].

A truly organic revolution [...] is not truly the work of anyone. It is

an idea that is at first very

rudimentary and that germinates like a seed; an idea that is at first in

no way remarkable since it is

based on popular wisdom, but one that, like the acorn buried in the

earth, like the embryo in the

egg, suddenly grows in a most unexpected fashion and fills the world

with its institutions.

History is full of these examples. Nothing simpler at first than the

Roman idea: a patriciate, a

clientèle, property. The entire system of the Republic, its politics,

its agitations, its history, arises

from this. The same simplicity in the imperial idea: the patriciate

definitively reduced to the level of

the plebs; all powers gathered in the hands of an emperor, exploiting

the world for the benefit of the

people, and placed under the control of the Praetorians. From there came

imperial hierarchy and

centralisation. Christianity starts in the same way: the unity and

universality of religion, based on the

unity of God and the Empire; the intimate union of religion and

morality; charity presented as an act

of faith and duty; the presumed author of this idea declared Son of God

and Redeemer: that is the

whole Christian idea. In ‘89, the Revolution arose again entirely in

human rights. By this right, the

nation is sovereign, royalty is a function, nobility is abolished,

religion is an ad libitum opinion. We

know how the religion of Christ and human rights have developed in turn.

Thus is the working-class idea in the 19th century: it would have no

legitimacy, no

authenticity, it would be nothing if it appeared under other

conditions.”

175/Capacité politique des classes ouvrières [Political Capacity of the

Working Classes], p. 111.

This dialectical theory of social relations involves a particular

conception of society. The

focus is first and foremost on diversity, on the plurality of terms,

subjects, and groups present. It is

the antinomies, balances, and tensions between the various elements that

ensure the movement,

the dynamisms, the innovations. This observation would be fundamental in

the anarchist and

federalist proposals.

Moreover, this “fluidic” conception of social terms, which renders them

all necessary for

social vitality, condemns any “authoritarian”, “absolutist”, or

“governmental” representation.

In Proudhon’s eyes, the dialectical conception of the social, by making

all the terms and their

dynamic relationships the real sources of collective life, condemns

oppressive structures, denounces

alienation, and establishes an egalitarian conception.

Finally, this dialectic does not lead in any way to a diminution of the

individual, to a negation

of individual action and innovation. Indeed, Proudhon stubbornly resists

any temptation to offer

society a new transcendence opposed to individual initiatives. Just as

the plurality of groups

contributes to the vitality of the social, so do individual freedoms

and, to an extent, tensions and

compromises between people participating in social dynamism, provided

they take place within a

mutualist society.

It is not very surprising that this dialectic, inspired to some extent

by German philosophy,

but in fact disagreeing with each of its sources, has been poorly

received and misunderstood.

Alexandre Herzen, who passionately followed the evolution of French

socialism from Russia,

wrote in 1845, on receiving the book On the Creation of Order:

“This book is an extraordinarily remarkable phenomenon. First, when

reading Proudhon as

Pierre Leroux and other philosophising Frenchmen, it must be recalled

that we find in them strange

ideas and ways of thinking, nonsense, illogicalities, etc. But we must

force through behind this

clutter [...]. Proudhon rises resolutely to the heights of speculative

thought. He rids himself in a bold

and cutting manner of the categories of the understanding. He shows

admirably the weakness of

casuality and substantiality. He solves their antinomy by series; that

is, by judgement that dissociates

itself in its diverse moments and by dialectical reason that conceives

synthesis as reality. There is a

prodigious quantity of luminous ideas in this book.”

176/A. HERZEN, Journal, t. I, pp. 270–271, cited in P. Haubtmann,

Proudhon, Marx et la pensée

allemande, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, p. 42.

Later, Herzen turned Proudhon into a “pure Hegelian”, and believed that

Hegel “moulded

Proudhon in his image”.

Marx also compared Proudhon to Hegel, but, unlike Herzen, concluded that

Proudhon had

not really understood the Hegelian dialectic. In 1865, recalling their

long Parisian discussions, Marx

tasked himself with teaching Hegelianism to Proudhon.

“During my stay in Paris, 1844, I entered into a personal relationship

with Proudhon. I

mention it here because I am somewhat to blame for his ‘sophistication’,

as the English call the

falsification of goods. During long, often overnight debates I infected

him to his great harm with

Hegelianism, which because of his ignorance of the German language he

could not study in the usual

way. What I began Herr Karl Grün continued after my expulsion from

Paris. As a teacher of German

philosophy he also had the advantage over me that he understood nothing

of it himself.”

177/K. Marx to Schweitzer, Misère de la philosophie [Poverty of

Philosophy], Costes, pp. 216–217.

And, indeed, despite his interest in Hegel, Proudhon still rebelled

stubbornly against the

Hegelian conception of the dialectic, which he reproached not only for

its abstraction, but also for its

conservative political conclusions. Hegel’s synthesis, aiming to

transcend thesis and antithesis by

absorbing them, is “governmental”; it leads to the “prepotency of the

State”:

“Hegel agreed with Hobbes on government absolutism, on the omnipotence

of the State, on

the subordination of the individual. I do not know whether, for this

piece of philosophy, Hegel

retained a single partisan in Germany; but I can say that to speak so

[...] is to dishonour philosophy.”

178/La Guerre et la Paix [War and Peace], p. 52.

On the contrary, Grün compares Proudhon to Feuerbach, to the point of

making him the

“French Feuerbach”. Making Fourier the French Hegel, Grün wrote in 1845:

“[...] Fourier has found his Feuerbach. Nothing is more accurate than

that comparison.

Proudhon is the French Feuerbach, the practical Feuerbach, who does not

wonder what the essence

of Christianity is, but what the essence of property is. It is the same

question, but considered from

another aspect. The question is this: where does dependence and slavery

in the world come from?

Feuerbach answers: from the fact that man has alienated his spiritual

nature and made it the

property of a transcendent Being.

Proudhon: from the fact that man is stripped of his being, his work, and

the product of his

work, and worships a superhuman god, the proprietor, by whose grace he

lives.

What does Feuerbach want? To destroy the God of religion and the

absolute Spirit of

philosophy, in order to replace them with man.

What does Proudhon want? To abolish property and property rights, in

order to honour the

essence of human life, work.

Feuerbach finds himself before theologians and philosophers; Proudhon,

jurists and

economists.”

179/K. GRUN, Die soziale Bewegung... [The Social Movement...], C.W.

Leske, pp. 404–405.

But, as we have seen, while Proudhon was indeed enriched by reading

Feuerbach as well as

Hegel, he never stopped following his own path.

In France, conservatives and moderates, horrified by the Proudhonian

critique, conversely

made Proudhon a victim of the philosophy of Young Hegelians who dragged

him into the swamps of

atheism. This is the interpretation that the readers of La Revue des

deux mondes [Review of the Two

Worlds] could read in October 1848:

“Where then does this strange philosopher come from? What explains this

monstrous

mixture of good and evil? To which master to attach these despicable

doctrines whose unknown

physiognomy has caused us as much surprise as indignation? M. Proudhon

is a keen mind who has

lost himself; he has lost himself decisively in his own sophistry; he

has distorted and mutilated his

rare intelligence with weapons that are his own and that he has forged

quite deliberately. Then, as

his inflexible thinking sank into the fatal paths it had made itself, he

found a philosophy to which

many common errors were unwittingly joined; he joined this school, and,

without being under its

yoke, he nevertheless borrowed more than one theory from it and kept its

recognisable imprint. This

school is that of the Young Hegelians, unruly members of the Doctors

Club who, sometimes

continuing, sometimes disfiguring Hegel’s thought, ended up denying the

absolute and proclaiming a

religion of which you and I are the gods. It is this influence of the

Young Hegelian school, these

relations between German atheism and French socialism, that it has

seemed useful to question.”

180/SAINT-RENÉ TAILLANDIER, in Revue des deux mondes, XXIV, October

1848, p. 283.

The Neo-Hegelian school would thus be guilty of having passed onto

Proudhon “its

pernicious dialectic... its poisonous dialectic, its hateful logic...”

The reality of the social

One of the reasons why his contemporaries found it difficult to

understand this dialectic is

that Proudhon referred to a reality that was unfamiliar to them. They

expected him to take a side in

the problem of the existence of God, propose a new philosophy, or even

build a new socialist theory.

But none of these were his goals, and while he questions God and

philosophy, it is in terms of

another question relating to social realities.

Proudhon’s fundamental thesis is not only that social relations matter

more than political

structures, but that social exchanges and especially labour social

relations have their own reality and

dynamism.

“In every society I find the distinction between two kinds of

constitution, one of which I call

the social constitution and the other the political constitution; the

first, native to humanity, liberal,

necessary, the development of which consists above all in weakening and

gradually eliminating the

second, which is essentially factitious, restrictive and transitory. The

social constitution is nothing

but the equilibrium of interests founded upon free Contract and the

organisation of economic forces,

which are in general: Labour, Division of Labour, Collective Force,

Competition, Commerce, etc.

The political constitution has Authority as its principle. Its forms

are: Class Distinctions,

Separation of Powers, Administrative Centralisation...”

181/Confessions d’un révolutionnaire [Confessions of a Revolutionary],

p. 217.

Society is not an abstraction, but a collective Being with particular

characteristics. The fact of

“collective force” clearly confirms this “reality” of the social beyond

the individuals of which it is

composed, since, as Proudhon puts it, the mere act of grouping and

organising people generates a

power of its own:

“[...] let us suppose that individuals, in such numbers as one might

wish, in whatever manner

and to whatever end, group their forces: the resultant of these

agglomerated forces, which must not

be confused with their sum, constitutes the force or power of the group

[...].

[...] A ship’s crew, a limited partnership, an academy, an orchestra, an

army, etc. [...] all

these collectivities, more or less skilfully organised, contain power, a

power which is synthetic and

consequently specific to the group, superior in quality and energy to

the sum of the elementary

forces which compose it.”

182/De la justice..., t. II, pp. 257–258.

To express this specific feature of the social, dialectics is a

“wonderfully convenient”

instrument to link the facts, to clarify the relations among hitherto

isolated elements. Let us recall

here the important letter already cited on p. 62:

“Without the need to follow Hegel in his fruitless attempt to build the

world of realities with

a priori pretensions of reason, one can boldly maintain, it seems to me,

that its logic is wonderfully

convenient for accounting for certain facts that we could previously

only consider as the

disadvantages, the abuses, the extremes of certain other facts.”

183/To M. Tissot, 16 December 1846, Corr., t. II, pp. 231–232.

Thus, the dialectic will teach to distinguish the multiplicity of

elements that make up

collective life; it will teach to bring out all the contradictions and

antinomies, whose tensions, far

from being a threat to social relations, are a guarantee of their

vitality and freedom, provided they

find their dynamic equilibrium.

“First, what is freedom?

Freedom is of two kinds: that of the barbarian, or even of the civilised

man, is simple as long

as it recognises no law other than every man for himself; compound, when

its existence involves the

concurrence of two or more freedoms.

From the barbaric perspective, freedom means isolation: it is freest

when action is least

limited by that of others. The existence of a single individual on the

face of the globe would thus give

the idea of the highest freedom possible. From the social perspective,

freedom and solidarity are

identical terms: the freedom of each finding in the freedom of others no

longer a limit, as in the

Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1793, but an

auxiliary, the freest man is he

who has the most relations with his fellows.

Because both ways of conceiving freedom are mutually exclusive, the

result is that the

freedom of the savage cannot be rationally and justly claimed by the man

living in society: a choice

must be made.

Two nations are separated by a stretch of water or a chain of mountains.

They are

respectively free, as long as they do not communicate with each other,

but they are poor: this is

simple freedom. They will be freer and richer if they exchange their

goods: this is what I call

compound freedom. As each of these two nations’ particular activities

become more extensive as

they provide each other with more objects of consumption and work, their

freedom also becomes

greater: for freedom is action. Thus exchange creates relations between

nations which, by uniting

their freedoms, increase their extent: freedom grows, like force, by

union, Vis unita major [force

united is greater]. This basic fact reveals a whole system of new

developments for freedom, a system

in which the exchange of products is only the first step. [...]”

184/Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, pp. 249–250.

This social reality has dialectics that are so general that they can be

taken as permanent. In

particular, labour is constantly being revamped: it is not organised,

“it is being organised”:

“Labour, we say, is being organised: that is, the process of

organisation has been going on

from the beginning of the world, and will continue till the end.

Political economy teaches us the

primary elements of this organisation; but socialism is right in

asserting that, in its present form, the

organisation is inadequate and transitory; and the whole mission of

science is continually to

ascertain, in view of the results obtained and the phenomena in course

of development, what

innovations can be immediately effected.”

185/Système des contradictions économiques..., t. I, p. 75.

In particular, this organisation of work is carried out through the

numerous contracts that

the producers agree and execute with each other. Through these

contracts, individuals and

enterprises make commitments according to their interests and economic

constraints, without

abandoning their initiative. From multiple reciprocal decisions an

economic right thus emerges, a

true social right radically opposed to political right. Of course, this

social right is in progress; it is far

from being realised in the regime of property, but it is taking shape

through the numerous relations

of production and commerce. This is the right that is realised in

working-class association and which

would become a “fundamental, [...] regulating principle” in mutualist

democracy.

This set of analyses on collective being, on collective force, forms

part of an intellectual

lineage, from Saint-Simon to Marx and especially Durkheim, that has

shaped the general principles

of sociology. Indeed, from his first works, by making property a social

relation between the capitalist

and the producer of value, by explaining economic appropriation through

the appropriation of

“collective force”, Proudhon together with Saint-Simon ushered in a new

science, not on the

production and circulation of wealth, but on the social relations

established in production and

exchange.

So it is no surprise that Marx adopted, word for word, some of these

Proudhonian analyses

of “collective force” or of the “externalisation” of the State.

It is by tracing the general consequences of “cooperation” in Capital

that Marx rediscovers

Proudhon’s reasoning. The effect of cooperation, i.e. the gathering and

organisation of many

workers, is to create a “collective force”. And, in accordance with the

Proudhonian analysis, the

production of value corresponding to this force is realised only for the

capitalist:

“When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and

the same

process, or in different but connected processes, they are said to

co-operate, or to work in co-

operation.

Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive

power of a regiment of

infantry is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or

defensive powers of the individual

cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of

the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the

social force that is developed,

when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided

operation, such as raising

a heavy weight, turning a winch, or removing an obstacle. In such cases

the effect of the combined

labour could either not be produced at all by isolated individual

labour, or it could only be produced

by a great expenditure of time, or on a very dwarfed scale. Not only

have we here an increase in the

productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the

creation of a new power,

namely, the collective power of masses.”

186/K. MARX, Le Capital, Éditions Sociales, 1950, book I, 2, p. 19.

And, likewise, whatever the numerous differences concerning the analysis

of the relations

between the State and civil society, Marx finds exactly the same

conclusions as Proudhon, in

particular in the example of the French State:

“This executive power, with its huge bureaucratic and military

organisation, with its

extensive and artificial state machinery, a horde of half a million

officials in addition to an army of

another half a million, this frightful body of parasites wound like a

caul about the body of French

society and clogging its every pore, was constituted during the absolute

monarchy...

Napoleon perfected this state machinery. The Legitimist monarchy and the

July monarchy

added nothing but a greater division of labour, growing in the same

measure as the division of

labour within bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and,

therefore, new material for

State administration. Every common interest was straightway severed from

society, counterposed to

it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the activity of

society’s members themselves and

made an object of government activity, whether it was a bridge, a

schoolhouse and the communal

property of a village community, or the railways, the national wealth

and the national universities of

France... All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking

it.”

187/K. MARX, Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte [The Eighteenth Brumaire

of Louis Bonaparte],

Éditions Sociales, 1969, pp. 124–125.

Proudhon constantly spoke about this historical dialectic between

popular forces and the

sclerotic State:

“If there is anything of a nature to cause sovereigns to reflect, it is

that, more or less

impassible spectators of human calamities, they are, by the very

constitution of society and the

nature of their power, absolutely powerless to cure the sufferings of

their subjects; they are even

prohibited from paying any attention to them. Every question of labour

and wages, say with one

accord the economic and representative theorists, must remain outside of

the attributes of power.

From the height of the glorious sphere where religion has placed them,

thrones, dominations,

principalities, powers, and all the heavenly host view the torment of

society, beyond the reach of its

stress; but their power does not extend over the winds and floods. Kings

can do nothing for the

salvation of mortals. And, in truth, these theorists are right: the

prince is established to maintain, not

to revolutionise; to protect reality, not to bring about utopia. He

represents one of the antagonistic

principles: hence, if he were to establish harmony, he would eliminate

himself, which on his part

would be sovereignly unconstitutional and absurd. But as, in spite of

theories, the progress of ideas

is incessantly changing the external form of institutions in such a way

as to render continually

necessary exactly that which the legislator neither desires nor foresees

– so that, for instance,

questions of taxation become questions of distribution; those of public

utility, questions of national

labour and industrial organisation; those of finance, operations of

credit; and those of international

law, questions of customs duties and markets – it stands as demonstrated

that the prince, who,

according to theory, should never interfere with things which

nevertheless, without theory’s

foreknowledge, are daily and irresistibly becoming matters of

government, is and can be henceforth,

like Divinity from which he emanates, whatever may be said, only an

hypothesis, a fiction.

And finally, as it is impossible that the prince and the interests which

it is his mission to

defend should consent to diminish and disappear before emergent

principles and new rights

posited, it follows that progress, after being accomplished in the mind

insensibly, is realised in

society by leaps, and that force, in spite of the calumny of which it is

the object, is the necessary

condition of reforms. Every society in which the power of insurrection

is suppressed is a society dead

to progress: there is no truth of history better proven. [...]

Everywhere, the social compact has united power and conspired against

life, it being

impossible for the legislator either to see that he was working against

his own ends or to proceed

otherwise.

Monarchs and representatives, pitiable actors in parliamentary comedies,

this in the last

analysis is what you are: talismans against the future! Every year

brings you the grievances of the

people; and when you are asked for the remedy, your wisdom covers its

face! Is it necessary to

support privilege; that is, that consecration of the right of the

strongest which created you and

which is changing every day? Promptly, at the slightest nod of your

head, a numerous army starts

up, runs to arms, and forms in line of battle. And when the people

complain that, in spite of their

labour and precisely because of their labour, misery devours them, when

society asks you for life,

you recite acts of mercy! [...] Ah! I tell you, we possess the secret of

your mission: you exist only to

prevent us from living.”

188/Système des contradictions économiques..., t. I, pp. 166–167.

Proudhon’s general principle concerning the reality of the social is

expressed, in various

forms, by all the great theorists of sociology. Durkheim made it one of

the main principles of the

sociological approach. Thus, he repeats:

“[...] society is not the mere sum of individuals, but the system formed

by their association

represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics.

Undoubtedly no collective entity can

be produced if there are no individual consciousnesses: this is a

necessary but not a sufficient

condition. In addition, these consciousnesses must be associated and

combined, but combined in a

certain way. It is from this combination that social life arises and

consequently it is this combination

which explains it. By aggregating together, by interpenetrating, by

fusing together, individuals give

birth to a being, psychical if you will, but one which constitutes a

psychical individuality of a new

kind... The group thinks, feels and acts entirely differently from the

way its members would if they

were isolated.”

189/DURKHEIM, Les Règles de la méthode sociologique [The Rules of

Sociological Method], P.U.F.,

11th edition, 1949, ch. 5, p. 103.

George Gurvitch rightly named Proudhon one of the founders of sociology.

Beyond the

general principles on which he bases himself, Proudhon brings many

considerations to the various

fields of sociology: sociology of work, social classes, religions, and

ideologies. In a field as specific as

the sociology of social law, Proudhon opened up a direction of thought

whose fertility is far from

being exhausted today.