đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș dennis-william-brogan-proudhon.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:25:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Proudhon Author: Dennis William Brogan Date: 1934 Language: en Topics: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, biography Source: Retrieved on May 16, 2008 from https://web.archive.org/web/20080516081107/http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu:16080/Anarchist_Archives/proudhon/brogan/brogan_toc.html
PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON was born on the 15^(th) of January, 1809, and
thus grew up in the shadow of two great events, the French and the
industrial revolutions; both of these he felt profoundly; the first of
them he understood. He was born in Battant, a suburb of Besancon, the
capital of the Free County of Burgundy, and his intense local patriotism
remained a living force in his life and thought to the day of his death.
His âlittle countryâ, Franche-Comteâ, had only been part of France for
one hundred and fifty years when Proudhon was born; Besancon was a real
local capital, and some of the seeds of Proudhonâs federalism, of his
dislike of Paris, and of centralisation, were sown in those early years.
He was a citizen of no mean city, a child of no mere department; and,
whether he was defending the intellectual independence of the County of
Burgundy against the pretensions of the Duchy of Burgundy, or looking
forward with delight to the reconstitution of the thirty submerged
nationalities which he believed existed in France, he was fighting, not
merely for a general principle,but for the memories and loyalties of his
youth.
More important still was his parentage. âMy ancestors on both sides were
free peasants, exempt from feudal servitude from time immemorialâ; there
remained to Proudhon all his life a family pride as great as that of a
Guerinantes; be was born of no proletarian or servile stock. Had not his
maternal grandfather, the old soldier, withstood before the revolution
die local tyrannical squire, and was not his mother ânoted for her
virtues and for her republican ideasâ? âThis is real nobility of race. I
myself am a noble.â His fatherâs family, the Proudhons, was noted for
obstinacy; one branch had risen in the world, had entered the middle
classes and produced an eminent lawyer, but the poorer connections were
far from playing the role of poor relations; they had their share of the
pride, that was to be so marked in their most famous kinsman. Proudhonâs
father was a cooper and, for a time, a brewer. He was, doubtless, an
honest and industrious man, but unsuccessful in his business. Later,
Proudhon attributed his fatherâs financial disasters to his incorrigible
habit of selling his beer at the âjust priceâ, that is, at the cost of
production, instead of imitating the rest of the brewers who sold at a
profit. Not only that, the elder Proudhon was careful about the
character of his customers, and so lost money by refusing to let women
enter his shop. Others were not so scrupulous, and âhaving grown rich by
prostitution ... married their children off to the best people, while my
fatherâs children have found nobodyâ. The lesson learned here was never
forgotten; there was a morally right way of doing business; there was a
morally wrong way of doing business; but in modern society the right way
led straight to bankruptcy, the wrong way to wealth and honour. Society
must be made safe for honesty and a world be created in which the
children of an honest man like Claude-Francois Proudhon should not be
embittered by having their fatherâs honesty in hunger and humiliation.
Although Proudhon considered himself a nativeof Besancon, the suburb
where he was born, preserved, as M. Daniel Halevy tells us, a rural
character. âMany market-gardeners, peasants, wine-growers, found it
convenient to lodge there, not far from the city-folk. Thus they could
make their living without changing their way of life, keeping
faithfully, in the shadow of the town, to their rural customs and their
rural speech.â This, again, was of great importance to Proudhon, for he
learned to know and sympathise with the peasants, to feel with the
peasants in his heart, to share their land-hunger; their rigid views of
right-living; their deep conservatism; all combined with their passion
for equality; their class-consciousness; and their savage resolution to
be each master of his own fields and his own household.
Not only did Proudhon know the peasant life; he lived it. Until he was
twelve, he was constantly engaged in farm-work, especially in herding
cattle, and late in life, he declared that there, in the grass, looking
at the sky, he learned un-Christian lessons of trust in nature, and
distrust of âthat absurd spiritualism which is at the basis of Christian
life and educationâ. When he had become a famous antagonist or the
Church, both he and his enemies were inclined to exaggerate the heresies
of his childhood; and one pious antagonist declared that prayer found no
echo in the Proudhon household. It was never safe to assume anything
about Proudhon, and he was indignant at this charge, for he was, in
fact, brought up in matter-of-fact orthodoxy by his parents. They were
good Catholics of the old French peasant school and so was their son. He
believed in God and the saints; he also believed in nymphs and fairies.
Proudhon owed his chance of formal education to the Abbe Sirebon, the
parish priest, next, to his fatherâs employer, but, above all, to his
mother, Catherine, who was the mainstay of the poor household. The
Proudhons were going down in the world. Claude-Francois was no longer
his own master, the future was dark but the boy was to be given his
chance. The entry to the local college (high school) was the greatest
event of Proudhonâs youth; more important than the siege of Besancon,
than his father failure, than the birth of a younger brother. He now
learned of delights as keen as any he had known as a herd-boy; he
displayed the prodigious industry that was to remain with him all his
life and an appetite for learning that startled his teachers. But he
studied under great difficulties; his family was desperately poor, and
he had to borrow school books from more fortunate boys, he had no hat;
he wore wooden shoes; and he learned the truth of the local proverb,
âPoverty is no crime; it is worse.â
The studies were almost entirely mathematics and Latin. He was a poor
mathematician (and that is worth remembering), but he was an excellent
Latinist. He mastered the language and shone in it and, until his death,
language fascinated him. He won prizes and one of them was Fenelonâs
Demonstration of the Existence of God. He read it, and it shook his
faith. âAfter that,â he said, âI was a metaphysicianâ -a belief which M.
Daniel Halevy notes, was an illusion.
His school life was difficult, and its difficulties nourished his sombre
pride; be was religious, but be saw, or thought he saw, that his zeal
was ill-rewarded, that the Church was a respecter of persons. When he
was sixteen he abandoned the practice of his religion, although be was
to return to it again. The family fortunes grew worse and worse. On the
day he was to receive a prize, there was no one of his family present,
and the presiding official had to take the place of the missing
kinsfolk. He went home to find his father in consternation, his mother
in tears; a lawsuit had ended in a decision against his father. âThat
evening we supped on bread and water.â The strain on the family
resources of keeping Pierre Joseph at school was unbearable. âAt
eighteen,â said his father, âI earned my keep and I hadnât had so long
an apprenticeshipâ-âI thought he was right.ââ What trade to adopt was
now the question? If he could have got access to the land, he might have
become a farmer, but the want of capital barred that road. âPerhaps it
was only the want of a good organisation of rural credit that kept me
from remaining all my life a peasant and a conservative.â Another
lesson, the exclusion of the poor from property and independence, was
now learned.
The trade chosen was printing, and he never forgot the lessons he
learned in his apprenticeship. He was proud to have a trade and believed
that it was a sure shield against want, that he was now independent of
everybody. He also became convinced that the competent artisan received
a more fruitful training than the bookworm; and he was always irritated
by the claims of an intellectual elite to lead the workers for their own
good. His conviction of the necessity, and the possibility, of equality
was given a secure basis in his mind by his memories of the printerâs
chapel. He learned the force of trade practice, of the way in which a
customary code can keep the sluggards up to the mark and prevent the
strong from racing ahead too fast. He learned a trade morality, and the
need for and the possibility of mutual loyalty. He never lost the
conviction that he knew the minds, the needs, the natures of the
workers, and of the peasants, as no academics, fortified with formal
doctrine, could know them. The workers never became for him a
homogeneous class of which any thousand were worth any other thousand;
their salvation must come from within. Any leadership from the outside,
no matter what were its claims to superior knowledge or
disinterestedness, was simply another form of tyranny. There were more
modes of exploitation than those created by formal property relations.
Besides learning his trade he fell in love, violently, as he was never
to fall in love again, and he returned to his religion with a passionate
enthusiasm. The work of the printing-shop was largely concerned with
theology; Proudhou read widely in the fathers of the Church as well as
more in modern writers. He thought of himself as an apologist for the
faith, for if he was already suspicious of the political side of
Catholicism, his faith in the theory, if not in the practice, of the
Church was still warm. Already he was perplexed by the problem of
inequality, of worldly injustice. Was the Church right, was there no
remedy for these evils in this world, or was it possible to organise
society on new lines, to harmonise the desires and passions of men? Was
man the maimed creature, marked by original sin as the Church described
him, or was the escape from his prison house in his own hands once he
found the key? He was tempted by the heresy of Socinianism, by the
denial of original sin. He was unwittingly on his way out of the Church
and on to another faith.
He was now a proof-reader and, through his corrections of a Latin Lives
of the Saints, he made the acquaintance and won the friendship of its
young editor, Gustave Fallot, destined to be the first great personal
influence in Proudhonâs life. Fallot was, or hoped to be, a philologist;
he infected Proudhon with his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which, with
Proudhon, took the form of learning Hebrew. This study left permanent
marks on his mind. He retained to his death what was, for a Frenchman,
an astonishing familiarity with the Bible. It was a weapon of fact, of
argument, of rhetorical appeal, and he ranked it with Adam Smith and
Hegel among the three sources of his ideas. Not only the Bible, but
philology attracted him. It is hard to realize now the prestige of
philological studies in that age; new vistas were opened up by it,
vistas not only in the history of language, but in the general history
of mankind. It was a clue to the nature of things which, if strenuously
held to, would lead its owner into the heart of the labyrinth where lay
the secret of human misery to be remedied by the application of the true
laws of manâs nature, laws which language could illuminate. This
illusion, that linguistic knowledge was the key to all or to most
problems, never wholly left Proudhon. It, as much as any borrowed
dialectic, was his method of research and of argument. On the whole,
this belief did him harm. It is worth saying once that the Hebrew text
of the commandment does not say âThou shalt not stealâ, but âThou shalt
not put asideâ, but Lo thignob recurs too often, not as an illustration,
but as an argument. Again and again arguments are interrupted or
eloquence is allowed to cool off, while the etymology of a word is
pursued through bold and often erroneous guesses. It is not of
first-class importance to know (or to think you know) that all the world
is wrong in believing that religio at bottom means binding , when it
really means bending. In any case, even if philology had been as
powerful and adequate a weapon as Proudhon thought, he was unfitted to
use it. He knew a good deal of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, but be knew nothing
of language, or nothing to the point. He pained friends, who knew
better, by his bold guesses. He had neither the scholarâs equipment nor
temperament. Words had the meanings Proudhon wanted them to have, and if
modern philology gave him no support, so much the worse for it! It is in
vain that his patient friend, Professor Bergmann, tries to tame him; the
bee keeps buzzing in the bonnet. He had valid reasons for disliking
Renanâs methods, but, in any case, the professional superiority of Renan
in philological equipment would have made Proudhon suspicious of his
rival author of a Life of Jesus.
Another key to knowledge of society was now put into his hands, for a
fellow-citizen of Franche-Comte, just becoming famous, had his book
printed at Besancon. The book was The New Industrial World of Charles
Fourier, and it helped to open the world of economic speculation to the
young proof-corrector. Later in life Proudhon, as was his wont, was less
and less willing to admit his debt to Fourier, especially as he got to
be on worse and worse terms with Fourierâs disciples, but the influence
was great. It is most obvious in the first edition of the Creation of
Order in Humanity, where the system of series is made to do all sorts of
wonders, but this was chiefly a matter of words. But Fourierâs
scepticism of the state his view that the social revolution could be
brought about within the existing society by setting an example of a
more efficient economy (the Phalanstery) has point of affinity with the
later anarchical doctrines of Proudhon, although the effect of the
example given in Proudbonâs system is moral, not economic. Proudhon
admitted six weeks of infatuation with Fourier, but the influence lasted
longer than that. Proudhon came to scorn all âUtopiasâ as Marx did; the
optimism of Saint-Simon, of Cabet, and of the Foutierists infuriated
him; all these promises of increased wealth to be generally distributed
by ingenious manipulations, by improved productive methods, were deceit
in his eyes, for the best that could be hoped for was decent poverty for
everyone, instead of wealth for some and wretchedness for the rest. It
is a source of his strength that the satisfactions he promises his
disciples are moral rather than material, but if he abandoned the path
opened by Fourier, he was for long enough in the debt of his
fellow-countryman, and in his own later years he thought more kindly of
the speculator whom he had been used to attack.
While this interior revolution was under way, an exterior revolution
broke out. The âthree glorious days of Julyâ (1830) overthrew the
restored Bourbons and made it evident to the world that the
revolutionary spirit was again on the march. That revolutionary spirit
filled the mind and still more the heart of Proudhon. He never wavered
in his belief that the French Revolution was a turning point in human
history. That Revolution might be, for Marx, merely a triumph of the new
capitalist over the old feudal order, but for Proudhon it was the
beginning of the reign of Justice, or, at any rate, it made possible the
institution of the reign of Justice. What the content of Justice was, in
Proudbonâs system, will be described later, but Proudhon never regretted
for a moment the Revolution. He could be bitter about its betrayal by
leaders who were heroes of the revolutionary legend, but whom he
condemned for misunderstanding the great moment of deliverance, but none
of his sneers at democracy and, still more, at democrats, can make of
him (despite the ingenious special pleading of M. Louis Dimier) a
âmaster of the counter-revolutionâ. Nowhere more clearly than in
Proudhon, can one feel the unshakable devotion of the French peasant and
worker to the memory of those days âwhen Death was on thy drums,
Democracy, and, with one rush of slaves, the world was freeâ. Is a man,
a book, a project, counter-revolutionary? It is thereby condemned. Does
a law or an idea seem to attempt to damn up the revolutionary flood; it
is futile. The future is, must be with the Revolution: the old obedience
to traditional authority, in politics and in religion, has received a
mortal wound. Any society based on these ideas is bleeding to death; it
may be bandaged up for a time, but the bleeding cannot be stopped, As
much as Marx, Proudhon believed and preached the inevitable victory of
his cause, the making of the world safe for the idea of Justice brought
into it by the French Revolution. It is the theme of his greatest book,
Justice in the Revolution and the Church. It shapes all his economic
arguments, so that Walras is startled to find an economic doctrine
refuted as being against the spirit of the Revolution. The Re- volution,
though side-tracked and betrayed, is ever on the march. Crises like 1830
and 1848 are bred by the instability of all institutions which do not
frankly take as their base the revolutionary idea of Justice, that is to
say, equality. There are now no authorities of tradition or of divine
right; all such authorities died in 1789; although their rotting corpses
may yet cumber the ground.
The immediate effect of the revolution of 1830 was not to provide
Proudbon with a philosophy, but to deprive him of his job, for the
upheaval was bad for business, Proudhon learned that even being master
of a trade did not (as it should have done) guarantee a living. Fallot
did his best for the friend to whom he predicted that âyou will be a
writer, a philosopher, you will be one of the lights of the age ... you
cannot escape your destinyâ. The destiny was still fugitive, however; a
livelihood of any kind, as a teacher, as a printer, was the first
necessity. Fallot had an idea. Why not apply for the Suard Scholarship?
It was tenable for three years; it was the very thing that would enable
Proudhon to complete his education. But Proudhon was far less ambitious
for himself than his friend was for him. At last he succumbed to
Fallotâs pleadings, to the offer to share their resources in Paris. He
set off for the capital on foot; Paris did not please him, neither the
place nor the people; and Fallot fell ill. He recovered, but Proudhon
would not be a drag on his friend any longer; there was no work to be
had in the city, so he set out, on foot, for the South, with ÂŁ2 in his
pocket.
He was, if not disappointed, for the moment at least, defeated; he was
to be a worker, not a writer â and he was a worker without work. The
times continued bad; the helplessness of the mere worker was taught to
Proudhon. He arrived at Toulon with three and a half francs left; he
found no work, but had he not a passport which promised help and
protection? He applied to the mayor to give him work, and the mayor, one
of the now triumphant bourgeoisie which the recent revolution had put
into power, told him that he had misunderstood his passport; all he
could claim was enough money to take him home. The official having
failed, he appealed to the man; again he was repulsed. âVery well âI
said between clenche teeth, âI promise you to remember this interview.â
And remember it he did, more than twenty years later when he told the
story.
There was nothing for it but to return to Besancon, where his family had
just lost the third son, called up to the army, which the sons of the
prosperous could escape by a money payment, and where Jean- Etienne was
to die, another victim of society. For a brief moment Proudhon was
editor of a new paper, an organ of âadvanced ideasâ; but, in a day, he
learned that the ideas must not be more advanced than those of the
proprietor. The job was thrown up at once, and a lesson on the necessary
compromises of party journalism taught â but not learned.
He worked for a while in the country at Arbois, aiding in a lawsuit
against a great proprietor and drinking deeply at the popular traditions
of the Revolution; and then returned to Besancon to work for his old
employers as a proof-reader. He had ÂŁ6 a month; it was wealth! Among his
jobs was the seeing through the press of a Latin Bible â and of a new
edition of the theological dictionary of Bergier. To the latter he owed
much of that command of theological learning that made many think he had
studied for the priesthood. It reinforced his contempt for vagueness or
for compromise; between Catholicism and Atheism, or, as he was to
insist, âanti-theism, there is nothing that a sober man can rest on.
There must be certainty, and one side or the other must be chosen. He
hated the Church and many of its servants, but he never ceased to
respect it; it was the greatest, most respectable of errors, not to be
assailed with the feeble and corrupt methods of Voltaire â for although
Voltaire was on the right side, the Bible and the Church were not to be
replaced by the lewd jesting of La Pucelle or the sentimental
religiosity of Rousseau.
Meantime, he attempted to escape from dependence, not by learning, but
by his trade. He set up in partnership as a printer. It was a moment of
hope and joy; a short moment, for his friend Fallot died, his great
schemes unfinished, and he had left his fame to Proudhon as a charge â
and, indeed, if Fallot is at all remembered to-day, it is as one who
helped Proudhon! But Proudhonâs ambitions were not purely those of a
printer; he had something to say; perhaps it was, as M. Daniel Halevy
suggests, a way of carrying on Fallotâs work. In any case, Proudhon
began his first book, an essay in philology, the science whose
possibilities had dazzled him when Fallot first displayed them before
his eyes. In form, the book was an appendix to a philological essay of
Bergier, but in essence it was the search after eternal truth by the
road of language; the science of language will lead man to the truth he
is made to know. The essay fell entirely flat; it did not bear
Proudhonâs name and, in any case, no one noticed it. As a serious study
in philology it was worthless; Proudhon, like Bergier, lived in a world
where modem scientific philology was unknown. Later, Proudhon recognised
this, and was as scornful of his first efforts as any critic could
desire. For the moment the lost chance of fame was less important than
the decline of the printing business. Proudhon was repeating his
fatherâs experience, an effort to secure independence by hard work and
honest dealing was proving fruitless. The death of his brother, of
Fallot, the failure of his writings, of his business, all embittered
him. He had,dreamcd of private vengeance, of the enforcement of justice,
or, at least, the avenging of wrong by a secret court of honest men,
only there were so few honest men! A hundred men in France devoted
to.justice would suffice, but out of 34,000,000 where to find the
hundred? And meanwhile, the prison-gates were again closing round him.
He had failed to escape by his learning; he had failed, it appeared, to
escape by his trade; he must resign himself to a life as the servant of
others. Why?
There was a last chance open to find an answer to this problem, the
Suard Scholarship. It was about to be offered by the Academy of
Besancon; he would be a candidate, and in the meantime he had a job as a
proof-reader in Paris. This was a change from his last stay in the
capital, a change for the better; but Fallot was dead and there was
nothing in Paris to touch his heart, although he made a few new
acquaintances, some of whom were in time to be friends.
Meanwhile, the negotiations and the necessary tactical moves in the
campaign for the scholarship were under way. Proudhon had won respect
for his character, and admiration for his talent, in Besancon, but he
was not always a help to his sponsors. One of the electors (and he was
no bad judge) thought highly of Proudhonâs ability, but declared âthat
fellow is bound to be a troublesome customerâ â and refused to vote for
him. Not only was Proudhon a rather intimidating candidate, but he had
odd views of what he would do with the scholarship if he gained it. The
Academy wanted its nominee to go to Paris and study in order that he
might rise in the world. Proudhon wanted to stay on in Besancon; he
would study, indeed, but he did not want to abandon his trade (he was
more and more involved in the illfortune of his partners) and he did not
want to rise in the world, for such an ambition was incompatible with
his new religion, that of equality. Despite his views he was chosen,
being supported by âall the most distinguished and influential membersâ,
notably by the Abbe Doney, who had been a disciple of Lammenais.
Proudhon was still an amateur philologist, and he had sent in an essay
for the Volney Prize, offered by the Institute of France. His Researches
on the Crammatical Categories and on some Origins of the French Language
got an honourable mention, and some of it appeared in a learned journal.
This ended philology for Proudhon, but when he was famous, some enemies
reprinted his Appendix to Bergier, to show that Proudhon was
inconsistent or hypocritical, a malicious trick which infuriated him,
and for which he blamed the Church. Proudhonâs project was ambitious
enough. He proposed to write Researches on Revelation, or Philo â sophy
serving as an Introduction to Universal History, a work designed to
demonstrate that evangelical morality represented eternal truths lost to
sight today. Evangelical truths soon lost their attraction for him, but
the belief in eternal truths which he could demonstrate for the
salvation of the world, remained a Proudhonian doctrine to the end.
The letter of application was equally characteristic. In the first
draft, it contained a profession of faith which alarmed his cautious
sponsor, Perennes. âBorn and brought up in the working-class, belonging
to it still, to-day, and for ever, by feelings, intellect and habits
and, above all, by the community of interests and wishesâ Proudhon
promised, if chosen, to toil, âby philosophy and science, with all the
energy of his will and all the powers of his mind, towards complete
emancipation of his brothers and fellowsâ. Such a programme, it was
feared, would not appeal to the academicians, and the text was amended.
The âcommunity of interests and of wishesâ became âthe community of
suffering and of wishesâ and, more important, âthe complete
emancipationâ of the workers become their âmoral and intellectual
bettermentâ. The campaign was over; he was chosen and he was inundated
by congratulations; congratulations which infuriated him, for they
showed that to the world he was a worker who was now given the chance of
escaping from his class; that few or none saw him as he saw himself, a
worker taking a chance to be trained to serve his class. He dared not
declare his intentions; his scorn of worldly success; âpeople would
think me crackedâ. Nevertheless, he was resolved to devote himself to
the cause of the poor and helpless, though thereby he might be âan
abomination to the rich and powerful; those who hold the keys of science
and of wealth might curse him, yet he would pursue the path of the
reformer through persecution, calumny, sorrow and death itselfâ. It was
not to have a knapsack with a marshalâs baton in it, not to have a
career open to his talents, that Proudhon sought the scholarship. He was
resolved to be a La Tour dâAuvergne of his class; to remain in the ranks
and fight with his brethren. It was a resolution that he never broke;
all his life, despite all his faults of temper and of understanding, he
fought for the good cause as he conceived it.
Proudhon returned to Paris in 1838, supporting himself by writing
articles for a Catholic encyclopedia and correcting proofs for a
royalist journal. These jobs did not last long; and he was ready to
plunge into his studies, supported by the scholarship. He had dreamed of
founding a review; he now wanted to express the ideas fermenting in him,
and he took the first opportunity offered by sending in an essay for a
prize offered by the Academy of Besancon, on the question of The
Usefulness of the Celebration of Sunday. His essay got an honorable
mention, but, more important, it revealed the essential Proudhon. The
social usefulness of the Mosaic law is stressed; but for us, the most
interesting themes are those that Proudhon was to spend his life in
elaborating. âIs equality of conditions an institution of nature, is it
equitable, is it possible? On each of these points I dare decide for the
affirmative.â There is a declaration of the absolute character of the
moral law, for Rousseau had erred âin submitting justice and morality to
the decision of numbers and to the opinion of the majority.â Lo thignob
is stressed; for it means not, âThou shalt not stealâ, but âThou shalt
not lay anything aside for thyselfâ, There must exist a science of
society which it is the work of the economist not to invent, but to
find. If the form and, in the main, the language of the essay are
innocuous enough, to any reader who knows the later Proudhon, it is
obvious that the Celebration of Sunday, for all its formal piety, shows
that the Academy had caught a tartar, and in 1840 appeared the work
which put this beyond doubt.
It was a very human touch in Proudhon to regard almost every book of
his, while be was writing it, as epoch-making, new, final. Of none of
them were these hopes better founded than the essay on property, which
he was convinced might prove âthe most remarkable event of 1840â. Into
it he put all his bitterness, all his delight in verbal analysis, and,
he thought, the result, free from all rhetoric, had nothing like itself
in all philosophy. What is Property? was the title, and the answer was
given in the first few lines. âIf I had to answer the following
question: What is Slavery? and answering in a single word, I replied: It
is Murder, my meaning would be understood at once. I should have no need
of a long discourse to show that the power to take from a man thought,
will, personality, is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a
man is to murder him. Why then, in answer to this other question: What
is Property? can I not reply, It is Theft without having the assurance
of not being understood, although this second proposition is only the
first transformed?â
Property is Theft. To most of his own countrymen Proudhon, for the rest
of his life, was capable of anything because of his epigram. In vain he
elaborated his doctrine, explained, for twenty years, that he was a
defender, not an enemy of property; he could never live down or live up
to the too successful,opening lines. But he never recanted what he had
written; he was indeed inordinately proud of his phrase â and there was
no quicker way to earn his hate than to assert that he had not invented
it or, at least, that he had not given it its first real interpretation.
It was one of the crimes of Louis Blanc that he said Brissot had
preceded Proudhon in this assertion, and the property in the
phrase,âProperty is Theftâ was fought over with an acerbity that has its
comic side.
The attack on property was made in three tracts. The first caused a
terrific scandal and embroiled him with the Academy. The second, however
(The Letter to M. Blanqui) was written in milder style to explain the
first, which might have led to Proudhonâs arrest had not M. Blanqui, a
distinguished economist, assured the Minister of justice, M. Vivien,
that Proudhon was a serious student, not a mere agitator -a good office
for which Proudhon remained grateful both to the academician and the
minister. The third tract was the Letter to Considerant or the Warning
to Proprietors, and this was as inflammatory as the first. What are the
arguments brought forward to justify the declaration that Property is
Theft? No time need be lost in confuting the critics who point out that
the idea of theft necessarily implies property. For Proudhon, property
was private property. Much of his argument reads oddly to-day, if it is
not remembered when he was writing and against what antagonists. In the
lifetime of Proudhonâs father and mother, there had been an immense
transference of property rights from the Church and the nobility,
chiefly to the middle classes; at any rate, not to the Proudhon family.
As fast as possible, the new owners began to demand a religious
reverence for all property rights, including those so recently acquired!
Property, indeed, had been declared to be one of the âRights of Manâ. It
is against these defences that Proudhon launches his most formidable
attacks. If âthe right to propertyâ, is to have any meaning relating it
to the other natural rights, it must mean the right of every man to have
property, not the right of some men to exclude their less fortunate
fellows from enjoyment of this ânatural rightâ. But property is not a
natural right at all; if it were, why all the argument? âWho,â he asks
audaciously, âever inquires into the origin of the rights of liberty,
security, equality?â All attempts to demonstrate that property has any
rights, other than those based on formal law, break down. Jurists, like
Grotius and Pothier, philosophers like Reid, âchief of the Edinburgh
schoolâ, produce arguments that either keep to the surface or involve
deep contradictions. In short, property is impossible!
The first retort of the unmetaphysically-minded reader is to ask that if
property is impossible, why make such a fuss about it? But by impossible
Proudhon means that the idea of absolute property, as understood by the
lawyers, is contradictory, is a Utopia. By property, Proudhon almost
always at this stage means property in land and property in land not
worked by the owner. It is rent in the common meaning of the word, not
the Ricardian economic rent, that is the first great grievance of the
propertyless classes, for the mere landlord is paid for something he has
not created; his relation to the economic exploitation of the land is
purely parasitic. It is useless for Charles Comte to ask what about the
owner who improves the land? The making of two blades of grass grow
where one grew before creates rights, (very limited rights indeed), but
they are apart from ownership. If a tenant improves the land he farms,
the law does not give him the increased value; it goes to the landlord
whose essential character is to draw an income without adding in the
least to the wealth of society. This parasitic drain on labour means
that production costs more than it is worth, âfor the landlordâs part
represents no economic reality. Proudhonâs views of production were
pessimistic and, if a large part of the total product of society went to
non-producers, production must fall. At its best it is barely sufficient
for the maintenance of the race; property cuts down this meagre return
from labour and so property tends to kill itself, to produce
impoverishment in the very exercise of its rights. As for the worker,
the farmer, his lot is far worse; he has to work harder and harder,
while the worker in industry is forced to undercut big fellows. As the
workers without property cannot buy what they produce, and since
production does not produce a surplus which can be seized with impunity
by non-producers, âproperty is murderousâ. Moreover, property is
incompatible with political liberty. If you have political equality and
economic inequality, property will be attacked under cover of law, by
taxation, for instance, and such attacks are inconsistent with the
absolute property rights of the lawyers. Property and equality cannot
co-exist; but equality is just and what is just is what should determine
the Organisation of society; justice is the criterion.
It was natural for Proudhonâs enemies and for hasty readers to conclude
that the author of this indictment was not only a socialist but a
communist. But he never gave any grounds for this view, and both Marx
and Considerant absolved Proudhon from the charge of being a renegade to
his earlier convictions. If the public bad been taken-in and believed
this fanatical individualist to have been a communist, the fault was the
publicâs for looking to the form rather than to the substance. In fact,
Proudhon was a defender of property; but property could not survive in
the post-revolutionary world if it could not be harmonised with Justice,
that is to say, with equality. Already governments, for all their
lip-service to property rights, are invading them. The conversion of the
national debt is an attack on property, even though the conversion is
formally voluntary. The holders of the debt have a right to their 5 per
cent -or property rights are empty, an argument that one might have
thought silly if it had not been used in our own time by Sir Ernest
Benn. What is good, in property, the possibility it offers of escape
from the slavery and degradation of communism, is only to be secured by
equality.
Proudhon pushes the argument for equality very hard. Even the farmer who
has increased wealth by his improvements on the land he tills is not
entitled to appropriate the increased wealth. After all, the fisherman
whose extra skill results in a catch twice as great as that of his
fellows is content with the reward of one double catch; he does not
claim a double catch for ever! Proudhon had always a weakness for
analogy, not as illustration, but as argument; and his attempt to limit
the rights of the improving farmer to a pre-emption and yet to preserve
equality are not very happy. He is hard, indeed, on all claims to
superior reward, for every member of society is its debtor; no matter
how hard or skilfully a man works, he dies as he is bom, overdrawn at
the Bank of Society. The great source of wealth is the community, and
this conviction is at the basis of what M. Bougle calls âthe sociology
of Proudhonâ. It is useless to say that high talents ought to be better
paid, for the difference between man and man is slight and more
education will reduce it further; while the scarcity of some talents
merely shows that they are not much needed. Nature provides as many of
each class of worker as society needs, so there is gross injustice in
paying an actress like Rachel more than a seamstress; any payment of
that kind must be taken from the workers. A poet who spends thirty years
on a masterpiece is, at the end of it, entitled to thirty years pay as a
worker, and any out-of-pocket expenses he may have incurred for books
and travel. After all, there are occupations which are luxuries, one
professor of philosophy is quite enough for the whole of France and one
economist for every two thousand million people! Naturally, some workmen
do in six hours what others take eight to do, but they must not make use
of those two hours to earn more. If others can only do four hours work
in eight hours, they must not get more than half pay. The average
product of., the average worker, that is what should be the standard. It
is easy here to see the former printer, used to the discipline of the
workshop! But the real solution is to secure land for everybody who
wants it, and to secure equality of resources in this way. For,
Proudhon, at this stage, and later, property is land and gold and
silver; they must be distributed equally, or society organised so that
the special privileges of their owners disappear.
The main doctrines of Proudhon are present in these three tracts â and
the main fancies. Commencing a revolutionary campaign, he fires on his
own side as well as on the common enemy. Not only the rich, but other
rebel writers and leaders are assailed. Cabet, Saint-Simon, Fourier,
Louis Blanc, the radicals of the National as well as the supporters of
the bourgeois monarchy, are bludgeoned. The passion for equality which
animates the author does not go as far as equality between the sexes,
man and woman are not in a common society, so the necessity of equality
which arises between man and man is absent! In this first appearance
before the great public, Proudhon was sublimely confident that he saw
further into the heart of things than anyone else, and that his writings
were of immense immediate importance. Property was like a criminal
trying to escape cross-examination and, in the Second Memoir, he
declares that he âis sworn to an immense relvolution, terrible to
charlatans and despotsâ! Pelletan was later to say that Proudhon fired a
musket off in the street to attract attention, and, in this case, he
succeeded in his, publicity methods. It was not for nothing that he had
known the young romantics of Paris; where Gautier had worn a red
waistcoat to startle the middle classes, Proudhon relied on violent
language, language which often concealed far from violent thought. He
now received the very thing he needed to maintain the impression he had
made, a prosecution, at Besancon, for the seditious character of the
Warning to Proprietors, a prosecution which failed and gave Proudhon an
advertisement and what prove to be a dangerously high opinion of his
power over an audience. The unknown printer and obscure student who had
been so ill-at-ease in the houses of his teachers in Paris, was now a
famous, or at least a notorious man. What were the causes of his
success?
The greatest of Proudhonâs assets was his admirable mastery of the
French tongue. He professed to despise mere literature and mere men, of
letters, but, at his best, there was no contemporary writer of French
prose who had a surer command of the language. This mastery he
displayed, above all, in attack and, at moments, his verve and force
made him not unworthy of comparison with the master who he admired so
much, Paul Louis Courier. In the first Memoir on Property, as in his
last posthumous fragments, there are passages of invective whose
technical excellence wins the admiration even of the most hostile
reader. When Marx praised the literary force displayed in the first
great pamphlet he, however grudgingly, recognised a polemical power in
this line at least equal to his own ; and the most enthusiastic tribute
to Proudhonâs literary ability comes from his rigorous critic, Arthur
Desjardins. âThis plebeian carves out his phrases with profound art, the
art of the great classical authors; he is descendant of the writers whom
Louis XIV protected and who perfected our tongue. He, no less than
Moliere, ought to have been a member of the Fren Academy.â
But not all of Proudhonâs literary skill was spent on invective. There
are in his letters, and scattered through his writings, especially in
the autobiographical fragments of Justice in the Revolution and the
Church, pages of pure description, of reminiscence, sketches of his
early days in Franche-Comte, which make on realise that he sacrificed
the chance of giving Renanâs Memories of Childhood and youth a more
fomidable rival than his Life of Jesus was to Renanâs best-seller. He
gave up to his cause, to his loves and hates, the possibility of a
literary career of the first order. Even when his publishers would not
publish his political books, when the Press was barred to him and when
literature invited him with open arms to escape from dire poverty by
entering her service, he was not tempted. He dallied with the idea of
literary criticism; his friends, like Sainte-Beuve, his well-meaning
timid publishers, the Garniers, tried to persuade him; but his vocation
had been chosen twenty years before, when the delights and duties of
controversy, of expounding the truth and of confuting error had taken
possession of him. His âone talent which was death to hideâ was for
public affairs, his duty was to aid the deliverance of the poor from the
chains in which ignorance of the true cause of their ills bound them.
Proudhon was content to be a pamphleteer.
He was a great pamphleteer, but the uncritical praises of big admirers
have made it harder for the world to appreciate his greatness. He was
only occasionally, and for brief periods, a keen reasoner. He was not,
despite repeated assertions of disciples, in his own lifetime and since,
a master of rigid logical demonstration. He himself was, indeed, under
the illusion that logic was his strong point. He was excessively fond of
casting argument into logical forms and having brought his demonstration
to a triumphant conclusion, he was prone to regard any critic who
demurred to his results, as wilfully blind â or merely incapable of
rational thought. In his long and barren controversy with Bastiat, over
the nature of interest, he was at last provoked into declaring that âI
have to do with a man whose intelligence is hermetically sealed and for
whom logic does not exist.â Bastiat was not a profound thinker, and his
share of the controversy earned him the contempt of Walras, but he was
not as stupid as Proudhon made out. In fact, Proudhonâs devotion to
logic was very superficial. A logical method, the series of Fourier, the
antimonies of Kant, the dialectic of Hegel, the syllogism of the
scholastics, was, for Proudhon, not a means of testing truth, or of
finding it, but a device for persuading his readers of truths which he
held on intuitional grounds. This is no doubt true of many more writers
than Proudhon, but few writers of his ability have relied on more
childish fallacies with more naive confidence than he. The pain with
which Walras disentangles some of the less flagrant sophistries, the
repeated bold transitions from a moral to an economic category which is
the great Proudhonian trick, is unconsciously funny. In the Proudhonian
world, âequality of respectâ and âequality of incomesâ were terms in the
same syllogism, for Proudhon had no understanding of an intellectual
world in which non-moral categories existed. For all his parade of rigid
demonstration of truths which would save the world, Proudhon was never
asking âIs this True?â but always âIs this Right?â If his opponents had
been notably more clear-headed than Proudhon, he would have been a less
formidable controversialist than, in fact, he was; but in the middle of
the nineteenth century, orthodox economists had not acquired their
present self-denying attitude and, consciously or unconsciously, mixed
their own categories. Even Walras, who was fighting at a higher level
than Bastiat or Thiers, committed himself to the view that it was
impudent for Say (and Proudhon) to attack the psychological results of
the division of labour, since division of labour had, or would, reduce
working hours, so that the worker who had spent ten hours making the
twelfth part of a pin could restore his mutilated personality by any
form of recreation he liked! The assumption, that the monotony or
variety of work was in itself unimportant, came more easily to the
mathematician than to the former printer who remained to his death so
proud that he had mastered a whole trade, not a mere part of a process.
But what was an occasional slip with Walras, was frequent with lesser
men, and the legal apologists for property, who mixed up implicit
utilitarianism, legal dogma hazardous anthropology, in one stout
affirmation of the property system as defined by the Code Napoleon, were
easy marks for Proudhonâs logical devices.
Naturally, such readers as were not taken-in by the parade of logical
rigour, were sometimes inclined to doubt Proudhonâs good faith. They
pointed out (it was not very hard) contradictions and inconsistencies.
Critics on the left thought his adoption of the role of the candid
friend an expression of spleen as well as of intellectual disagreement;
critics on the right thought he was, in another sense, a traitor to the
workers by filling them with half-baked and chimerical ideas which
distracted their attention from practicable reforms. Both can find
apparently conclusive texts, but Proudhon was both honest and
disinterested, only he had mistaken his abilities; he was not a
philosopher; he was not an economist; he was a moralist, for whom the
object of all social and economic arrangements was not the increasing of
the level of material well-being, but the creation of a society in which
the great law of the universe, the subordination of all ends to the rule
of Justice, embodied in independent and equal men (or, more strictly,
heads of families) was, at last, after thousands of years of error, to
be given free play. This preoccupation with right saved Proudhon from
difficulties which assailed other socialist leaders, for he did not
promise to increase production. His arguments against capitalism were
not arguments, based on its inefficiency, but on its injustice.
Occasionally, he does make optimistic prophecies; when he is trying to
refute Malthus, he makes bold assertions of the greater rapidity of the
growth of production compared with human fertility, but his heart is not
in such demonstrations. He believed, that the human race was destined to
work harder and harder and, indeed, it was this increasing burden of
labour that would solve the population problems by making continence
easy to the weary labourers. The most that Proudhon promises is the
diversion to useful work of the soldiers, officials and other
unproductive members of society made necessary by the present state
system and, in addition, the equalisation of property rights will force
the idle rich into productive activities. This is something but not
much, for even when the rich and their political parasites have got off
the backs of the poor, those backs will still be bent by the natural
necessity of unceasing toil. Although Proudhon talked a great deal about
the division of labour, he was really doubtful of its economic efficacy.
He thinks that the labour saved is merely diverted into other equally
unproductive channels, and this is the basis of his persistent objection
to free trade. On his own principles, he was bound to oppose free trade.
One of the few legitimate activities of the state was to even out the
different factors of production. The owner of a hundred acres in the
Beauce should not thereby be allowed to ruin the owner of a hundred
acres in the Cantal; and, still less, should the producers of France be
rained by American wheat and Lancashire cotton. But Proudhon is not
content with this application of his equalitarian theories. At the end
of his life he tried to show that the Cobden Treaty was wholly
deceptive, because even if the price of cotton goods went down, the
price of wine would go up equally! Bordeaux and Manchester would benefit
at the expense of the cotton spinners of Rouen and of the French worker
who would no longer be able to afford his native wine. Without going
very far into the argument, it is easy to see that Proudhon did not
understand or refused to consider what the free trade case was and he
would have been well advised not to plunge into a controversy for which
he was ill-fitted.
If his pamphlets and his trial brought Proudhon fame, they did not bring
him fortune. With a simplicity which never left him, he thought that the
government and social order which he had been assailing would give him a
job. Needless to say, the two official posts he had hoped for, were not
wasted on so incorrigible an agitator; and he had to shoulder the debts
of his unfortunate printing business, the burden of his parents without
an income with the ending of his ÂŁ 6o a year from his three years
scholarship. He had never been so poor as he was just after he had
become famous. He found an employer in a judge who had a desire to win a
reputation as a criminologist and for whom Proudhon was to furnish
information and ideas. It was not a dignified post, but he thought he
could smuggle his ideas into the work of the eminently respectable
judge. Even a judge could see through this trick, for Proudhon, in his
Machiavellian moments, had a marked resemblance to the villain of
melodrama who hisses behind his hand, âI donât mean a word of what I am
telling this simpleton.â The collaboration and the income came to an
end, but Proudhon was now deep in the writing of a great philosophical
work of which he had, in advance, the highest possible opinion, seeing
himself as another Newton. He had got rid of his printing business at a
loss of ÂŁ 4oo, a terrible burden of debt for one in his position and his
livelihood was a most urgent problem. An old school friend took him into
his firm, Gauthier Brothers; the business was that of transporting coal
on the Rhone-Saone system and Proudhon became an expert on river
transportation, and, in his own eyes, a master of business method. As
was usual with him, all his experience was worked into his philosophy.
It reinforced his belief that other revolutionaries who knew nothing of
book-keeping were unworthy of attention, for book-keeping by double
entry applied to society was the solution of all social problems; so
arithmetical arguments now begin to come in at suitable and unsuitable
moments. Gauthierâs business was beginning to suffer from the
competition of railways; and Proudhon began to write on railway
economics. Theorists might talk about savings in time and money, but he
knew, that if it were not for the double-dealing of the government under
the influence of the speculators, the canals and rivers of France would
hold their own and departments which had river communications in their
territory would not have their vested interests ruined by the selfish
greed of the other departments which cared nothing for the bargemen or
stevedores of Lyons, if only they could get their goods carried cheaply
and quickly from Paris to Marseilles! It is difficult to decide if he
detested railways more for being so often under the control of
Saint-Simonists (who were also Jews), than he detested Saint-Simonists
for being builders and exploiters of railways! When Proudhon tries to
discuss railways and canals the âfallacy of misplaced concretenessâ is
seldom far away!
But business was only a means of livelihood; the passion for preaching
was as strong as ever. He dreamed of editing a newspaper; he engaged in
an attack on the famous Dominican preacher, Lacordaire; and he published
his treatise On the Creation of Order in Humanity, or Principles of
Political Organisation. This is a confused work which its author
afterwards regretted. It shows the high-water mark of Fourierâs
influence and some of Proudhonâs disillusionment with it may be due to
this inconvenient fact; but there is a good deal of essential Proudhon
scattered through these ill-planned pages, most characteristic, perhaps,
in the announcement of the true object of political economy. âEither
political economy is a hoax and those who teach it are liars: or it
really has as its object, the centralisation of industrial forces, and
the disciplining of the market.â
If The Creation of Order was ambitious, the book which grew out of it
was more ambitious still, for Proudhon was convinced that he had
discovered fundamental contradictions in the writings of the classical
economists. He proposed to show the existence of these contradictions
and, later, to harmonise them. So the motto of his new book was Destruam
et Aedificabo (I shall destroy and build up). He secured as publishers,
Guillaumin, the leading economic publishers, and they insisted in
tempering the vigour of his assaults on the orthodox economists. The
book appeared on October 15, 1846, under the title of The System of
Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Poverty.
Although there are still writers who regard this book, highly, its main
importance, to-day, is that it marked the occasion of Proudhonâs break
with Marx. The latter, as a refugee in Paris, had made Proudhonâs
acquaintance and, for a time there was a brisk exchange of ideas between
them. Marx later professed to have indoctrinated Proudhon with Hegel-
and to regret it, since Proudhon was incapable of using the dialectical
method successfully and was only led further astray by his attempts to
do so. This Proudhon would not admit and, indeed, the question was
little moment, for Hegel, like Kant, was mere topdressing for Proudhonâs
ideas and he was quit capable of getting a smattering of Hegelian
language from other sources than Marx. A rupture was bound to come; each
was a born teacher, but a poor disciple; each was jealous of fame and of
authority. Sorel suggests that Marx came to resent the influence which
Proudhon had acquired in Germany at a time when he, the learned doctor,
was still unknown and there are some evidences of this in the
confutation of Proudhon which Marx hastened to publish. Bo apart from
personal differences, the doctrinal positions of the two men were widely
apart. For Proudhon, socialism was primarily a solution for moral
problem, the deliverance of the individual from the fetters imposed on
him by the industrial system; he was not, and never pretended to be,
communist. For Marx, there were no absolute moral truths which had
existed from the beginning of time and which the French Revolution had
revealed; the fundamental force was the organisation of the methods of
production. A clash between the materialist and the spiritualist views
of history was inevitable. In any case, Proudhon, for all his
pretensions, was not a system builder, he repeated, in various forms,
what he considered a few fundamental truths, but he recoiled from a new
orthodoxy, especially one coming from another source and animated by
another spirit. Before he broke with Marx, he appealed to him âto give
an example of a learned and foresighted tolerance .. donât let us pose
as apostles of a new religion, even of the religion of logic, the
religion of reason.â On these terms, he thought it possible to
co-operate with Marx, and he willingly awaited Marxâs criticisms of his
book. âI am willing to accept the rod from your hands, if there is
reason for it, and with good grace, waiting for my revenge.â The rod did
descend, but not on a grateful victim!
Marxâs criticism took the form of a long, able, hostile and angry tract
called The Poverty of Philosophy. Proudhon would not have been Proudhon
-or a human being â if he had remained passive under this assault. Marx
was still obscure, (twenty years later, for Proudhonâs first biographer,
Saint-Beuve, he had remained obscure), and he hurt Proudhonâs pride as
well as his doctrines. He declared that Proudhon owed his reputation in
France to the belief that he was a master of German philosophy and, in
Germany to the belief that he was a master of French economics; both of
these beliefs, as Marx proposed to show, were erroneous. Proudhon was a
clever pamphleteer who had overestimated his strength and, far from
being a leader of the social revolution, was a champion of the most
backward class of all, that of the âlesser bourgeoisieâ to which he
belonged, a class doomed to disappear, and one whose wriggles under the
harrow of modem capitalism had no permanent historical interest and
could in no way affect the movement of society. In attempting to erect
the prejudices of this class into eternal laws of nature, in his
preoccupation with ârightâ and âwrongâ, instead of with the dialectical
movement of history, Proudhon showed his incapacity for understanding
either philosophy or economics; he neither understood, Hegel nor could
apply Ricardo. âThe work of M. Proudhon is not simply a treatise on
political economy, an ordinary book, it is a Bible. âMysteriesâ,
âSecrets dragged from the bosom of Godâ, âRevelationsâ, nothing is
lacking.â These rhetorical passages are irrelevant, but they are
symptomatic of Proudhonâs mind, for he thinks of economic activity as
subordinated to ethical activity, but if the work of one man is now
worth that of another, âit is not the doing of M. Proudhonâs âeternal
justiceâ, it is solely the accomplishment of modern industryâ.
This assault, when it came, infuriated Proudhon. He had expected attacks
from the right. His patient friend, Bergmann, had reproached him with
the pamphleteering character he had given to what passed for a work of
science, but Proudhon defended his personalities. âTo my mind, in
politics, in practical morals, in social science, in all that concerns
active life and the actuality of societies, theories are not merely
ideas, abstractions of the mind; they are interests, influences,
alliances, intrigues, persons as well.â But what was sauce for the goose
was not sauce for the gander; and the âlibel of a Doctor Marxâ was âa
tissue of insults, abuse, calumnies, falsifications and plagiarismsâ. As
the notes he made on his copy show, Proudhon thought that The Poverty of
Philosophy was merely an expression of jealousy on Marxâs part. âThe
real meaning of Marxâs work is that he regrets that, all through, I have
thought like him and that I have said it before himâ. Whatever Marxâs
motives may have been (and he was not altogether an amiable man!) this
was not one of them, for the two, men differed profoundly as to method
and as to object.
But even to-day it is still not enough to say of a book, to dispose of
it, that Marx did not approve. The merits of the two men were very
different and Proudhon might have incurred just criticism and yet the
book be, in the main, a good one. To one reader, at least, it seems a
bad one. It loses, by its length and diffuseness, the fighting point of
the Memoirs on Property; if it has dropped much of the terminology, it
preserves much of the confusion of The Creation Of Order; it has more
than the usual share of rhetoric and less than the usual share of
eloquence. God is brought in and then asmued as the origin of evil. The
refusal, or inability, to understand what the classical economists were
driving at, makes long passages mere verbiage. There is the customary
assault on railways and the usual philology, ingeniously defended to
Bergmann, who thought it irrelevant â and, as philology, bad. But if
Proudhonâs genius is often hidden, it sometimes flashes out. He wins a
few verbal, if not substantial, victories over his antagonists; and
there are momentary triumphs of his irony. âWhat need have we now of the
dietary rules of the Church? Thanks to taxes, all the year is Lent for
the worker; and his Easter dinner is not equal to the Bishopâs Good
Friday collation.â But there were people whom the book impressed and
events were soon to make of its author, an actor, instead of merely an
observer.
PROUDHON had grown more and more discontented with his job; it kept him
away from Paris, in Lyons and travelling round the provinces. Even at
the best of times he was not easy to get on with. âI felt,â he wrote to
Bergmann, âsomething that was unsuitable and, above all, in the way they
carried it onâ; so, in October, 1847, he settled in Paris, hoping to
make a place for himself, to start a newspaper, The People, which âwill
be the first act of the economic revolution, the plan of campaign of
work against capital....I hope the editing will be as original as the
position is exceptional.â He made his preparations, badly shaken by the
death of his mother,âworn out, like my father, by age, difficulties,
toil, weariness....I cannot accustom myself to the idea that nobody
cares about me, that my old mother is gone.â the temperature of the
political battle was rising; but Proudhon looked on the parliamentary
battle with scorn. âThe best thing that could happen for the French
people, would be the throwing of a hundred members of the opposition
into the Seine with millstones round their necks.....They are worth a
hundred times less than the conservatives, for they are hypocrites into
the bargain.â But this was not the solution that was found; for, on
February 24, the bourgeois monarchy fell, with less resistance and far
less dignity than had the elder line of the Bourbons. The sceptical
observer of politics had taken part in the overthrow. Proudhon had gone
out when the fighting was taking place and had been called on by Flocon,
one of the leaders of the revolt, to serve the revolution with his
trade. He had set up the manifesto: âCitizens, Louis-Philippe is having
you murdered as did Charles X; send him to rejoin revolution triumph;
and he was filled with contempt both for the government which had
collapsed so feebly and for the leaders of the revolt who were being
carried to power on a wave of popular feeling. The workers were all
right, gay, brave, joking, honest. But, on the morning after the
victory, when all Paris had lost its head with enthusiasm, Proudhon kept
his. The revolution had no plan. âIt must be given a direction and
already I see it perishing in a flood of speeches.â However, âI should
prefer to believe that my point of view is false, rather than accuse
everybody else of folly.â Proudhon was no a model of prudence and , when
he was engaged in conflict, he often lost all sense of proportion, but
to have written this diagnosis of the Revolution of February 24, on
February 25, was an astonishing feat of penetration for it was Proudhon
who was right â and the naive enthusiasts who were wrong.
The early illusions were natural enough; the bourgeois monarch had gone,
with hardly a show of resistance, why should the bourgeoisie itself not
be as easily displaced? As for the society which should be built on the
ruins of the old order, were there not plenty of acute critics and bold
constructors to be pressed into service? Was there not Louis Blanc? Were
there not the Fourierists and the Saint -Simonists, and Cabetians? Was
there not Proudhon who had promised to provide a solution of the
contradictions of the old system? Some of the workers remembered
Proudhon; they called on him and pressed him into service on February
26; two days after the fall of the monarchy. They offered to provide
paper and a printer. Proudhon consented; he was to have his journal at
last and he was launched on the dangerous career of a party leader; he
had now both to preach his doctrine and get it accepted. He stood as a
candidate for the Doubs (Franche-Comté) and for Paris. He appealed to
Louis Blanc, who represented socialism in the Provisional Government, in
an effort to find common ground. Despite his avowed intentions of
conciliating masters and workers, he was not elected â and Louis Blanc
snubbed him. He had for the moment, to preach his doctrine through
pamphlets and through his newspaper, The Representative of the People.
What did he preach?
The essential doctrine in Proudhon is the identification of Justice with
equality and the coercion of economic life into accord with Justice. The
necessity and possibility of equality was taken as obviously true; all
economic reasoning had to end with equality. So, for the theory of
value, Proudhon substitutes a theory of the just price. If the orthodox
economists say that value is not fixed, but is a relation between supply
and demand, they are condemned out of their own mouths, for what meaning
can âvalueâ have if it is not certain? Room is left for the âhiggling of
the marketâ, but, for Proudhon, this is no metaphor; he really means the
higgling of the market, the chaffering in the village square between the
man selling a cow and the man selling fodder. The just price is revealed
by this higgling; the two parties discover, by higgling, what is the
real price of a cow and of fodder in terms of each other; it will lie
between the highest demand and the lowest offer in each case, but the
range of variation is small, for value is based on the cost of
production. It is doubtful if Proudhon appreciated all the ambiguities
hidden under his âcost of productionâ, but he saw some of them. The cost
of production is that of the average producer, a price fixed by the
practice of the trade. How that customary price is to be fixed without
âmarket-anarchyâ we are not clearly told. A healthy society is that in
which all production is organized on a basis of mutuality, when
producers agree to be consumers of the goods produced by each other.
When that occurs, all prices will be âconstitutedâ; the present anarchy,
in which all goods are priced in money will be ended; and the monopoly
of money, and of credit, which is the stronghold of
counter-revolutionary capitalism, will fall.
Proudhonâs immediate object was to persuade the workers â and the
government â that it was easy to bring about this state of affairs, to
give the revolution a real social content. What is needed is cheap, or
rather , free credit. It is impossible to understand Proudhonâs views on
this question without knowing what he believed about money. Money (gold
and silver) were the only commodities whose value was constituted; this
gave their possessors an unfair advantage over the producers of
unconstituted values. It is doubtful how far Proudhon realised that gold
and silver had a variable price like all other goods. He talks of a
happy time if gold and silver were as plentiful as iron and copper and
so no more valuable, but it is doubtful if he saw the implications of
this remark. A price level was not interpreted by him as an aspect of
the price of money. Marx had asked him if he really believed that
everything could be dear at the same time and it seems probable that he
did! Gold and goods could both be dear. In form, at any rate, Proudhon
was a fanatical deflationist. He believed that there was some social
gain in an absolutely uniform and symmetrical reduction of prices. All
his life he thought of low prices, not as a sign of abundance, but as a
good in themselves; the Restoration became a golden age in retrospect,
because prices had been so low. âReal wagesâ is a conception which is
seldom traceable in Proudhonâs work. The first measure he advocated, was
a rigorous deflation of all costs, not to meet world competition, not to
shift a burden from one class to another, but simply to make the meagre
supply of money go further. There was to be a general reduction of
interest charges, the bank-rate, salaries and wages. Proudhon thought
this programme quite practicable, and in some forms of it, he argued
that no one would lose, that the total result would be to have everybody
where they started â except that all goods would be cheaper. When he
advocated this, in his debate with Thiers, the latter asked, naturally
enough, what was the good of going to all that trouble? In fact, of
course, as Thiers pointed out, Proudhonâs schemes would not result in a
uniform reduction, but in a reduction of the returns from one kind of
property, that based on fixed-interest charges: it was fixed interest,
not property as such, that Proudhon, at this moment of his career,
regarded as theft. Marx, Bastiat, Thiers, Walras, all in vain pointed
out that interest was only an aspect of property; that it was
inseparable from property. Proudhon was adamant, interest was wrong
because only labour could create wealth; the owner of capital did no
work when he lent it, so that any interest on it was stolen from the
borrower of the capital.
There are two classes of writers on credit, those who believe that a
bird in the hand is always worth a bird plus something in the bush; and
those who regard this supposed axiom as a superstition. Proudhon
belonged to the second class. For him, lending was no hardship, you only
lent something for which you had no immediate use and you got it back
intact after the period agreed upon. Where, then, was the privation for
which Bastiat and the other preachers of orthodoxy said you had to be
compensated? At times, pressed in formal controversy, Proudhon hesitated
and allowed various charges to be made for loans, but interest as such
was wrong. It was one of the errors of the Church that having once
grasped the moral and economic truth that interest was wrong, she had
wavered and tried to make distinctions between banking and usury; there
was no distinction, all interest for the use of money or goods was
usury. In Proudhonâs money market, only demand counted; usury would
stop. That lending might stop too; and that a credit structure, based on
loans which were no privation to the lender, might be rather inadequate
for the needs of society did not occur to him, for the time element was
disregarded. He seems, at moments, to regard the importance attached to
immediate possession as a counter-revolutionary superstition and when he
reflects that what prevents a farmer who, over thirty years, pays the
total value of his farm in rent, from thereby becoming its owner, is the
insistence of the proprietor of the land on money down, his indignation
is at least as much directed at the stupidity, as at the cupidity of the
landlord! To declare that all rent should be deemed part purchase and
that the rent of money could thus be avoided seemed simple enough. It
was this illusion that property could be left intact and prevented from
having its fruits that infuriated Marx, who could find nothing worse to
say of Proudhon, as an economic controversialist, than that even Bastiat
was too much for him.
The bank-rate declared by the Bank of France seemed to Proudhon, not an
example of the general power of capital, but a result of the legal
monopoly given the bank. Let the state order the reduction of the
bank-rate and of all fixed charges to one percent or half percent and
the usurers would be defeated. Who, he asked, would borrow at five
percent if they could get money at a half percent if they could get
money at a half percent, this being a charge made merely to cover
book-keeping expenses? Who would lend at that price when by buying
property, instead of titles to money, they could evade this legislation,
was a question he did not answer! If he did not answer the question who
would lend money, he did answer the question, how would credit be
provided? By mutuality. The monopoly of capital could be broken if all
producers ignored the monetary system and exchanged the goods at just
prices, guaranteed by mutual confidence. As time was unimportant, the
knowledge that, at some time in the future, you would get a bag of flour
in return for the immediate delivery of three pairs of shoes, was all
that you could want. If all classes of producers were united in these
mutual agreements, money would be unnecessary and the entries on the
books of the bank would take their place. Book-keeping without money,
that was the panacea.
He demanded, therefore, that the government should decree that âsince
direct exchange without money and without interest, is both part of
natural right and of public utilityâ, interest should be cut down and
free credit established. Failure to realise both the desirability and
practicability of this reform, was a sign of wickedness, or of
stupidity, or of both. Most left-wing leaders fell under this ban. Some
were communists and so enemies of liberty and the family; others were
absorbed in mere politics, in universal suffrage and other devices for
rendering harmless what was necessarily harmful, the authoritarian
state. In pursuit of these chimeras, they needlessly alienated the
middle classes who could be shown that they had as much interest in the
abolition of the credit monopoly as any worker. In the hectic atmosphere
of die spring and summer of 1848, when the old order seemed to be
collapsing everywhere, Proudhon, like many others, acquired a following.
At a by-election in June, he was elected to the assembly from Paris with
a very handsome majority. He now had to play the part of the statesman,
and his conduct in the next few months alienated him from most of his
political allies, and so drove him further towards his natural goal,
anarchy.
By the time Proudhon entered the assembly the revolution was obviously
ebbing. The crushing of the revolt of the workers in the days of June
showed that bourgeois society was stronger than had seemed possible in
March. The countryside had sent an immense conservative majority to the
assembly, and reaction grew stronger every day. Proudhon, despite some
rash words, was against trying to remedy this state of affairs by armed
revolt, but he was himself a scarecrow to right-thinking people. A play
was put on called Property is Theft, and Proudhon was daily abused as a
monster, inspired by the Devil. His newspaper was suppressed again and
again, and Proudhon was a liability to the left-wing parties who were
now trying to save something out of the wreck. When Proudhon, on July
31, declared his policy to the assembly, that body voted that âthe
preposition of Citizen Proudhon is an odious attack on the principles of
public moralsâ. There were only two disentient votes, that of Proudhou
himself and of Greppo. The rift with the left-wing leaders continued to
grow. Proudhou refused to vote against the reactionary ministry of which
his old protector, Vivien, was a member. He fought a duel with FĂ©lix
Pyat, and would have had to fight others had he not refused to be bound
by the conventions of French politics. He was a leader of the extreme
left section which broke up party unity in the presidential election by
running Raspail against Ledru-Rollin. Out of seven million votes cast,
Raspail got thirty thousand. The unknown Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, whom
Proudbon had tried to indoctrinate, was elected, and Proudhon poured out
abuse on the new head of France whom many critics felt he had done much
to elect. The assembly was not slow to take its chance to reprove
sedition in the person of the enemy of society, and it allowed Proudhon
to be tried for his attacks on the head of the state. He was sentenced
to three yearsâ imprisonment and three thousand francs fine. He had just
started his âBank of the Peopleâ, but the chance of trying out his
theories was lost. He escaped to Belgium, but was rash enough to return
to Paris, was denounced, and sent to prison.
His life as an active politician was at an end; and he had the leisure
to think out his system and digest the experience of the past year. He
had also a new tie to take the place left vacant by his mother, for he
had married a poor seamstress, Euphrasie PiĂ©gard, âwith premeditation,
without passion, to be a father of a family, to have a complete life,
and to have by me, in the vortex into which I have cast myself, an image
of maternal simplicity and modestyâ. His wife was a fit companion for an
agitator; ill-educated, but an excellent manager and resolute in all
difficulties. He married outside the Church, a great triumph for him,
for his wifeâs father was a royalist of the extreme right. The
inconveniences of such a connection were to be made evident when his
father-in-law was sentenced to two yearsâ imprisonment for a royalist
conspiracy after a trial, of which the most interesting document was a
petition to the Pretender, the Comte de Chambord, written by Proudhon;
himself ! It was, said Proudhon, a hoax, but by that time (1853), he had
enough enemies to rub it in to him that there are follies which look
like crimes. For the moment, marriage calmed him. His wife lived
opposite the prison, Sainte-PĂ©lagie, and in November, 1850, Proudhon was
delighted by the birth of daughter.
For the greater part of his prison life, he was very leniently treated,
by British standards, allowed daily visits from his wife, and allowed to
go out of prison. He wrote for his paper, now a weekly called The
People, and even managed to get tried and acquitted for another violent
piece of journalism. As the reaction got stronger, and as the resistance
of the left took the criminally foolish form of the insurrection of
June, 1849, Proudhonâs prison liberties were restricted. He was, for a
period, sent to Doullens and to Bourges, where he met most of the other
left-wing leaders and was characteristically scornful of them. âThe one
thing I dislike more than persecutors,â he was reported to say, âare
martyrs.â He had himself been a victim of June, for the National Guard,
now the storm-troopers of reaction, had destroyed his printing plant.
The futile appeals to more rebellion which came from the exiles
infuriated him and, when the dying Republic was snuffed out by the
Presidentâs coup dâ etat of December 2, 1851, Proudhonâs dislike of the
victors was considerably tempered by his scorn of the vanquished. By
sweeping away the debris of democracy, the dictator was leaving the way
clear for the prophet of the true revolutionary doctrine â anarchy.
Proudhonâs place in the history of anarchy is secure; there were moments
of inconsistency; moments of wavering when he looked to the state and
even to mere politics for deliverance, but, as he announced in the First
Memoir, âI am an anarchistâ -and he remained one. Anarchy was in the
air; many reformers besides Proudhon were anxious to carry out the
Saint-Simonist programme and to substitute âthe administration of things
for the administration of menâ. By anarchy, Proudhon meant the absence
of a master and of subjects. He was always sceptical of mere differences
in political form. He was a republican by temperament; his devotion to
the revolution as the dawn of equality made it hard for him to tolerate
such a glaring exception to equality as hereditary monarchy; but he
never attached a sufficient importance to the sacred word ârepublicâ to
qualify as quite orthodox among the writers and politicians of the left.
What he wanted of a government was that it should commit suicide
gracefully, giving way to the free anarchical society without trying to
make the birth of the new order difficult. If the House of Orleans would
put itself at the disposal of the Revolution, Proudhon would put up with
the anomaly of hereditary political power. He was willing, later, to
make the same bargain with the House of Bonaparte, and he saw nothing to
choose between a monarchical and a democratic tyranny. Indeed, he was a
blasphemer of revolutionary orthodoxy; at times a defender of the memory
of the Bourbons, even of Charles X, a praiser of the Charter of 1814,
and an assailant of the Jacobins whose divine right of the majority was
as outrageous in theory and far more dangerous in fact than the divine
right of âHenry Vâ. When personally infuriated he was willing to believe
any nonsense about Napoleon III, ready to credit his imminent deposition
at the hands of palace conspirators, but never willing to put his
differences with the imperial government on the ground of political
illegitimacy. Universal suffrage was a delusion; but a government
professing to be based on it should not be allowed to tamper with its
working, yet the obsession of âthe Jacobinsâ with mere politics, the
attempt to get the state into their own hands, was a deception of the
people, for if property was theft, the state was tyranny, be it empire
or republic. The ideal to be aimed at in matters of government is not
âdirect legislation or direct government or simplified government, but
no more governmentâ. As early as 1840, Proudhon had declared that most
of the functions of government will disappear, and those which remain
will take on a scientific character, a science of which the data are
statistics (for the belief in book-keeping was present before the
experience of it); but, if the basis of anarchy is present in What is
Property?, it is in the books written after the death of the illusions
of 1848 that the doctrine is set forth in most detail and with most
enthusiasm. A state, Proudhon had finally learned, could only be an evil
whether it was ruled by Ledru-Rollin or by Louis Napoleon. Government
was always for the governors, never for the governed. No democratic
machinery could alter the fact that those who detained power were
masters and those who had to obey, servants. All sophisms of the general
will, all social contracts in the manner of Rousseau which attempted to
explain away the necessary surrender of liberty involved in any powerful
state, were enemies of the rights of every man to rule âhimself, not in
fiction, but in fact. Not only was the state an evil, it was not a
necessary evil. âThe social constitution,â he wrote in The Confessions
of a Revolutionary, âis bound up with human nature, liberal, necessary
... its development consists above all in weakening and getting rid of
the political constitution which is essentially artificial, restrictive
and transitory.â How was the state to be replaced and society given its
constitution? By the magic power of contract. No lawyer, not even Sir
Henry Maine, had a more lyrical conception of the glories of contract
than had Proudhon. Mutual contracts were to solve the problem of
exchange and of credit,â they were also to solve the problem of
political organisation. The General Idea of the Revolution in the
Nineteenth Century is a hymn to contract. âThe idea of contract excludes
that of government.... What characterises the contract, the mutual
convention, is that in virtue of this convention manâs liberty and
wellbeing increase, whilst by the institution of an authority, both
necessarily diminish.â The object of social science is âto find a form
of bargin which, bringing to unity the divergence of interests,
identifying the private and the general good, effacing the inequality of
nature by that of education, resolves all political and economic
contradictions; where each individual is equally and synonymously
producer and consumer; citizen and prince; administrator and
administered; where his liberty always increases, without any need ever
to alienate any part of it; where his wellbeing grows indefinitely,
without his experiencing, from society or from his fellow-citizens, any
injury either in his property or his work or in his income or in his
connections of interest or affection with his kindâ.
How was this paradise to be reached? Not by the aid of government, that
was Louis Blancâs error. A government cannot be paternal if it is
limited, for, asks Proudhon, âwhat father ever thought of a bargain with
his family.... The authority whose seat is in the family is a mystical
principle, anterior and superior to the will of the people concernedâ,
but society has no such basis for its authority. On the other hand, an
unlimited authority in the state is inequality, tyranny....âThe rule of
contracts substituted for the rule of laws would constitute ... the real
sovereignty of the people, the REPUBLIC.â Proudhon was conscious that
his faith in contract was not universally shared. âYou imagine that it
is impossible to fulfil these conditions. The social contract, when you
consider the frightful number of relations it ought to regulate ... seem
something like squaring the circle or perpetual motion. That is why,
worn out with the fight, you relapse into despotism and force...
Realise, however, that if the social contract can be concluded between
two producers -and who doubts that, in this simple form, there is a
solution? â it can equally be concluded between millions since the
undertaking is the same, and the number of signatures â while they make
it more and more effective â do not add an article [to the agreement].
Your alleged inability is non-existent then; it is ridiculous and makes
you inexcusable.â
Given the practicability of a society so organised, it must be
understood that the contractual basis of society does not create rights
and obligations not set out in the bond. All this talk about
âassociationâ is dangerous, for it implies that there is a common will
in the associates, that the body they create has a life of its own
outside the narrow objects for which it has been created. But such
theories are conducive to tyranny. A society for production creates no
bond between its members outside those indispensable for the economic
activity of the society. The absolute independence of each member must
be observed. No social food is worth the price of liberty. Naturally,
such a doctrine made its author suspicious of trade unions, and strikes
he abhorred from the beginning to the end of his life.
As was usual with Proudhon, he destroyed before he built up. Even in the
comparatively early expositions (The General Idea of the Revolution: The
Confessions of a Revolutionary), written under the shadow of the
disasters of 1848â49, Proudhon recognises that the state will not
disappear at once, although, for obvious reasons, he is convinced that
if other state institutions may have a little life in them, the judicial
system must be immiediately abolished for the state has no right to
punish, although a man may ask to be punished.
The apparent necessity of the state is due to economic inequality,
because of the absence of justice. When all men have bound themselves to
mutual justice, the need for the coercive apparatus of the state will
vanish. Even in the present system, the claims of the state are
exaggerated. France has to endure an immense army, hordes of officials,
a splendid court, all necessitating an overwhelming burden of taxation,
because Frenchmen are vain; because they want their country to make a
great impression in the world. They are the victims of any skilful
jingo. What good does it do them? They are worse off than the Swiss, who
have no such illusions.Their vast and expnsive army ought to be replaced
by a militia which would be competent for defence, but not for tyranny.
In any case, there is not one French nation; there are thirty submerged
nationalities in France, and, in a rationally organised society, these
ânationsâ would be the natural unitsof government. The deadly
centralisation beloved of tyrants, Bonapartes and Jacobins, with their
fetish of âindivisible Franceâ would be destroyed, to the benefit of all
concerned, even of Paris. As long as Paris has concentrated within her
walls, the government, the financial and educational institutions of the
country; as long as the whole of France is taxed to adorn the capital
with splendid buildings; so long it will be impossible to permit Paris
to have any active political life of her own.
The solution to this, as to other governmental problems, was federalism.
This was the answer to the contradictions Proudhon thought he had shown
to exist in the political sphere, the clash between government, even
âdemocraticâ government and liberty. The smaller the unit, the greater
degree of freedom in government. The great industrial units should rule
themselves and a federalism, based on the free cooperation of the
communes and provinces, would solve the purely governmental problems.
The commune (the parish or town) should rule itself, provide for its own
justice and its own educational needs. The intrusion of the central
government into these fields should cease. The commune should even
provide and control its own church. The great day of the Revolution was
the day of the Federation, before Jacobin absolutism had diverted the
Revolution from the true path.
This enthusiasm for federalism affected Proudhonâs judgment of current
events in odd ways. He bitterly regretted the annexation of Savoy to
France. What fools the Saveyards were to let themselves be tricked by
their clergy into voting for annexation to France when they might have
become a free Swiss Canton! In any case, how disgusting was the
spectacle of Victor Emmanuel abandoning the land of his ancestors!
Italian unity is only a hoax for is not the destruction of Tuscan
nationality a great disaster? The real greatness of Italy is only
possible in a federal state. So we find Proudhen defending the projected
Italian confederation against the blind admirers of Mazzini and
lamenting the defeat of the armies of King Francis of Naples! The
spectacle of the great revolutionary fostering the same sacred flame as
Cardinal Antonelli and âKing Bombaâs Lazzaroniâ was startling enough,
but Proudhon even asserted that the Lombard peasants were quite
indifferent whether their oppressors were Italians or Austrians. Indeed,
Austria, by moving in the path of federalism, was making her place in
the forefront of civilisation secure, while Italy was going back!
Real unity, he was to write at the end of his life, âwas in inverse
proportion to size; so, in every collectivity, organic power loses in
intensity what it gains in extension and reciprocally.... Apply this law
to politics; a state is essentially one, indivisible, inviolable: the
bigger her population and area grow, the further force of cohesion and
the unity of the government will decrease .... Let branches be formed,
let colonies be formed... these will form a federal bond with the mother
state â or even will have no connection at all.â Small states or
communes, directly ruled by freemen, who were economically equal, each
master of his trade or of his farm â and of his family, that was
Proudhonâs ideal community; a community like the Battant of his youth,
but not under the guns of the citadel of Besancon nor at the disposal of
a prefect sent from Paris! In a federal organisation for each country
and for Europe as a whole, Proudhon, at the end of his life, asserted
that he had found the solution of the political problem he had posed in
1840. He had destroyed â he now built up. âI began by anarchy, the
conclusion of my criticism of the idea of government, to finish by
federation, as the necessary base of European public law and, later on,
of the organisation of all states. On all this question, it is easy to
see that logic, right and liberty are dominant; so that public order
basing itself directly on the liberty and conscience of the citizen,
anarchy, the absence of all restraint, of all police, authority, judges,
legal rules, etc., is discovered to be the correlative of the highest
social virtue and the ideal of human government. No doubt we are far
away from it, and it will take centuries before we reach this ideal; but
our LAW is to advance in that direction.â
While Proudhon was formulating his doctrine of anarchy, he was watching
the political situation with impatience and with hope. He was lucky to
be imprisoned when the conflict between the assembly and the president
was coming to a head. He had not to choose between a reactionary
parliament and a probably reactionary dictator. Proudhon made no point
of political orthodoxy. He had always been sceptical of universal
suffrage, and if the sight of millions of Frenchmen putting their
destinies in the hands of Louis Napoleon disgusted him, it did not
surprise him. He had not thought France ready for revolution in 1848;
now it was obvious she was not; but having had to âjump out of the
first-floor window instead of coming downstairs one at a timeâ, Proudhon
was willing to make the best of a bad job. He saw clearly the dilemma in
which the President found himself. On the one hand, Louis Napoleon had
appealed to the conservative elements as the saviour of society; on the
other, he had dissolved the assembly which had limited the right to
vote, and was supposed to be preparing a monarchist restoration. All
governments were alike to Proudhon, dangerous institutions, but the new
one need not be any worse than the last. Let Louis Napoleon give proof
that he was with the Revolution and his ambition, his broken oath, and
the blood of December would be forgiven him. That proof above all, lay
in his religious policy. Proudhon was now a most determined
anti-clerical. In 1847 he had replied to the ritual question asked of
him when he was admitted as a Freemason. âWhat does man owe to God?â by
the startling answer âWarâ; but not until the combination of the Church
with the conservatives in 1848, did he resolve on war to the death
against the clerical party. There were, in the Prince-Presidentâs
circle, men as rigorously anti-clerical as Proudhon; notably Prince
Napoleon. Through common friends, Proudhon kept in touch with the
prince; he even visited him from time to time at the Palais Royal, to
the horror of the exiles in London and Brussels, to whom the crime of
the coup dâetat was inexpiable. Proudhon refused to leave France; he
refused, for instance, to take refuge in Sardinia. âWho the devil,â he
asked, âexpects enlightenment From Cagliari?â He refused a more tempting
offer, for Albert Brisbane, the populariser of Fourierâs doctrines in
America, friend of all new ideas, and father of Mr. Hearstâs chief
leaderwriter, wanted to bring Proudhon to New York. He was free in his
denunciations of the allies of December 2, the âsabre and the holy-water
sprinklerâ; but he believed he could make a bargain with the new rulers
of France. He would devote himself exclusively to science âwith its
axioms, its determinations, its method, its own certainty, a science
which is neither mathematics nor jurisprudence, nor anything that is
called science at present .... After economic science a Philosophy of
History... and, later, a General Philosophy .... All this can be done in
France, in spite of despotism.â Proudhon hoped, above all, to get
permission to start a journal in which he could assail the clericals and
induce the new regime to move to the left, but he was too notorious and
not tactful enough to be worth conciliating. His hopes were dashed again
and again; he was told that the Jesuits were behind the refusal of
permission; but he came to realise, slowly, that his days as a
journalist were over. He had his living to make, and he was full of
literary projects, among them being a History of Democracy, which
remained a fragment. In the meantime, he put together a potboiler called
The Manual of the Stock Exchange Speculator. Proudhon usually had the
highest opinion of his books while he was writing them, but grew
disillusioned after they were published; but he reversed this history in
the case of the Manual. Most of it was the work of Duchene, the former
manager of The People, but, as the book sold well, Proudhon put his own
name on the title-page of the third edition. The Manual is chiefly
devoted to describing various companies then quoted on the Paris Bourse
and has a limited interest to-day, but Proudhon was incapable of
writing, or even of revising anything and not marking it with his
personality. The Manual is a very characteristic work. Proudhoh displays
his scepticism about railways; his dislike of Saint-Simonisto who are
both capitalists and Jews; his belief in the immense possibilities of
mutuality and of the reform of credit; his hostility to the
possibilities of monopoly working through railway rebates, and a rather
pathetically optimistic belief in the future of co-operative societies
of production as a step towards a reformed society. His Railway Reform
was a vigorous assault on the imperial policy of creating vested
interests in the railways by giving concessions. By leaving the railways
too much freedom in fixing their charges, they are permitted to ruin
water transport and then to plunder the defenseless public. He believed,
however, that the growth of railways would lead to a decentralisation of
industry and the decay of the great towns â a prediction in the spirit
of his most distinguished disciple, Kropotkin. In any case when the
railways had completed their destuctive work, the old methods of
transport would come into their own!
Proudhonâs hopes of founding a review were now vanishing and he had
public and private motives to resent his enforced silence, for he had no
regular income and he thought his market-value as a journalist was high.
In any case, the Emperor was going over to the counter-revolution
embodied in the Church. Proudhon almost despaired of the French, during
the Crimean War he was ready to believe any bad news and sceptical about
good news. The rapid progress of the industrial system in France under
the Second Empire and the growth of speculation deceived this frivolous
people into thinking it was well off. The national debt kept rising and
the moral tone of the nation kept falling.
Bad temper and genuine indignation found a vent in the publication of
Proudhonâs greatest and most characteristic book. Of Justice in the
Revolution and the Church was ostensibly provoked by a clerical
journalist, Eugéne de Mirecourt, who had publish a brief sketch of
Proudhon. Proudhon had a horror of any intrusion into his private life,
and he flattered himself that he never introduced any personal animus or
scandal into his own writing. Mirecourt, indeed, could not find any
serious flaws in Proudhonâs morals, but, in any case, it was nobodyâs
business if the revolutionary was a model husband and father. When
Proudhon learned that it was to Cardinal Mathieu, the Archbishop of
Besançon, that Mirecourt owed some of his information and that the
Cardinal had attributed Proudhonâs opinions to poverty and pride, his
rage boiled over. A fellow-citizen of Franche-Comté had so far forgotten
the obligations of that bond as to make Proudhon the victim of a
Parisian scribbler! A reply to the Cardinal was begun, a reply which
grew from a pamphlet into a book of over two thousand pages in which
Proudhon repeated almost all he had said, but with a fervour and an
eloquence that he had never equalled before. The main theme of the book
is declared in the title, Of Justice in the Revolution and the Church.
It is not merely a reply to Mirecourt or to the Cardinal; it is a
declaration of war against the Church, a demonstration of the
fundamental incompatibility of the teaching of the Church and the
teaching of the Revolution.
What is the nature of this incompatibility? It lies in the place given
to God in Catholic theology. Proudhon does not deny the existence of
God; but he is hostile to any idea of God which makes human action
depend on His action or which puts off to the next world the remedy for
the injustices of this. The central achievement of the Revolution was
that it brought down Justice from the sky to the earth. Where Christian
teaching had stressed charity, an idea involving more or less than
Justice, the Revolution asserts that Justice is the greatest need of man
-and that it is attainable. To look to God for aid in its achievement is
to corrupt the essential truth that all men hunger after Justice before
all other earthly goods; that Justice is immanent, not transcendental.
Christianity obscures this truth. It has many merits; it is the only
possible alternative to the rule of Justice; but whatever its services
in the past, since the Revolution abolished government by divine right,
all authorities depending on divine right, the Church, and even the
state, substituting the divine right of the people for the divine right
of the king, are condemned. They are a barrier in the way of progress,
the realisation of Justice on earth, Justice revealed in mutual respect,
in economic equality, and in the political equality that will follow
from it.
Most writers would not take two thousand pages to assert these dogmas,
and to illustrate them, but in the course of his argument, Proudhon is
not hampered by relevance. He is able to attack communism, both in the
form of early Christian communities and in that of the Fourierist
phalanstery. The closest reasoning of Bentham may make him a great
economist, but what avails that if he contemn Justice? But he is not
content with attacking opinions; he forgets his own sound principles and
assails persons. His outrageous assault on the memory of Heine shows him
at his worst; and his ostentatious refusal to indulge in mere
anti-clerical scandal mongering did not last long. The wickedness of
bishops who listen too readily to charges made against the morals of
their clergy is stressed in one place- and the truth of those charges
asserted in another. The Cardinal is asked to be grateful that Proudhon
does not dwell on âthat bishop recently dead who became father to a
whole company of national guards; nor on that parish priest who, to the
sight and knowledge of his parishioners, had ten children by three
womenâ. This moderation was not as well received as Proudhon professed
to expect and, when he was asked for his authority, he had to write
furiously to a friend that âthe two cases were told me by a naval
officer, or admiral, who was a witness of them in Spanish America or in
Brazil, I donât know which .... This is called calumny.â As Proudhon had
taken great pains to put his scandals on âthis side of the Atlanticâ,
the charge of calumny was not ill-founded; and it is easy to imagine the
fury with which any similar trick, played by Mirecourt, would have been
received!
In addition to philosophy, economics, morals and scandals, Proudhon
demonstrates his literary principles in Justice. They are not always
consistent. BĂ©ranger is ranked above Pindar, David, Horace. At another
time he is merely one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century;
at another he is very mediocre. Most of the leading contemporary French
writers are relegated to inferior places because of their preoccupation
with art, instead of with teaching. Didactic poetry is the only poetry
worth writing or reading, so the future of Victor Hugo depends on his
abandoning La LĂ©gende des SiĂšcles for more pamphlets. The erotic novels
of George Sand naturally come off badly; English literature has long
been dead; French is now dead; but, not only in prose but in poetry,
French is the best of languages and literatures. That he had no
qualifications for passing on the merits of German or English literature
did not modify Proudhonâs confidence.
Not only does Proudhon wander; some of his old faults of pointless
logical jargon recur: âx being the average value of genius in the human
being, possibly there will be found exceptional individuals whose genius
equals x x 2; there are no geniuses equalling x x 3.â âIf, in strength,
man is to woman as 3 to 2; woman, in beauty, is in turn to man as 3 to
2. Neither the argument for natural equality, the suspicions of any
special claim for talent nor the firmly rooted belief that equality
between men does not involve equality between the sexes, are really
helped by the intrusion of crude mathematical proportions in fields of
judgrnent unfitted for them. More mathematics in his economics and less
in his aesthetics and morals would have improved Proudhonâs books!
If Proudhonâs rivals reproached him with terrifying the middle classes
by his association with the abolition of property, Proudhon was equally
angry with those who gave ground for the belief that socialism and free
love went together. For one thing, he had a low estimate of the
importance of sexual love. It was one of the detestable fruits of the
âromantic scrofulaâ that love was made essential to marriage. Marriage
had higher aims than the gratification of love or lust. Proudhon was
very proud of his own chastity, a form of pride singular enough in the
literary and reforming circles of that day. His own sexual passions do
not seem to have been strong, and he had no sympathy with those whose
passions were stronger. He could do without love as he could do without
tobacco, and the slaves of either of these bad habits had only to
imitate him to their profit. On this subject he was never tired of
preaching, preaching at its best worthy of Massillon, at its not
infrequent worst, rather recalling the powerful articles of Mr. James
Douglas. This enthusiasm for morality made Proudhon the victim of a
celebrated hoax, for he was led to send a letter of advice to a female
circus rider who was repenting an ill-spent life. The advice, if
rigorous, was good, but in the Paris of that time the joke was thought
even better-except by Proudhon, who was furious at the trick played on
him.
In nothing was Proudhonâs position more determinedly maintained than in
his attacks on feminism. His passion for equality was limited. If there
were races which could not be raised to the level of Frenchmen â let
them disappear, but he did not want woman to disappear or to claim
political or social equality with man. The outside world only reached a
woman, in a properly constituted society, through her husband or father.
She was always in tutelage, for she was in body and mind inferior to
man. No doubt she had high qualities of her own which man could not
imitate, but she reached them through man. In Paris corrupt through and
through, where woman novelists were allowed to sap the foundations of
morality and prostitutes flaunted the spoil that their keepers had
stolen on the Stock Exchange, these healthy truths were neglected, but
the traditional peasant view of womanâs place was unflinchingly asserted
by Proudhon and practised by him at home. He did not want of his wife,
or daughters, intellectual equality; he even thought religion a good
thing in its place for a sex incapable of rising to the high conception
af immanent Justice and of taking a place in the life of society in
their own right.
This sexual conservatism did not save Proudhon from prosecution, for the
drift of imperial policy from right to left had been interrupted by the
attempt to murder the emperor made by Orsini. In the reaction that
followed, Proudhon was a victim. Justice had had a great success; it was
seized and its author prosecuted for âattacks on public and religious
morals... defence of crimes... attacks against the respect due to law...
incitement of citizens to mutual hate and scorn ... publication of false
news.â He fought back by ingenious petitions to the Senate, but was
condemned to three years imprisonment and 4,ooo francs fine. His
publisher got one month â and it proved a lesson to him. Appeals were
useless, and Proudhon had to flee to Belgium, where he learned the hard
lessons of life as an exile.
He settled down in Brussels in 1858, full of rage at his plight,
although candid friends pointed out that he had his own violence of
language to thank for it; it was folly to imagine that the imperial
government would let pass so good a chance of conciliating the Church by
sacrificing a pamphleteer who was as troublesome a friend as an enemy.
The first troubles of the exile were financial. Garnier had learned his
lesson. He would publish no more polemical works for Proudhon;
literature, yes, but politics and economics, no! Proudhon had calculated
on the profits of his books to free him from the constant money worries
that he had endured since he had left Lyons. Now he was cut off from his
market. He could write more freely in Belgium than in France, but he
could not reach the French public, or turn his writings into a means of
livelihood. He suffered from constant catarrh, which he blamed on the
Belgian climate; he objected to the high price of wine and to his forced
addiction to beer. Moreover, he made enemies in Belgium. He preached
against centralisation, thus annoying the politicians of Brussels; he,
the great anti-clerical, poured scorn on the Belgian liberals, saying he
preferred the Catholic party; and, if in France he was always attacking
the naive pride of his countrymen, he made it clear to his Belgian hosts
that France was still at the head of civilization. Events were moving
fast in France â and in the direction that Proudhon had advocated. The
Emperor decided, in 1859, to make war on Austria to free Italy. It was a
swerve to the left, to the party of the Revolution and it was so
regarded by observers on both sides. The left rejoiced; the right grew
more and more suspicious, for any upset of the status quo in Italy could
only harm the Pope. Proudhon refused to believe in the war; he refused
to believe in French victories; he refused to rejoice in them; and the
world was soon treated to the spectacle of the great revolutionary
praising the work of the Congress of Vienna; casting cold water on the
idea of Italian nationality; regretting the triumphs of Garibaldi;
abusing Mazzini; burning all the idols of the democratic party in
Europe. He asked, in the spirit of a modern French royalist, what was
the gain for France in creating another great power on her southern
frontier and abandoning the great political asset of being the
hereditary protector of the Pope? He added to his crimes by asserting
that Austria and Russia were truly progressive countries and by
attacking Poland. At that time, an ill-informed and sentimental sympathy
for Poland was as much the mark of a good radical as ill-informed and
sentimental hostility to Poland was the mark of a good modern radical â
until 1933. Poland, said Proudhon, was an aristocratic republic, which
died of her own vices; it should not be revived at the expense of the
future freedom of Russia. Russia, under an enlightened Tsar, is capable
of progress; Catholic Poland is not. The scandal caused was immense;
here was a lost leader indeed, but worse was to come when the apostle of
Justice preached the right of force in the last of his great treatises,
War and Peace.
The argument of this lengthy essay on international law is simple
enough. The great good of human society is equilibrium as a consequence
of the rule of justice, but force has its rights, which have to be
allowed for before a just equilibrium can be reached. Moreover, in war
man develops his personality and learns indispensable lessons of social
organisation: there are passages to the glory of war which would be in
place in a speech by Herr yon Papen, and Proudhon, who had attacked his
fellow-radicals for their jingoism, appeared as a defender of war when,
at long last, the French left parties were turning pacifist! It is true
that the age of war is asserted to be over, that âwar, for every
attentive mind, has held its last assize from â92 to 1815 . The
constitutional system, expression of the politics of interest, corollary
of the famous treaties of 1815, have given it notice to quit... Cursed
then be the nation which, forgetting herself, shall ask from war what
only science, work and liberty can give.â But the conclusions of the
book are not altogether in accordance with its spirit. In his enthusiasm
for the ordeal by battle, Proudhon becomes a victim of what Mr. J. B. S.
Haldane has called âBayardismâ. He objects to strategy and deceit in
war. The object of battle is to discover which of the two parties to a
dispute is the stronger. If, by a stratagem or trick the less strong
side wins, the whole object of war is nullified, since what matters is
the relative strength and a victory of the weaker side over the stronger
is a deplorable falsification of judgment.
War and Peace is a natural pendant of Justice; it is an attempt to
discover how, in fact, rights have been created in the past. That much
of what we take to to be our national rights has been created by war;
that force has fights as well as possession; are truths that sentimental
democrats sometimes neglect, but, as usual, Proudhon was better in
criticism than in construction, and his picture of honourable war giving
place in the new society to equally honourable forms of peaceful
competition, is decidedly Utopian.
His exile came to an end in a most characteristic way. Having refused to
take advantage of an imperial amnesty, Proudhon was living in Brussels
in a dignified exile, when an article which he had written seemed to
advocate the annexation of Belgium to France. The Freemasons, according
to Proudhon, were at the bottom of the agitation which made Belgium too
hot to hold him, for he opposed the evacuation of Rome by the French
garrison. Whatever the cause, he hurriedly took refuge in France on
December 17, 1862; his wanderings were over and his doctrine, in the
main, complete.
He had been an indefatigable writer during his exile and had had the
triumph of winning a prize offered by the Swiss Canton of Vaud for the
best essay on taxation. That the free Swiss, that a state should thus
honour the exile, delighted him, and illustrated again the folly of the
French. According to Proudhon taxation is simply the share each citizeny
has to pay of the cost of providing state services. The state, like any
individual or corporation, ought to sell its services at cost price. Of
these services some citizens will use a bigger share than others, the
rich will get more than the poor, so ought to pay more. But, although an
income tax seems just at first sight, it is added to the cost of goods,
and so is spread over the community, like an ordinary tax on
consumption. He attacks a progressive income tax as tyrannical and
futile, for all taxes become indirect taxes on consumption, the âresult
is zeroâ. A tax on land values, even if the state took only a third of
the revenue from this source, would pay all legitimate expenses of
government. In a well-organised state, government services should not be
more than a tenth of the gross revenue of the community, but until that
happy deflation of the state is achieved, most taxes should be left
alone for most reforms are fictitious! There can be no real justice in
taxation in a society which permits economic inequality, there is the
root of the matter. There are, of course, obvious improvements to be
made in detail; the duties on wines should be reduced, but those on
tobacco kept, (Proudhon was fond of wine and a non-smoker); houses
should be taxed, so as to break up the great towns. It was, indeed, an
eminently conservative essay; apart from its hostility to state action
and its hints of equality as a remedy, there is nothing in it to alarm
the most timid.
One other work of this last period showed Proudhonâs resolute
independence, for living by his pen, he attacked the claims for
perpetual or lengthy copyright made by his fellow-authors, with a zeal
more natural, as Ămile Faguet says, in a publisher than in an author.
Literary Entails is, if not of first-class importance as a contribution
to the theory of property in ideas, at least worthy of Proudhonâs
spirit. Indeed, he repeatedly gave proofs of disinterestedness of a more
immediately practical type than his assault on copyright. With the
ending of his journalistic career, his means of livelihood became very
limited. He thought of going back to business, but that project came to
nothing. He worked for a projected railroad, but the concession went by
favour, and Proudhon refused compensation for his lost time. His own
health and that of his wife and children was not good, and serious
privation, if not actual starvation, came very close. He hoped to be
able to give his two surviving daughters dots, but, should they have to
fend for themselves, they would have the benefit of a severe training;
they were to expect everything from work, nothing from favour. When they
were still children of about ten, he saw signs in them of âdissipation,
vanity and impertinenceâ-vices to be stamped out and when well-meaning
friends sent them too handsome Christmas presents they were rebuked for
spoiling them! But Proudhon was equally severe on himself, and was hurt
by gifts of wine from admirers, gifts he insisted on paying for and, if
he underestimated the risks run by lenders, he may have forgotten that
not all men had his horror of debt or his zeal in repaying money only
borrowed under the pressure of dire necessity!
In his final years, Proudhon again attempted to lead the workers of
Paris into the true revolutionary path. Having made embittered enemies
in the past by his willingness to co-operate with the empire, he now led
the movement for rigid abstention from political life as long as the
imperial administration falsified the working of universal suffrage. He
wished the party of the Revolution to protest against the system by
abstaining from voting or by casting blank ballot papers. The election
of deputies was a tacit approval of the imperial régime and, as
candidates had to take an oath to the Emperor, the crime either of
perjury or of treason to the revolutionary cause, was made inevitable.
To active politidans, anxious to maintain a united front against the
government party, Proudhon was as big a nuisance as he had been in 1848
for he never wrote better than he did in his protest of the Non-Furing
Democrats, and in his advocacy of a declaration of political
independence by the working-classes, the Manifesto of the Sixty, a claim
for working-class representation, a denial of the representative
character of the bourgeois radicals. He left, in his last completed
work, The Political Capacity of the Working-Classes, an exposition of
the same theme. The Revolution had torn the worker out of a stratified
society; it had placed him opposite the bourgeoisie. What does this
class of wage earners bring to the problems of state? It brings a
solution of the problem of justice and equality; the magic formula of
mutuality will solve the economic problem, not communism: federalism
will solve the political problem, not the fantasies of the professional
democrats with their parliaments and armies of voters.
But if the working-class is called to a consciousness of its mission, it
is preached at as well as praised. Its fondness for strikes is
vigorously attacked, and so are the outrageous claims of the trade
unions to interfere with workshop management! An alliance with the
bourgeoisie is advocated; and the workers are reminded that they have
been too busy with their own wrongs to understand the sorrows of the
middle classes. Only a working-class whose moral character frees them
from mere passion can live up to its mission.
The last formal message of the great contradictor was thus harmony, but
Proudhon did not live to see the book through the press. He died on
January 19, 1865. The imperial government, anxious to frighten the
Church, permitted Proudhonâs funeral to be made a great anti-clerical
demonstration, but sent the publisher and printer of his posthumous
Annotated Gospels to prison, a contradiction worthy of Proudhon himself.
If there are real inconsistencies in Proudhonâs work- and there are not
a few- there are more apparent ones. His temper was too hot; he wrote
too much under the influence of immediate events; and these events gave
his prophetic powers the lie too often; for him to escape having to
curse what he had blessed and to bless what he had cursed. He judged
events, and men, by their fitness to aid in the work of the Revolution
and his judgment of what would aid the Revolution was too easily
affected by irrelevant circumstances of personal importance. He was, in
short, a man, not a thinking machine. But he was fundamentally very
consistent, although he concealed his consistency under verbal
extravagances. He grew, it is true, more conservative as he grew older,
less scornful of bourgeois virtues once he had become a bourgeois
himself, and more inclined to scepticism of the virtues of a populace
which paid so little attention to the advice he gave it. Then his
refusal to understand what his opponents meant sometimes had surprising
results. To read in War and Peace that even âif production is doubled,
population will not be long in being doubled in its turn, which means
there is no changeâ -and to reflect that this pessimism comes from a
writer who used the name of Malthus as a term of abuse, is to suspect
inconsistencies. But Proudhon had never been really very far away from
Malthus; it was the inequality of working the law of population in the
present society, not its truth, that he had attacked.
The most common cause of his apparent variations was his spirit of
contradiction. He may not have been the Mephistopheles which Mazzini
called him, but he was certainly a denier. What was usually a
temperamental reluctance to agree with the truths or falsehoods in
common circulation, was erected by Proudhon into a system of dialectic;
he pushed, he asserted, a thesis to its ultimate conclusion, then
rebuilt on a sound foundation what he had destroyed. Thus he annihilated
property and then gave it a real life in the form of mutuality.
Sometimes this explanation covers the facts, sometimes it does not. Any
assertion was likely to provoke Proudhon to contradiction and to violent
contradiction at that, but, at heart, he was moderate, conservative in
almost all matters, sceptical of fundamental improvments in human life
and willing to take half a loaf, or even less, as an instalment of
justice. Out of his pros and cons it is possible to construct any number
of systems â and impossible to explain the whole of human institutions
and social history. Proudhon is a quarry, not one of the rival
symmetrical buildings for the future residence of mankind that are
declared to have been built by Marx; and, consequently, Proudhon, other
difficulties apart, could not compete with Marx as a founder of a
school. Indeed, he resembled such preachers of genius as Cobbett and
PĂ©guy, (in substance as well as in form), rather than systern-makers
like Marx. Proudhonâs influence was considerable, but it was the
influence of his spirit rather than of any consistent body of doctrine
that made him important in the history of revolutionary Europe in the
years following his death.
There is one possible exception to this view of Proudhonâs importance.
He was, as Kropotkin said âthe father of anarchyâ. The anarchists at
least preserved his memory and circulated his writings; as was fitting,
for anarchy, as a positive doctrine of free order, was formulated by
him.
The immediate connection between Proudhon and anarchy as a movement was
furnished by Bakunin, who was lavish in praise of his master and
developed some of the Proudhonian theses with a rigour which was foreign
to the essentially compromising spirit of their author. In the First
International, the cleavage between the anarchists and the Marxists
seemed to carry an old quarrel beyond the grave and, dead, Proudhonâs
name was powerful enough to serve as a rallying cry for the enemies of
the authoritarian doctrines of Marx. On this rock, indeed, the
International split; and there seemed for a time to be a chance that the
socialist movement would remain sundered by the doctrinal differences of
the communist and anarchist schools. The Commune of Paris was, in verbal
form, a Proudhonian rising. His ideas were powerful in giving to the
patriotic and social indignation of the Parisian workers, a federalist
form; and the commemoration of the martyrs of the âWall of the
Federalistsâ is a tribute to one side of Proudhonâs teaching. On the
other hand, the orthodox Marxian criticism of the tactics of the
Communards is severe on the part played by Proudhonâs disciples; their
lower middle class superstitions about right and legality, it is
asserted, ruined whatever chance of success the revolt had.
The crushing of the Commune drove anarchist propaganda underground; and,
when it was able to come out into the open again, the field had been
occupied by the orthodox socialists. To the French anarchists, Marxian
leaden like Guesde and Lafargue were deceiving the workers, leading them
into the old political paths where they had been led and betrayed by the
men of 1848. Despite energetic leaders, the anarchist agitation, moving
far from the ideas of the later Proudhun, failed to win a permanent
place for itself. There was some truth in the Marxist criticism of the
followers of Proudhun in the First International that they were mostly
workers in the Paris luxury trades, parasites â as their enemies
insisted- on the capitalist society they professed to wish to destroy.
Indeed, Proudhun was never closely in touch with the new industrial
proletariat. Apart from vague syndicalist solutions, he had little to
say to the worker who was not a possible peasant proprietor or possible
master of his own workshop. He did not like, and did not understand,
large-scale industry; and he had, by his hostility to strikes, left the
workers in such industries helpless until the far-distant date when the
present system should have been replaced. Naturally enough, the men who
were in revolt against the wrongs of the system of industry, which was
daily strengthening its hold on society, could hardly be expected to
wait on the ultimate deliverance of the Proudhonian revolution, and went
over to Marxian socialism or to a more active anarchy, to âpropaganda by
the deedâ. In his youth, Proudhon himself had dreamed of a wild justice
exercised by a select and virtuous minority who should punish the
innumerable unpunished crimes of the present social order but although
his temper occasionally boiled up, he became more sceptical of the
merits of this private punishment, and he devoted a part of, Justice to
confuting the defenders of tyrannicide. It was not enough that the
tyrant should deserve death; the assassin himself should, morally, be
above reproach, and in a corrupt society, where are such men to be
found? Where in sixteenth-century Italy would you find a man worthy to
slay a Borgia? Moreover, tyrannicide is as likely to find its victims
among the worthy as among the unworthy. William the Silent and Henri
Quatre were victims not of bad men, but of good men, of saints indeed!
So high a standard of political morality was incompatible with a good
deal of later anarchist activity, with murders and robberies committed
by men who were less than perfect, by men who were scornful of bourgeois
morality; and it is unfair to both sides to make Proudhon the inspirer
of Vaillant or Ravachol.
The eclipse of Proudhon seemed complete by the end of the nineteenth
century, except in an anarchist movement of decreasing practical
importance. The orthodox French socialists were inclined to remember
Proudhonâs indiscipline in the crisis of 1848, and spokesmen for Marxian
doctrines were patronising, if not hostile, to the untamed genius who
had misled the French workers for so many years.
It was a new generation that restored Proudhon to his pride of place.
The inevitable revolution was less imminent in 1890 than in 1880. Ten
years had been given the old order by a zealot in 1880; the ten years
had elapsed; the revolution was now far off -and revolutionary zeal had
cooled off. Socialists sent to parliament as a means of propaganda, were
beginning to demonstrate the psychological truth later to be formulated
by Robert de Jouvenel. âThere is more in common between two members of
parliament, one of whom is a revolutionary, than between two
revolutionaries, one of whom is a member of parliament.â Millerand, who
had used Proudhonian arguments against the Bank of France, came to
represent the cornpromising necessities of parliamentary politics. In
his speech at Saint-Mandé in 1896, he repeated the side-tracking of the
Revolution against which Proudhon had protested in 1848; when he entered
the cabinet to âdefend the republicâ, the parallel with the âJacobinsâ
of fifty years before was evident. The republic was saved, socialist
discipline improved, and politics and party unity, twin evils against
which Proudhon had protested, seemed enthroned. But events fought for
Proudhonian ideas. The old order was not dying easily. The concentration
of property in a few hands had not gone far enough to create,
automatically, a unified working-class, ready to expropriate the
expropriators. The Dreyfus case had shown that there was life in the old
liberal doctrines of the rights of man; that the principles of the
French Revolution were still thought to be worth fighting about.
The idea of a working-class, conscious of its mission, not tied to any
academic orthodoxy, but creating its own weapons of combat and
spontaneously producing its own leaders, suspicious of state socialism
and of party creeds, found its vehicle in the syndicalist movement and
its prophet in Georges Sorel.
Against the current superstitions, Sorel declared war. He attacked the
âunlimited confidence in the economic capacities of the stateâ. âThe
democrats allow themselves to be trapped by dialectic ... academic
manipulations of abstractions inspire them with an extreme confidence
because such exercises serve to deceive the people which does not
understand what it is being led to applaud.â The Marxian class war was
asserted to be an intellectual construction and its preachers thought
themselves free from any obligation to explain further what they meant
by it in a given situation.
Sorel was an enthusiastic and influential advertiser of Proudhon, but he
was himself, in his intuitionslist philosophy, opposed to the formal
rationalism of Proudhon. But in his insistence on the value of ideas
worked out, for the workers by the workers, he is in the spirit of The
Political Capacity of the Working-Classes. Proudhon would, probably,
have been less indifferent to the âmythicalâ character of the general
strike; less willing to let the workers test their will-power without a
cool examination of the forces they would have to combat, not all of
them forces which could be altered by a mere effort of willing- however
hard! But in the insistence of Sorel and his disciples on effort; on the
refusal to await the inevitable working of history; in the insistence on
the role of the will in society; the apostles of syadicalism were in the
line of descent from Proudhon.
Other theses of Proudhon gained, from the necessities of the time, a
more respectful hearing than had seemed likely when the first Marxian
wave swept over France. The insight into the feelings of the French
peasant, which was one of Proudhonâs chief assets, was justified by the
increasing scepticism with which mere industrial socialism was preached
to peasants, who were not in the least anxious to destroy property, as
long as they had a chance of acquiring some themselves. Proudhon had
declared that no one who knew the French peasant would think of trying
to communise him and, indeed, there is hardly any less tractable human
raw material for orthodox communism than a French peasant hoping to
become a kulak. As a preacher of âsocialism for peasantsâ, Proudhon
became respectable in French socialist circles and his violent hostility
to collectivism was forgotten or watered down. The war, the Russian
Revolution and the establishing of Party orthodoxy of the kind Proudhon
detested, have again eclipsed Proudhon. It is true that, in a gallant
attempt to lind a common ground, French Socialist orators appeal to the
doctrines of Proudhon, but as they also appeal to the doctrines of
Saint-Simon and are reluctant to abandon their claims on Marx, the value
of this praise is not great. Needless to say, the regular communists in
France pay not even lip service to the great heretic whose economic
doctrine is the âNew Economic Policyâ made permanent and whose hostility
to revolutions, run from a safe distance by professional leaders, would
certainly not be diminished by the assertion that there was an
infallible party in Moscow on the job, in the place of his old enemies,
the London exiles! Proudhon had, if not a sceptical, a suspicious mind,
and that would have been enough to disqualify as a good party member.
Proudhon was, indeed, too various a writer to be a good founder of a
school, Syndicalist, anarchhts, royalists, have all been able to find
support for their views somewhere in Proudhon. None of these schools can
claim the whole of Proudhon and, as far as he has a spiritual heir, it
is Mr. Belloc whose âdistributismâ expresses peffectly the essential
economic doctrine of Proudhon. To spread property in fairly even doses,
over most of the community; to regard equality in separate property
rights, not in common property rights, as the goal to be aimed at; and
to be sceptical about the forms of production which are not easily
reduced to individual equal property holdings are Proudhonian remedies
for social evils, as they are those of Mr. Belloc and the violent
anti-clericalism of Proudhonâs later life must not blind us to the
degree in which he represented French tradition. He said indeed, that
there was not enough religion in France to make the country Protestant,
but he had in fact little or no sympathy with the Reformation. In his
views of the family, of the place of woman, of sexual morals and of the
rationality of the universe, he might have agreed with his clerical
enemies â if only they would have agreed to put immanent Justice in the
place of God and the Revolution in the place of the Bible and the
Church!
It is as a representative of the French peasant and worker that Proudhon
is of first-rate importance. His passion for equality; his suspicion of
any bonds imposed on the individual, even in the flattering form of a
doctrine of fraternity or of association; his ingrained suspicion of
superior people, whether their superiority is based on wealth, birth, or
dogmatic infallibity; his willingness to sacrifice immediate material
gains for ideal satisfactions; his devotion to principles rather than
palpable âreformsâ as the motive of his political action; all are
commonplaces of French life. In his suspicion of authorities of all
kinds; in his conviction that they are almost always wrong; in his
realisation that if the state (or the party) is made powerful, its power
will be used for the rulers always â and often against the ruled;
Proudhon is a good radical and the radical is the typical Frenchman. In
his fondness for violent extremes of language, covering what is often
moderate or even timid thought, Proudhon is again a typical French
radical. He is willing to compromise, in fact if not in words; he even
offers at the end of his great polemic against the Church, to make a
bargain with it! But on one subject he was never ready to compromise; he
would never abandon his belief that Justice was not only the first of
goods, but was attainable. He would have scorned the moral pessimism of
the practical politician or of his apologists, with their belief that
since the rich are sure to plunder the community, the best the political
agents of the poor can do for their clients is to get a meagre share of
the spoil. Such a doctrine may keep alive the party machine; it may
invite the ingenious apologetic of âAlainâ; but it would not be good
enough for Proudhon. He would have had Lazarus starve rather than let
him be bought off by crumbs from the rich manâs table. Such scepticism
he detested. âWhen doubt, secretly awakened in the souls of men, strikes
Justice: when man comes to regard laws and institutiom as bonds imposed
by force or necessity, but without roots in his conscience; when in
presence of social defects, incredulity shakes religion, then society is
done for; it is on the way to decadence and can only recover by a
revolution. No one says to himself that there are mistakes in the
established order, inadequacy in recopised rights, that the ideas behind
the laws must be rectified, the formulas corrected, that men must set
themselves bravely in search of truth and Justice, enduring the while,
with resignation and devotion, the effect of evil institutions.... No
one has faith any longer in the legislator or in men; men say to
themselves, as did Brutus, that human nature is corrupt, that Justice is
but a word, since experience has shown her to be inequal, contradictory
and there is no security that she will become better. Men see in the
state henceforward, simply an arbitrary coustitution, which profits only
the ambitious and the cunning; men see in religion only a conjuring
trick, an instrument of despotism. Every man keeps to himself, the good
virtuously, the bad, and the men of no faith, selfishly .... Society has
passed insensibly from Justice to despair.â
Nearly seventy years have passed since Proudhon foresaw the modern
dilemma as a moral dilemma, as a crisis in faith. He set up the banner
of Justice as one to which all men of good will should rally; as a
standard by which faiths, religious and political, should be tested. It
is an unfashionable banner and the faith Proudhon preached seems to have
even fewer adherents in our time than it had in his. It may be that his
truth was fiction; that the surrender of a belief in ethical values
transcending the economic structure and the class struggle and the
surrender of liberty into the hands of individuals or parties, remotely
responsible, if at all, to the multitudes that they rule, are inevitable
phenomena of historical development. But in the making of the brave new
worlds of Russia and Italy, sacrifices of truths (or of illusions) have
been made that Prouahon would have thought ill-compensated for by
punctual trains or abundant tractors. What value this nostalgia for the
illusions of â89 may have is a matter of opinion, but no one who is sure
he can separate Justice and Revolution, Justice and Society, will find
much of value in Proudhon.
The chief source for the life of Proudhon is his Correspondence
published in fourteen volumes after his death; more recent publications
have added to this mass of letters and others, still unpublished, are
known to exist. Proudhonâs works were published after his death and in
1923 a new and admirable edition was begun under the editorship of MM.
Bogglé and Moysset. This edition, very fully annotated, is
indispensable, but it is as yet only half-finished. Some of Proudhonâs
works have been translated into English under anarchist auspices: the
first two, Memoirs on Property in 1876 and The System of Economic
Contradictions in 1888, by Benjamin Tucker. The General Idea of the
Revolution in the Nineteenth Century was translated by John Beverley
Robinson in 1923. The chief works of Proudhon are: