💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › pierre-joseph-proudhon-letter-to-langlois.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:19:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Letter to Langlois Author: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Date: December 1851 Language: en Topics: letter, Libertarian Labyrinth, a response Source: Retrieved on April 8, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160408080653/http://library.libertarian-labyrinth.org/items/show/3162 Notes: Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur
To Mr. [Amédée Jérôme] LANGLOIS
My dear Langlois, all your criticisms are fair, and I would have to
write ten volumes to clarify the points that appear obscure to me in
your brochure, but they would still be so.
Society, it is infinite, and it is certain that there are millions of
cases to resolve of which those who pose as reformers will never think.
All that one can do, in the time of revolution, is to strongly deny the
past, and, up to a certain point, the present, then to note the aim—an
Ideal!—and to plant, in the direction of that ideal, some markers. The
strongest of men will never do more than that, and barely that. Did
Jesus Christ make Christianity? Though we worship him as its author, he
did not know the hundredth part of it! Did Romulus or Numa make Rome?
Was it Charlemagne who made feudalism? Was it Turgot, who only know what
the men of 89 knew, who invented the constitutional system?...
A man never knows, can never express but a very small portion of the
Truth. Truth, whether social or human, is a product of time...
Thus, in my last book, I made a critique; deduce from that critique the
indication of an aim; I have posted some markers. Do not expect me to
give you a system. My system is Progress, the necessity of working
ceaselessly to discover the unknown, bit by bit, as the past is
exhausted... next year, that aspect, the most important of our work,
will be brought to light in a manner to quickly seize minds; then one
will understand that free credit and other formulas are for us only the
first step out of the past; but that the future, in its fullness, evades
us, and that it is hardly possible to imagine it except through a
symbol, more or less mythical, that I call Anarchy, as others call it
Fraternity. Then, also, one will see why and how sects and systems are
nothing; why the true revolutionary only labors from day to day; why the
destiny of man is a void, a gap placed before us. It is children that
are amused by systematic perspectives. It is still the People, incapable
of understanding that it must always go on, like the Wandering Jew, who
love to rest with Cabet, Fourier, etc., under the shades of Community
and Association. The People, like the reaction, would like to be done
with it; now, I repeat, there is no end; and if history teaches us
anything of the curve that we describe, we remain almost entirely
ignorant of the future. Our forecast does not go beyond the antithesis
that the present suggests to us.
That largely developed theory of Progress, a theory that posits the
exclusion to all absolute notions, all the so-called definitive
hypotheses, is that which, in my opinion, must furnish the solid, but
always mobile basis of the future. It is that which shelters society
from conservative idleness and from false revolutionary enterprises.
What does it matter, after that, that we are harassed every day by some
new difficulty of details and application? Some difficulties? Can that
one be regarded as a flat refusal when one exists in an impossible
present? Would they hope to prevail against us, who cross their arms
heroically and sleep soundly, awaiting the occasion of rushing forward
to the rudder, without having the least knowledge of the Pole?...
You see, my dear friend, that far from concealing the objections that
could be made, I am instead inclined to exacerbate them myself, but to
refer them to those who propose them; for I don’t know anyone who is not
held to resolve them, unless they have decided, with the Jesuits and the
big rentiers, that all is well.
I have written, in my latest work, five or six propositions that I
regard as essential, and that is for the moment all that I wanted:
the subjection and dispossession of the greatest number;
economic forces;
economic force; it is of the government;—nevertheless, there are cases
where that modification of individual liberty appeared indispensable;
created by means of authority; it must result from the tacit or
expressed consent of the citizens, namely from free contract...
What I then add on the liquidation, the organization of the economic
forces, the dissolution of the political powers are only general views,
too condensed, I know, for the understanding of the details, still too
rigorous in its formulas for the multiplicity of cases. I know all these
things. But is it fair for me to object to them? In physics, are the
most general laws anything but simple abstractions that, in individual
cases, receive thousands of different modifications? Just so, the
truest, most general laws of society are also only some abstract
notions, which practice modifies infinitely. But we must have these
notions, or else we can do nothing: we must post them, or perish on the
road.
I believe, my dear friend, that these reflections, instead of leaving
you idle and indifferent, under the pretext that I do not respond to
everything, that [elements] remain unintelligible in my work, will urge
you to seek yourself...., since, at this moment, I am nearly the only
man who works seriously on these questions. What, in truth, do our
fellows do? Each of them, convinced that they possess the key to the
future, the formula of the absolute, remains tranquil and waits for the
world to come and ask for its salvation. As for the need of
investigators of the truth, we only find revelators. And I tell you that
if we let ourselves go on in this way, we are lost.
P.-J. PROUDHON.