Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (born January 15, 1809, Besançon, France—died January 19, 1865, Paris) was a French libertarian socialist and journalist whose doctrines became the basis for later radical and anarchist theory.

Early life and education

Proudhon was born into poverty as the son of a feckless cooper and tavern keeper, and at the age of nine he worked as a cowherd in the Jura Mountains. Proudhon’s country childhood and peasant ancestry influenced his ideas to the end of his life, and his vision of the ideal society almost to the end remained that of a world in which peasant farmers and small craftsmen like his father could live in freedom, peace, and dignified poverty, for luxury repelled him, and he never sought it for himself or others.

Proudhon at an early age showed the signs of intellectual brilliance, and he won a scholarship to the college at Besançon. Despite the humiliation of being a child in sabots (wooden shoes) among the sons of merchants, he developed a taste for learning and retained it even when his family’s financial disasters forced him to become an apprentice printer and later a compositor. While he learned his craft, he taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and in the printing shop he not only conversed with various local liberals and Socialists but also met and fell under the influence of a fellow citizen of Besançon, the utopian Socialist Charles Fourier.

With other young printers, Proudhon later attempted to establish his own press, but bad management destroyed the venture, and it may well have been compounded by his own growing interest in writing, which led him to develop a French prose difficult to translate but admired by writers as varied as Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Baudelaire. Eventually, in 1838, a scholarship awarded by the Besançon Academy enabled him to study in Paris. Now, with leisure to formulate his ideas, he wrote his first significant book, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?, 1876). This created a sensation, for Proudhon not only declared, “I am an anarchist”; he also stated, “Property is theft!”

This slogan, which gained much notoriety, was an example of Proudhon’s inclination to attract attention and mask the true nature of his thought by inventing striking phrases. He did not attack property in the generally accepted sense but only the kind of property by which one man exploits the labour of another. Property in another sense—in the right of the farmer to possess the land he works and the craftsman his workshop and tools—he regarded as essential for the preservation of liberty, and his principal criticism of Communism, whether of the utopian or the Marxist variety, was that it destroyed freedom by taking away from the individual control over his means of production.

In the somewhat reactionary atmosphere of the July monarchy in the 1840s, Proudhon narrowly missed prosecution for his statements in What Is Property?; and he was brought into court when, in 1842, he published a more inflammatory sequel, Avertissement aux propriétaires (Warning to Proprietors, 1876). In this first of his trials, Proudhon escaped conviction because the jury conscientiously found that they could not clearly understand his arguments and therefore could not condemn them.

In 1843 he went to Lyon to work as managing clerk in a water transport firm. There he encountered a weavers’ secret society, the Mutualists, who had evolved a protoanarchist doctrine that taught that the factories of the dawning industrial age could be operated by associations of workers and that these workers, by economic action rather than by violent revolution, could transform society. Such views were at variance with the Jacobin revolutionary tradition in France, with its stress on political centralism. Nevertheless, Proudhon accepted their views and later paid tribute to his Lyonnais working-class mentors by adopting the name of Mutualism for his own form of anarchism.

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As well as encountering the obscure working-class theoreticians of Lyon, Proudhon also met the feminist Socialist Flora Tristan and, on his visits to Paris, made the acquaintance of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and the Russian Socialist and writer Aleksandr Herzen. In 1846 he took issue with Marx over the organization of the Socialist movement, objecting to Marx’s authoritarian and centralist ideas. Shortly afterward, when Proudhon published his Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (1846; System of Economic Contradictions: or, The Philosophy of Poverty, 1888), Marx attacked him bitterly in a book-length polemic La misère de la philosophie (1847; The Poverty of Philosophy, 1910). It was the beginning of a historic rift between libertarian and authoritarian Socialists and between anarchists and Marxists which, after Proudhon’s death, was to rend Socialism’s First International apart in the feud between Marx and Proudhon’s disciple Bakunin and which has lasted to this day.

Early in 1848 Proudhon abandoned his post in Lyon and went to Paris, where in February he started the paper Le Représentant du peuple. During the revolutionary year of 1848 and the first months of 1849 he edited a total of four papers; the earliest were more or less regular anarchist periodicals and all of them were destroyed in turn by government censorship. Proudhon himself took a minor part in the Revolution of 1848, which he regarded as devoid of any sound theoretical basis. Though he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic in June 1848, he confined himself mainly to criticizing the authoritarian tendencies that were emerging in the revolution and that led up to the dictatorship of Napoleon III. Proudhon also attempted unsuccessfully to establish a People’s Bank based on mutual credit and labour checks, which paid the worker according to the time expended on his product. He was eventually imprisoned in 1849 for criticizing Louis-Napoleon, who had become president of the republic prior to declaring himself Emperor Napoleon III, and Proudhon was not released until 1852.

His conditions of imprisonment were—by 20th-century standards—light. His friends could visit him, and he was allowed to go out occasionally in Paris. He married and begat his first child while he was imprisoned. From his cell he also edited the last issues of his last paper (with the financial assistance of Herzen) and wrote two of his most important books, the never translated Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (1849) and Idée générale de la révolution au XIX^e siècle (1851; The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 1923). The latter—in its portrait of a federal world society with frontiers abolished, national states eliminated, and authority decentralized among communes or locality associations, and with free contracts replacing laws—presents perhaps more completely than any other of Proudhon’s works the vision of his ideal society.

After Proudhon’s release from prison in 1852 he was constantly harassed by the imperial police; he found it impossible to publish his writings and supported himself by preparing anonymous guides for investors and other similar hack works. When, in 1858, he persuaded a publisher to bring out his three-volume masterpiece De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’église, in which he opposed a humanist theory of justice to the church’s transcendental assumptions, his book was seized. Having fled to Belgium, he was sentenced in absentia to further imprisonment. He remained in exile until 1862, developing his criticisms of nationalism and his ideas of world federation (embodied in Du Principe fédératif, 1863).

On his return to Paris, Proudhon began to gain influence among the workers; Paris craftsmen who had adopted his Mutualist ideas were among the founders of the First International just before his death in 1865. His last work, completed on his death bed, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865), developed the theory that the liberation of the workers must be their own task, through economic action.

Legacy

Proudhon was not the first to enunciate the doctrine that is now called anarchism; before he claimed it, it had already been sketched out by, among others, the English philosopher William Godwin in prose and his follower Percy Bysshe Shelley in verse.

There is no evidence, however, that Proudhon ever studied the works of either Godwin or Shelley, and his characteristic doctrines of anarchism (society without government), Mutualism (workers’ association for the purpose of credit banking), and federalism (the denial of centralized political organization) seem to have resulted from an original reinterpretation of French revolutionary thought modified by personal experience.

Proudhon was a solitary thinker who refused to admit that he had created a system and abhorred the idea of founding a party. There was thus something ironical about the breadth of influence that his ideas later developed. They were important in the First International and later became the basis of anarchist theory as developed by Bakunin (who once remarked that “Proudhon was the master of us all”) and the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin. His concepts were influential among such varied groups as the Russian populists, the radical Italian nationalists of the 1860s, the Spanish federalists of the 1870s, and the syndicalist movement that developed in France and later became powerful in Italy and Spain. Until the beginning of the 1920s, Proudhon remained the most important single influence on French working-class radicalism, while in a more diffuse manner his ideas of decentralization and his criticisms of government had revived in the later 20th century, even though at times their origin was not recognized.