Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
For Proudhon, property that lets some live off the work of others is theft; society should be organised from below by free associations, without a state.
Placement
Self-taught printer from Besançon and the first to call himself an anarchist: “property is theft”; instead of the state, a federation of free associations linked by contracts and mutual credit.
Key ideas
- “Property is theft”
- Mutualism
- Federalism
- Anarchy as order without rule
Influence
Influenced by 1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
influenced by ✓
Proudhon learned of Hegel in Paris from Marx, Bakunin and Karl Grün (1844–45) and built his System of Economic Contradictions (1846) on a dialectic of antinomies. P.-J. Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (1846); K. Marx, letter to J. B. Schweitzer (24 Jan. 1865); K. S. Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (1984)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Influenced 5
Alexander Herzen
influenced
Herzen financed Proudhon’s paper La Voix du peuple (1849), portrayed him in My Past and Thoughts and shared his hope for a society free of state tutelage. A. Herzen, Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts, 1852–68); A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought (1979)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Alexander Herzen › 1812–1870
Mikhail Bakunin
influenced ✓
Bakunin, who knew Proudhon in Paris in the 1840s, took up his anti-statism and federalism but joined them to collective ownership (Statism and Anarchy, 1873). M. Bakunin, Gosudarstvennost’ i anarkhiia (Statism and Anarchy, 1873); P. McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin (2002); SEP “Anarchism”
Mikhail Bakunin › 1814–1876
Leo Tolstoy
influenced ✓
Tolstoy visited Proudhon in Brussels in 1861, the year Proudhon published La Guerre et la Paix, whose title his novel War and Peace later shared. P.-J. Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix (1861); L. N. Tolstoy, Voina i mir (1868–69)
Leo Tolstoy › 1828–1910
Peter Kropotkin
influenced ✓
Kropotkin traced anarchism to Proudhon’s What Is Property? (1840) but rejected his mutualist payment by work in favour of distribution according to need (The Conquest of Bread, 1892). P. Kropotkin, La Conquête du pain (1892); “Anarchism”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910); P.-J. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840)
Peter Kropotkin › 1842–1921
Martin Buber
influenced
In Paths in Utopia (1946) Buber presented Proudhon as a founder of the federalist, cooperative socialism he defended, built from communities rather than from the state. M. Buber, Netivot be-utopia (1946); Pfade in Utopia (1950); SEP “Martin Buber”
Evidence: AI draft
Martin Buber › 1878–1965
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Karl Marx influenced
influenced
In The Holy Family (1845) Marx praised Proudhon’s What Is Property? (1840) for making private property itself the object of a critical examination of political economy. K. Marx and F. Engels, Die heilige Familie (1845); P.-J. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
criticised by
In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx objected that Proudhon treats economic categories as eternal ideas, whereas they express historical, transitory relations of production. K. Marx, Misère de la philosophie (1847), ch. 2, first observation
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Criticizes 1
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
criticised
Proudhon found ‘no vestige’ of a real contract in Rousseau’s Social Contract, only a legitimation of government instead of free agreements (General Idea of the Revolution, 1851). P.-J. Proudhon, Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXe siècle (1851); H. Rosenblatt & P. Schweigert, “Rousseau and Proudhon”, in Thinking with Rousseau (2017)
Evidence: AI draft
Jean-Jacques Rousseau › 1712–1778
Works
“Property is theft”: whoever owns without working lives off the labour of others; possession for use is legitimate, ownership as a right to unearned income is not.
Every economic institution – division of labour, competition, credit – both helps and harms; Marx answered with “The Poverty of Philosophy”.
Position
What Is Property? answers its own question: “property is theft.” Proudhon did not mean possession – the peasant’s field, the craftsman’s tools – but property as a right to income without work, through rent, interest and profit. Against both capitalism and a socialism run by the state he proposed “mutualism”: producers exchange their products on the basis of labour, free credit replaces interest, and contracts between free associations replace laws imposed from above. He was the first to call himself an anarchist, meaning order without rule, and in later works such as The Federative Principle (1863) he described a federation of communes and regions. His System of Economic Contradictions (1846) presented each economic institution as a contradiction to be balanced rather than abolished; Marx, who had praised the book on property, answered with The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), and the two currents later split the First International. Proudhon’s notebooks for December 1847 contain a call to expel or “exterminate” the Jews, and his writings on women, collected in the posthumous Pornocracy (1875), allow them only the roles of housewife or courtesan. Historians still debate how far these views shaped the rest of his work.
Life & context
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born in Besançon in 1809, the son of a cooper and brewer. Poverty cut short his schooling, and he trained as a printer and typesetter, teaching himself Latin while setting theological texts. A scholarship from the Besançon academy took him to Paris in 1838. What Is Property? (1840) made him known; in 1844–45 he met Marx, Bakunin and Karl Grün in Paris. Elected to the National Assembly in June 1848, he edited radical newspapers and founded a People’s Bank in 1849 that soon failed. For attacks on Louis-Napoléon he spent 1849–1852 in prison. After Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858) he was sentenced again and fled to Belgium, returning in 1862. He died in Passy, near Paris, in 1865.
Further main works
- General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851)
- Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858)
- The Federative Principle (1863)
- The Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865)
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