Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Gustave Courbet
Portrait of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
French philosopher
born January 15, 1809, Besançon, France
died January 19, 1865, Paris
Main
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.
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 XIXe 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.
Assessment
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.
George Woodcock
Encyclopaedia Britannica
