Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

12 Key excerpts on "Pierre-Joseph Proudhon"

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  Justice, Order and Anarchy

  The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  • Alex Prichard(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  25 A particular notion of anarchy and a general fidelity to the state has become embedded and has ossified the intellectual contours of IR and political theory. Such is the dominance of the centrality of the state to most political and IR theory, and such are the effects of the marginalisation of anarchism, that attempts to craft critical alternatives to statism in IR and political theory routinely elide what an anarchist would take to be obvious. There is simply no general frame of reference for understanding how anarchism might have something to contribute to contemporary IR or political theory. Because of this lacuna, the exegesis I provide here is the primary contribution of this book.

  So who was Proudhon? Born in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars in the eastern French city of Besançon in 1809, the young Pierre-Joseph, the son of a cooper and cook, was raised in poverty and personal calamity. Post-war famine wreaked havoc on the region in 1817, and his father's business failed for refusing to profit from his customers (a moral conundrum that perplexed the young Proudhon). Pierre-Joseph was sent to school barefoot and without books, humiliated and belittled by his more affluent peers, he abandoned his baccalaureate at the final moment to help support the impoverished family. Eventually completing his schooling in 1827, he went on his first tour of France and on his return secured an elite apprenticeship as a typesetter for a local, but important press, publishing staple religious works alongside those of his radical local compatriot, Charles Fourier. His work nurtured his precocious intellect. He learned Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and developed a passion for philology. In 1838 he won a scholarship from the Suard foundation, allowing him to travel to Paris where he attended lectures by Jules Michelet (amongst others) and was immersed in the intellectual ferment of the Restoration period.

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  Affluence and Freedom

  An Environmental History of Political Ideas

  • Pierre Charbonnier, Andrew Brown(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  3 Proudhon is an author whose importance in the history of political thought deserves to be reconsidered.

  Property and labour

  It has been said that the years between 1789 and 1848 constituted the ‘age of property’.4 Defined in the French Civil Code as the ‘right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided that one does not make a use of them prohibited by law or by regulation’,5 property was in fact conceived as the legal base of equality and liberty, i.e., as the practical condition of an equalization of conditions and a liberation of all from the servitudes affecting both human beings and the land under the ancien régime.

  It was in this context that the rigorous defence of property could appear to the young workers’ movement as the instrumentalization of revolutionary political grammar in the service of a new established order. Jurists at that time acquired significant intellectual prestige and high positions in the administrative apparatus of the various successive political systems. Characters such as Portalis, Troplong and even Jean-Baptiste-Victor Proudhon, a distant relative of Pierre-Joseph, exercised an almost unrivalled authority in the space of political thought. So they could, for example, reaffirm that ‘property and the law were born together and will die together’,6 and therefore equate public order with the maintenance of property. The jurist Belime wrote: ‘Once the principle of property is attacked in its legitimacy, the law itself is called into question, because it is on property that society, laws and even morality rest.’7 In 1848, Adolphe Thiers devoted a monumental study to the defence of this principle, in response to what appeared to him, too, as the most serious of all threats against the social and republican order.8

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  Anarchism and Moral Philosophy

  • B. Franks, M. Wilson, B. Franks, M. Wilson(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  102 The Ethical Foundations of Proudhon’s Anarchism was actually a historically specific resurrection of Roman law (Pockock, 1985). With the emergence of more complex societies, there emerged more complex theories and practices of property and of association. In fact, with [t]his understood, we will notice that the general laws of history are the same as those of the social organization. To write the history of a people’s relations with property is to say how it survived the crises of its political formation, how it produced its powers, its bodies, bal- anced its forces, regulated its interests, equipped its citizens; how it lived, how it died. Property is the most fundamental principle with which one can explain the revolutions of history [ ... ] no nation has surpassed this institution; but it positively governs history [ ... ] and it forces nations to recognise it, punishing them if they betray it. (Proudhon, 1997: 120) Human society’s relationship with property has evolved and under- standing the evolution of this history is to tell the story of the evolution of political community as such. Transcendent principles of property demonstrate more about how a class thinks of itself and its obligations than it does about any transcendent order. Take the liberal and Jacobin socialist arguments. In relation to the first, Proudhon argued that ‘if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of propri- etors be anything but chaos and confusion?’ (Proudhon, 1994: 211). Imposing one’s ‘will as law’ (210), the essence of bourgeois theories of property in the self, would result in ‘anarchy’ in the worst sense of the term, and yet this is ‘the ideal of the economists who attempt strenu- ously to put an end to all governmental institutions and to rest society upon the foundations of property and free labour alone’ (Proudhon, 1989: 20).

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  Pluralism on and off Course

  • Stanislaw Ehrlich(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  If we add to this his occasional anti-Semitism (exacerbated by his controversy with Marx over Philosophie de la Misère , his consistent opposition to the emancipation of women (towards the close of his life he wrote a special study, Pornocracy ..., on the subject) and his approval of Negro slavery, we can see the amplitude of the oscillations in which Proudhon's life abounded. 34 His name evokes much dislike, unfortunately justified, and also much prejudice, especially in the international worker movement, on which a vulgarized assessment of anarchism is occasionally superimposed. People often failed to notice the fact that his programme was one of positive anarchy, i.e. of an organized society, although a society outside the framework of the bourgeois state. Proudhon's striking lack of sense of strategy and tactics in political conflicts can to some extent be explained by his socioeconomic assumptions. Being a dilettante in economics, he believed, after Saint-Simon and like Comte, in its primacy over politics, and thus reduced social relations to productive ones. The importance of economics seemed to him necessary at the time'when the industrial revolution was beginning in France. This was at least how he understood the requirements of the industrial revolution. There was another reason why Proudhon underestimated the status of political problems. He was convinced that the attainments of the French revolution could not be restored by reforms of the electoral system, that socialism and parliamentary democracy were incompatible with one another, and that a political revolution would result in the reconstruction of the authoritarian system of power. The construction of socialism-to use the now current expression-would naturally and spontaneously be achieved by the industrial revolution, which would bring about far-reaching economic and social changes. This was not to say that the capitalist system would come to an end without conflict.

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  Thinking with Rousseau

  From Machiavelli to Schmitt

  • Helena Rosenblatt, Paul Schweigert(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  29 Proudhon shared many of Rousseau’s misgivings about the connection between property and the wealthy class, but he did not frame his analysis as a quasi-anthropological historical account. Rather, he focused on the social, legal, and philosophical defenses of property provided by Grotius, Thomas Reid, and early nineteenth-century writers like Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte, Destutt de Tracy, Joseph Droz, and Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui. His major theme was the conflict between the poor and the rich, between la misère and its social opposite, la propriété. He argued that prosperity should be the reward for effort, rather than power, but that unfortunately modern societies generally did the opposite, rewarded power and punished effort. As was frequently the case with Proudhon’s polemical style, however, his discussions of property and these wider issues blended abstract logic with agitated rhetoric, serious analysis with bitter social criticism. 28 Ibid., pp. 175–176. 29 Ibid., pp. 177–178. Rousseau & Proudhon: Human Nature, Property, & Social Contract 259 Proudhon’s attack on property was not as radical as his rhetorical blast – “property, it is theft” – at first might suggest. This is largely because of the narrow definition of property that he employed. It referred only to that type of ownership that produced an income without requiring any work: that is, income derived from the ownership of the means of production; or, income from the interest earned on lent money; or, income from rented lands or buildings. In a just society, all would work for their income. “Work is obligatory, property is usufruct,” he wrote in his 1839 book De la célébration du dimanche. 30 Proudhon did not oppose the private possession of the land, dwelling, and tools that a worker needed to provide the day- do-day needs of himself and his family. He termed these “possessions,” and he wished to protect these against the power of idle owners of property and against the power of the state.

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  Karl Marx in his Earlier Writings

  • H.P. Adams, H. Adams(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The next important book of Marx was directed against Proudhon himself. In Proudhon he was attacking one of the greatest representatives of a tendency destined, even after both of them were dead, to divide the socialistic world with Marxism. Proudhon had been inspired, in the course of a youth of heroic struggles, by the twin impulses of intellectual ambition and philanthropic passion. Like some other self-taught thinkers he had embraced a great range of learning and had attempted the foundation of vast systems of thought. As a system builder he was not successful; his importance lies in two other directions. He is one of that protesting group that includes Tolstoy, Carlyle and Ruskin, who, however they differed, agreed in attributing most of the evils of modern times to the escape of the social sciences from the control of ethics. What Machiavelli did for politics and Adam Smith for political economy was by no means the triumph of progress which to most modern minds it appears. Proudhon was not even satisfied with writers who, like Rossi, wished the results of economic science, where they conflicted with humanity, to be overruled by superior considerations of ethics. He insisted that the postulates of ethics must be satisfied within economic science itself. This is one of the sources of Proudhon’s importance. The other is that he stands at the head of those who have endeavoured to think out a form of socialism based on co-operation, to create, on a foundation of social effort, a new and juster society which should be based on the voluntary relations of individuals repudiating the state. He is thus the father of modern anarchism and syndicalism.

  The nature of the divergence between Marx and Proudhon will be most easily seen by remembering that Marx had passed through the school of Hegel. By Hegel, who saw in all Nature and all history nothing but the self-expression of supreme reason, no ultimate conflict between the world of ethics and the historical process was admitted. World history was to Hegel explicitly the highest ethical instance. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht

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  The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought

  • Douglas Moggach, Gareth Stedman Jones(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  If Proudhon had declared himself an ‘anarchist’ as early as 1840, defin- ing ‘anarchy’ as ‘the absence of a master, of a sovereign’, he did little to indicate what exactly he meant by this endorsement, other than suggesting rather vaguely that the realisation of such an alternative regime would entail imagining a ‘third social form’ somewhere between ‘property’ and ‘community’. 2 But the events surrounding the revolutionary year of 1848 would change Proudhon profoundly, and compel him to articulate more concretely what that early endorsement might mean in a political context 2 P.-J. Proudhon, What Is Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1840]), pp. 205, 209, 211–17. 40 Edward Castleton radically different from that of 1840. To this extent, the collapse of con- stitutional monarchy in France forced Proudhon to elaborate a vision of ‘anarchy’ that focused more explicitly on political representation and went beyond its initial subsumption within a critique of private property rights. Indeed, an increasingly intransigent fixation on the state in place of his prior fixation on economics remained characteristic of Proudhon’s later Second Empire writings until his death in 1865. But this constant process of revision raises serious questions about the meaning of Proudhon’s ‘anarchism’. I The Futures Past of 1848 In 1846, Proudhon published his Système des Contradictions Économiques, a critique of the key concepts of political economy. Although Proudhon had been tinkering with a concrete programme of overlapping state and economic reform since 1844 in his manuscripts, none of this appeared in the Système. Instead, he concluded the two-volume work indicating that his institutional solution to political economy’s conceptual antinomies was forthcoming.

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  Anarchism

  A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory

  • (Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • The Floating Press

    (Publisher)

  Justice must be done to all, even to Louis Napoleon, exclaimed Proudhon, to the great astonishment orbis et urbis after the coup d'etat ; and not to take a lower standard than the father of Anarchism, we exclaim also, Justice must be done to all, even to Proudhon. 78 The most usual reproach which is cast against Proudhon is that he is contradictory and confused. This reproof is generally made by people who know no more about Proudhon than the paradox Property is Theft, and from this one expression call him confused and contradictory. Proudhon saw very clearly the end before his eyes, strove to attain it unfalteringly and steadily, and amid all the variety of the developments in which he preached his ideas to the world for a quarter of a century, never betrayed one iota of its contents. The contradiction from which his work suffered lay deeper. It lay in the form of his thought, and partly in the period to which he belonged. Placed on the boundary line between two epochs of social science and of social forms, one of which is marked by dogma and the other by induction, he had not the strength to break completely with one or give himself up completely to the other. His whole life and thought was a constant fight against dogma in every form. He fought against social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: Man is born free; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a moral order of society—two propositions which can never be proved by experience, but rather contradict all experience.

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  Jean-Paul Sartre's Anarchist Philosophy

  • William L. Remley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  While the context of Proudhon’s argument is different from Sartre’s, the outline proves quite similar. Proudhon sees the desire of organized society to preserve itself and its social unity, even though the fundamental relation between individuals is one 61 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Life and Political Philosophy of conflict and struggle. Ultimately, however, dogmas, mystification and authority provide the foundation for the unity of the group. Sartre puts forth analogous arguments as he discusses the transformation of the organized group into the bureaucratically dominated institution with a sovereign embodied in one person, a political reality also premised on struggle, conflict, dogmatic ideologies, mystification and above all violence. 4 Proudhon’s Thoughts on Authority and His ‘Solution to the Social Problem’ ‘it is not a crime to be poor, it is worse’. —Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Proudhon and Authority As with many anarchist thinkers of his day, much of Proudhon’s attack on social institutions appears in economic terms, especially the concept of exploitation. However, as I have pointed out, Proudhon should not be seen merely in terms of economics; rather, his critical theory seeks, as Marx championed, to grab the situation at the ‘root of the matter’ and is directly aimed at what he feels to be the most effective implements of oppression: hierarchy and government. 1 While Proudhon was an avid reader of philosophy, perhaps the one greatest influence on his political philosophy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but even that influence is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, Barbey D’Aurevilly described Proudhon as ‘the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the 19 th century’, and, on the other hand, C é lestin Bogl é viewed him as Rousseau’s worst enemy. 2 In many respects, both are correct in their assessment. Even though Proudhon generally agrees with Rousseau, the conflict lies in Rousseau’s alleged failure to go further in his critique.

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  Political Economy from Below

  Economic Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840-1914

  • Rob Knowles(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  4 For as long as such historical caricaturing of Proudhon remains in place however, it represents a caveat over the way in which any discussion of his ideas can be carried out. This chaptermust first cut a path through the polemical and rhetorical thicket of caricatures in order to be able to perceive the man and his economic ideas as they manifested, for him, in his own time.

  One of the difficulties in carrying out this initial task is to engage with sufficient of his works in order to achieve the goal of this chapter. As Robert Hoffman5 has pointed out, Proudhon was a prolific writer. His published work is made up of ‘well over twenty thousand pages' and his unpublished writings comprise about two thousand more pages. The breadth of topics he discussed seems to be almost without limit. Not all of his work has been translated into English, although several of his major writings have been, the most prominent being What is Property? (1840), System of Economical Contradictions or, The Philosophy of Misery, Volume 1 of two volumes (1846), Proudhon's Solution of the Social Problem (1848), General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), The Principle of Federation (1863), and a useful anthology edited by Stewart Edwards, Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1969).

  Substantial and important works which remain in the original French are De la création de l'ordre dans l'humanité, ou principes d'organisation politique (1843), De la justice dans la révolution et dans l'église: Nouveaux principes de philosophie practique adressés à son eminence Monseigneur Mathieu (1858), La Guerre et la Paix: Recherches sur le principe et la constitution du droit des gens (1861), De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865), Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale (1865), and of course Volume 2 of his Système des Contradictions Économiques ou Philosophie de la Misère (1846). In addition, there are several collections of his works still in the original French, most incomplete, but each containing valuable material.6 For the purposes of this study, although there is a substantial amount of material in the English translations, it has been necessary to refer to the French material on many occasions in order to be certain that significant ideas are not overlooked. This applies not only to Proudhon's writings but to the excellent supporting notes and introductions which accompany some of the French collections.7 As Hoffman observed, ‘Proudhon is familiar to very few, especially outside of France, and those acquainted with him at all usually know too little of the variety of his ideas.’8 The work which eventually brings together Proudhon's economic idea of mutualism and its federalist counterpart is his De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières.9

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  A History of Economic Doctrines

  from the time of the physiocrats to the present day

  • Charles Rist(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  This is his profound belief in individual liberty as the indispensable motive of economic activity in industrial societies. He realised better than any of his predecessors that economic liberty is a definite acquisition of modern societies, and that every true reform must be based on liberty. He has estimated the strength of spontaneous economic forces more clearly than anyone else. He has demonstrated their pernicious effects, but at the same time he has recognised, as Adam Smith had done, that this was the most powerful lever of progress. His passionate love of justice explains his hatred of private property, and his jealous belief in liberty aroused his hostility to socialism. Despite his famous formula, Destruam et ædificabo, he destroyed more than he built. His liberalism rested on his profound hold of economic realities, and the social problem of to-day, as Proudhon clearly saw, is how to combine justice with liberty. Proudhon’s project for an Exchange Bank must not be confused with analogous schemes that have appeared either before or after his day. All these schemes have a common basis in a reform of exchange as a remedy for social inequalities. Apart from this one idea the resemblance is frequently superficial, and the economic bases differ considerably. (1) Proudhon’s idea has often been contrasted with Robert Owen’s labour notes, and with the scheme prepared by Mr. Bray in 1839, in a work entitled Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, [680] as well as with the later system outlined by Rodbertus. Proudhon’s circulating notes have nothing in common with the labour notes described by these writers. The circulating notes represent commercial goods produced for the purpose of private exchange. Prices are freely fixed by buyer and seller, and they bear no relation to the labour time, as is the case with the labour notes. The final result, doubtless, was expected to be the same

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  Property and Practical Reason

  • Adam J. MacLeod(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Following Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, some influential scholars have argued that any liberty-based defense of private ownership that is strong enough to succeed also undermines the case for private ownership, at least to the extent of requiring redistribution of things, and possibly requiring collective ownership. Proudhon famously opined that private property 1 Alan Ryan, Property (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987), 71. 64 is theft because, he argued, it is impossible to respect the interests of property owners without respecting the equal interests of non-owners. “[I]f the liberty of man is sacred, it is equally sacred in all individuals and . . . if it needs property for its external action, that is, for its life, then the appropriation of material is equally necessary for all.” 2 By these considerations one sees that “every imaginable argument made on behalf of property, no matter what it may be, always and necessarily leads to equality, that is, to the negation of property.” 3 And because private property is impossible, it is also unjust. Refining Proudhon’s strategy, Jeremy Waldron has argued that what he calls a general right claim to own private property defeats itself. The general right to own must be universalized, which requires distribution, which undermines private property. Others have made similar argu- ments, and the Proudhon strategy is now regarded in many circles as a success. Not all Proudhon-type critiques are identical. Stephen Munzer, for example, has claimed that everyone should own property, but that welfare rights might suffice for some people, and different types of property for others. 4 For simplicity, and because of its influence and ambition, I will address Waldron’s version. Waldron’s Proudhon strategy Universalizable claims of ownership Following Proudhon, Waldron insisted that any moral, general right claim to property that is grounded in liberty must be universalizable because all possess an equal right to liberty.

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