Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–65)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French social theorist, political activist and journalist. Claiming to be the first person to adopt the label ‘anarchist’, he developed a vision of a cooperative society conducting its affairs by just exchanges and without political authority. In his lifetime he exercised considerable influence over both militants and theorists of the European left, and he is remembered today as one of the greatest exponents of libertarian socialism. His last writings, though still strongly libertarian, advocated a federal state with minimal functions.

Proudhon was born in Besançon, in the French Jura, to a poor artisan family. He worked first as a printer, and was largely self-educated. At the age of thirty he won a fellowship from the local Academy and went to Paris, where he spent most of the rest of his life. During the 1840s his writings included Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property?) (1840), and Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la Misère (System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty) (1846), which laid the groundwork for his social and economic theory: the latter drew an acerbic reply (The Poverty of Philosophy) from Marx, who regarded Proudhon’s views as those of a petit-bourgeois. By the time of the 1848 revolution he was prominent enough to win election to the Constituent Assembly, where, however, he was too isolated a figure to be effectual. After the advent of the Second Empire in 1851, Proudhon suffered periods both of imprisonment in France and exile in Belgium. During this period he wrote some of his most important books, notably his three-volume De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église (On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church) (1858). Five years after Proudhon’s death, many leaders of the Paris Commune, the most important socialist insurrection ever to take place in Western Europe, regarded themselves as his disciples. Russian anarchists, such as Tolstoi and Kropotkin, also acknowledged his influence.

Proudhon wrote in a muscular and impetuous style, often producing startling aphorisms, which on first glance may seem to be paradoxes. The two for which he is best known are ‘property is theft’ and ‘God is evil’. Neither of these, however, can be taken at face value. With regard to the first aphorism, Proudhon believed that possession of a share in productive resources was immensely important: it was essential to the development of the (male) individual’s inventive and productive powers. What he rejected as ‘theft’ was the existence of a property right which confirmed some people in their possession of resources, when others possessed none. Proudhon favoured a society in which possession of productive resources would be widely shared (in contrast to the collective ownership favoured by socialists such as Marx (see Marx, K. §12)). Producers would exchange their goods, not at a market price determined by the interaction between supply and demand, but at a price fixed by the average labour time required by the goods’ production. Efficient producers would thus be rewarded.

The second famous aphorism, ‘God is evil’, also requires a context. Proudhon equates ‘God’ with ideas of fatality which exclude or downplay the idea of human agency. When he says, in System of Economic Contradictions, that ‘the first duty of the free and intelligent man is to hunt the idea of God from his mind’, he means that, to be free, people must abandon the idea that human circumstances are something other than a human construct. Part of unfreedom is the belief that the evolution of human society is the work of fate or providence and thus beyond the control of humans: this belief will vanish when there are no longer massive concentrations of economic and political power which remove decisions from the hands of ordinary people. Another part of unfreedom is the belief that one must obey authorities endowed with some special status which places them beyond the control of their subjects, an irrational belief which would not survive without religious support.

Independence – material and intellectual – was thus an important value for Proudhon. But he also stressed the interdependence arising from the complementarities in social life. The complementarity of different skills creates an incentive to reach agreement, as well as multiplying the power of human labour. The non-synchronized character of humans’ needs makes possible the institution of credit: Proudhon’s writings inspired some important practical reforms in the credit system. Interestingly, within the family unit, the principle of interdependence triumphed wholly over that of independence: Proudhon held rigid views about the sexual division of labour, and would have allowed women no role outside the household. Traditionalist aspects of Proudhon’sthought have led some right-wing theorists to claim him for their own.

Proudhon’s thinking reveals many influences: there are echoes of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Comte, British political economy, Hegel and Feuerbach. Rousseau (see Rousseau, J.-J. §3), however, has a special importance for him, both positive and negative. What Proudhon shared with Rousseau was the idea that absolute personal independence could be reconciled with the social condition – that one can belong to a social order yet ‘obey only oneself’ (perhaps in the limited sense of obeying one’s own reason). What he hated in Rousseau was the conclusion that this reconciliation could be achieved only in the state: it could best be achieved, Proudhon thought, in civil society, and in the reciprocity among groups of producers, characterized by mutual respect and complementarity of interest. Proudhon was a critic of political democracy, which he thought Rousseau had inspired: although he believed in the capacity of small groups to manage concrete affairs which they could understand, he had no faith in the political discernment of the masses. When he came eventually to accept the need for government, he did so only on the condition that the primary units of government would be small communities constrained by immediate responsibility for their decisions: the radically decentralizing spirit of his earlier work is not abandoned.