X. P. J. Prqudhon

CHAPTER X

P. J. PROUDHON

OF all the writers whose works have gone to the fashioning of socialism, none occupies so peculiar and ambiguous a position as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; none has been so perpetually a cause of exasperation and annoyance to the commentators and the critics, who quite obviously have, for the most part, never quite known what to make of him. Doubtless, here as elsewhere, the early years helped to make the man, and may in part (though not wholly) explain the enigma of Proudhon's psychological make-up. Born in 1809 at Besançon (Fourier's town) he experienced in his early days the bitterness of extreme poverty, and the shame that poverty may bring to a sensitive temperament. Though his father worked in the town, the tradition and the background of the family tied them to the land. The memories of the days when he herded cattle in the fields around Besançon remained with Proudhon, and in odd ways helped, until the end of his life, to make him a peasant at heart. Arrived at years to take up something more than casual employment, Proudhon became a printer's compositor. It was both a fortunate and an unfortunate choice—fortunate, in that the sensitive cowherd had been a bookish lad, so that his new work lay in the line of one of his interests; unfortunate, in that it gave him the opportunity of reading all the books set up in the establishment. Proudhon, in fact, never lived down the surfeit of theology which he imbibed at this period, as an incidental by-product of his daily activity. He became, and he remained through life, a man of vast, if somewhat undigested, erudition, which he was never at any pains to conceal. It has been the custom to decry Proudhon, as one who too easily got beyond his depths; yet it is only fair to acknowledge that the four volumes of De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise probably contain more miscellaneous and abstruse learning than is likely to be encountered in any other book of comparable size, apart from an encyclopaedia. The award of a scholarship by the Academy of Besançon enabled Proudhon to read and study more systematically, and the publication of Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? made him known and, indeed, what is no less desirable, perhaps even notorious. Thereafter his life was a prolonged campaign of pamphleteering, if the term may be used with reference to such substantial works as Proudhon normally produced, varied by a slight and unsuccessful incursion into active politics as a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1848. He had his share of persecutions and his periods of imprisonment, but as imprisonment was not allowed to interfere with his writing, it was more or less an unnoticed incident in his life. Also at times it appeared inexpedient to live in France; but again, a writer, with the pen of a ready writer, may write as readily in Brussels as in Paris or Besançon. He wrote to the end, and indeed he left a very considerable number of volumes to be published posthumously. But he left no school; and Proudhon, detesting ‘sects,’ would probably have preferred it so.

For indeed it is in the loneliness of Proudhon that we find his most arresting characteristic; it is scarcely a figure of speech to say that he went through life in a minority of one. It is probably in any case impossible to understand Proudhon; but there can certainly be no beginning of an understanding until the springs of his loneliness are laid bare. One governing consideration has already been indicated. Proudhon was, in his very bones, of the people. In applying to the Academy of Besançon for the award of his scholarship, he had expressed the intention of devoting his studies to the improvement of the physical, the moral, and the intellectual condition ‘de la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.’¹ The words are a literal transcription from Saint-Simon's last testament. Much later he was proud to boast that he had enjoyed the rare advantage of being born of the people and of remaining one of the people.² In this, of course, he was not unique. There are, however, two points which should be borne in mind in assessing the influence of Proudhon's origin. The first is that up to the point now reached, nearly all those who, in the socialist sense, had spoken for the people, had nevertheless not been of the people. The second modifying consideration is that, mingled with Proudhon's somewhat too acute consciousness of his plebeian origin, there are memories of a world which had not been overkind to him in the early days of his schoolboy poverty. Proudhon was therefore sent into the world conscious that he was different from others, and prepared to be antagonistic to others.

Moreover, Proudhon was temperamentally destructive and critical. His instinct was to attack everything and everybody. Towards the end of his life, he showed a considerable degree of sensitiveness with regard to the charge that his contribution had been purely negative, and he produced an impressive list of his positive contributions to thought.³ But the record is against him. Nier, toujours nier, he had proudly proclaimed to be his principle of procedure, and as early as What is Property? he had boasted that he had taken an oath to be faithful to his work of demolition, and that he would continue to pursue truth à travers les ruines et les décombres.¹ If not exactly in the Mephistophelian sense, his was essentially a Geist der stets verneint. Moreover, Proudhon, more than most writers, periodically expressed a phobia of the commonplace; the fact that a view is commonly held, or held by a considerable number of his fellow-men is for him sufficient reason for holding it to be not merely erroneous but absurd. His choice is invariably for a daring paradox in preference to a hackneyed truth. Further, if the paradox appears to be one that is likely to shock, it becomes still more desirable, as more calculated to arrest attention.²

The result is that Proudhon throughout life rushed about like an infuriated bull, tossing all his fellow-socialists aloft on his indignant horns. Even in his own lifetime, the critics found amusement in collecting choice posies of Proudhon's abuse of all other socialists and all other schools of socialism. Louis Blanc is the ‘declared enemy of Liberty’³; Cabet is abused with a refreshing persistence which never flags. There is something invigorating in a supposedly leading socialist who declares roundly that ‘le socialisme n'est rien, n'a jamais rien été, ne sera jamais rien,’⁴ or who asks impatiently whether his correspondent has ever found in socialism autre chose que de la vanité et de la bêtise.⁵ More devastating is an exclamation addressed to the communists, which somehow sounds almost unduly grotesque if translated into English: ‘Loin de moi, communistes! votre présence m'est une puanteur, et votre vue me dégoûte.’⁶ Rousseau, a respected name if not a respectable character, becomes the ‘Genevese charlatan.’⁷ Indeed Proudhon washes his hands of everybody: ‘Comme homme de réalisation et de progrès, je répudie de toutes mes forces le socialisme, vide d'idées, impuissant, immoral, propre seulement à faire des dupes et des escrocs.’⁸

All this is very confusing to those who like their specimens of humanity to be neatly docketed. The confusion is rendered worse by Proudhon's incurable tendency to violent language and to extravagant utterances which he did not mean, or did not wholly mean, or did not mean without qualification. For long Proudhon was generally known exclusively in virtue of two statements, firstly, that ‘La propriété, c'est le vol’—that property is theft—which throughout his life served as his signature-tune; and secondly that ‘Dieu, c'est le mal’—that God is the principle of evil. But in fact, as we shall see presently, Proudhon did not in the least believe that property was theft: indeed he spent a large part of his life proclaiming the virtues of property and preaching the universalisation of property. A more scrupulous Proudhon would have said, not that property is theft, but that under certain circumstances property may enable its owner to acquire an income in ways of which he, Proudhon, disapproved. But such a statement would clearly have been useless as a signature-tune. Nor did Proudhon really believe that God is the principle of evil. He found much currently accepted theological doctrine obscure, not to say incomprehensible, and he was in no way attracted to the God whom certain of his neighbours professed to serve. But again in probably neither of these respects was he unique.

Proudhon's natural impulse to ‘demolition,’ his thirsty joy in attacking and refuting any statement made by anyone, would probably in any case have made it a difficult task to reduce him to a formula. Unfortunately, Proudhon, falling under the influence of Hegel, exalted his besetting weakness into a fundamental principle which he elected to follow in the development of his thought. It is highly probable, as Marx suggests, that Proudhon did not understand Hegel—but in such a matter who is justified in throwing the first stone? Proudhon confesses that the Hegelian dialectic intoxicated him—la dialectique m'enivrait¹—and the symptoms of his intoxication are manifest everywhere, but particularly in the Contradictions Economiques. Periodically, Proudhon gives elementary lessons for babes in Hegelian principles, and rather scolds the world for not being properly initiated. In practice, the great principle that the thesis should give way to the antithesis, and that both should be reconciled in the synthesis, does not quite work out that way in Proudhon. He appears to have flattered himself that he was conforming to Hegelian principles if he argued on both sides of a question. His devotion to antinomies is revealed in the extreme intellectual delight which he experienced in showing that ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ were alike equally absurd answers to any given question. But the peculiarity of Proudhon is that, despite professions and intentions, he never really gets to a synthesis. The 950 pages (approximately) of the Contradictions Economiques are devoted, in the name of Hegel, to a mutual destruction of the arguments, for and against, on most of the subjects of current human interest. Emile Faguet has admirably shown what a snare a supposed devotion to Hegel may be to a mind of Proudhon's type. If he is trapped in a glaring contradiction, he has but to say: ‘Ah, but I was then expounding the thesis, whereas now I am in the anti-thesis.’ If presently he says something which is consistent with neither of the contradictory doctrines to which he has already pinned his faith, he has but to say: ‘And this, my friends, is by way of being the synthesis.’ As interpreted by Proudhon, Hegelianism was not merely a licence, it was an injunction to be self-contradictory. Thus in the matter of property, Proudhon's utterances cover the whole gamut of possible views on the subject; yet he never admitted inconsistency or contradiction. On the contrary, in putting forward one extreme view, he boasted of the glory due to him for having expressed the entirely contrary view. Later, the intoxication occasioned by Hegel wore off. In one of his posthumous works, Proudhon acknowledges that the thesis and the antithesis are not in fact resolved; the problem is not that of their fusion, qui serait la mort, but of their equilibrium.¹ This somewhat tardy abjuration of Hegel, however, came too late to prevent a lifetime devoted to ransacking the world for contradictions.

All these influences help to explain why this ‘enfant terrible du socialisme,’ to adopt a phrase from Malon, has been somewhat gingerly treated by the critics. He fits in nowhere. On the first encounter, and indeed much later, he appears to be a mass of extravagant, irresponsible and contradictory contentions leading nowhere. It also explains why there is such considerable diversity in the various presentations of Proudhon. According to taste, and by judicious selection of citations, Proudhon may be made to appear as the embodiment of revolutionary destructiveness or the essence of die-hard individualism. A writer who is so elusive and so Protean has only himself to blame if in the end the world finds the task of attempting comprehension disproportionate to the reward.

Yet Proudhon, in the anarchist and syndicalist tradition, has been an influence, and indeed one of the greatest. It is therefore not permissible, as was rather the tendency a generation ago, to thrust him aside as a negligible purveyor of cheap catch-phrases, much as the apparent chaos of his writings might tempt one to pursue such a course. Moreover there is, fundamentally, much more consistency than may at first sight appear. If he be pruned of his exaggerations, his violences, and his paradoxes; if (not so easy a task) allowance is made for the element of negation, and of the negation of the negation which a misconstrued Hegelianism imposed upon him, there are certain cardinal points on which Proudhon remained immovable and invariable. Doubtless a summary of the essential Proudhon should conclude, and not precede, any attempted exposition of his ‘doctrine’; but in view of the difficulty which Proudhon has presented to the humble seeker for understanding for almost a century, it may be permissible in the present chapter, even at the risk of repetition, to reverse the logical procedure. A brief statement of the points on which Proudhon was relatively invariable may provide a guide through the Proudhonian jungle, a framework into which his contradictory statements may fit with a minimum appearance of contradiction.

The fundamental conception in Proudhon—the idée mère, to use that convenient phrase—is that of justice. He has his own definition of justice, but for the present it is unnecessary to come to closer grips with this most elusive of virtues. That justice should be done is the supreme test in all things, and lengthy stretches in Proudhon resolve themselves into hymns in praise of justice. It is because property may give rise to an unjust source of income that property is theft: it is because property, if rightly used and justly distributed, need not do so, that Proudhon is enabled to maintain simultaneously that property is liberty and the salvation of society. It is in ‘justice’ that we must seek the overriding consideration. In practice, putting aside Proudhon's definition, justice is throughout very largely interchangeable with ‘equality’; and we may therefore say that justice, interpreted as equivalent to equality, is the first of the constant elements in Proudhon's waywardness.

Secondly, Proudhon is consistent in his extreme individualism, which manifests itself in an incessant feud against all kinds of authority. The two most obvious authorities, issuing commands to the individual, are the State and the Church; and, accordingly, Proudhon is consistently anarchist and anti-clerical. But more intelligent than most, he has sufficient insight to realise that most of the forms of socialism then in vogue are in their way as authoritarian as the most authoritarian and arbitrary State, and that the tyranny of socialism may be as oppressive to the individual as the tyranny of the State under which we now groan. This explains the unending feud he carried on against ‘communists,’ and in particular against Louis Blanc and Cabet, who represented the types of authoritarian socialism which were especially repugnant to him. Justice, interpreted as equality, and freedom from restraint, represented by the extremest individualistic liberty, are then the two principles which commanded Proudhon's unwavering loyalty. Perhaps just here is a further explanation of the confusion which swamps Proudhon. For in spite of the tradition of the French Revolution which harnessed Freedom and Equality along with Fraternity, it may be doubted whether Proudhon's two ideals, as he interpreted them, are in fact reconcilable. If we are to have real equality, we must be coerced into it by the State or by some other authority; if, on the other hand, we are to have unrestrained, unfettered, untrammelled liberty, then among other things we must be left free to be unequal. It is a dilemma which in fact Proudhon never solved, and in a sense it pursued him into many fields of controversy.

Probably a systematic statement of Proudhon's theories ought not to begin with a consideration of his views on Property, but should rather approach this subject as a particular illustration of his more general doctrines regarding Justice. As, however, such a systematic statement of the chaos that is Proudhon is in any case impossible, there is a certain advantage in beginning where Proudhon in effect began, especially as the subject of Property, cutting across all other conceivable topics, runs throughout the whole of Proudhon's writings from his earliest work of real significance to the posthumous volume which was designed as a full and complete statement of his views on this question. Let it be premised that although Proudhon does not expressly say so, it is primarily property in land that he has in mind, as is perhaps fitting in one who remained at heart a peasant. It was the opening paragraph of Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? that made Proudhon. In this somewhat too notorious passage, he remarks that if, in reply to the question: What is Slavery? he were to answer in a word ?'est l'assassinat, he would at once be understood. Why then can he have no hope of being understood if, in reply to the question: What is Property? he replies with equal truth that Property is theft, although this is but the previous proposition expressed in different words?¹ There then is the proposition, La Propriété, c'est le vol! which for the vast majority of Proudhon's contemporaries and for most of the world ever since was the essential and, indeed, almost the sole contribution of Proudhon to the advancement of thought. Unfortunately it was not even original, and critics were not slow to point out that identical words had been used by Brissot, and Emile Faguet quite properly cites similar expressions in Saint-Simon and Morelly, adding characteristically that the thought ‘a toujours été dans le cœur de ceux qui ne possèdent pas.’ But Proudhon remained bombastically and childishly proud of his great discovery, even while advancing views regarding property which were entirely inconsistent with his primary title to glory:

The definition of Property (he exclaims) is mine, and my whole ambition is to prove that I have understood its meaning and its scope. La Propriété, c'est le vol! Not in a thousand years is utterance given twice to such a saying as this. I have no possession in the world other than this definition of Property; but I hold it more precious than the millions of the Rothschilds, and I venture to say that it will be the most considerable event of the government of Louis Philippe.²

As to the unworthy suggestion that this, his most precious possession, was also a theft—from Brissot or another—Proudhon can but shrug his shoulders somewhat cavalierly. Brissot, he observes, did not understand the meaning of his own words¹: and with even more indignation he challenges his accusers to prove that Brissot knew what he was saying!² Thus might one find excuses for plagiarising the Apocalypse by calling on the prosecution to prove that St. John understood what he had written.

The essence of Proudhon's first attack on Property is extremely simple, though inevitably (the author being the man he was) the argument overflows its banks in contrary directions. But in essence, had Proudhon been compelled to summarise his argument in six pages, he would have said that the customary expositions of the right of property are inadequate. In the main (and again it should be recalled that he is consciously or unconsciously thinking of land) the basis of property is ordinarily found either in the right of first occupancy or in the so-called ‘Labour Right,’ with which we are familiar in Locke and Mill—the right of the producer to what he has himself produced. So far as occupancy is concerned, it is argued that there can be no right created against later comers or later generations: ‘si les premiers occupants ont tout occupé, qu'est-ce que les derniers venus occuperont?’³ Going back to Cicero's rather foolish analogy drawn from seats in a theatre, to Grotius and others, the utmost that can be conceded is that all have an equal right to what is necessary for their maintenance. Thus the argument in favour of property (so far as permissible) leads to an argument for equality, which is the negation of property.⁴

Nor (according to Proudhon) can labour give a right to property, along the lines of Locke's argument. According to Locke, the worker ‘mixes his labour’ with the gifts of nature, and what results is his, as a kind of extension of his personality; but clearly this argument assumes that the gifts of nature are not yet appropriated. In a world where all things are appropriated, the lone labourer has nothing wherewith to mix his labour. If a worker assiduously mingles his labour with the waters of the Tweed, and elicits a salmon, so far from the salmon being his property, he will (unless fortunate) be prosecuted for poaching, since, in what used to pass for a witticism in Scotland, ‘the Earth is the Laird's, and the fullness thereof.’

Indeed anyone whose duty it is to expound to the young the more or less commonly accepted ‘bases of private property’ must confess, if he be honest, that he approaches the subject with a somewhat apologetic air. The generally accepted ‘bases of private property’ comprise a curious medley of juridical, moral and economic considerations, and give but a dusty answer, if they give an answer at all, to the fundamental question of why private property exists. Indeed—no uncommon occurrence in life—they tend to give an answer to the wrong question. Assuming that it has been decided that private property shall be allowed to exist, then it is permissible to say that property may be founded on labour, or contract, or prescription, or on any other ground that may be deemed valid. But to the deeper question of why property should exist at all, these various considerations are not relevant. To any one brought up in Icaria or any other Utopia, who should challenge the right of private property in toto, it is obviously no answer to plead the right of prescription, and to say in effect: ‘I am justified in owning this, because it has been mine for a long time.’ To the profounder question which centres in the justification of private property as such, it is probable that there is no satisfactory theoretical answer; and this is, in a sense, the sum and substance of Proudhon's dissertation. All that the sensible man can do (and it is what Proudhon does elsewhere, when he is sensible) is to fall back on Aristotle, and plead that private property is justified because it is in accordance with human nature and satisfies a natural human instinct.

As in the case of the argument for property based on occupation, Proudhon contends that the labour basis, in so far as permissible, also tends to equality. In most of his discussion on this point, he is more obscure than usual, but the main point advanced in support of his position here is that wealth is produced socially: the greater the number of workers, the smaller is the task assigned to each, so that natural inequality in men's endowments is neutralised in an expanding society.¹ A wholly different argument is that the higher capacities which on orthodox (and Saint-Simonian) theory call for higher remuneration, are made possible only when society has sufficiently enlarged itself to allow the creation of such superior posts. It is, he would seem to argue, the queue at the cinema door that makes the film star, who would languish if restricted to the population of St. Kilda or Tristan da Cunha. Thus it is society, and not the individual, which creates the more responsible position.² The familiar fact of mutual interdependence makes the work of production a common and joint effort. In a phrase which deserves to be pondered, he speaks of the worker as being, with regard to society, a debtor who necessarily dies insolvent.³ None of us ever can meet our obligations to our fellows. Largely, therefore, because no one can claim merit, and because the work of no one can be isolated, the development of society is towards equality.

In the course of his diffuse argument on this question, Proudhon throws out an idea, of which, if one may borrow his own reference to Brissot, he does not appear to have realised the full significance: at least he does not return to it, as he does to most ideas dear to his heart. It is, however, of some interest as containing the germ of a theory of exploitation different from that which Marx was later to place on the centre of the stage. He argues that the worker, even after he has received his wages, has a natural right of property over the thing he has produced. This is so because the worker is necessarily underpaid. While the employer pays so many days’ wages in respect of the effort of each worker, nothing is paid in respect of ‘cette force immense qui résulte de l'union et de l'harmonie des travailleurs.’ There is an additional productivity arising from union, and this ‘force collective’ goes unremunerated. This explains, in a phrase used by Proudhon but more familiar elsewhere, the ‘exploitation de l'homme par l'homme.’¹

To return more closely to the central question of property, we have seen that ‘Property is theft’; yet it is obvious, even at the moment of its utterance, that this portentous formula, as has been well expressed by Suranyi-Ungar, has a somewhat hohlen Klang, a hollow sound; that it is but an inhaltsloses Kampfgeschrei. For even in this first and most extreme pamphlet, it is not really property that Proudhon condemns; it is what, with a curious affectation of learning, he calls the droit d'aubaine inherent in property—that quality which enables the owner to exact a revenue from others. In an illuminating phrase in his posthumous Théorie de la Propriété Proudhon explains that by property he means the sum total of the abuses that may spring from property.² It is a curious procedure to define an institution as the abuses which may be associated with that institution; yet this is what Proudhon does when disporting in that field of dialectic in which Property is theft.

The right of aubaine may, of course, take different forms: rent in respect of land or houses, interest on investments, gains and profits—in short, all possible revenues deriving from possession, all the possible devices whereby ‘le propriétaire moissonne et ne laboure pas, récolte et ne cultive pas, consomme et ne produit pas, jouit et n'exerce rien.’³ Here we come to the crux of Proudhon on this question of property. It is this droit d'aubaine that constitutes the right of theft, le droit de vol⁴; if property can be purified by the infusion of his beloved justice, so that it no longer enables the owner to exact a revenue, so that the elements ‘hostile to sociability’ are eliminated,⁵ then indeed property will no longer be anathema. At this stage Proudhon flatters himself that he has done the trick when he replaces property by possession, so that the privileges of ownership will be restricted to the usufruct.

Proudhon ends Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? with a characteristic boast that as a result of his tract, ‘Property is vanquished; it will never again raise its head.’¹ To learn how blessed and beneficial, how essential and eternal a thing property is, one must turn to the Contradictions Economiques and the posthumous Théorie de la Propriété. The Système des Contradictions Economiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère, to give it its full title for once, is a somewhat maddening book, and Karl Marx is not the only one who has been maddened beyond endurance by its 960 ample pages. Fortunately there are now few who expose themselves to the risk. It represents a spurious Hegelianism run mad. There are doubtless considerable stretches where interest revives; somewhat oddly, one of the most effective passages is that devoted to a destructive criticism of orthodox socialism. Yet the effect of the whole is asphyxiating. In design, Proudhon aims at discussing such things as Value, Division of Labour, Machinery, Competition, Monopoly, and much more, showing in each case how that which is good and necessary leads to that which is evil and deplorable. Division of labour, for example, is a condition of progress; but as the arts progress, there is retrogression of the artisan. ‘Comment un principe dont le développement est visiblement utile, peut-il être en même temps funeste?’² This question, as it happens, has specific reference to competition, but in fact it governs the whole of the two bulky volumes. It is, of course, designed to be the Hegelian thesis and antithesis, but Proudhon is singularly ineffective in getting anywhere near a synthesis. The scheme of this, his most pretentious work, does in fact, however, provide an elastic framework within which he may argue on both sides of any given question.

In the main, however, on the question now before us, the weight of the argument in the Contradictions Economiques is not merely on the legitimacy of property, but indeed on the necessity of its universalisation. In the opening pages he introduces the new theme by admitting that the renting or hiring of land (le loyer), as indeed of money or any other object of value, is a spontaneous and universal fact, ‘qui a sa source au plus profond de notre nature,’ and which by its development becomes one of the most potent springs of organisation.³ Now he depicts the fatal consequences which would follow the abolition of property: ‘With the destruction of property, society would fall into a disorganisation without end.’⁴ He identifies property with the family, which, for Proudhon, the strictest of all puritans, is the most sacred of all institutions: ‘La famille et la propriété marchent de front, appuyées l'une sur l'autre.’ The aim of the legislator is, not to abolish, but to realise for everyone three things which are intertwined: le mariage, la famille, la propriété. Moreover, in the interests of the family, there must be inheritance; for without inheritance there can be neither husbands nor wives, neither ancestors nor descendants. There must be inheritance, ‘parce que la famille ne doit jamais périr.’¹ Here it is Proudhon, the patriarch, the incurable individualist, who is speaking. Even if, with every desire to render Proudhon comprehensible, the ideas of property and possession are kept apart, it is difficult to see how ‘possession,’ to which inheritance in this patriarchal sense has been added, differs from property in the ordinary sense.

In the posthumous Théorie de la Propriété we make further progress in discovering how property, purged by justice—that is to say, deprived of its power to exact a revenue from others—becomes not merely defensible, but praiseworthy. And indeed we are provided with a wholly new, and highly curious, theory in defence of property; and, odd as it may appear in the light of all that has gone before, a reason for preferring ‘property’ to the more anæmic ‘possession’ originally commended for our acceptance. The impulse to this new theory of property is to be found in the horror with which Proudhon, as an extreme individualist and anarchist, regarded any State or any authority. Accordingly he now argues that the justification of property is to be found, not in its origins but in its ‘ends.’² The State being what it is, it is necessary to create a counterpoise, to balance its power. The only possible and adequate counterpoise for this purpose is in fact to be found in property. Property has always been the most redoubtable enemy and the most perfidious ally of the prevailing power, and that is why every Government and every Church distrusts property. Property is the greatest revolutionary force in existence, and the only one that can be opposed to that mysterious thing which Proudhon calls ‘le pouvoir.’ The formidable power of the State can be balanced only by uniting the power of the proprietors, and thus may liberty be guaranteed. Nor can this miraculous effect be produced by ‘possession’ in the Proudhonian sense: for possession, implying thereby usufruct as apart from absolute ownership, is itself dependent on the State, and instead of opposing the State, it will come to its aid.³ Property is thus a liberating influence,⁴ and indeed it has always been so regarded in the liberal tradition. Much of this may not appear to be a very convincing defence of property, especially if it be remembered that Proudhon, when approving property, thinks in terms of small and preferably peasant proprietors; but it is not without interest in revealing the flexibility and the versatility of Proudhon's mind.

For the rest, the Théorie de la Propriété tends to become a panegyric of property, it being always understood that property is now purged and purified of the unjust droit d'aubaine, and the equally offensive jus abutendi of the Roman lawyers. If marriage were the right to abuse one's wife, would it, he pertinently asks, be a respectable institution?¹ But assuming that property is divested of such unsocial accretions, it emerges free of reproach, and no praise is too high for it. It is by virtue of property that the ego, which is ‘individuel, insocial, avare, envieux, jaloux, plein d'orgueil et de mauvaise foi,’ ceases to possess all these undesirable characteristics, and is transformed into something higher.² Thus in what is perhaps the most crucial sentence on this subject, ‘Property which is in its origin a principle vicious in itself and anti-social, is destined to become, precisely through its generalisation, the pivot and the mainspring of the whole system.’³ ‘Property,’ he exclaims elsewhere, ‘must never perish; it must remain in the heart of man as a perpetual stimulant to labour.’⁴ Indeed, Proudhon ends by regarding himself as the saviour of property: ‘Odd, that after waging war against property for fifteen years, I am perhaps destined to save it from the inexpert hands of its defenders.’⁵ Finally, for those who share Proudhon's delight in a concatenation of adjectives, property appears as ‘libérale, fédérative, décentralisatrice, républicaine, égalitaire, progressive, justicière’—all of these being in the Proudhonian sense adjectives of commendation.⁶ Such is the end of the journey which began with the loud trumpeting of the identity of property and theft, and the triumphant proclamation that property would never again raise its head.

At the risk of a somewhat disproportioned account of Proudhon's writings as a whole, his views on property have been examined in some detail in the foregoing paragraphs, for two reasons. Firstly it may give some idea of the chaos (perhaps more apparent than real), of the inconsistencies and contradictions in which he chose to cloud all that he had to say. We have seen how he damns and praises property in the same breath; and while asserting that property will be the salvation of society, he boasts of the glory due to him for having discovered that property is theft. In fact, as has been indicated, property at times means for Proudhon ‘property,’ and at times it means the ‘abuses of property.’ If, sacrificing literary grace, he had called them P₁ and P₂, his argument might have been clearer and his conclusions less apparently contradictory. The second reason for dealing in some detail with Proudhon's views on property is that, though he may have been more influential elsewhere, it was this subject that made him known, and for long it was on this that his fame (or his notoriety) rested. Not much of Proudhon's writings has passed into general knowledge, and for this Proudhon is himself largely to blame; but the first thing that is known of him (even if frequently it is also the last) is that he fathered (or step-fathered) the great phrase that property is theft. It has therefore seemed excusable to examine what in fact he did say.

Property, it has been seen, will become sacred, if it is purged and infused with justice. It is time to consider how this purging process can be effected. Broadly, the remedy obviously lies in extirpating the droit d'aubaine, the power to extract a revenue from others which property confers on its owner. In a characteristic phrase, property in land deprived of its rent will be ‘cured of its leprosy’¹; and the same applies to other types of ownership. Justice must be introduced; and on one view, the whole of Proudhon is a groping after justice and an attempt to apply it—as he conceives it—to all human relationships. Whether justice in the abstract is an ideal which can be attained is extremely doubtful. It is perhaps even open to question whether we know what we mean when we speak of justice; or whether (Plato's Republic notwithstanding) any of us could define justice without using terms which are even more elusive and ambiguous. Doubtless, it may be possible to give a limited and circumscribed definition of justice which would bring it within the field of human pursuit; but justice in the large eludes us.²

Proudhon, of course, has his own definition of justice; but as used by him throughout his endless writings, the word overflows all definitions, and becomes the living God. La Justice est le Dieu suprême, elle est le Dieu vivant.³ When he compels himself to be more specific, justice, putting it somewhat colloquially, may be summed up as involving respect for human dignity in our neighbours as well as in ourselves.⁴ His complete definition may be given: Justice is ‘the respect, spontaneously felt and reciprocally guaranteed, of human dignity, in whatsoever person and in whatsoever circumstance it may be compromised, and to whatsoever risk its defence may expose us.’⁵

The first and most obvious application of justice, however it may be defined, is in the elimination of the droit d'aubaine, where interest represents the heaviest burden resting on labour.¹ The reduction of the rate of interest to approximately zero accordingly became to a surprising extent the panacea which, with unusual consistency, Proudhon throughout his life advanced as a cure for the world's ills. It is rather odd how frequently writers who are blessed with an enviable ignorance of the mysteries of money, turn to a monetary solution of the perplexities of this life. The organisation of a Bank which would give free credit, or at least credit at a minimal rate to cover office expenses, was of all projects the dearest to. Proudhon's heart, and indeed considerable steps were taken to bring it into existence. What Proudhon says with regard to the organisation of credit and indeed on money generally, somewhat resembles the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, wherein the prophet discourses of the whoredoms of Aholah and Aholibah. While it is possible to apprehend generally what is the theme of discussion, few readers could conscientiously say that they grasp the course of the argument.

Although Proudhon flatters himself that ‘les hommes du métier’ will easily comprehend his train of thought,² fortunately only the connoisseur in museum-pieces need trouble about the details of his Bank. As expressed in general terms by Proudhon, the underlying idea is that the workers should mutually guarantee each other in respect of both work and a market, and that for this purpose they should accept as money their mutual obligations.³ The workers require credit, but credit is just precisely what the State cannot give. The State possesses nothing but debts and bayonets.⁴ In a phrase which doubtless delighted the author, the State, eternally unproductive, is not the prince of credit, but ‘le type du discrédit.’¹ The workers must therefore provide their own credit; they will do so by rendering each other mutual support. Credit can be organised, putting into practice the principle that products exchange against products. Credit must be given so large a basis that no demand can exhaust it. To do this, the sovereignty of money must be destroyed, and to this end every product of labour must become current money. Under the domination of the money system as we know it, credit is unilateral; with a system of reciprocity, credit will be bilateral. In more technical language, Proudhon claims that his proposal is merely a generalisation of ‘la lettre de change.’² To the Bank erected for the purpose, the would-be borrower will present himself with the title of his property; the Bank will give him coupons to the value of two-thirds or three-quarters of his property, and the coupons will henceforth be money.³ The emission of this new paper can never be excessive, provided it takes place only against ‘bonnes valeurs de commerce’ and according to the demand for discount.⁴ Thus by providing gratuitous credit in this simple way, Proudhon imagined that, applying the principle of ‘Mutualism,’ he had overcome that loathly dragon, le droit d'aubaine.⁵

Proudhon's Bank, designed to provide free credit, has been cited as an example of what he called indifferently ‘Mutualité’ or ‘Mutualisme.’ This Système mutuelliste to which Proudhon looked forward as providing a better world is in its widest definition a society which holds together its members by promising and assuring ‘service pour service, valeur pour valeur, crédit pour crédit, garantie pour garantie.’⁶ Mutualism is in fact Proudhon's particular brand of socialism, and is doubtless best considered as part of the general question of his views on government.

It is doubtless on this side, on the question of government, that Proudhon has been most influential, though indeed not most notorious: here also he was probably most consistent. As a starting-point, it should be noted that fundamentally he was an outrageously extreme individualist. There are a number of pages in the Contradictions Economiques in praise of competition in which the orthodox views of the ultra-classical school of English Political Economy are expressed with a disgusting nudity and crudity. Man, he tells us, emerges from his indolence only when need disquiets him; the surest way of extinguishing his genius is to deliver him from all anxiety, and transfer to the State the responsibility of his inertia. A man may love his fellow to the point of dying for him, but not to the point of working for him. Again, the only encouragement to work is to be found in profit. Men are so constituted that ‘dès que leur bien particulier les sollicite, ils désertent le bien général.’¹ All this might be the voice of McCulloch in one of his graver lapses into orthodoxy. Nor is this merely a comment on the weaknesses of others from which, after the manner of writers, he claims to be personally free. In scoffing at the ‘fraternity’ of the socialists and their schemes of distribution, he exclaims: ‘I intend to be rewarded in the measure of my work: otherwise, I stop working.’² Elsewhere his comment on the problem of the small shopkeeper is remarkable in a prophet of equality: ‘Au plus diligent et au plus probe la faveur des chalands.’³ What more could James Mill desire?

This extreme individualism carries Proudhon further, and makes him the first conscious advocate of what, with a curious affectation in the matter of hyphens, he calls an-archy; for an anarchist is merely the limiting case of a liberal individualist whose commonsense has become infinitesimal. Incessantly and perpetually, in season and out of season, he protests against all that government stands for: ‘We do not admit the government of man by man any more than the exploitation of man by man.’⁴ With a more personal and rebellious note, he exclaims: ‘Whoever lays his hands on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant; and I declare him my enemy.’⁶ He speaks consistently of the State as of something he would not touch with a barge-pole: ‘I have never asked the State to do anything,’ and again ‘I want no State even for a servant.’⁶ The same attitude is observed with regard to laws: ‘If there must be legislation (I wish) to be my own legislator.’⁷ Even more emphatic is this complete renunciation of the Law and all its doings: ‘In so far as I have not wanted the law, in so far as I have not consented to it, voted for it, signed it, I am under no obligation to it; it has no existence.’⁸ He protests, like an exponent of the theory of multiple sovereignty, against ‘cette funeste théorie de la compétence de l'État.’¹ The State becomes a monster: it is ‘that fictitious being, without intelligence, without passion, without morality, that we call the State.’² To be governed—but it requires the best part of a page to present briefly and concisely the degradation of being governed. It is among other things (for this is merely a selection):

to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, taxed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so... enrolled, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished... repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured.³

Any one harbouring such views is of necessity an anarchist, believing that the State is void of virtue. In particular, however, the State is worse than useless for any kind of revolutionary activity. That Louis Blanc failed to realise this, and sought to make use of the State as his tool, explains the contempt which colours all Proudhon's references to Blanc. His emphasis on this point again takes us to the roots of syndicalism. You cannot by Satan cast out Satan, and you cannot by the State effect a revolution. He has much to say about revolutions par en haut, and revolutions par en bas⁴; but any revolutionary activity is repugnant to the State which in its very essence is counter-revolutionary. Every revolution, to be efficacious, must be spontaneous: it must spring, not from the head of the powers-that-be, but from the entrails of the people.⁵ The root-cause of his lively criticism of his contemporary socialists is his contention that they did not realise this; they worshipped power and thirsted for authority. Authority has its seat in the family and nowhere else, and Louis Blanc's mistake was to transfer and apply to the State what was true only of the individual and the family.⁶

Nor is this antagonism to the State confined solely to States which are ordinarily regarded as of the authoritarian and repressive type. The idea of nationality, of the sovereignty of the people, of democracy, and of association were in Proudhon's day much in evidence, and were hailed as the angels of freedom and of progress. Perhaps just for this reason they left Proudhon frigid, or provoked him to the congenial task of destruction. In the matter of nationality, the two outstanding cases of his time were presented by Poland and Italy. On each Proudhon went his own wayward way, looking on the unification of Italy, for reasons to be noted presently, as a mistake. No one has more effectively laid bare the elusiveness of the ‘people,’ for whom sovereignty is claimed. It is sometimes said, he observes, that the people rose as a single man: and he goes on to ask, ‘pense-t-il aussi comme un seul homme? réfléchit-il? raisonne-t-il? conclut-il? a-t-il de la mémoire, de l'imagination, des idées?’ These and many more searching questions await an answer: if they cannot be answered, then ‘your respect for the sovereignty of the people is but an absurd fetichism.’¹ It is but a fiction, a myth.²

On democracy and the machinery of democracy, Proudhon also pours forth his contempt, coming rather close to certain modern schools of thought who would claim that all representation is bound to be misrepresentation. In a somewhat startling phrase he asserts that government is by divine right (as he would probably admit it to be in the case of a father of a family), or it is nothing: democratic government is but a contradiction. Is the ballot, he asks, more trustworthy than tradition or heredity?³ In any case, what do numbers prove? By adding together votes, you can never arrive at any general thought.⁴ The greatest men may not be able to find a solution; yet ten million citizens, ‘feebly minded,’ can infallibly solve the problem of the revolution!⁵ Nor can there be any legitimate representation of the people; all electoral systems are merely ‘des mécaniques à mensonge’; the deputy never represents more than one idea, one interest; all the rest are pitilessly excluded.⁶ Half the electors plus one may decide the election; in which case half the electors minus one are for ever unrepresented or misrepresented. It has again been a familiar line of argument in these latter days; it suffices to prove to Proudhon that democracy is a Chimère.⁷

With regard to association, Proudhon is not wholly condemnatory, but his attitude is, if anything, on the icy side of tepid. Acknowledging that he distrusts fraternity, he finds in ‘association in general’ more evil than good. Here, as elsewhere, his antagonism springs from his distrust of Utopias and fine words. Association is for him merely a dogma. It is neither a directing principle nor an industrial force: there is nothing in it which makes the worker stronger or quicker, reduces the cost of production, or achieves any measurable end.⁸ In its essence, association is sterile and indeed injurious, since it places fetters on the liberty of the worker: ‘Never, except in spite of himself, and because he cannot do otherwise, does man associate.’⁹ This again is a curious reflection of a world in which there are no trade unions, no need for trade unions, and no appreciation of trade unions. This is well illustrated by the case in which Proudhon does admit association, and which he introduces as if it were exceptional. There are, he realises, ‘certain industries, which require the combined employment of a large number of workers, a vast array of machines and hands,’ and much more. Where there is great division of labour and a considerable collective force, association among the workers imposes itself of necessity; and every such industry is ‘destined to become a society or company of workers.’¹ That Proudhon should have laid the emphasis where he did, placing the field of non-association before the field of association, shows how much he moved in thought in the village and in the world of small industry. Yet with regard to these ‘certain industries’ his vision was that of the Guild of recent thought: ‘A railroad, a mine, a factory, a ship, are to the workers who use them what a hive is to the bees, at once their tool and their home, their country, their territory, their property.’² In the main, however, his criticism of association is that of the confirmed individualist. Either association is compulsory, or it is voluntary. If compulsory, then it is merely slavery; if voluntary, what guarantee can there be that the members will work according to their capacity, or that the association will reward them according to their needs?³

In the light of this antagonism to all government and to all the machinery of government, and indeed of his dislike of anything that brings men together, Proudhon could not fail to be an anarchist. Government must disappear, and indeed anarchy is approaching daily. ‘La liberté, toujours la liberté, rien que la liberté, et pas de gouvernementalisme’—there, he exclaims, is the whole revolutionary catechism.⁴ What, in Proudhon's vision, is to take the place of the detested governmental machine? Two ideas, which are in a way interlocked, provide the clues to Proudhon's anarchy. The first is mutuality or mutualism which has already been mentioned in connection with gratuitous credit; the second is the development and extension of a system of free contracts. The système mutuelliste is in some ways so much the whole substance of Proudhon on the constructive side, that it may be as well to give one of the more lucid definitions of what it implies. Under mutuality:

la société, doit être considerée, non comme une hiérarchie de fonctions et de facultés, mais comme un système d'équilibrations entre forces libres, dans lequel chacune est assurée de jouir des mêmes droits à la condition de remplir les mêmes devoirs, d'obtenir les mêmes avantages en échange des mêmes services, système par conséquent essentiellement égalitaire et libéral, qui exclut toute acception de fortunes, de rang et de classes.¹

With this system of reciprocal rights and duties, it is necessary to consider the important part assigned by Proudhon to contract. Outside the family, there is no place for authority²; contract is accordingly the only moral bond which free and equal beings can accept. Moreover, while Proudhon claimed that he was in no way a consenting party to law, he acknowledged that he was of necessity a consenting party to any contract into which he might enter. A system of contract must therefore replace a system of laws; and as contracts necessarily imply that they are made between equals, such a system will furnish the blessed trinity of Liberty, Equality and Freedom, with Order thrown in. The contract, he claims, solves all problems.³ Thus in the end there will be no void caused by dissolving, submerging and suppressing the whole governmental machine: industrial organisation will take the place of government, and in place of laws there will be contracts.

Let no one raise foolishly commonsense objections that Proudhon's anarchy, or any other anarchy, would not ‘work.’ To ask what would happen if... is merely to reveal ignorance of the conventions and of the rules of the game. There is, however, this to be said for Proudhon's anarchy, that even if a world wallowing in contracts, with no power to enforce them, is something of a nightmare, the spirit of Proudhon's anarchy suggests certain halfway houses which are by no means so repugnant to experience. For at the root of all Proudhon's political theories the one constant element is hatred of the dominating centralised authority; the one remedy is decentralisation and still more decentralisation, and this is quite a practical policy, provided one stops short of making every man his own lawgiver. Mutuality on the political and international plane becomes federalism,⁴ and Proudhon is the prophet of federalism. The twentieth century, he prophesies, will open the era of federations⁵; and even if events have not so far fulfilled his prophecy, the idea is certainly in the air. The advantage of federalism in Proudhon's eyes is that it tends to diminish power by breaking it up. His opposition to the national movement in Italy in so far as it tended to lead to unification, was caused by the view he took that Italy (as it then was) was specially created for a federal constitution. In any case, the fewer centralised states the better. Every centralised State is by its very nature annexationist, but ‘une confédération demeure sans force pour la conquête,’ just as it discourages the effervescence of the masses.¹

One other aspect of Proudhon's federalism plays a considerable part in history. He represents, for reasons already given, the claims of the local authority against the central State. The question of municipal liberties is, he says somewhat extravagantly, the whole of federation.² In practice this, of course, means, in Proudhon's environment, the claims of the Commune, for which he claims sovereignty as against the State. A highly significant passage may be cited in an abridged form, as it gives the whole of Proudhon on this point, and is not without importance in connection with subsequent political theory:

La commune est par essence, comme l'homme, comme la famille, comme toute individualité et toute collectivité intelligente, morale et libre, un être souverain. En cette qualité la commune a le droit de se gouverner elle-même, de s'administrer, de s'imposer des taxes, de disposer de ses propriétés et de ses revenus.... La commune, en conséquence, prend des arrêtés, rend des ordonnances: qui empêche qu'elle aille jusqu'à se donner des lois?³

It is on this quasi-political side that Proudhon becomes a figure of importance in the development of thought. The conception of federalism passed to Bakunin; and as embodied in Bakunin, became a rock of offence to Marx and the seed of dissension in the First International. The Paris Commune was inspired by Proudhonian ideas. Later, his doctrines He at the root of much that became syndicalism: the social theories behind Guild Socialism are Proudhonian in essence. The eclipse of the old doctrine of sovereignty in our time could appeal to his writings for justification. He showed, none more clearly, how unrepresentative a representative system may be, and in the bubbling cauldron of political speculation this too has been an ingredient in later times. Proudhon stands by the side of all who support the London County Council against the Ministry of Health; the Borough of Wandsworth against the London County Council; the ward committee against the Borough of Wandsworth; the Trade Union Branch against the Trade Union Executive Committee; the Presbytery against the General Assembly; the Kirk Session against the Presbytery; and whether they know it or not, all these dissidents are in his debt.

In dealing with a writer so diffuse and contradictory as Proudhon, who moreover aims at discussing every aspect of everything, any attempt to grasp the essentials in a few pages is bound to lead to the exclusion of much that may be of interest in itself or might claim a place in a full-length study, but which is less essential when Proudhon is viewed as a link in a chain. Nevertheless, a slight reference to a few points which have been by-passed in the foregoing pages may be of service in completing the picture.

The first and most obvious question is that of value, that miry pit in which, as it happens, Proudhon flounders more than most. Justice, the chief characteristic of the Système Mutuelliste, will limp unless value is determined.¹ On the main point, he is in the Marxian line, orthodox and unsurprising. It is labour that determines value, and for this purpose labour is to be measured by time.² But this is complicated by a curious idea that value has in some way to be constituée.³ This, so far, has been done only for gold or silver. As the saying is cryptic, it may be given in his own words, so that each may interpret it according to his will and capacity: ‘Or, ce que nul n'a remarqué, c'est que de toutes les marchandises, l'or et l'argent sont les premières dont la valeur soit arrivée a sa constitution.’⁴ On the general principle, justice requires that every product shall exchange for another product which shall have cost the same sum of effort and expense.⁵ This is comprehensible or at least familiar, even if practical difficulties leap to the eyes. Proudhon, however, in effect, suggests an elaborate system of price control. There is virtue in the prix fixe; and very naively he says that la vente à prix fixe is more dignified than la vente à marchandage; indeed if we all sold at prix fixe, we should have Mutuality.⁶ But who in a Proudhonian world is to fix prices remains a mystery. If authority, then we continue to groan under governmental tyranny; if the ‘law of supply and demand,’ then we are still in the jungle of injustice.

Something has already been said about equality, which in Proudhon's earliest tract had figured as a necessary condition of liberty.⁷ Equality is in general for Proudhon the manifestation of justice. Yet he is here curiously rent between an abstract and somewhat intellectual love of equality and his individualistic instincts to let the best shop-keeper get the largest number of customers. But in his egalitarian moments he tries to persuade himself against his better judgment, and by curious arguments, that men are in fact equal, and that equality is the law of nature. The progress of society, he holds, tends to make all alike and is leading us to an equivalence of talents and knowledge.⁸ The man of genius is merely a man of good constitution who has had the opportunity of working, thinking and analysing, whereas the dull dog is merely one who has killed his intelligence by his inertia.⁹ This is somewhat to over-simplify the problems of psychology. Greatly daring, he goes beyond this and argues that equality is the law of Nature. The number of days in the year is constant; the years are equal; the revolutions of the moon, if slightly variable, return to equality. The amount of rain in the year is sensibly constant. Equality governs the oceans where flux and reflux march with the regularity of a pendulum. Leaf is equal to leaf; flower to flower. Inequality comes not from the essence of things, but from the ‘milieu.’¹ Never surely was there such a fantastic argument for the equality of man.

Perhaps, and still more oddly, the desire that man should be equal explains Proudhon's paradoxical appearance as an apologist of war. In one of his most perverse books, La Guerre et la Paix, Proudhon reveals himself, for the greater part of its 800 pages, as an enthusiastic defender of ‘le droit de la force.’ War is represented as a religious revelation, a revelation of the ideal; it is even—most perverse of all, and in Proudhon of all people—a revelation of Justice. Doubtless before he has exhausted the subject, it is indicated that war, like religion, is something that mankind has outgrown, and indeed that war ‘a tenu sa dernière assise’ in the events leading to 1815.² But the effect of the whole volume is to convey the impression of a Prussian enthusiasm for war as such. Fundamentally, however, as Emile Faguet has indicated, war is commended because it is, or is supposed to be, a leveller, and equality can be attained by eliminating the weak as well as by more humanitarian methods. This too is his attitude to inferior races; for, despite his devotion to equality, he admits that such exist. There are ‘races mal nées ou abâtardies,’ races whose inferiority will be only more clearly demonstrated by any attempt to educate them. But the remedy here is that they will be absorbed, ‘et finiront par s'éteindre.’ ‘L'EGALITE OU LA MORT!’ he exclaims in capital letters, ‘such is the law of the revolution.’ It is an echo of Babeuf, but with a new significance; for now we are to attain equality by snuffing out those who are inferior.³

There is, however, a limit to the egalitarianism of Proudhon, and it is highly significant. All the earlier Utopian socialists had been feminists proclaiming the equality of woman, seeking to remedy her manifold wrongs. Proudhon is the great exception. He does not like woman. She is ‘impudique et provocatrice par nature’⁴—an observation which somehow suggests kinship with some of the more pointed ex parte statements in the Book of Ecclesiasticus. He would have approved, though he could not have devised in its terseness, that somewhat whimsical simile, according to which ‘from garments cometh a moth, and from women wickedness,’ so that woman's depravity is seen to be but the spontaneous and effortless flowering of her personality. In all his utterances on this question, one suspects in Proudhon (as in Fourier) a complex deriving from unrevealed early experience. He writes habitually like an adolescent who has not recovered from the outrage of having been seduced, or like a Joseph fleeing from a danger too great to be challenged. For Proudhon woman is essentially inferior, a creature to be kept in her place (which is by the fireside), one who finds her expression only through a father, a husband, a brother or a lover. He observes, just in passing, that the day on which his wife is given a vote will be the day of his divorce¹; and for once one feels that here is a thesis to which there can be no anti-thesis. When contrasted with Thompson, Fourier, Godwin and many others, this complete denial of women's rights is curious—or perhaps it may not be so curious. To no one did the sacredness of the home and the family mean so much; to no one was any suggestion of scortatory love² so nauseating and repugnant (it was this that had made the communists a puanteur); no one was ever of a more ferocious and uncompromising chastity than was Proudhon. Communism might be all very well for prostitutes and nuns, but it was not for the mothers of families.³ The home, for Proudhon, was everything, the one cell in society where authority prevailed, and within that home everything must be subject to the ‘master.’ It is the morality of the austere and puritanical peasant.⁴

Lastly, in this brief catalogue of references to points lying somewhat off the main path, Proudhon was of course anti-religious, or at least (if one wishes to be fastidious in the use of language) he was anticlerical and anti-Christian. Did he not coin the phrase: ‘Dieu, c'est le mal’? And indeed those who search will find even more astonishing observations. That enormous book, De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise, is indeed merely a lengthy over-grown anti-clerical tract, the theme of which is that Justice is to be found with the Revolution and not with the Church. A very considerable section of that early essay in destruction, De la Création de l'Ordre dans l'Humanité is devoted to proving the hostility of religion to science and progress, and to the establishment of the simple proposition that ‘l'homme est destiné à vivre sans religion.’¹ We are not concerned with Proudhon's theology (if such it may be called), but it is interesting to note the varying impulse to the anti-religious attitude of so many of the early socialists, apart from amiable optimists like Fourier. Godwin's irreligion was based on the fact that all religions, and especially Christianity, taught obedience and submission, whereas the first lesson of morality is to learn to disobey: the only command should in effect come from one's own conscience. Owen's quarrel with religion was that all religions had failed to grasp ‘the science of circumstances’; they held that men were responsible for what they were, whereas our characters are made for us. Proudhon, on the other hand, was anticlerical, because (as he saw it) the Church stood for injustice, both in the large sense and in the more restricted sense of his own definition. For what justice is there—though he did not so express it—in the doctrine of Predestination or the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Divines? Starting from Proudhon's peculiar definition of justice, that it means respect for human dignity in one's self and others, the impulse to anti-clericalism is even stronger. For the Church in Proudhon's eyes is chiefly concerned in teaching us to despise ourselves: we are full of wounds and bruises and putrifying sores, and our righteousness is as filthy rags. The first principle of Christianity—to quote Proudhon rather than Isaiah—is ‘la condemnation du moi humain, le mépris de la personne, le viol de la conscience’; its fundamental assumption is that the natural state of man is a state of sin.² And this, according to Proudhon, is to strike at the roots of justice. We are here, though with a very different driving force, nearer to Saint-Simon, who, in substance if not in terms, dissented from the doctrine of original sin and all its implications, for the very simple reason that, unlike St. Paul, he did not regard himself or his fellows as sinners in any remarkable or outstanding degree.

So perforce we must leave Proudhon, the most difficult and the most elusive of all the great figures in the history of socialism. Glaring and confusing as are the apparent contradictions in his writings, they are not greater or more astonishing than the contradictions in the man himself. He was a writer of infinite violence when armed with a fountain-pen or its mid-nineteenth-century equivalent; but the bitterness and the gall were in the fountain-pen and not in his heart. In himself he was the simplest and least offensive of men, just and upright, austere and incorruptible—if it were not for the pain it would have caused him, one might even have added that he lived a god-fearing life. The most moving pages in Proudhon—pages of real eloquence—are those in which he recalls his early days as a cowherd beside the Doubs.¹ He was always at heart a peasant, and he had all the virtues and some of the limitations of the best type of peasantry. Had fate been kind to him, it would have made him a patriarch, with patient and placid cows and a very placid and patient wife—sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-Place—surrounded by his children's grandchildren, running to do his bidding. For what Proudhon desired was a village of individualistic peasant owners, free from the offensiveness of wealth, a wife who could always be found in the kitchen, and—‘that the tooth of usury be grinded that it bite not too much’—an agreeable bank granting loans at? per cent. Reybaud speaks of Owen as a combination in which Abraham is greatly astonished to find himself in contact with Babeuf. The picture is even truer of Proudhon.