PROUDHON
Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born in 1809 at Besançon, France, the native place also of the socialist Fourier. His origin was of the humblest, his father being a brewer’s cooper, and the boy herded cows and did such other work as came in his way. But he was not entirely self-educated; at sixteen he entered the college of his native place, though his family was so poor that he could not procure the necessary books, and had to borrow them from his mates in order to copy the lessons. There is a story of the young Proudhon returning home laden with prizes, but to find that there was no dinner for him.
At nineteen he became a working compositor, and was afterwards promoted to be a corrector for the press, reading proofs of ecclesiastical works, and thereby acquiring a considerable knowledge of theology. In this way he also came to learn Hebrew, and to compare it with Greek, Latin, and French. It was the first proof of his intellectual audacity that on the strength of this he wrote an Essai de grammaire générale. As Proudhon knew nothing whatever of the true principles of philology, his treatise was of no value.
In 1838 he obtained the pension Suard, a bursary of 1500 francs a year for three years, for the encouragement of young men of promise, which was in the gift of the Academy of Besançon. Next year he wrote a treatise On the Utility of Keeping the Sunday, which contained the germs of his revolutionary ideas. About this time he went to Paris, where he lived a poor, ascetic, and studious life, making acquaintance, however, with the socialistic ideas which were then fermenting in the capital.
In 1840 he published his first work, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property?) His famous answer to this question, La propriété c’est le vol (Property is theft), naturally did not please the academy of Besançon, and there was some talk of withdrawing his pension; but he held it for the regular period.[[1]]
For his third memoir on property, which took the shape of a letter to the Fourierist, M. Considérant, he was tried at Besançon, but was acquitted. In 1846 he published his greatest work, the Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophie de la misère. For some time Proudhon carried on a small printing establishment at Besançon, but without success; and afterwards held a post as a kind of manager with a commercial firm at Lyons. In 1847 he left this employment, and finally settled in Paris, where he was now becoming celebrated as a leader of innovation.
He regretted the sudden outbreak of the revolution of February, because it found the social reformers unprepared; but he threw himself with ardour into the conflict of opinion, and soon gained a national notoriety. He was the moving spirit of the Représentant du Peuple and other journals, in which the most advanced theories were advocated in the strongest language; and as member of Assembly for the Seine department he brought forward his celebrated proposal for exacting an impost of one-third on interest and rent, which of course was rejected. His attempt to found a bank which should operate by granting gratuitous credit, was also a complete failure; of the five million francs which he required, only seventeen thousand were offered. The violence of his utterances led to an imprisonment at Paris for three years, during which he married a young working woman.
As Proudhon aimed at economic rather than political innovation, he had no special quarrel with the Second Empire, and he lived in comparative quiet under it till the publication of his work, De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église (1858), in which he attacked the Church and other existing institutions with unusual fury. This time he fled to Brussels to escape imprisonment. On his return to France his health broke down, though he continued to write. He died at Passy in 1865.
Personally, Proudhon was one of the most remarkable figures of modern France. His life was marked by the severest simplicity and even puritanism; he was affectionate in his domestic relations, a most loyal friend, and strictly upright in conduct. He was strongly opposed to the prevailing French socialism of his time because of its utopianism and immorality; and, though he uttered all manner of wild paradox and vehement invective against the dominant ideas and institutions, he was remarkably free from feelings of personal hate. In all that he said and did he was the son of the people, who had not been broken to the usual social and academic discipline; hence his roughness, his one-sidedness, and his exaggerations. But he is always vigorous, and often brilliant and original.
It would obviously be impossible to reduce the ideas of such an irregular thinker to systematic form. In later years Proudhon himself confessed that ‘the great part of his publications formed only a work of dissection and ventilation, so to speak, by means of which he slowly makes his way towards a superior conception of political and economic laws.’ Yet the groundwork of his teaching is clear and firm; no one could insist with greater emphasis on the demonstrative character of economic principles as understood by himself. He strongly believed in the absolute truth of a few moral ideas, with which it was the aim of his teaching to mould and suffuse political economy. Of these fundamental ideas, justice, liberty, and equality were the chief. What he desiderated, for instance, in an ideal society was the most perfect equality of remuneration. It was his principle that service pays service, that a day’s labour balances a day’s labour—in other words, that the duration of labour is the just measure of value. He did not shrink from any of the consequences of this theory, for he would give the same remuneration to the worst mason as to a Phidias; but he looks forward also to a period in human development when the present inequality in the talent and capacity of men would be reduced to an inappreciable minimum.
From the great principle of service as the equivalent of service he derived his axiom that property is the right of aubaine. The aubain was a stranger not naturalised; and the right of aubaine was the right in virtue of which the Sovereign claimed the goods of such a stranger who had died in his territory. Property is a right of the same nature, with a like power of appropriation in the form of rent, interest, etc. It reaps without labour, consumes without producing, and enjoys without exertion.
Proudhon’s aim, therefore, was to realise a science of society resting on principles of justice, liberty, and equality thus understood; ‘a science, absolute, rigorous, based on the nature of man and of his faculties, and on their mutual relations; a science which we have not to invent, but to discover.’ But he saw clearly that such ideas, with their necessary accompaniments, could be realised only through a long and laborious process of social transformation. As we have said, he strongly detested the prurient immorality of the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier. He attacked them not less bitterly for thinking that society could be changed off-hand by a ready-made and complete scheme of reform. It was ‘the most accursed lie,’ he said, ‘that could be offered to mankind.’
In social change he distinguishes between the transition and the perfection or achievement. With regard to the transition he advocated the progressive abolition of the right of aubaine, by reducing interest, rent, etc. For the goal he professed only to give the general principles; he had no ready-made scheme, no Utopia. The positive organisation of the new society in its details was a labour that would require fifty Montesquieus. The organisation he desired was one on collective principles, a free association which would take account of the division of labour, and which would maintain the personality both of the man and the citizen. With his strong and fervid feeling for human dignity and liberty, Proudhon could not have tolerated any theory of social change that did not give full scope for the free development of man. Connected with this was his famous paradox of anarchy, as the goal of the free development of society, by which he meant that through the ethical progress of men government should become unnecessary. Each man should be a law to himself. ‘Government of man by man in every form,’ he says, ‘is oppression. The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.’
Proudhon’s theory of property as the right of aubaine is substantially the same as the theory of capital held by Marx and most of the later socialists. Property and capital are defined and treated as the power of exploiting the labour of other men, of claiming the results of labour without giving an equivalent. Proudhon’s famous paradox, ‘Property is theft,’ is merely a trenchant expression of this general principle. As slavery is assassination inasmuch as it destroys all that is valuable and desirable in human personality, so property is theft inasmuch as it appropriates the value produced by the labour of others in the form of rent, interest, or profit without rendering an equivalent. For property Proudhon would substitute individual possession, the right of occupation being equal for all men.
With the bloodshed of the days of June French socialism ceased for a time to be a considerable force; and Paris, too, for a time lost its place as the great centre of innovation. The rising removed the most enterprising leaders of the workmen and quelled the spirit of the remainder, while the false prosperity of the Second Empire relieved their most urgent grievances. Under Napoleon III. there was consequently comparative quietness in France. Even the International had very little influence on French soil, though French working men had an important share in originating it.
| [1] | A complete edition of Proudhon’s works, including his posthumous writings, was published at Paris, 1875. See P. J. Proudhon, sa vie et sa correspondance, by Sainte-Beuve (Paris, 1875), an admirable work, unhappily not completed; also Revue des Deux Mondes, Jan. 1866 and Feb. 1873. |
CHAPTER IV
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM
Compared with the parallel movement in France the early socialism of England had an uneventful history. In order to appreciate the significance of Robert Owen’s work it is necessary to recall some of the most important features of the social condition of the country in his time. The English worker had no fixed interest in the soil. He had no voice either in local or national government. He had little education or none at all. His dwelling was wretched in the extreme. The right even of combination was denied him till 1824. The wages of the agricultural labourer were miserably low.
The workman’s share in the benefits of the industrial revolution was doubtful. Great numbers of his class were reduced to utter poverty and ruin by the great changes consequent on the introduction of machinery; the tendency to readjustment was slow and continually disturbed by fresh change. The hours of work were mercilessly long. He had to compete against the labour of women, and of children brought frequently at the age of five or six from the workhouses. These children had to work the same long hours as the adults, and they were sometimes very cruelly treated by the overseers. Destitute as they so often were of parental protection and oversight, with both sexes huddled together under immoral and insanitary conditions, it was only natural that they should fall into the worst habits, and that their offspring should to such a lamentable degree be vicious, improvident, and physically degenerate.
In a country where the labourers had neither education nor political or social rights, and where the peasantry were practically landless serfs, the old English poor law was only a doubtful part of an evil system. All these permanent causes of mischief were aggravated by special causes connected with the cessation of the Napoleonic wars, which are well known. It was in such circumstances, when English pauperism had become a grave national question, that Owen first brought forward his scheme of socialism.
Robert Owen, philanthropist, and founder of English socialism, was born at the village of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, North Wales, in 1771.[[1]] His father had a small business in Newtown as saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received all his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. At ten he went to Stamford, where he served in a draper’s shop for three or four years, and, after a short experience of work in a London shop, removed to Manchester.
His success at Manchester was very rapid. When only nineteen years of age he became manager of a cotton-mill, in which five hundred people were employed, and by his administrative intelligence, energy, industry, and steadiness, soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of American Sea-Island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the first cotton obtained from the Southern States of America. Owen also made remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun. Indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade, as he had found the mill in no well-ordered condition and was left to organise it entirely on his own responsibility.
Owen had become manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company at Manchester, when he made his first acquaintance with the scene of his future philanthropic efforts at New Lanark. During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with the daughter of the proprietor of the New Lanark mills, Mr. Dale. Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark; and after his marriage with Miss Dale he settled there, in 1800, as manager and part owner of the mills. Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton-factories in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current commercial ones.
The factory of New Lanark had been started in 1784 by Dale and Arkwright, the water-power afforded by the falls of the Clyde being the great attraction. Connected with the mills were about two thousand people, five hundred of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Many of them were the lowest of the population, the respectable country-people refusing to submit to the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the factories. Theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were alike neglected; most families lived only in one room.
It was this population, thus committed to his care, which Owen now set himself to elevate and ameliorate. He greatly improved their houses, and by the unsparing and benevolent exertion of his personal influence trained them to habits of order, cleanliness, and thrift. He opened a store, where the people could buy goods of the soundest quality at little more than cost price; and the sale of drink was placed under the strictest supervision. His greatest success, however, was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. He was the founder of infant schools in Great Britain; and, though he was anticipated by Continental reformers, he seems to have been led to institute them by his own views of what education ought to be, and without hint from abroad.
In all these plans Owen obtained the most gratifying success. Though at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, he soon won the confidence of his people. The mills continued to prosper commercially, but it is needless to say that some of Owen’s schemes involved considerable expense, which was displeasing to his partners. Wearied at last of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wished to conduct the business on the ordinary principles, Owen, in 1813, formed a new firm, whose members, content with 5 per cent of return for their capital, would be ready to give freer scope to his philanthropy. In this firm Jeremy Bentham and the well-known Quaker, William Allen, were partners.
In the same year Owen first appeared as an author of essays, in which he expounded the principles on which his system of educational philanthropy was based. From an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion, and had thought out a creed for himself, which he considered an entirely new and original discovery. The chief points in this philosophy were that man’s character is made not by him but for him; that it has been formed by circumstances over which he had no control; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame—these principles leading up to the practical conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man’s character is to place him under the proper influences, physical, moral, and social, from his earliest years. These principles, of the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences, are the keynote of Owen’s whole system of education and social amelioration. As we have said, they are embodied in his first work, A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, the first of these essays (there are four in all) being published in 1813. It is needless to say that Owen’s new views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, and that his originality is to be found only in his benevolent application of them.
For the next few years Owen’s work at New Lanark continued to have a national and even a European significance. His schemes for the education of his workpeople attained to something like completion on the opening of the institution at New Lanark in 1816. He was a zealous supporter of the factory legislation resulting in the Act of 1819, which, however, greatly disappointed him. He had interviews and communications with the leading members of Government, including the Premier, Lord Liverpool, and with many of the rulers and leading statesmen of the Continent. New Lanark itself became a much-frequented place of pilgrimage for social reformers, statesmen, and royal personages, amongst whom was Nicholas, afterwards Emperor of Russia. According to the unanimous testimony of all who visited it, the results achieved by Owen were singularly good. The manners of the children, brought up under his system, were beautifully graceful, genial, and unconstrained; health, plenty, and contentment prevailed; drunkenness was almost unknown, and illegitimacy was extremely rare. The most perfect good-feeling subsisted between Owen and his workpeople; all the operations of the mill proceeded with the utmost smoothness and regularity; and the business still enjoyed great prosperity.
Hitherto Owen’s work had been that of a philanthropist, whose great distinction was the originality and unwearying unselfishness of his methods. His first departure in socialism took place in 1817, and was embodied in a report communicated to the Committee of the House of Commons on the Poor Law. The general misery and stagnation of trade consequent on the termination of the great war were engrossing the attention of the country. After clearly tracing the special causes connected with the war which had led to such a deplorable state of things, Owen pointed out that the permanent cause of distress was to be found in the competition of human labour with machinery, and that the only effective remedy was the united action of men, and the subordination of machinery. His proposals for the treatment of pauperism were based on these principles.
He recommended that communities of about twelve hundred persons should be settled on spaces of land of from 1000 to 1500 acres, all living in one large building in the form of a square, with public kitchen and mess-rooms. Each family should have its own private apartments, and the entire care of the children till the age of three, after which they should be brought up by the community, their parents having access to them at meals and all other proper times. These communities might be established by individuals, by parishes, by counties, or by the State; in every case there should be effective supervision by duly qualified persons. Work, and the enjoyment of its results, should be in common.
The size of his community was no doubt partly suggested by his village of New Lanark; and he soon proceeded to advocate such a scheme as the best form for the reorganisation of society in general. In its fully developed form—and it cannot be said to have changed much during Owen’s lifetime—it was as follows. He considered an association of from 500 to 3000 as the fit number for a good working community. While mainly agricultural, it should possess all the best machinery, should offer every variety of employment, and should, as far as possible, be self-contained. In other words, his communities were intended to be self-dependent units, which should provide the best education and the constant exercise of unselfish intelligence, should unite the advantages of town and country life, and should correct the monotonous activity of the factory with the freest variety of occupation, while utilising all the latest improvements in industrial technique. ‘As these townships,’ as he also called them, ‘should increase in number, unions of them federatively united shall be formed in circles of tens, hundreds, and thousands,’ till they should embrace the whole world in one great republic with a common interest.
His plans for the cure of pauperism were received with great favour. The Times and the Morning Post, and many of the leading men of the country, countenanced them; one of his most steadfast friends was the Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria. He had indeed gained the ear of the country, and had the prospect before him of a great career as a social reformer, when he went out of his way at a large meeting in London to declare his hostility to all the received forms of religion. After this defiance to the religious sentiment of the country, Owen’s theories were in the popular mind associated with infidelity, and were henceforward suspected and discredited.
Owen’s own confidence, however, remained unshaken, and he was anxious that his scheme for establishing a community should be tested. At last, in 1825, such an experiment was attempted under the direction of his disciple, Abram Combe, at Orbiston, near Glasgow; and in the same year Owen himself commenced another at New Harmony, in Indiana, America. After a trial of about two years both failed completely. Neither of them was a pauper experiment; but it must be said that the members were of the most motley description, many worthy people of the highest aims being mixed with vagrants, adventurers, and crotchety wrong-headed enthusiasts.
After a long period of friction with William Allen and some of his other partners, Owen resigned all connection with New Lanark in 1828. On his return from America he made London the centre of his activity. Most of his means having been sunk in the New Harmony experiment, he was no longer a flourishing capitalist, but the head of a vigorous propaganda, in which socialism and secularism were combined. One of the most interesting features of the movement at this period was the establishment in 1832 of an equitable labour exchange system, in which exchange was effected by means of labour notes, the usual means of exchange and the usual middlemen being alike superseded. The word ‘socialism’ first became current in the discussions of the Association of all Classes of all Nations, formed by Owen in 1835.
During these years also his secularistic teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion, in 1839, for the statement in the Westminster Review that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them. His views on marriage, which were certainly lax, gave just ground for offence. At this period some more communistic experiments were made, of which the most important were that at Ralahine, in the county of Clare, Ireland, and that at Tytherly, in Hampshire. It is admitted that the former, which was established in 1839, was a remarkable success for three and a half years, till the proprietor, who had granted the use of the land, having ruined himself by gambling, was obliged to sell out. Tytherly, begun in 1839, was an absolute failure. By 1846 the only permanent result of Owen’s agitation, so zealously carried on by public meetings, pamphlets, periodicals, and occasional treatises, was the co-operative movement, and for the time even that seemed to have utterly collapsed. In his later years Owen became a firm believer in spiritualism. He died in 1858 at his native town at the age of eighty-seven.
The causes of Owen’s failure in establishing his communities are obvious enough. Apart from the difficulties inherent in socialism, he injured the social cause by going out of his way to attack the historic religions and the accepted views on marriage, by his tediousness, quixotry, and over-confidence, by refusing to see that for the mass of men measures of transition from an old to a new system must be adopted. If he had been truer to his earlier methods and retained the autocratic guidance of his experiments, the chances of success would have been greater. Above all, Owen had too great faith in human nature, and he did not understand the laws of social evolution. His great doctrine of the influence of circumstances in the formation of character was only a very crude way of expressing the law of social continuity so much emphasised by recent socialism. He thought that he could break the chain of continuity, and as by magic create a new set of circumstances, which would forthwith produce a new generation of rational and unselfish men. The time was too strong for him, and the current of English history swept past him.
Even a very brief account of Owen, however, would be incomplete without indicating his relation to Malthus. Against Malthus he showed that the wealth of the country had, in consequence of mechanical improvement, increased out of all proportion to the population. The problem, therefore, was not to restrict population, but to institute rational social arrangements and to secure a fair distribution of wealth. Whenever the number of inhabitants in any of his communities increased beyond the maximum, new ones should be created, until they should extend over the whole world. There would be no fear of over-population for a long time to come. Its evils were then felt in Ireland and other countries; but that condition of things was owing to the total want of the most ordinary common sense on the part of the blinded authorities of the world. The period would probably never arrive when the earth would be full; but, if it should, the human race would be good, intelligent, and rational, and would know much better than the present irrational generation how to provide for the occurrence. Such was Owen’s socialistic treatment of the population problem.
Robert Owen was essentially a pioneer, whose work and influence it would be unjust to measure by their tangible results. Apart from his socialistic theories, it should, nevertheless, be remembered that he was one of the foremost and most energetic promoters of many movements of acknowledged and enduring usefulness. He was the founder of infant schools in England; he was the first to introduce reasonably short hours into factory labour, and zealously promoted factory legislation—one of the most needed and most beneficial reforms of the century; and he was the real founder of the co-operative movement. In general education, in sanitary reform, and in his sound and humanitarian views of common life, he was far in advance of his time. Like Fourier, also, he did the great service of calling attention to the advantages which might be obtained in the social development of the future from the reorganisation of the commune, or self-governing local group of workers.
Still, he had many serious faults; all that was quixotic, crude, and superficial in his views became more prominent in his later years, and by the extravagance of his advocacy of them he did vital injury to the cause he had at heart. In his personal character he was without reproach—frank, benevolent, and straightforward to a fault; and he pursued the altruistic schemes in which he spent all his means with more earnestness than most men devote to the accumulation of a fortune.
In England the reform of 1832 had the same effect as the revolution of July (1830) in France: it brought the middle class into power, and by the exclusion of the workmen emphasised their existence as a separate class. The discontent of the workmen now found expression in Chartism. As is obvious from the contents of the Charter, Chartism was most prominently a demand for political reform; but both in its origin and in its ultimate aim the movement was more essentially economic. As regards the study of socialism, the interest of this movement lies greatly in the fact that in its organs the doctrine of ‘surplus value,’ afterwards elaborated by Marx as the basis of his system, is broadly and emphatically enunciated. While the worker produces all the wealth, he is obliged to content himself with the meagre share necessary to support his existence, and the surplus goes to the capitalist, who, with the king, the priests, lords, esquires, and gentlemen, lives upon the labour of the working man (Poor Man’s Guardian, 1835).
After the downfall of Owenism began the Christian socialist movement in England (1848-52), of which the leaders were Maurice, Kingsley, and Mr. Ludlow. The abortive Chartist demonstration of April 1848 excited in Maurice and his friends the deepest sympathy with the sufferings of the English working class—a feeling which was intensified by the revelations regarding ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ published in the Morning Chronicle in 1849. Mr. Ludlow, who had in France become acquainted with the theories of Fourier, was the economist of the movement, and it was with him that the idea originated of starting co-operative associations.
In Politics for the People, in the Christian Socialist, in the pulpit and on the platform, and in Yeast and Alton Locke, well-known novels of Kingsley, the representatives of the movement exposed the evils of the competitive system, carried on an unsparing warfare against the Manchester School, and maintained that socialism, rightly understood, was only Christianity applied to social reform. Their labours in insisting on ethical and spiritual principles as the true bonds of society, in promoting associations, and in diffusing a knowledge of co-operation, were largely beneficial. In the north of England they joined hands with the co-operative movement inaugurated by the Rochdale pioneers in 1844 under the influence of Owenism. Productive co-operation made very little progress, but co-operative distribution soon proved a great success.
| [1] | Of R. Owen’s numerous works in exposition of his system, the most important are the New View of Society; the Report communicated to the Committee on the Poor Law; the Book of the New Moral World; and Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race. See Life of Robert Owen written by himself, London, 1857, and Threading my Way, Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography, by Robert Dale Owen, his son, London, 1874. There are also Lives of Owen by A. J. Booth (London, 1869), W. L. Sargant (London, 1860), and F. Podmore (London, 1906). For works of a more general character see G. J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation in England, London, 1875; Adolf Held, Zwei Bücher zur socialen Geschichte Englands, Leipsic, 1881. |